Dreams to Die For

by Alan G Boyes

  Things did not start well. Within an hour he had learnt that there were considerable translation problems with the Egyptian authorities, plus jurisdiction issues. Eventually, the Egyptians had managed to find someone who spoke good English and so the translators that Ritson had called for had to be sent away. The Egyptians then said that whilst they would wish to help the UK if possible, they could not just divulge their account holder’s details unless good reason was provided. Ritson did not want, nor could even if he wished, allege it was in connection with a possible terrorist threat, but after some considerable time and further lengthy discussion, the Egyptians said they would refer the British request to their Interior Ministry for a decision. Ritson now desperately hoped that OFAC could identify a similar transfer from the Egyptian bank. If so, more information regarding names would be available. He waited most of the afternoon, impatiently sitting at his desk whilst others did likewise. All they needed was something, anything, more tangible to give them a lead that would then cause them to spring into action.

  It was Dongle that provided it when he returned to the office a little after 4:30pm. He went directly to Ritson. “There isn’t a lot, but you will find it interesting. The bank’s systems are rubbish, and they don’t retain much unfortunately. They do use cookies but whoever logged on had a blocker, and as the cookie was pretty basic and not important to their online banking system, it didn’t function.”

  “Don’t give me this jargon about stuff that doesn’t work, just tell me what you found out. Is it helpful or not?” Ritson really didn’t have time for a computer lesson.

  “OK. The logon holder is Halima Chalthoum. You probably know that. To access an on line account the user has to give a logon id, password and input three digits the bank’s computer randomly requests from a stored memorable name. The account id is her customer number, 7348754, not the bank account number. The password for the account is corn1che – note it has got a figure ‘1’ in it instead of the letter ‘I’. But, here is the interesting bit, her seven digit memorable word, is 1nf1del again the number ‘1’ instead of the letter ‘I’ but an interesting word isn’t it?

  “Bloody shit” whispered Ritson “anything else?”

  “Yes, hopefully, but I have to run some stuff from here before I can confirm. Computers use things called IP addresses, and there are static addresses and dynamic addresses. These are governed by all sorts of international and other protocols that… ”

  “Stop it, Dongle,” Ritson cut him short. “I don’t want to know. Just go and do what you need to do. Please.”

  Dongle was, for sure, an expert guy on computers but like most highly specialised technical people, he could never resist trying to explain his science to others. Dongle shrugged his shoulders, turned and walked lazily away to his own desk. There he powered up his own system and within a few minutes his fingers were typing furiously at the keyboard as numerous brightly coloured screens flashed before his eyes. Every now and again he would pause, lean back into his chair and subconsciously run his fingers through his overlong crop of black hair and study the screen intently, sometimes scribbling a note on his desk pad before resuming his typing. He was using all his skills to glean information from a number of sources that he felt would be helpful. Amongst the sites he accessed were the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) based in California and the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) whose headquarters were in Amsterdam. ICANN’s tasks include responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic and country code top level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. More generically, ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. RIPE NCC acts as the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. Somewhere, deep in the caverns of their collective databases, would be information on the specific whereabouts of the computer that had made the withdrawal.

  Dongle was so absorbed in his work that he failed to notice that most of his colleagues on the other ATU teams had left for home when at 8:15pm he picked up his desk pad and went over to Ritson.

  “Not as much as I had hoped for boss, sorry. But whoever made those transactions did so from France. That much is certain. I was hoping to narrow it down to area. There is some possibility it might be Paris, but I wouldn’t want you to take that as anywhere near certain.”

  “France! How do you know that?” Ritson was astounded, but quickly decided not to let Dongle answer.

  “No, on second thoughts don’t tell me. Good work, Dongle. This job is all about putting together pieces of a jigsaw and you have just given us a very large piece indeed.”

  Ritson was certainly pleased. He was thinking he could now get the French Sûreté Nationale or, more accurately since its reorganisation, the National Police, involved and interested. Ritson also quietly hoped that any threat, if indeed there was one, would not be being planned to take place on British soil. It was a frustrating three additional hours before Ritson was finally able to confer with his equivalent in the French Anti-Terrorist department. When he first called, there had only been a lowly junior officer on duty, the rest of the department having left the building and gone home. The duty officer had eventually managed to impress upon his superior that there was a serious matter that required his immediate recall to the office. Ritson carefully explained all he knew and left the French to carry out their own urgent investigations, both forces promising to co-operate and share any relevant information.

  It was now nearly midnight and as there had not been any further information from OFAC regarding the possible onward transmission of the funds from the Egyptian bank, Ritson decided to send his men home. He and they were exhausted. They had spent most of the long day trying to brief agencies and obtain hard information, but their endeavour had yielded scant results. As he put on his jacket, the telex machine clattered into action. He saw immediately it was from OFAC and his pulse quickened. He ripped the page from the tractor feed before it had completely finished, but he had already read the text as the paper clicked its way through the machine.

