Assassin's Web

by Richard T. Burke

  The two plain-clothes officers edged around me and headed along the hall.

  “What were you doing here before?” I said, addressing the smoker.

  He flashed me a smug grin as he barged past, ignoring the question.

  As I made to follow, the man in uniform placed a hand on my shoulder. “Please remain here, sir.” The final word carried a slight sneer.

  I turned back to him. “What’s this all about?” I asked although I had a sick feeling that I already knew at least part of the answer.

  “We’re searching your premises in relation to an ongoing police investigation.”

  “You don’t say.” Despite my shock, I couldn’t keep the note of sarcasm from my voice. “What exactly are they looking for?”

  The man’s eyes bored into me, but he said nothing.

  I decided to change tack. “Those two were hanging around my house earlier today. My neighbour told me. What were they doing there?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t tell you that.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  The policeman folded his arms and gave me the stare once again.

  Frustrated at the lack of response, I continued my attempts to obtain answers. “One of them was inside the house less than an hour ago. What the hell was he doing here?” I didn’t know that for sure, and I had no evidence other than Mrs Owens’ description of the men, but it was too much of a coincidence.

  The officer shook his head. “If you have any complaints, you can take them up with the Independent Office for Police Conduct, but quite frankly, I think you’re going to have far bigger concerns to worry about.”

  “So, you do know what this is about?”

  The policeman frowned. “Look, sir. You’ll find out soon enough if they press charges. I’m just here to help with the search, so if you don’t mind, let’s keep it quiet and wait for them to finish.”

  An awkward silence developed between us. Movement from several yards behind the waiting police officer caught my attention. Mrs Owens stood at the entrance to my property, staring in through the open gate. The dog was nowhere to be seen. Our eyes met for a second.

  A loud crash came from somewhere inside the house, and I dragged my gaze away. “What are they up to? Trashing the place?”

  “Let them do their job. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”

  Right on cue, the taller of the two plain-clothes officers struggled along the hallway carrying a large black object in a clear plastic bag. As he came closer, I recognised the contents as the base unit of my computer.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked.

  “We’re seizing this item as evidence,” the man replied. It was the first time I had heard him speak. His voice carried the hint of a northern accent.

  “That thing cost a lot of money. When are you going to return it?”

  The uniformed officer answered the question on his behalf. “It’ll be held until there’s a court case, or they decide to drop charges. Either way, I wouldn’t count on getting it back any time soon.”

  The breath caught in my throat at the mention of charges. Until that point, I hadn’t considered the implications, but now the reality of my situation came crashing down on me. If they chose to prosecute, the school would undoubtedly suspend me with immediate effect. With that my livelihood would disappear. My savings might tide me over for a few months, but they wouldn’t last forever. The worst part was that I still had no idea of the crime for which I was being investigated.

  “You haven’t told me what this is all about.”

  “Somebody’s been downloading stuff they shouldn’t,” the smoker replied.

  My mind immediately switched to the dark web. “I know what I did is technically against the law, but it’s not as if I stole the login details. They were on a note I found. I only logged in once.”

  The taller man flashed a tight-lipped smile. “If you downloaded it all in one session, it must have taken a while.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “What are you talking about? I didn’t download anything. I only opened the page.”

  The smoker chuckled, the laugh morphing into a coughing fit. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and cleared his throat into the blue material.

  “I really need to lay off the fags,” he said when he had regained his breath. “Let me guess; somebody hacked your machine and downloaded all those files while you were somewhere else. We’ve heard it all before.”

  A rushing sound filled my ears. It seemed they weren’t talking about the site on the dark web after all. Then it occurred to me; I had never logged in to the page on my home computer. The only time I had ever connected successfully was using my laptop from the Internet café. My thoughts spun to Jamie’s warning about making sure I downloaded Tor from the official website. Perhaps I installed an infected version, and somebody had been hijacking my connection to download something illegal.

  “What ... what material do you mean?” I asked, trying to hide the stammer in my voice.

  “Give me your car keys,” the taller man said, ignoring the question.

  “Why do you want them?”

  “We need to search your vehicle too.”

  I reached into my pocket and handed them over.

  The policeman’s gaze focused on the memory stick. It was a free gift and possessed limited capacity by modern standards, but it was a quick way of transferring files from one machine to another when I was at school. “We’ll take this as evidence too,” he said, unclipping the rectangular block from the ring. He removed a clear plastic bag from his pocket, dropped the gadget inside and handed it to the uniformed officer.

  The two men split up, one going to each side of the car. The smoker started at the front passenger door. He opened the glove box and pulled everything out. After finishing there, he turned his attention to the rear, checking the door pockets and beneath the seat. His partner repeated the process on the driver side. They completed their tasks at the same time and moved around to the back of the vehicle.

