20/20

by Carl Goodman

  On the College of Policing Authorised Professional Practice site she reviewed the rules. Section 26(8) Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act provides the legal framework for the lawful deployment of Under Cover Officers as Covert Human Intelligence Sources, it told her. This creates a distinction between a public CHIS and a law enforcement operative performing the role of a UCO.

  Okay, she thought, so I don’t have to say I’m a police officer if the evidence supports the action. That at least made the next step easier. But what was the next step? What would ProOptica respond to?

  When she finally looked at the time on her computer she found it was almost two o’clock in the morning. The wine had worn off by then. She had trawled websites for over two hours, following links and making notes in a text document she had opened on her desktop. A picture had begun to form. At least she thought it had. Eva stared at a four-letter acronym she had highlighted in bold in the note. It might be the answer, she thought as she finally shut the computer down and tucked it under her bed. It really might be.

  The trouble with that was she would need help to pull it off. And that meant going back to the devil incarnate himself.

  * * *

  Alastair Hadley looked more than just irritated. ‘Why am I interested in this?’

  A train rumbled through the station. A wire fence divided them. Hadley stood under the cover of an awning on the platform. Eva stood in the rain.

  ‘Because Sutton is putting pressure on me to make progress in the murder cases and that’s a significant distraction from looking for Razin’s fixer. I have a shortlist. I feel like I’m getting closer to them but I can’t focus on that with Sutton on my back. If I can find a connection between ProOptica and the murders then it buys me time.’

  Hadley stared. ‘You’ve got a shortlist? When were you thinking of telling me?’

  ‘When I’ve crossed a couple more names off it,’ Eva said quickly. ‘I don’t want to give you anything half-baked.’

  He couldn’t argue with that. Clearly still irritated, he nevertheless changed the subject. ‘So what is this, a government department?’

  ‘The MHRA,’ Eva said. ‘The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. They’re the UK regulator for any kind of implant, amongst other things.’ She held up her phone. It showed a web page from the MHRA site with the title: International regulators inspecting in the UK. ‘The point is any regulatory partner in any country has the right to show up and inspect a company to verify the accuracy of registration dossiers. It’s basically checking the records to make sure standards are being maintained. They can do it in the UK, and we can do it overseas. It’s a fundamental part of the agreements that allow medical devices to be sold internationally.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hadley said. ‘So?’

  ‘So it gets me through the door at ProOptica. We don’t have enough evidence to get any kind of warrant or to ask the Slovak police for one, but we do have enough to believe there is a connection between ProOptica and four murders. Observation by an undercover officer is justified. I have enough to go to the Office of Surveillance Commissioners with.’ Eva stopped there and wondered if Hadley would take the bait.

  He did. ‘Or a superintendent can authorise a UCO if the case is deemed urgent,’ Hadley drawled. ‘I can authorise it.’

  Very little about Hadley surprised her. ‘I’d need it in writing, sir, to take to Sutton.’

  He curled his lip. ‘That can be arranged. Anything else?’

  ‘Credentials and a letter of notification from the MHRA that they want to do a spot inspection of ProOptica’s registration dossiers. Maybe saying they’ve been selected for random inspection, so as not to alarm them.’

  Hadley almost sneered. ‘Not asking for much are we? How much time will this take from looking for Razin’s man?’

  ‘Two days, sir, if it goes ahead.’

  ‘What now?’

  She knew she would have to take him step by step through the process. ‘There’s no point in going to ProOptica unless it leads us to Laska. Even if ProOptica is covering something up we’re unlikely to find out what it is without Laska’s help. If Nicola Milne comes back and agrees then we’ll need to move quickly.’

  ‘And until then?’

  Eva tried not to seethe. It wasn’t as if it was difficult to figure it out. ‘We wait,’ she told him.

