Read Chapter 29: An Unlikely Trio

The safehouse smelled of stale coffee and old plaster dust from a leak David had patched three times. Priya’s server dashboard glowed from a borrowed laptop propped on a crate, the upload progress bar frozen at 94%.

“Why is it stuck?” Eleanor asked, fingers hovering over a cold mug.

“Because your government’s firewall is a paranoid bastard.” David didn’t look up from the second laptop, where lines of code scrolled like a confession ledger. “The newspaper’s secure drop is fighting the encryption handshake. Give it thirty seconds.”

Marcus paced behind them, still favouring his left shoulder. The wound had healed enough that he’d stopped wincing with every step, but not enough that Eleanor had stopped noticing. She hadn’t forgiven him. She wasn’t sure she ever would. But when David had crawled out of his fake grave and presented himself as the only living man who knew the firm’s internal architecture, there had been no vote taken. Three people in a leaky room above a chandler’s shop. An unlikely trio if ever there was one.

“The moles gave us the poison protocol too,” David said, switching screens. “Whitmore’s heart attack was a modified digitalis compound. Tasteless. Undetectable post-mortem unless you’re looking for it. They’ve used it six times in eleven years.” He swivelled the laptop toward Eleanor. A spreadsheet showed names, dates, coroner verdicts. Men in power who’d died of natural causes, each leaving behind a sealed estate and a family that grieved without suspicion.

Eleanor felt the cold climb her spine. “My father.”

David’s jaw tightened. “Not on the list. He was one of theirs, not a target. But they killed him anyway when he tried to walk away.” He looked at her directly for the first time since she’d found him in the granary. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I was afraid of what you’d do.”

“I would have believed you,” she said softly.

“Most people don’t.”

Marcus stopped pacing. “It’s moving.” He pointed at the bar: 97%.

The three of them gathered around the screen. The dashboard read *encrypting… uploading… 98%*. Eleanor could feel the seconds stretch. The folder contained David’s journal—meticulous notes on the firm’s engagements, client names, the bursar’s signed authorisation, and a grainy photograph of the trustees meeting at Whitmore’s club where they’d agreed to bury the diary’s findings forever.

“99%,” David said. “One more second.”

The door exploded inward.

Eleanor had time to register two things: the spray of wood splinters arrowing across the room, and Marcus’s hand on her wrist hauling her sideways behind a steel filing cabinet. A third man came through the window in a crash of glass, and then the room was full of shouting and the flat bark of a suppressed pistol.

“David—the laptop!” Marcus shouted.

David was already moving, scooping the laptop off the crate and tucking it under his arm like a rugby ball. The upload bar had vanished—the feed cut mid-transfer. Eleanor’s stomach dropped. They’d only needed one more second.

A fourth enforcer blocked the staircase door, a compact man with a face like a rubber mask stretched too tight. He raised his weapon and fired once, not at her—at the server dashboard. The laptop in David’s arms spat sparks and died.

“The USB!” Eleanor said. The backup, the chancellor’s confession extracted from Whitmore’s poisoned files, was in her coat pocket. She felt its tiny weight against her ribs.

David ran, and Eleanor followed, Marcus bringing up the rear. They burst through the back door into a narrow alley that reeked of rotting crates. Behind them, boots hammered on the wood floor. The alley ended at a low brick wall, beyond which the pale spine of the River Cam curved through the grey afternoon.

“No way through,” Marcus said, scanning.

“There’s always a way.” David vaulted the wall and landed on the towpath. Eleanor scrambled after, Marcus’s hand steadying her as she wobbled on the damp stone.

They ran along the riverbank. Ahead, an arched sandstone bridge rose spectacularly from the far bank, its span crossing the water in three graceful limbs. Behind them, the enforcers cleared the wall with practiced ease. One of them raised a hand, and Eleanor heard the whistle of a dart—she’d forgotten they didn’t always use bullets.

The dart buried itself in a tree trunk beside her head.

“The bridge,” David said, veering off the towpath onto the bridge’s stone steps. They climbed, lungs burning. At the apex, he stopped and looked down. A flat-bottomed punt was tethered to an iron ring at the bridge’s edge, almost directly below the parapet—a summer pleasure boat, canvas canopy folded back, cushions wet with drizzle.

“You’re not serious,” Marcus said.

“It’s eight feet. Maybe nine. We’re not that old.”

Behind them, the enforcers reached the foot of the steps. The rubber-faced man sighted on David’s back.

Eleanor’s hand went to her pocket. The USB was safe. But David still carried the laptop—the encrypted folder had been on its dying drive, along with the moles’ identities. If they lost it, they lost everything.