  The taller man lifted the hatchback. At any moment, I expected them to haul out the laptop bag. Then I remembered bringing it into the house the previous night. I had left it in the gap between the two sofas. Their bodies blocked my view as they bent over and inspected the contents.

  “Nothing here,” the smoker announced.

  Why hadn’t they found the laptop during their earlier search? It wasn’t in plain sight, but neither was it well hidden. And how had the illicit material ended up on my hard disk? The policemen had suggested that the incriminating data, whatever that might be, was on my desktop computer. My first thought was that it had something to do with the dark web. But I hadn’t even installed the Tor browser on that machine.

  The uniformed officer broke me out of my thoughts. “That’s it. Sign here to acknowledge that we’ve taken these two items.” He thrust a form at me.

  I gave the sheet of paper a quick scan and met his gaze. “What if I don’t?”

  He sighed. “I’ll sign it on your behalf, and I’ll be even more pissed off than I am right now.”

  I scribbled my signature and entered the date in the box. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not at the moment, but I wouldn’t try to leave the country.”

  The plain-clothes officers were already walking back to their car. The taller of the two carried the base unit. Smoke rose from the recently lit cigarette in the other man’s hand as he passed through the open gate.

  “Pricks,” the uniformed officer muttered under his breath as he handed over my car keys. Then he too turned away.

  Chapter 16

  I started with the car. All the doors hung open, and the contents of the glove box lay arrayed across the front passenger seat. I returned everything to its place and moved onto the boot. They had lifted the cover to reveal the spare wheel. I tidied up, then breathing in deeply to steady my nerves, headed inside.

  Sofa cushions littered the floor in the lounge, but they had dis
turbed little else. The laptop bag remained where I remembered leaving it, on the carpet between the two sofas. A quick check confirmed the case still contained the machine. The dining room was unaffected. In the kitchen, the breadbin and most of the cupboards were open. An overturned box of breakfast cereal spilt its contents onto the work surface and from there onto the grey, stone tiles. I grabbed a dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess.

  I headed along the hallway to the study. This was where I expected the most disruption, and it came as no surprise to find the room trashed. Books lay strewn across the carpet where they had been pulled from the shelves. The monitor sat askew. The keyboard and mouse trailed leads to where a dust-free area of the desktop indicated the previous location of the base unit.

  Flashing lights drew my eye to the printer, which lay on its side to the right of the desk amidst the spilt contents of the paper tray. That must have been what caused the crash I heard earlier. It took several minutes to tidy the mess. At least there didn’t seem to be any lasting damage although I wouldn’t know for sure until I reconnected the system box.

  I made my way upstairs to the bathroom. Apart from the open cabinet door, nothing seemed to have been disturbed. The spare room told a different story. All the drawers yawned open, and the mattress rested on its side beside the base. The main bedroom was in a similar state, but here every drawer lay on the floor, the contents regurgitated into haphazard heaps across the beige carpet.

  Twenty minutes later, I had restored most of the disturbed items to a tidy state. What should I do next? At the moment, all I could be certain of was that the police suspected me of accessing something illegal on my computer. I tried to recall the conversation with the policemen. At the time, I had been convinced their main area of interest lay in the dark website, but the taller of the two plain-clothes officers had accused me of downloading a large number of files.

  As far as I knew, my download history didn’t include any illegal material. Yes, I had accessed the occasional porn site. After all, I was a single heterosexual man in the prime of life with no partner to help fulfil my sexual urges. But I had never watched anything hardcore that veered towards the unlawful.

  If I hadn’t downloaded the incriminating files—whatever they contained—then who had? And what was their motive? As my mind ran through the possibilities, my thoughts kept returning to the dark web. The coincidence was too great to assume my accessing of the site and the police visit were unrelated. But if that was the case, how had the illegal data ended up on my desktop machine?

  An idea hit me. I used a cloud-based storage solution on both of my machines. The software stored files on a remote server and synchronised it between connected computers. That meant the incriminating evidence might have been downloaded on the laptop and transferred automatically to the desktop PC. The night before I had spent several hours in front of the computer screen, ample time to synchronise the data from one machine to the other.

  It still didn’t explain how or why the files had been copied to my computer in the first place. Had I been using an infected version of the Tor browser? Jamie had checked out the laptop the previous night and given me the all clear. My thoughts turned to the Internet café. After forgetting to take the computer with me, it had been out of my sight for ten or fifteen minutes. I had returned to discover Molly looking at the screen. Was she the person responsible for downloading the material? I found that difficult to believe. What motive could she possibly have?

  I desperately wanted to check out the laptop’s hard drive to confirm the validity of my theory. However, my recent experiences had left me with a strong sense of paranoia. The police already possessed a search warrant, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume they would realise there was another machine and return for a second examination of my house. If that happened, I would lose any opportunity to discover what they were accusing me of downloading.