  As she walked back to the station the feeling that had first struck her in the supermarket came back with a vengeance. The sense she was being followed. Eva stopped on a street corner and looked around while waiting for a light to change before crossing the road. She didn’t recognise any of the people coming in and out of the shops in the town centre, but that didn’t mean anything. There were so many places to hide, so many opportunities for concealment, that if somebody were actually following her it would be difficult to spot them. Razin’s people again? Or somebody connected with one of the other cases? She felt a tingling in her scalp as a cool breeze blew across her hair. She shivered, as though somebody had just walked across her grave.

  Eva crossed the road. She walked back to Kingston police station more quickly than when she had left it.

  * * *

  That evening Flynn persuaded her to go to the gym. She got Eva in on a guest pass. Eva had to stop at a sports shop when she left the station to buy shorts and trainers, but the idea of a workout appealed to her. When they entered the brightly lit hall at the end of the high street the familiar odour of sweat drifted over her. She could almost feel the heat of thirty or forty bodies, all running or stretching or straining at weights. Eva noticed several officers from the station. Reclining on a bench, grey T-shirt stained dark with perspiration and with a forty-kilo dumbbell balanced in each hand, was Moresby.

  ‘Slovakia?’ Moresby grunted as he lifted the weights above him and let them hang in the air for a moment as though deciding what to do with them. ‘Will the DCI go for that?’

  ‘She won’t have any choice,’ Eva told him in-between lunges. ‘I can get UCO authorisation from a superintendent and a cover story. She said she wanted me to move things on. This is moving things on.’

  Eva saw the frown on his face. ‘But you’re planning to go alone?’

  ‘It’s an inspection of documents, not a raid. I’ll be like an auditor showing up. I can’t go in mob-handed.’

  Moresby lowered the weights to the floor and sat up. Eva dropped to the ground and started doing push-ups. ‘And Lynch’s men?’ he asked as he watched her back, voice kept low and fingers laced together. ‘What do you think they’ll be up to in the meantime?’

  She knew the lie was wearing thin. ‘I don’t think they’ll find much of interest in Bratislava,’ Eva said, evading the question, ‘except ProOptica is based in a town called Banská Bystrica. It’s about a two-hour drive from the airport.’

  ‘It’s all a bit academic,’ Flynn said as she strained at a respectable dead-weight lift, ‘if Nicola Milne doesn’t come through.’

  It was. Eva ran on a treadmill for twenty minutes and then went and found a punchbag and a pair of sparing mitts. She knew every part of her would ache the following morning. It felt good, though. The mindless repetition of exercise. For a while she could forget everything except the gnawing in her muscles and the dull impact as her fists hit the bag. After a while she slipped her trainers off and practised roundhouse kicks. They made her thighs sore, but the satisfying sound her foot made as it slapped the bag overcame that. She punched and kicked the bag for another twenty minutes. After that she decided to do some planks.

  ‘What are the chances?’ Flynn said as she settled down on a mat beside her. Eva put her phone in front of her and opened a stopwatch, then pushed up on her elbows and flattened her hands on the mat.

  ‘If you’re looking for odds, I couldn’t even begin to make a guess,’ Eva muttered as the digits on the stopwatch counted hundredths of seconds pointlessly. ‘Milne, if it is Milne, saw fit to give us two leads. I imagine it depends on how exposed she feels as
to whether she’ll do more. And there’s another thing,’ she said as the stopwatch passed forty-five seconds. ‘Is Milne telling us about the murders or is she telling us about Isherwood? Are they the same thing or is there something else going on here we don’t know about yet?’

  ‘Murder is one thing,’ Flynn grunted. ‘If there’s something else dodgy going on at the Chatham Centre then I don’t know if we’ve got the resources to cover it.’ A minute thirty, Eva noticed. Flynn dropped to the mat.

  It was her first session back at the gym for a while and she didn’t want to overdo it. Eva decided to let it go at two minutes for the plank. She watched the seconds tick by.

  The stopwatch disappeared.

  A text message replaced it. Someone will know you are at ProOptica, it read. They will try to get Laska to contact you. Eva too dropped to the mat, grinned like a wolf and held the phone up so Flynn could see it too.

  ‘Looks like we’ve finally got a break.’

