He looked at the other passengers and said, “In the business lounge in Geneva yesterday, a guy asked me to sign one of my books.”
“Really?” She was being polite, but then something snagged her interest and she said, “Does that happen a lot?”
“No, not very much. People ask me to sign books when they know me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody reading one on a plane or anything.”
“Why did you call yourself Charles for the books?”
“Charles is my real name.”
She laughed. “No it isn’t!”
He took his passport and handed it to her. She opened it and said, “How come I didn’t know that?” She handed it back. “So why are you called Finn?”
“I have a brother, five years older than me. When my mother was pregnant with me, my brother’s best friend was called Finn and he kept insisting that the new baby should be called Finn, too. Naturally, my parents paid no attention and called me Charles. But my brother was a determined child and called me Finn anyway, so much so that pretty soon it was the only name I answered to. Even my parents ended up using it.”
“That’s so cool.” She laughed, but then said, “Pretty wild, though, in a way—like being an impostor your whole life.”
“I never thought about it quite like that,” he said, wondering if she’d meant to imply something with those words.
She hadn’t, and her mind made a link to something else in his story and she said, “Mom wants me to take a pregnancy test, and . . . other stuff. I tried to tell her we’d been careful.”
“That’s good, that you were careful. As for the pregnancy test and the health check, I’d say that’s a pretty small price to pay for their peace of mind.”
“I guess.”
“How were they generally?”
“Forgiving. Relieved. I think it would’ve been easier to bear if they’d just yelled at me.” She thought about it, quickly adding, “But then I guess you don’t think it should be easier for me.”
“I think you should be aware of the upset you’ve caused, and you should feel bad about it. Hurting people who love you should cause remorse, simple as that, whatever your reasons. But that’s not the same as beating yourself up about it, and I’m glad your parents have reacted the way they have. They’re cool people.”
He didn’t actually see them as cool people, but Hailey seemed to accept it, then drew a line under that part of the conversation and said, “Why did you want that USB stick? I hope Jonas didn’t give you the wrong idea about what’s on it.”
“You hacked Gibson’s network, that’s what’s on it.”
“Yeah—but it’s, like, random boring stuff. Most of it doesn’t even make any sense.”
“Welcome to my life.” She looked confused. “For two years, it seems someone has been running a surveillance operation from the apartment next to yours—Gibson for the last year of it. The person they had under surveillance was me.”
Slightly too loudly, she said, “So you are a spy—Adrienne always said you were!”
From the corner of his eye, he spotted a woman looking across at them in response to the comment. Finn burst out laughing, showing it up as a joke, and the woman lost interest. It was a joke, anyway—maybe he’d have concealed his past better if he’d claimed to be a spy all along, double-bluffing Adrienne and the others into thinking he was a fantasist.
“Adrienne was guessing, and I don’t want you to get carried away—I worked for the British government, but not doing anything particularly clandestine.”
“That’s so obviously a lie.”
“Because?”
“Because they’ve been watching you for two years—they wouldn’t do that for someone who worked in the mail room. And all that stuff Jonas and me hacked into, they wouldn’t collect all that.” She stopped abruptly, surprised at herself for not seeing something obvious until now. “That’s why you came to get me, and why you didn’t mind paying all that money, because you weren’t really coming to get me, you were coming to get the USB stick.”
It was hard to tell whether she was annoyed by that realization.
“I agreed to help find you before I found out about Gibson and the USB stick. I came to Uppsala partly because I wanted to see through what I’d started, but mainly to get the information on the memory stick.”
She thought about it for a second and said, “Actually, that’s kind of a relief.”
“How so?”
“Well, I thought it was pretty weird, you coming up here to get me when you don’t know me that well. But it makes sense now.” He could see her point. “What will you do . . . with the information?”
“Maybe nothing. I want to find out what they’ve been looking for, but it might be something and nothing.”
“You clearly don’t believe that!” He looked puzzled. “The cell phone? I’ve seen enough movies to know about stuff like this. You think they’re tracing your phone. Who is Gibson anyway? Have you confronted him?”