‘Not really. Only that someone used his card.’
‘True.’ She frowned. Matthew could be heard, calling them both in to lunch. ‘But most important, I think, is the fact that whatever delay there had been relating to the enigmatic Arthur Payne was now over. Whatever it was, Paul was ready to tell it or deliver it or …’ She gestured irritably. ‘Whatever it was. Tim, lunch, I think. We’ll work better on full stomachs and I think we should give Mac a call, see if he can tell us any more.’
Edward couldn’t settle. Bridie Duggan had made sure they wanted for nothing but he still felt like a prisoner. Effective house arrest, even with such attention to comfort, was still just that and after recent events he even felt wary about going into the garden.
The house was a bit of a strange one, he thought, with its weird mix of mock Tudor, UPVC double glazing and those columns by the front door that looked like someone had pinched them from the Parthenon. Inside, there seemed to be a bit of a powder-blue trend going on; all the downstairs carpets and those up both flights of stairs being in that particular shade. Bedrooms had been themed, apparently; the guest room he shared with Lydia dressed in someone’s rather abstracted notion of art deco, though the glimpse he’d had of Joy’s room was refreshingly just post-teenage. He was rather touched to see that this cool, calm young woman, still had a collection of bears and rag dolls arrayed on the old wooden trunk at the foot of her bed.
The Duggans’ security system would have put some government buildings to shame, he thought. It was all controlled from a central room into which all the cameras – sixteen in all – sent their images.
‘What happens if someone tried to cut the feed?’ he had asked.
‘They’ll have a job doing that,’ Fitch told him. ‘Everything is channelled underground and then under the house.’
Edward didn’t like to ask what had led to such paranoia. He had a vague idea that the nightclub businesses the Duggans ran had once been supplemented by less legitimate sources of income, but he didn’t like to ask. It seemed rather rude, in the circumstances. He did, however, feel rather hemmed in. Used to the view of open skies and wide bay, this return to the urban felt suddenly claustrophobic and did nothing to soothe his frayed nerves.
The news from Rina and Tim had upset him terribly and roused feelings of guilt and anxiety that he couldn’t shake. But what to do about them?
He’d spent the past hour talking to Lydia about going home, facing whatever it was they had to face and now, frankly, she was furious with him.
‘People risked their lives to get us here,’ she said. ‘And no, I’m not exaggerating, am I? Bridie has the best security set-up here I’ve ever seen. Even Paul would have been proud to have designed something like it. A flea can’t move without her knowing, never mind some homicidal maniacs in a red car. I’m not going anywhere. Not leaving this safe place. You want to ask Fitch to take you back, you go and ask him, but I’m staying here and I wouldn’t blame him in the slightest if he told you to just go and catch the bloody train.’
‘I’m just concerned for Rina and the others.’
‘And what are you going to do to protect them if you go back? You’d just give her one more person to worry about and I think she’s got her hands full already, don’t you?’
‘We should never have involved her.’
‘Seems to me she involved herself and my god, I’m glad she did. I’m not the heroic type, Edward. I’m just the one that fills in the gaps, remember, does all the unglamorous jobs you and Paul weren’t any good at. And I didn’t mind. I was good at dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and smoothing out the wrinkles in the deals you struck, but I’m not good at getting shot at. I never signed up for that when I took my marriage vows.’
A light knock on the door interrupted their quarrel. It was Joy.
‘I just came to see if you needed anything,’ she asked. ‘Everything OK?’
Lydia sighed. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose we were getting rather loud.’
Joy shrugged. ‘Oh, you should hear Mum when she gets going. Makes you two sound like you were whispering. Look, Fitch just thought you’d like to know, he’s managed to get some friend of his to run the registration through the police computer. He thought it might have been a stolen car but it wasn’t. The registration number was for a car that didn’t exist. It’s a bit of a risk, doing that, especially with all the number plate recognition cameras around. It might have attracted just the kind of attention they wouldn’t have wanted. They did seem very sure of themselves.’
‘What does it all mean?’ Edward asked.
Joy wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Fitch thought they were amateurish, because of the way they let us see them and all that, but now he thinks we were meant to think that. Kind of like a double bluff.’
‘But to what purpose?’ Lydia asked.
‘If we knew that,’ Joy said, ‘we’d know what to do about it. Fitch says we’ve just got to wait for the next move.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Richard Grey had considerable admiration for whoever had written this code, or rather, these layers of code. At first he had assumed that the machine code contained straightforward instructions for some new game-play the programmer had been creating. Every programmer has their own style; their own fingerprint as Richard Grey liked to call it and knowing who had written this particular piece of code, he was intrigued as to why Paul de Freitas had chosen to use machine code and not some much simpler computer language to develop what was, on the face of it, a relatively simple patch for an existing game.
