Ethereum

by N C Mander

  ‘Bingo!’ Edison muttered and took stock of his surroundings. He ducked into another greasy spoon and took a seat in the window which offered good sight lines to the internet café.

  A buxom waitress bustled over, brandishing a laminated menu card. ‘Can I get you anything to drink, luv?’ she asked, throwing the card on the table. It slid across the glossy surface and came to rest against an unbranded bottle of red sauce.

  ‘Tea, please,’ Edison said, glancing up at her. She scribbled in her notebook and turned on her rubber heels.

  Through the haze of grime, Edison could just about make out the arrangement of desks in the front of the shop. There were three tables, sporting ancient desktop computers, and there was no sign of any customers. The man behind the counter was the only person in the shop. He was tall and slim and, Edison reckoned, of the same ethnicity as the coffee advertised in the window.

  Edison pulled out his phone and was about to dial Colin’s number when a call came in. It was Kat. ‘Where are you?’ She sounded livid. Edison told her. ‘Why are you there? I thought you were staking Gaunt Street, but I’m here and there’s no sign of you.’

  The waitress returned with his tea. A silver metal pot and milk jug, accompanied by a thick china mug, was placed before him. ‘Will you be eating, luv?’ the waitress asked, ignoring the phone pressed against Edison’s ear. Edison shook his head, and she leaned across the table, her ample bosom passing uncomfortably close to his face as she retrieved the menu. She bustled away, and Edison turned his full focus back to the surveillance of the shopfront opposite.

  ‘Things moved on whilst you were in transit.’

  ‘Care to fill me in. I’m only the lead officer on this case.’

  ‘Might be best if you join me here. There’s nothing to see at Jamie’s place.’

  ‘So I see. When I arrived, he was slouched on his sofa one hand on a bottle of beer, the other one down his pants. I’m on my way.’

  Edison hung up. He shot off a message to Colin – Any movement? The reply came back in seconds – Nothing. The money’s sitting in a wallet in Vienna. I reckon they’re done for today. What’s happening OTG? On the ground, thought Edison, reading the once-familiar acronym. I’m OTG in a key clandestine operation for the Security Service. Sourcing intelligence vital for the protection of the nation. After the chase across London and the thrill of tracking the hub for the cryptocurrency, the enormity of the situation hit Edison. He drew a deep breath and swallowed a mouthful of tea. All quiet – he replied to Colin.

  The shop’s proprietor perched himself on a stool behind the bar at the back of the shop and scrolled through his phone. Edison watched patiently, nursing his tea. As he waited, his mind drifted back to the list of investors he’d been given earlier that day. He would have to tell Kat about the mysterious name on the list. As if the thought had conjured her, she appeared in the doorway of the greasy spoon. She was dressed in jeans, Converse trainers and a leather jacket. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail, revealing ears heavy set with costume jewellery. The get-up allowed her to blend into London’s streets from Elephant & Castle to Whitechapel.

  She slid onto the bench opposite him. ‘Black coffee,’ she said before the waitress had got within three feet of the table.

  ‘Anything to eat, luv?’

  Kat shook her head.

  ‘Fill me in and quickly.’

  Edison did as he was asked. As he came breathlessly to the end of his recount of the afternoon’s events, Kat leaned back in her chair and landed a fist on the table. ‘So, Jamie isn’t our man at the bank, and whoever is managed to get in here and out again without us noticing. Fan-bloody-tastic.’

  Edison didn’t have a chance to reply to her outburst before their attention was drawn back to the Continental. The man in the shop had moved from his perch and was switching off all the lights. He backed out of the door, locked it and scurried off in the direction of the Old Kent Road.

  ‘Doesn’t look like we’re going to get much more out of today here,’ Kat said, draining her coffee and throwing a five-pound note on the table. ‘Let’s get back to the Grid.’

  Two hours after he’d tracked Jamie through the crowds at the tube station, Edison and Kat walked in silence through the hordes of commuters negotiating their way onto the tube. Emerging at Westminster, Edison raised the thorny issue of his access to the Grid.