  Exit Strategy

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A dusting of snow covered the runway at M.R. Štefánik airport in Bratislava. The ebbing thrust of the aircraft engines whipped it into small, horizontal tornadoes as the plane trundled slowly towards the terminal building. Eva gazed through the window of the aircraft at the anonymous glass-and-aluminium structure. It could be anywhere, she thought as the air-bridge extended to the cabin door, anywhere on earth. The aircraft, their livery, the architectural style of the airport buildings – wherever you went they stayed the same, a constant and predictable international grammar. Here on the ground only the colour of the sky gave any clue as to her location. Above the clouds even that was unchanging.

  She picked up the keys to a rental car from the usual kiosk in the arrivals lounge and followed multi-lingual signs to the parking lot. The car was white. The steering wheel was on the left, but it didn’t take her long to get used to that. Eva put her phone in the cradle on the dash, set her sat-nav and exited the airport. She drove for two hours. The road was smooth and straight as she left Bratislava, and the traffic only moderate. She drove through fields and a flat landscape that reminded her of northern France. Further away from the capital though, as she headed northeast towards the Cerova highlands, the road began to climb through an increasingly undulating landscape that suggested a prelude to the High Tatras Mountains, which the travel guide on her phone told her divided the border with Poland.

  Eva arrived in Banská Bystrica not long after midday. The road through the town passed by a large, pedestrianised square where awnings protected cafes and bars. A fountain still burbled despite the centimetre of snow that covered it. The style of the buildings seemed familiar here too, but there was more character to this place than she had found in the tedium of the airport. The architecture was mostly eighteenth-century and the houses had been looked after. Not a rich town, she imagined as she searched for her destination, but not a poor one either. An iron-grey sky pressed down. More flurries of snow tumbled in from the mountains to the north. It was colder here, Eva thought as she drew to a halt outside the small hotel, much colder.

  The middle-aged woman who sat at the reception desk of the hotel smiled as she entered. Eva only had carry-on luggage. With any luck she would meet Laska soon and be away back to the UK in a couple of days. She signed and gave her credit card for charging, then dropped her luggage in her room. The hotel didn’t belong to a chain. It seemed a little tired, and could have done with a lick of paint, but then again her room overlooked the square and the place had a charm of its own. Eva put her case on the nightstand, gathered her papers and went to find ProOptica.

  * * *

  On a road called Kapitulská not much more than a ten-minute walk from her hotel, Eva found the offices of ProOptica SRO. She stopped in front of a modern office building with a neatly fabricated sign and a tarmac area to one side of it where about forty cars were parked. It looked ordinary, she thought as she climbed the three steps to the front door. Nothing about it seemed out of place.

  The young woman on reception spoke English. ‘I’ve come to see Antonin Jelen,’ Eva told her. ‘My name is Harris. I’m from the MHRA in the United Kingdom.’

  The young woman frowned. ‘Strýc Jelen is expecting you, but he did not know at what time you would arrive. I will try and find him. Please,’ she said, pointing at a sofa near the door. As Eva sat down she picked up her phone and started trying extensions.

  People drifted through the reception area. Eva waited for almost half an hour before Antonin Jelen, ProOptica’s managing director and the named individual on the company’s registration dossiers, finally appeared.

  ‘I hope there is not a problem,’ Jelen said. He stood over her. He didn’t apologise for keeping her waiting. In his late forties with a shaven head and ruddy skin, Jelen had a wrestler’s build. He looked like a thug, Eva thought. He had an air of casual brutishness about him that she disliked instantly. His hands curled into fists almost without him thinking about it. He looked down on her as though, as a woman, she deserved no consideration. His attitude immediately infuriated her, but she was not about to be intimidated. Jelen was not especially tall. When Eva stood, she looked him directly in the eye.

  ‘I’m not anticipating any, Strýc Jelen,’ she said, using what she hoped was the correct form of address. ‘It’s just a random inspection. I know it must be inconvenient but the sooner we begin the sooner I’ll be able to leave.’