  I also had some hard questions for Molly. The best solution was to visit The Café Corner in person. The police might follow me there, but I doubted it. It was one thing to record my Internet usage, but it would take a serious level of manpower to track my movements. The fact they hadn’t arrested me yet implied the case against me lacked evidence—at least for now. With my mind made up, I headed to the car.

  As I slammed the driver’s door shut, Mrs Owens came through the gateway to my property without the dog. She had clearly been loitering outside, waiting for signs of movement. I was in no mood to talk to the nosey cow. I started the engine and kept my eyes forward as I edged the vehicle past her. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I noted with a warm glow of satisfaction the surprised expression on her face.

  Fifteen minutes later, I navigated into a parking space at the pay and display car park in the centre of Basingstoke. I was no expert in detecting surveillance, but the roads were so quiet I felt certain I would have spotted any tail. Continuing my journey on foot, I stopped several times along the route to look into shop windows, but nobody seemed to be following me.

  With a final glance each way along the pedestrianised street, I pushed through the door of The Café Corner. As on the previous afternoon, the place was almost empty. There was no sign of Molly. I approached the counter and waited for the girl preparing a coffee to finish. She had pink hair and a small gold stud through one nostril. Her arms were painfully thin, and the striped uniform hung off her as if it was on a coat hanger. I put her age at no more than seventeen or eighteen years old.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she called before carrying the white mug to an elderly man sitting by himself in the corner. She returned seconds later and smiled at me. “What can I get you?”

  “Actually, I wanted to have a chat with Molly. Is she here?”

  “Oh, you must be her old teacher. She mentioned you’d been in yesterday. She’s on her break at the moment. I’ll go and find her.”

  Before I could say anything, she disappeared through the door behind the serving area marked Staff Only. After a few seconds, she returned. “Molly will be out in a moment.” She flashed another brief smile and set about wiping down the espresso machine.

  A short while later, Molly emerged from the back room. She grinned at me. “Hi, Alex. I think you’ve already won the competition for most visits in a week.” Her behaviour did not seem typical of somebody with a guilty conscience.

  “What did you do on my laptop yesterday?” I asked.

  A slight frown creased her brow. “I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure who it belonged to, so I powered it up. As soon as I saw the login box, I knew it was yours. Like I told you last night, I tried to find an email address or phone number inside the case so I could contact you. Why? Is something wrong?”

  I ignored her question. “And you didn’t log in or anything?”

  Her head jerked backwards in surprise. “How would I do that? I don’t have your password.”

  “So, nobody else used it?”

  The frown deepened. “Well, obviously I asked if any of our customers wanted to borrow your computer to do some browsing. No, of course I didn’t let anybody else use it. Why do you think they would want to use your old laptop when almost everybody in the country has a mobile phone?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t implying ... Is there any chance somebody logged on or connected something to it while you weren’t looking?”

  Molly folded her arms. “You left it by the table. I noticed it almost immediately, so I picked it up and put it behind the counter. Then I switched it on to confirm it was yours, and a few minutes later you came back. Nobody else had time to use it. What’s all this about?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s nothing.”

  “Is it something to do with that dark web stuff?”

  The girl cleaning the machine turned around and stared at me for a moment. It was obvious she had been listening in to our conversation.

  I lowered my voice as I leaned in closer to Molly. “I’m not sure what’s going on. It was just a theory.”

&n
bsp; “If I were you. I’d stay well clear of anything like that. My boyfriend says there are some seriously dodgy people on there.”

  “I can believe it. Thanks for looking after the laptop for me. As a matter of interest, what does your boyfriend do for a living? How come he knows so much about the dark web?”

  “He tells me he uses it to buy stuff, but to be honest, I don’t really understand what he does. I’ve seen him using that special browser thing a few times. He doesn’t like to talk about it.” Her voice took on a lighter tone. “Anyway, while you’re here, can I get you a drink?”

  I ordered another Americano. I handed over a five-pound note and once again told her to keep the change. As she prepared my coffee, I returned to the table by the wall where I had sat the previous afternoon. I retrieved the laptop from its case, plugged in the charger and pressed the power button. After several whirring and clicking sounds, the login prompt eventually popped up.

  I tapped in my password and waited for the desktop to appear. After another minute of mechanical grating noises, I clicked on the Windows Explorer icon. I didn’t really know what to look for. For several minutes, I investigated directory contents including the online synchronised folder but discovered nothing out of place. Whatever the policemen had found on my desktop machine, it seemed my laptop was not the source.

  As Molly approached the table, I closed the lid.

  “Is everything alright?” she asked, placing the mug beside me.

  “I’m not really sure.”

  She hesitated for a moment, waiting to see if I would elaborate. When I didn’t, she shrugged and made her way back to the serving area.

  I sipped at the drink, trying to decide what to do. The obvious next step was to ask Jamie for his advice, but I was reluctant to involve him further. In any case, he was probably still at work.