Chapter 135
Onemonth earlier
‘How quickly can you grow a beard?’ Doyle asked.
‘A beard?’ Poe said.
She nodded. ‘You won’t catch Frederick Beck by trying to get ahead of him. He’s been planning this for years and he’s very intelligent.’
‘So howdowe catch him?’
‘His ego,’ she said. ‘We use it against him.’
Poe sat up. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘We have a narrow window of opportunity. At the minute, Frederick’s regrouping. We’ve lifted the shroud, shown the world his trick. He’ll be planning how he can recapture the public’s imagination. That means we have a month, maybe six weeks where he’ll be focusing on far too many things at once.’
Poe nodded. Doyle was right. Beck was currently being pushed in a multitude of directions. His bandwidth had to be stretched to the limit right now. Evading an international manhunt. Planning a new campaign while simultaneously trying to keep the public engaged. Wondering how he could keep the truth about his marriage a secret now that Doyle was out of prison. And Henning Stahl had to fit into his plans somehow. Poe hadn’t figured out how yet, but Beck had picked him for a reason.
‘You want to give him something else to worry about, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘It was something Tilly said that gave me the idea,’ Doyle admitted. ‘She told me about the time you pressed a load of random buttons on her laptop. Overloaded the CPU and crashed it.’
‘I keep telling people, it only happened once and it was a really old computer.’
‘She says she couldn’t have replicated what you did, not even in lab conditions.’
Poe cleared his throat and checked his watch. ‘You said we only have a month?’
‘Sorry,’ she laughed.
‘Tell me what you want to crash his mind with?’
‘What’s the most important thing to Frederick Beck?’
‘Being the centre of attention,’ he said without hesitation. ‘His career wasn’t about developing the best medicines; it was about his status. And I doubt he cared about the things his victims had done, he just wanted the public to adore him. His campaign of murder was about recapturing what he lost when his career was taken from him.’
‘So, what’s the one thing that could bring him out of wherever he’s holed up?’
‘I don’t know. Revenge, maybe. I go on TV and call him out.’
‘Not revenge. Revenge can wait. This would have to be something time sensitive.’
Poe gave it a couple of minutes, but he couldn’t think of anything sensible. ‘Other than there being a major breakthrough in acquired Breeg–Bart syndrome,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to imagine what else he’d care enough about to press the pause button.’
Doyle stared at him, her eyes twinkling.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ she replied. ‘All we have to do is solve the Breeg–Bart riddle and let his ego take care of the rest.’