  ‘Bugger,’ Kat said in response. She’d forgotten that Edison’s revised security clearance meant she couldn’t bring her former colleague up to the office. She dialled Colin and arranged for him to meet them in the Morpeth Arms.

  *

  ‘I think we should make a habit of debriefing in the pub,’ said Colin with a grin as Kat and Edison arrived. He’d secured a table away from the busy bar area, and on it sat two pints and a whisky. Edison took a long draft as he sat down, and Kat smiled gratefully as she swallowed the measure in one. ‘So, it all kicked off after you guys went underground,’ Colin said, flipping up the lid of his laptop which was perched precariously on the crowded table.

  ‘Tell us,’ Kat said. Edison was intrigued.

  ‘So, the crypto had landed in a wallet, and I assumed that that was that for today. But about ten minutes later, it was traded out via a mainstream exchange into good ol’ Great British Pounds.’

  Edison whistled, knowing that was the end of his track on the altcoins.

  ‘Do you know where it’s gone from there?’ Kat asked.

  ‘Into a bank account with the HSBC. A business bank account.’ Colin’s eyes sparkled. ‘A bank account we know well. Indeed, our friends at the Met might want to know about this bank account too.’ Colin was enjoying the suspense and rapt attention of his boss and his former boss.

  ‘Ok, enough of the amateur dramatics,’ said Kat, her patience tested to its limits. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘It’s the bank account belonging to the property management company, Barinak Holdings, that owns the West Ham squat.’

  Kat and Edison simultaneously sat back in their chairs. Colin looked from one to the other.

  ‘Excellent work,’ Kat spoke first.

  ‘What now?’ said Edison.

  ‘That is a very, very good question,’ replied Kat.

  The three of them sat in silence, each of them consumed with their own thoughts. Edison added what Colin had told them to the case details he already had stored in his head. People-smuggling across the continent through a Yorkshire fishing town via a boat skippered by a now dead captain, the circumstances of his demise still open to interpretation. A bomb factory in East London abandoned. VIPERSNEST, Edison assumed, had been moved to another of the properties owned by the Turkish property company. Layered on top of that, the laundering of money from Penwill & Mallinson, syphoned into a bank account owned by the same property company to finance the operations of the terrorist cell.

  Edison imagined the words that would be plastered across the top of the whiteboard in Thames House – What? Who? When? Where? Why? – the five questions underpinning any investigation. They were making progress on the ‘who’, but the other questions were eluding the team, and it was frustrating Edison.

  It was clearly exasperating Kat too, as she released a pained noise and pummelled her fists on the table. The glasses wobbled and chinked. ‘They’re planning something, and we don’t know when or where.’ It was the biggest challenge of the job, and time was of the essence. Innocent people’s lives were in their hands, and the feeling that the enemy was one step ahead of them was overwhelming. The immediacy of the questions of when and where an attack might take place always took precedence for the operational team. But answering the ‘why’ question could often lead them to the perpetrators much more quickly, as the army of psychoanalysts, that the Service engaged from the private sector at great expense, liked to remind them regularly.

  Edison looked at Kat. She ran her hands over her hair three times. He recognised the familiar tic which betrayed her stress levels. She was young to be leading s
uch a complex operation, and in that moment, Edison’s heart contracted, and instinctively, he laid a hand over hers. Momentarily, she allowed the warmth and weight of Edison’s hand to rest before pulling her hand away and looking at Colin. He hadn’t noticed the affectionate exchange; his attention was on his laptop screen.

  ‘We’re working through the property company’s portfolio, but it’s huge – they’ve got over a hundred flats and houses across East London and another handful further south. Mo tells me the Met are working through them too.’

  ‘Anything on the internet café?’ Kat asked, her composure returning.

  Colin shook his head. ‘You know everything I do at this stage. I have to go, I’m afraid. The twins have got ballet tonight. Is there anything else?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Colin,’ Kat said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, good work today.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Colin snapped his laptop closed and left, rushing home to his family. Kat and Edison watched their colleague retreat.

