Read The Need for Fear for Free Online

Monk’s address at the younger man again, telling him to get his thumb out of his arse and contact the journalist before she left for her meeting with the editor. Then the old spook jumped on the first available train out of there. Chi took another train in the opposite direction, heading back into the city. Sitting in a half-empty car, he spread his coat and bag across the seats on either side to deter anyone from joining him, then he booted up his laptop and connected it to the hard drive.
    He left Robert’s thumb drive wrapped in foil in his pocket. He wasn’t opening that little Pandora’s box without some serious security. There was no telling what kind of malware was on it. He’d prefer to wait until he got home and plug it into an air-gapped server he had there. That thing could take more punishment than Wolverine, but there wasn’t time to get to his house and back before Sharon Monk left for her meeting, so he’d have to set up some new firewalls on the laptop. The fridge drive shouldn’t be too dangerous though, so once he had run some basic checks on it, he opened it up on his desktop.
    The fridge’s computer had a thousands-strong vocabulary of terms for food, but voice recognition software often struggled with unusual pronunciations or strong accents. If it came across a sound it didn’t recognize, it translated it into strings of numbers that, in turn, were translated into text that displayed on the screen. In this way, it could show its owner a word and ask if this was what he’d meant. If it wasn’t, the owner could key in the word by hand and the fridge would recognize it from that point on.
    Gordon Lidby was from Newcastle, and while Chi thought the spin doctor’s Geordie accent was perfectly intelligible, the German-made fridge clearly did not. There was a very long list of queried words on the hard drive. There was no direct recording of Gordon Lidby saying anything, but there was an extensive list of words he’d used within range of the fridge’s microphone that the fridge did not understand.
    Thankfully, Lidby must not have corrected his fridge’s interpretation very often, or he’d have seen all those secret terms it had picked up and had them deleted.
    Scanning down through the thousands of words, Chi started copying and pasting any interesting vocabulary into a document on his desktop. In among things like: avocado , quinoa , foie gras , and stottie were more interesting ones, such as: collateral , deployment , and weaponized . They were in chronological order, not alphabetical, and without context, they looked hopelessly random.
    He was still scanning through the list when the train arrived at Bethnal Green station. Chi snapped the laptop closed, got off, and headed toward Shoreditch. Sharon Monk lived with her girlfriend, the policewoman, in one of those narrow, four-story brick buildings that probably dated back to the early eighteenth century.
    Monk lived above a bookmaker’s. Chi stood looking at the place for a minute, unsure of what to do next. It was almost half past two and he still hadn’t read anything that Robert had given him. He’d hoped that checking out Monk’s home would give him some insight into her life. It didn’t really. Robert had said Sharon would be leaving her flat at three-thirty. There was a café a little farther down the street with a window that would give him a view of Monk’s building. If she left early, he wanted to be able to catch her. In the meantime, he could start putting together a profile on her.
    The café was a typical London meeting point, with bare brick walls, shelves full of exotic useless things from other countries, and framed, stylized prints of cups of coffee. The furniture was made from new wood sanded and treated to look like chunky reclaimed old wood. A few minutes later, armed with a vanilla latte and a pecan Danish, Chi started downloading and