All programming for games was created with back doors to allow the programmer to test out the elements of the game without the need for actually playing through entire levels. Regular players with a modicum of technical knowledge took delight in discovering these illicit ways in – hence the proliferation of forums and discussion sites for gamers where ‘cheats’ were exchanged and discussed. Far from being worried about this, many games designers would insert ‘easter eggs’, which were little surprises and prizes for those clever enough to figure things out. Often these would be an extra level of game-play or some new solution to a puzzle. Just occasionally, when too many tunnels had been dug through a particular game, or when a game was about to be re-released, programmers would patch the most well-known cheats and close some of the back doors and thus add to the challenge for old players as well as encouraging the newcomers. Richard knew of completists who bought every new edition of a favourite game, just to try and discover these little variations. Not as popular or as obvious – in fact, usually members only – these cheats also had their forums and their aficionados. Richard did not really number himself among them. In fact, he wasn’t what you might call a player of games but he kept abreast of the latest trends because you never knew what would be important or when it might become so. Richard was at the top of his particular profession and he fully intended to remain there.
He had thought at first that Paul had just been working on such a patch. The game in question, Eventides, was a lovecraftian RPG, first person, so far as Richard was aware and that was what had first alerted him to something being odd. He had gone away and phoned a friend, checking that he was correct in his first-person assumption.
Yes, his friend told him, though there had been rumours for a while of a hidden level played from the perspective of a woman called Lydia, a minor character in the original. ‘It’s some sort of an in-joke,’ the friend told him. ‘Paul de Freitas did the original story development as well as a lot of the game-play. Eventide was one of their first games, from when Paul didn’t work for the company, he was just mucking about on the periphery.’
‘And the in-joke?’
‘Apparently, his sister-in-law is called Lydia. The story is, she was the one who put up the money to get Iconograph off the ground. The in-joke is that she looks like a secondary character, in the game and in real life, but she’s the one calling the shots all the time.’
&
nbsp; ‘And this hidden level, according to the rumours, does it have an underwater theme?’
The sudden silence on the end of the phone told Richard that it did.
‘You know something,’ his friend demanded. ‘Christ, Rich, if you know something, you’ve got to let me in.’
‘So you can print it in that dumb magazine of yours?’ Richard laughed. ‘Look,’ he said more seriously, ‘this is work. I can’t tell you anything. But … do the rumours mention something about a kraken?’
Again the silence, followed by a burst of laughter and a string of expletives. Richard took that as confirmation and rang off. He sat staring at the phone, something at the edge of his consciousness telling him that though that might look like the answer, there was more to it than that. He went back to the sanctuary of his desk and ran the lines of code back across the computer screen.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but …
Here and there were tiny fragments of unrelated code. At first he’d thought they were just place markers. It was easy to lose the thread if you were interrupted programming or debugging. He had, long ago when he still did such things, used a similar system himself. But … no.
On the desk in front of him were three screens, the middle one running the lines of code. He switched the other to reflect the virtual machine, operating like a second computer from within his own system. Now he had two screens showing completely different pages. Slowly, he began to extract the random markers and place them on the second screen, compiling them in the order that they occurred.
‘Find anything?’
He was so focussed on the task that he did not hear his boss. Richard jumped. ‘Jeesus. Can you not creep up on a body.’
‘So? What have you found?’
Richard Grey shook his head. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It’s just random fragments of code that don’t belong.’
‘And if you made an educated guess?’
‘Then I’d be telling you to go and hunt a kraken,’ Richard said. ‘Look, I’m sorry, maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely.’
His boss shrugged. ‘Any connection between this file and the other? Payne 23.’
‘Not that I can see. I sent that through to documents a couple of hours ago. It seems to be a list of names. I unravelled the binary to get a list of numbers and the numbers were a fairly simple alphanumeric substitution code. Clever, but not designed to be uncrackable. It took me two, three hours.’
‘And can you get to the bottom of this new problem?’
Richard didn’t want to commit himself but on the other hand he didn’t want one of the most challenging puzzles that had come his way in months to be handed off to someone else. ‘Oh, I’ll get there,’ he said. ‘You can be sure of that.’
Hale was examining footage from motorway traffic cameras. It showed the four-by-four driven by Fitch and the red car following them. Hale would have given a great deal to have known the identity of the driver and his passenger.
‘How did you lose them?’ he asked quietly. His associate shuffled his feet, embarrassed.
‘We know they went to the Martin woman’s house. After that … we don’t know when they left or when the driver picked them up or where from. Our all-points alert identified them up at the services and we’ve managed to backtrack to where they came on to the M5. The red car started to follow them from the services at Avonmouth.’
‘And the plates are false, the windows tinted and the men wore baseball caps which means the cameras don’t have a clear picture, even from the front. I got that already.’ Hale took a deep breath. ‘You let an elderly actress and a house full of ageing actors slip the de Freitas’s out from under your noses and you don’t know how.’
‘At least we know where they’ve holed up.’
‘And that helps? How? Bridie Duggan is well used to dealing with authority. She won’t fold just because we might put the pressure on and she’s got that place of hers tight as Fort Knox.’
‘We get someone on the inside?’
‘Oh, that’s really going to happen. There’s not one man or woman on her staff hasn’t been with her for at least a decade and not one that doesn’t owe her.’