“Give me the laptop,” she said.

David’s eyes widened. “No.”

“You can’t jump with it. The water will kill it anyway.” She didn’t have time to explain that she’d rather risk her own fall than lose their only leverage. “Trust me.”

Something passed between them—the ghost of a father who’d died for this cause, the weight of a journal that David had written in fear. He handed her the dead machine. Eleanor didn’t hesitate. She threw it, underhand, in a high arcing throw that carried it well past the bridge’s span and into the river’s deepest run. It sank with a muted splash.

“You just—” Marcus started.

“It’s dead. But the USB—” she patted her pocket—“is alive. And so is the chancellor’s confession.” She gripped the parapet, looked down at the punt rocking gently below, and jumped.

The drop was shorter than she’d feared. She hit the punt’s cushioned seat with a jarring thud that knocked her breath out, her fingers scrabbling at the flat wood to keep from pitching over the side. Above her, Marcus followed without hesitation, then David. A moment later, a body hurtled past them—the enforcer who’d tried to copy their trajectory. He caught the edge of the punt, capsized it sideways, and all four of them plunged into the icy Cam.

Eleanor went under with a shock that drove the air from her lungs. The river was mud-stained, cold as a held grudge. She fought upward, gasping, and found the punt overturned beside her. David was already kicking toward its hull, dragging something—a sodden satchel strap tangled around his arm. Marcus surfaced spitting water, cursing in a language Eleanor didn’t know he spoke.

The enforcer surfaced further downstream, closer to the bank, and started swimming toward the steps.

“Go,” Eleanor croaked. “Downstream. The college boathouse.”

They swam frantically, the current carrying them past the bridge’s shadow, around a bend obscured by weeping willows that trailed their branches into the water like a screen. Eleanor’s shoulder clipped the riverbed and she scrambled onto a mud shelf, then up a half-rotted wooden ladder to the boathouse platform. She turned and helped pull Marcus up. David came last, his face pale beneath the river slime, the satchel clutched to his chest.

“What did you save?” Eleanor asked, panting.

David opened the satchel. Water poured out. Inside, wrapped in three layers of plastic, was a slim volume bound in dark leather—the diary they’d thought lost when the enforcers had raided the hotel. The original, its key pages partially mutilated, its secrets still legible enough to damn.

“So it’s not dead,” Marcus said, staring at it.

“It’s proof,” Eleanor said. She pulled the USB from her pocket, water dripping from its metal casing, and prayed it had survived. “But we need a reader that can show what’s on both. Offline. Somewhere not connected to the firm.” She looked up at the college’s grey towers across the lawns, and remembered a black stone bench in a garden, a man she’d trusted, and a pocket watch she’d never finished opening.

“I know a place,” she said slowly. “But it requires a key I lost. Or thought I lost.”

David’s eyes met hers, and she saw understanding flicker there until it caught flame. “The watch. Your father’s pocket watch.”

Eleanor touched the chain tucked beneath her sodden collar. It had been with her all along. She’d been so focused on the diaries, on the broad strokes of betrayal, that she’d never looked closer at the inheritance her father had literally left in her hands.

“He made a copy of everything before he died,” she whispered. “The entire diary. Photographic. Microfilm quality.” Her breath was shallow. “If it’s still inside—if the water hasn’t gotten to it—they can burn every original they want. We still have everything.”

Marcus stared at her. “Then what are we doing crawling out of a river like drowned undergraduates?”

“We’re finding a microfilm viewer.” Eleanor stood, shivering, clutch of hope so fierce it warmed her despite the cold. “Preferably the one in the library’s archive room on the top floor. The bell tower. It’s high, it’s isolated, and it’s the last place the trustees will think to look while they’re busy covering their tracks.”

David began laughing, a wild, water-choked sound. “Three criminals, a dead man, a traitor, and a historian walk into a bell tower.”

“And they don’t leave until the truth does,” Eleanor said.

Above them, on the bridge they’d jumped from, a dark figure stood silhouetted against the grey sky—not the enforcer they’d left in the water, but another. Tall. Unhurried. Watching them with the patient languor of a man who never needed to run because he knew exactly where they were going.

Eleanor’s throat tightened. She knew that stillness.

“He found us,” she breathed. “The peer. He’s watching.”

The figure raised a hand—not to signal, but to lower a phone from his ear. Then he turned and vanished back the way he’d come, leaving them frozen on the mud shelf with one dead laptop, one waterlogged diary, one fragile USB, and the sudden certainty that they were not fleeing an enemy.

They were being herded.