  TRANSFER OF EQUIVALENT ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND GBP STERLING FROM AL KENEMESSAN BANK TO BANQUE PRIVEE DEL SOLEGIT SA GENEVA MADE AT APPROX 1100 HRS 7 SEPTEMBER. SECONDS LATER TEN THOUSAND EURO (SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND EGYPT POUNDS) TRANSFERRED FROM AL KENEMESSAN BANK TO YEMENI BANK ADEN. SIMILAR AMOUNT THEN TRANSFERRED FROM YEMENI BANK TO DUBAI (NO DETAILS). DETAILS OF ACCOUNT HOLDERS AND NUMBERS BEING INVESTIGATED.

  Ritson knew the Swiss bank would not release details of its account holders unless he could obtain a court order from a Swiss judge. That took a great deal of time and would probably be a complete waste of time, since the judiciary demanded such high-level of proof of wrongdoing that almost invariably no disclosure order was granted. Further, he knew from bitter experience that the principal drawback of seeking to use the Swiss legal system to prize information from their secretive banks, was that any action almost always resulted in the account holder being made aware of the enquiry – thereby enabling the miscreant to slip quietly away and go to ground, often withdrawing the money before a freeze order was implemented. Ritson cursed. This was going to be a tough case to break open, but the involvement of the Swiss banking system within a convoluted chain of banking transactions had confirmed one thing to him: whatever purpose the Hannet-Mar funds were ultimately to be used for, it certainly would not be legal. He turned his attention back to the printout and considered the significance of the second transaction. Was it relevant? Or had OFAC included it only because the timing was so obviously suspicious? The absence of hard information meant there was little he could do and he certainly wasn’t going to get anywhere at nearly 2:00am Aden time. He placed the telex on his desk and went home.

  46

  Fadyar Masri spent Thursday preparing for her trip to Britain. She visited her local bank and withdrew €6,000, immediately exchanging a thou
sand of them over the counter for English pounds. She ordered a further £3,000 sterling; the funds to be taken from her account. The bank clerk promised her currency would be ready for her collection by 11am the following day. Much to her surprise, the bank clerk raised no comment and simply put the slip into a basket that was placed next to him. She was certain that £4,000 plus the €5,000 in her pocket would be ample for any expenditure she would require. After dark, she carefully started to prepare her lethal luggage. She fully dismantled her rifle, inserting the barrel inside foam pipe insulation, the sort one uses to prevent domestic pipes freezing in winter. She then placed the covered barrel inside a long aluminium tube, ostensibly a fishing rod carrier. The bolt and box magazine were carefully wrapped in aluminium foil and placed inside larger plastic boxes that contained an assortment of fishing equipment, purchased on her previous trip to Britain. Metal fly boxes and packets of various odd-shaped lures and spinners surrounded the metallic parts of the rifle. She packed her suitcases and started to load her car, making sure it was obvious to anyone that she was going fishing. She collapsed the back seat to accommodate a couple of the several long, tube rod holders, both of which held a rod, though one also contained the smaller length barrel concealed by its foam covering. Anyone cursorily examining the rod holder would see the fishing rod and not notice the rifle barrel at the base of the long tube. She made certain the carrier tubes were placed on the floor of the enlarged cargo carrying area and piled on top of them were her suitcases, various coats, boots plus various items of assorted luggage. Placed on the assemblage for her holiday trip was a third rod carrier containing a three section, ten foot fly-fishing rod. It would take several minutes to unload the car and she guessed that she would only be asked to do that if the car had to pass through an X-ray machine. If it did, and she was asked to pull over and have the car searched, she thought there was a good probability that the tubes would be sufficient to allay any fears of the busy customs officials. Having loaded her car, she returned to her flat. It was nearly midnight and she sent a coded text message to Carron saying she was on schedule and that she would be leaving Paris tomorrow morning. She knew that over the coming weekend her flat would be cleared of most of the remaining personal belongings – leaving only items that would confuse or delay the police – and thoroughly cleaned before a letter ending the tenancy and enclosing a cheque for one month’s rent would be sent to the managing agents. By Monday morning all trace of Fadyar Masri would have disappeared from the flat.

  She woke early on Friday 8th September. The wind had got up to storm force at about 5:00am and the heavy rain had begun half an hour later. The sharp sound of the heavy droplets hitting the windows reminded Fadyar of small calibre automatic fire and, half asleep, she sat bolt upright in bed, her dream of the loch and the dam summarily disrupted. She shivered, not from cold but from fear. The shudder went through her body before her brain slowly disassociated itself from her mission and the rapid firing, and eventually made sense of the noise hitting the glass. She dressed slowly and poured herself a fruit juice. She did not want to eat. She turned on the television to see a twenty-four hour news service but there was nothing of interest to her. Had she been watching a few hours later she would have learned of a Taliban suicide car bombing near the US embassy in Kabul. As it was she quickly became bored and switched off the set, preferring to listen to her small radio. She had one final task to perform before she left that morning.