  Once Colin had gone, Kat’s face crumpled. Edison shuffled his chair over and put his arm around her. ‘This is nuts,’ she breathed, leaning into his embrace. ‘Every time we think we make some progress, there’s another dead end. What do you think Jamie was up to with that memory stick that made him so nervous?’

  ‘It looked to me like he had downloaded a bunch of boxsets on the bank’s bandwidth.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Edison. You said he was jumpier than a flea in the office. He must be tied up with this one way or another. Maybe he’s sharing his login details with someone?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ Edison mused. His mind was elsewhere, itching to get back online.

  ‘Edison? Edison?’ Kat was waving a hand in front of his glassy eyes. He snapped his focus back to her. ‘I could really do with your help on this, and it would be a good start if you could stay in the room with me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Edison muttered. Parking the suspicion that had started to develop in his mind. ‘What do we know?’

  ‘A cell of jihadis are at large in the city. We found enough evidence of bomb-making at the squat in West Ham to blow the roof off Westminster Abbey. There’s a link to P&M through the financing and Barinak Holdings. But who’s the connection between Barinak and P&M?’

  ‘What about targets?’

  ‘Targets, targets, targets …’ Kat ruminated.

  ‘It could be anywhere.’

  ‘The big summer sporting events? Silverstone? Wimbledon? There’s a test at the Oval.’

  ‘All good possibilities.’ He found himself parroting his own mentor, Hughes, who had guided him through many difficult cases over the years.

  ‘The list is endless.’ Kat wrung her hands together and studied her empty glass. She jerked to her feet. ‘I need another one.’

  ‘Something interesting came up this morning,’ Edison said when she returned from the bar.

  Kat’s eyes filled with hope that this might be the piece of the puzzle that would bring the full picture into focus.

  ‘I got the list of investors earlier today,’ Edison explained. ‘There’s a name very familiar to us invested in the crypto fund.’

  ‘Who?’ Kat asked.

  ‘Lady Elizabeth Hughes has a significant stake in the fund. Invested really early on. One of the seed investors would be my guess.’ Edison delivered this intelligence with a triumphant smile, but it faded quickly as Kat’s face didn’t light up with the excitement he’d expected. ‘You don’t look like this is news to you – did you already know Hughes was involved in this?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Edison,’ Kat said, scoffing. ‘He’s not involved in this.’

  ‘He’s invested in the fund in a big way,’ Edison protested. ‘Surely that puts him squarely in the frame for some kind of involvement.’

  Kat sighed. ‘How many other filthy rich individuals were there on that list?’

  Edison shrugged. ‘A dozen,’ he offered.

  ‘Exactly. Hughes is a very rich man. Or at least his wife is. I suspect if we dug into the investor list of half of London’s asset managers, we’d find some of his family money.’

  Edison’s shoulders sagged. ‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? A seed investor? Such a big stake?’

  ‘But why, Edison?’ Kat pushed him. ‘Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Hughes is somehow involved, what’s his motivation? Tell me why?’

  ‘There’s the drugs link,’ Edison offered, referring to the reason why Hughes had been dismissed. Edison would never forget the sense of falling he felt while standing on the mountain, listening, open-mouthed, as Hughes laid out their future together. The deliveries had been coming in pure, via Turkey, and the product was then being distributed to Hughes’s network of right honourable friends, and now it was Edison’s turn. He had watched as his mentor and friend crowed. The two of them would be rich, Hughes had said, and the bottom had dropped out of Edison’s world.

  Edison could see the look on Kat’s face as the steam leaked out of his argument against Hughes, and he began to wonder whether it was just a coincidence that he’d come across the former Head of MI5’s wife’s name on the list of investors.

  Kat shook her head, ‘Too tenuous.’ She then looked hard at Edison. ‘I know you hate him,’ Edison’s close circle suspected that Edison had not been the sole architect of his departure from MI5, ‘but there’s no way he’s involved in a plot against the country.’

  ‘We should at least have a chat with him?’ The idea of seeing Hughes again filled him with a sort of sick fascination. ‘Perhaps his involvement is purely monetary. If we can’t work out the connection between Penwill & Mallinson and VIPERSNEST, then maybe he hasn’t either?’ Edison played his final card, knowing it was hopeless.