‘Which doesn’t preclude …’
‘Which adds to our problems. We don’t have time for subtlety. Ian got himself killed because we pussyfooted about waiting for people to “cooperate”. We don’t have that luxury any more and,’ he jabbed a finger towards the motorway footage still playing out on the overhead screen, ‘we don’t know who the hell they are.’
‘Probably who killed Ian.’
‘Oh, you think? Talk about stating the bloody obvious.’ Hale turned around to face his unfortunate operative. ‘Ian was a bloody good man. Tried, tested, loyal. Nothing I’ve seen so far convinces me you’re worthy to lick his frigging boots. Got that?’
The associate left, wise enough at least to know when to keep his mouth shut. Hale fumed silently. Paul had promised to deliver and Hale had no reason to suppose he would renege on the deal. He had also told Hale that a record of what he’d found and the solution he’d created would be left somewhere, just in case.
‘In case of what?’ Hale had asked him.
‘In case something happens to me. In case you decide I’ve been useful enough and I’m now surplus to requirements.’
‘And who would that information be left for?’ Hale had demanded, but Paul had just grinned at him in that infuriating way he had and had walked away, turning back to wave before getting into his car.
Some men, Hale reflected, live scared for themselves. Some live frightened of what might happen to others. Some, like Paul de Freitas, are almost untouchable in their assurance, their confidence, their simple inability to understand that they should feel intimidated. Hale had known a few men like that in his life. Most had been military men, others had been psychopaths. A few had been both, one occupation not of necessity excluding the other. A rare few, like Paul de Freitas, lived what looked like normal lives until you dug a little below the surface and you realised that they didn’t really have a clue. Or rather, they didn’t know how to see the social cues that said ‘care now’, ‘respond now’, ‘kiss me now’ or ‘be afraid’. They knew those rules for living existed; learned by rote how to respond. They didn’t have the inherent cruelty that came with some traits of abnormal psychology; oddly, for Paul, that was another cue that passed him by.
Life fascinated Paul de Freitas, but it didn’t frighten him not even on behalf of others. He trusted Lydia and Edward to be able to look after themselves and Hale was absolutely certain that any message Paul had left would have been left for them.
Tim’s Uncle Charles was a career warrior – Tim never thought of him as a soldier; far too prosaic for a man who’d led such an eventful life. As a boy, Tim’s father had told him that Charles slept with a Kalashnikov under his pillow and a Luger tucked into his sock. Tim, completely ignoring the logistical improbability of sleeping on a pillow with a machine gun slipped beneath it, had focussed on the random fact that ‘Uncle Charles sleeps in his socks’.
Later, he realised that the legend of Uncle Charles’ unlikely bedfellows had become part of his subconscious to the extent that, in a rather drunken moment a few Christmas’s ago, he had asked his Aunt Lucy if she minded.
She had replied that so long as Charles didn’t mind her Beretta, she didn’t see she had the right to object.
Uncle Charles, on leaving the army, had sidestepped into diplomatic protection and thence into more shadowy areas which seems to entail an awful lot of travel, so far as Tim could tell. Aunt Lucy certainly complained that he was never there. He’s some kind of aide, was all Tim’s father could say about the matter. He gathered that no one in the family asked, knowing they wouldn’t get a satisfactory reply. So far as that was concerned, Tim wasn’t about to challenge the status quo, but he did figure that if anyone he knew had access to the information he wanted, then Uncle Charles might be that m
an, and so he had asked.
Charles phoned just as the Martin household was about to sit down to dinner. Tim, half expecting the call, grabbed the phone as the others passed by, filing into the dining room.
Charles was typically to the point. ‘The man’s a phoney,’ he said. ‘Abe Jackson had a fine service record until six months ago. He was allowed to resign his commission rather than face a court martial, but there his connection with her majesty’s forces and any other government body ended.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Now that’s the question. I’ve managed to speak to his old commanding officer. Apparently, on his last operation, Abe Jackson lost four of his men to a roadside bomb. He’s lost men before; we all have. Doesn’t make it any easier. Seems he was annoyed, shall we say. He hunted down those that were responsible or, at least, those he believed to be responsible and he killed them. Or, at least, that’s what his commanding officer understands to have happened. Nothing could be proved because none of his men would give evidence against him. All declared they were elsewhere at the time or didn’t know where he was or … well, you get the picture. But his behaviour certainly became erratic and he was writing letters to the national press telling them that his men died because they lacked essential equipment. He was shipped back, hospitalised, finally persuaded it was in everyone’s interest to quit with his pension intact.’
‘What happened to him after that?’
‘Well, his pension was paid into his bank account, but he’s never touched a penny. Abe Jackson disappeared off the radar. The truth is, Tim, no one was bothered. He’d gone, end of problem.’
Tim absorbed that. ‘We’d better tell Mac,’ he said.
‘Your policeman friend? Oh, I’ve already sounded the alarm bells. He should know what’s going on by now. I believe there’s now a warrant out for Jackson’s arrest.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Oh, impersonating whatever it was he was impersonating, I suppose. They’ll no doubt work the rest out as they go along.’
The Power of One Page 12