  She put on a thin pair of rubber surgical gloves, found a small screwdriver and carefully removed the casing from her desktop computer. This gained her easy access to the four securing screws of her hard drive, and five minutes later the small, heavy unit was in her hand. Once she had successfully carried out the currency transfers, she had taken the precaution of overwriting all the non-critical files using a free downloadable utility program from the internet, but she also knew that the only absolute guarantee of the disk not being read, even when overwritten, was to destroy the disk itself. She removed the central small bolt holding the disk assembly together, and as the two halves came apart she saw the shiny silver disk. Using a pair of pliers, she lifted it away from its spindle and placed it on the table before thoroughly scratching it and bending it almost in half. She reassembled the unit, minus its disk, and put it back in place in the computer. She leant down to the bottom drawer of her desk, took out an identical hard drive and wrapped it in a plastic supermarket bag before hiding it behind the kitchen refrigerator. This drive contained thousands of images and pages of text downloaded from various internet sites, which had been saved on the disk either as word processed documents or bitmap files. These had been password protected by the software’s own highly powerful encryption program which ensured far more effective security than the computers log on screen password. The task had taken her several months but it had given her some sort of purpose whilst she was waiting to be given a mission, and now the 120 gigabyte drive was 85% full of rubbish and had never contained any of her personal information. Fadyar was taking no chances. If, and when, the disk came into the possession of anyone else, it would take them a considerable time to realise and discover what was wrong as they could not afford to miss something really important amongst the dross. The delay might give her a few critical extra hours. One could never be too careful in this business. At 10:30am, she slipped on a lightweight anorak, put the now useless and damaged disk into her pocket and ran to her garage to avoid getting soaked. As she drove to her bank the sky began to lighten and the brightness raised her spirits. She put the radio on and turned up the volume, singing along to one of the latest hit records. By the time she reached the bank and parked her car on a meter opposite, the wind and rain had stopped and she removed her anorak before crossing the road. The currency was ready for her and she placed it carefully inside a second wallet which she then hid amongst one of her suitcases in the boot. She drove steadily to Calais stopping on route for a very leisurely and lengthy lunch, finally arriving at a cheap travel hotel outside the port in early evening. After dinner, she dropped the disk into the murky water as she strolled along the Quai du Rhone.

  The following morning, feeling a little apprehensive, she drove her car the short distance to the terminal and joined the queue for the ferry. She retrieved the internet obtained ticket from her handbag. The printout gave details of her name, Fadyar Masri, her make and model of car plus registration number, and confirmed her place on the outbound 8:20am ferry to Dover on Saturday 9th September 2006. Her stomach muscles tightened as she read the inbound details of 23rd September 2006, departing Dover 2:30pm local time. Whatever happened, she knew she would not make the return journey and fleetingly she became distracted, wondering just where she would be when the quoted sailing left the famous white cliffs astern. The sound of a car engine starting close by quickly alerted Fadyar that she should move forward in the queue. She watched as each driver ahead of her, in turn, presented their tickets to a bored-looking woman wearing a bright yellow plastic waistcoat sitting high up in a grubby booth. When she reached the kiosk, the woman stuck her hand out of the window and took Fadyar’s ticket without saying a word and checked it against a list of names on a computer screen. In silence, she handed Fadyar a boarding pass and returned the ticket. Fadyar drove on and was quickly at the rear of another queue, again making slow progress forwards. She knew this would be the passport control and when she was level to the officer, she smiled at him.

  “Bonjour,” she held out her passport and boarding card as she spoke. The officer smiled back. He took a brief look at her papers then at her face and, wishing her a good holiday, waved her through. Ten minutes later, she was marshalled onto the vast platform of the vehicle deck. The crossing of the English Channel was uneventful and Fadyar was able to relax by reading a paperback she purchased on the ferry. Dover was really busy, much as she had hoped and anticipated. Ranks of cars and heavy goods vehicles thronged the huge concourse waiting to embark whilst those arriving in the UK, like Fadyar, graduall
y followed the signs to exit the terminal. She entered one of the four designated lanes of slow moving traffic marked ‘Cars Only’ for European Union passport holders and proceeded towards the border control point. She was waved through. No one examined her ticket, passport or vehicle, and a little before 11am British Summer Time, Fadyar had cleared the port of Dover and was driving steadily towards Birmingham. She pressed the automatic search button on her radio and a few seconds later was tapping her fingers in rhythm to the music.

  47

  Friday had not been good for Detective Superintendent Ritson of the ATU of the Metropolitan Police. His team had diligently pursued what enquiries they could but were hampered by a distinct lack of any hard facts or evidence. Indeed, they had very few leads and still did not know whether they were chasing ghosts and simply wasting their own and everyone else’s time. The Egyptian Interior Ministry had, after lengthy deliberation, simply referred the ATU back to the Hannet-Mar Bank in London stating that, in their opinion, all the information the ATU required could be obtained on their own door step. The telex machine remained stubbornly silent and Ritson concluded that OFAC had not been able to trace any more details than those that had come through late the previous evening. He decided to talk things over with his superior Assistant Commissioner Manders.