  ‘Do you have the full list?’ Edison pulled the papers from his pocket that David Murray had given him earlier and handed them to Kat. ‘I’ll have Colin run this tomorrow.’ It was a conciliatory promise, Edison knew, but there was nothing he could do to push the issue further.

  ‘Home time, I think,’ Kat said. ‘It’s been a long day.’ Edison nodded. ‘I’ll let you know what the plan is from here.’

  ‘Ok,’ Edison said, although he hadn’t really heard her. His mind was still focused on Hughes. He left Kat on the pavement outside the pub. She gave him a good head start to reach the tube station, recognising he needed space.

  *

  Back in Bethnal Green, Edison collapsed at the kitchen table. The muffled boom of a shoot-’em-up computer game came from Tony’s room. He pulled out the photocopy of the list he’d taken before leaving the office and stared at where he’d underlined Lady Elizabeth Hughes. Edison felt exhausted and drained. His mind was racing. The conversation in the pub had stirred up a painful cocktail of emotions. His own failings. His wife’s death.

  As Ellie had been dying, he’d travelled to Scotland for a weekend with his mentor. Hughes had invited him to get out of the city. He was having a hunting party with some friends, and he thought that it would do Edison good to get away for a few days. The revelations of that weekend had knocked Edison for six. As he’d stood on the summit of the ben, he could scarcely believe what the man who he’d come to respect like a father was telling him. He had been using his own agents to smuggle drugs into the country. Supplying the upper classes with the finest cocaine and extorting vast sums of money out of some of the country’s most senior civil servants, politicians and government officials. Hughes had spent the weekend back-peddling and reminding him of how indebted he should feel to the man who had orchestrated his career. Edison had travelled back to London, to his ailing wife, feeling miserable and conflicted. After six months of soul searching, during which time Ellie’s condition worsened, he’d submitted what he knew to the whistle-blowing service. Ellie had died the day Hughes was formally cleared of all charges. He recalled standing on the steps of Thames House as Hughes had been driven away. Across the river, in St Thomas’ hospital, his wife drew her last breath without him.
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br />   The memory haunted him.

  This wasn’t a coincidence. Edison was sure of it. He would have to do something.

  *

  Later that night, Edison lay awake on his bed, unable to sleep. It was one o’clock in the morning when his phone rattled on his bedside table, announcing a message from Kat – No action other than ongoing surveillance. Maintain your cover at bank.

  What about Hughes? Edison replied. It was an incendiary question, he knew, but he knew Hughes better than anyone, and there was no chance he’d have cut all nefarious ties after his dismissal from Five.

  The phone rang. The caller wasn’t identified, which meant that Kat was still in the office despite the hour. He ignored the call.

  *

  The morning light crept through the window, waking Edison. He was fully clothed, and he hadn’t drawn the curtains before collapsing onto his bed the previous night. He looked around for his mobile and spotted it, nestled amongst the duvet, where he’d discarded it. He checked the time on the screen. It told him that it was a little before 5.00 a.m. and that Kat had tried to call him four times and left two voicemails. Reluctantly, he dialled his voicemail.

  ‘Edison,’ Kat spoke to him, her tone was stern, bordering on angry, ‘you need to take your personal issues with Hughes off the table. He’s a rich man and has lots of investments. Add to that that he’s a tech fiend and the likes of the crypto fund are going to be right up his street. I really think you’re reading far too much into this. We need to focus on the property company and what the funds are being used for.’ She hung up.

  ‘Edison,’ her tone was more conciliatory in the second message, ‘please don’t get caught up on the Hughes issue. I really don’t think it’s relevant. The guys will run the investor list. I really need you at the bank, keeping an eye on whoever it really is who’s messing with the trading algorithm and maintaining your cover. Call me in the morning, will you?’

  Edison rolled over to place his phone on his nightstand. Ellie looked back at him from the photograph propped there. ‘This isn’t a coincidence,’ he told her. He knew what he had to do. ‘Just one thing to check at the bank in the morning, and then it’s time for a trip up north, Ellie,’ he said and fell back into a heavy sleep.