  Jelen did not answer for a moment. He was making a decision she guessed, deciding whether to be cooperative or awkward. She thought she had played the routine nature of the visit well, but ultimately success or failure would depend on how Jelen reacted to her. In the end though it seemed he made his choice. ‘Why don’t we begin by getting you a drink,’ Jelen said, with a look at the woman who sat behind the reception desk. ‘It must have been a long journey.’

  They sat in a conference room while Eva sipped her coffee. Jelen had tea, but he made no pretence at drinking it. ‘Have you been with the MHRA long?’

  ‘My first assignment,’ Eva said by way of an admission. ‘I was an auditor until six months ago.’

  Jelen smiled. It was a tight-lipped smile. Even though she thought she had placated him it set alarm bells ringing in her head. ‘What documentation would you like to inspect?’

  Was the question a trap? ‘I won’t inspect anything,’ she told him. ‘I’ll simply verify the copies of the documents you provide were given under my direction and that I witnessed you copying them. The documents themselves will be inspected by the appropriate experts in the UK.’

  ‘And what documents should these be?’

  ‘Strýc Jelen,’ Eva said, ‘I know you will be aware of your obligations under the Conformité Européenne marking scheme.’ She took a USB drive from her coat pocket. ‘The last three years will be sufficient.’

  ‘It might take some time,’ Jelen said. His smile didn’t change.

  Eva smiled too, but this time hers was colder than his. ‘It had better not,’ she said, ‘because that would result in an immediate suspension of certification within the UK. We would have to issue a notice to all of your suppliers that they would have to cease using your products immediately.’

  ‘You misunderstand,’ Jelen almost purred, ‘by some time I meant an hour or so to collate the documents and copy them onto your stick.’ He reached forward and took the USB drive from her.

  ‘What a relief,’ Eva sighed. ‘That’s acceptable of course.’ She let her smile warm a little. ‘An hour or so? It’s perfect. That will give us enough time for a tour of your factory.’

  Jelen made some excuse early on in the tour and passed her over to a gangly youth named Marik. With lank hair and something close to a goatee beard, Marik turned out to be a lab technician who spoke English well. ‘You want to see the accounts department?’ he asked Eva as they walked.

  ‘No, Marik,’ Eva told him as politely as she could manage. ‘I’ve seen accounts departments before and I’m sure y
ours is perfectly fine. What I’d really like to see is where you manufacture the lenses.’

  She had to leave her coat on a hook in the entrance to the clean area and don overalls, hair cover and polythene overshoes. ‘You know we can’t go in,’ Marik said, ‘but we can look through the windows. Is that okay?’

  It would have to be. The area outside of the fabrication room was designated clean too, but the room itself was classed as sterile. ‘We keep the air pressure in the fabrication room higher than outside to keep dust away,’ Marik said as he led her to a large window. ‘That machine,’ he said, pointing at a featureless brown box the size of a cabinet freezer, ‘that’s the 3D printer. It builds the lenses up one layer at a time.’ Eva stood and watched the brown box. Precisely nothing happened.

  ‘Does it take long to make a lens?’

  ‘One hour and forty-seven minutes,’ Marik said. He shrugged. ‘You have a phrase in English. Like watching paint dry. That’s how it is with lenses.’

  ‘An hour and three-quarters for each lens?’

  Marik gave her a v-sign. ‘Two lenses,’ he explained. ‘We have two machines.’

  ‘So twelve pairs of lenses a day?’ No wonder they were so expensive.

  ‘It takes longer than that,’ Marik told her. ‘Once the lens is made we send it away to be encased in a special resin to give it strength. That takes another day, but the company that does that can do fifty at a time. Making the lens,’ he said, pointing at the machine, ‘that’s the genius.’

  Eva didn’t fully understand. ‘Other companies must have machines like this one though?’

  ‘A few,’ Marik agreed. ‘But we came up with the design for the lens.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw the math; I tell you, it’s like general relativity or something. I couldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Eva licked her lips. ‘Was this Grau Laska’s work?’ She didn’t know how Marik would react at the name, but he almost shouted. It was as if she had just named his favourite football star.