Castle reached down to his briefcase, took out an envelope, and passed it across to Louisa.
“You know one of Karasek’s men was killed here the other day. Turns out he was escorting a young girl Karasek had a particular interest in, and the girl disappeared. Karasek’s furious. I think one could even say incandescent.” She patted the envelope. “You’re going to pay him a visit, tell him we might be able to help each other, that we have a surveillance picture of a man leaving the church just after the murder. If he can help us identify the man, we might be able to help him get his property back. We don’t need to give him any more information than that—indeed, any more and he’ll be suspicious. I think this will get his attention.”
It had certainly managed to grab Finn’s attention. His body had flooded with adrenaline, to the extent that it was taking all his concentration to keep still. For a moment, he couldn’t even think how to respond without giving something away. Then he hit on it.
“Just a second. I’m assuming this is an underage girl, and we’re going to hand him a photo that could help him find her?”
With a strange sense of liberation, he realized he obviously couldn’t be identified from the surveillance photo. But his heart kept beating hard, even as Louisa said, “The photo’s a fake. Take a look.”
She slid the envelope across to him and he pulled the picture out and looked at it. It had been well done. The guy walking away hurriedly from the church was wearing a winter coat, no hat, his fair hair caught in the wind and looking ruffled—a lot of detail, but nothing that made him easy to identify.
Hardly visible at first, there was a girl on the far side of him, her head obscured by a protective arm. With some relief, Finn couldn’t see anything to convince Karasek it wasn’t Katerina, and he presumed Karasek had never actually seen her in the flesh.
“Who is he?”
“Doesn’t matter—he’s not in Tallinn now.” She paused, pleased with herself. “And I can see from your face that you think it’ll be enough to interest him, maybe even enough to get his guard down.”
Finn nodded, but from his few meetings with Karasek and his greater knowledge of the man, he also knew how volatile he would be right now. For whatever reason, Karasek had invested a lot of energy in Katerina, and his rage at losing her would make him even more unpredictable than usual.
“It’ll get his attention, but I’ll have to judge on the day whether to put the other matter to him.”
“Of course. You’ll have received an email—it’s in your inbox now, in fact—outlining the intelligence on the Maria Nuovo. Realizing that you’re the only person to have been sent it, you’ll have spotted the opportunity to make a little business deal of your own.”
Once again, Castle pulled an awkward face. It made Finn wonder what his job usually entailed, because this didn’t sound a great deal more wing-and-prayer than many of the other operations he’d been involved with. And with more detail it would seem less ramshackle.
But then Louisa said, “As for judging on the day—that day is today.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given the narrow window within which they were working. Even so, Finn found himself veering toward Castle’s position now, doubting whether this had been thought through clearly enough, wondering if Louisa was sending him on a near-suicide mission, with only the slightest hope that it might yield a result.
“That’s quite short notice.”
“It is, but you’ll have all the information you need. This is high risk, Finn, I won’t deny it—high risk in terms of whether it’ll work, rather than regarding your own safety—but sometimes that’s what it takes.”
“Trust me, Louisa—with Karasek, this is high risk in every sense. It’s not as if I can go in there armed. I presume I’ll be going to his club.”
“You presume correctly, on both counts. And although we’ll be aware of what’s going on, there’ll be no close support, so if you get into trouble, it’s unlikely anyone will get there in time to help you. For obvious reasons, this has to be, to all intents and purposes, a lone wolf operation.”
“I understand that.”
“Good. Now, in some senses I’m rather glad we don’t have much time, because it won’t allow you to overanalyze things before going in. But we do have a great deal of ground to cover, so let’s get on with it. John?”