Gray Redemption

by Alan McDermott

  “Think of it as a kind of re-chargeable battery,” Small explained, “but rather than releasing its energy at a constant rate, it purges instantly. They are used on a much bigger scale to replicate lightning strikes.”

  “How big is this one?” Farsi asked.

  “It’s not huge, but my guess is that as soon as you open that door, everything in the room gets hit by a couple of thousand volts. Forensics might be able to salvage some of the data on the hard drives, but if he’s using SSDs, everything will be wiped instantly.”

  “SSDs?”

  “Solid-State Drives,” Small said. “Normal hard drives store data on rotating metal disks, but SSDs are more like chips or RAM, with no moving parts. They are more resistant to shock, such as being dropped, but they are susceptible to power surges. Zap one with a capacitor and you lose everything.”

  Farsi looked at the prisoner. “Do you think you can wriggle out of this if you destroy the evidence?”

  Gordon suddenly found some bravado, more in desperation than anything. “I want to see the search warrant.”

  “We’re here under the Terrorism Act 2000, we don’t need a warrant. All that’s required is for me to suspect that you’re a terrorist, simple as that. No warrant, no solicitor, no bail and we can hold you as long as we like. How does that sound?”

  Gordon’s eyes grew wide with shock. “I’m not a terrorist!”

  “Perhaps not, but while we suspect you are, you’re royally screwed. I guess the only way you can prove us wrong is to give us access to your computers.”

  Gordon’s eyes darted around the room, searching for a way out of the situation. He’d thought they were there because of the hacking he’d done on behalf of his benefactor, the man he knew only as B, but as far as he was aware he hadn’t accessed any networks that were so sensitive that his actions could be labelled terrorism. There had been a few individuals’ computers and perhaps a dozen companies, but none of them were risks to national security.

  This led him to wonder just what they were planning to charge him with.

  “What is it that I’m supposed to have done?”

  “Collection of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism,” Farsi replied. “We know you host a website for someone we’re looking for, so you can add helping in the preparing or commissioning of a terrorist act, too.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with me!” Gordon shouted. “I just host the site, that’s all. There’s no law against it.”

  “You must have known he was up to no good,” Small jumped in, “otherwise you wouldn’t have hidden behind a dozen relay servers.”

  The prisoner bit his lip as he stared once more at his office door.

  “If you’ve got any booby traps in there, I suggest you disarm them now.” Farsi said. “You’re looking at a long time in prison, so don’t add further charges by destroying any evidence. We already have proof that the website is being run from this flat, and that will be enough to convict you. However, if you play nicely we might be able to convince the judge that your co-operation helped our investigation. You might get away with five years.”

  The prospect of a long sentence was the final straw. He was built to manipulate ones and zeros, not fight for survival in a prison environment.

  “I want immunity from prosecution,” Gordon whined. “I can’t go to prison. I wouldn’t last a week.”

  “Not going to happen. We might be able to push for three years and you’ll serve just eighteen months, with half of that out on licence.”

  Nine months was still a long, long time, and if word got out that his sentence had been reduced because he’d given evidence against someone else, his cards would be marked.

  There was also the backlash from B to consider. He’d met the man just twice: The first time outside the court when he’d offered Gordon work; and the second when he’d turned up with his first cash payment. On that occasion his new employer hadn’t been as cordial. He’d explained what he needed and asked if Gordon could provide it. The answer had been an easy “Yes”. He already had a server relay in place for his own file-sharing site, and setting up another would be a piece of cake. Finding ways into other people’s computers wouldn’t be too challenging either, Gordon had promised – though it obviously depended on the nature of the information. He could get into the telephone networks or National Health Service in seconds, but banks and government networks were out: Their firewalls and intrusion-detection systems were simply too advanced.

  B hadn’t needed anything that secure, and the partnership had been sealed with the handing over of the money and delivery of the caveat: “When you take this money, you’re in for good. There’s no walking away when you get bored, and you never tell anyone about me. If I find out you’ve opened your mouth I’ll hunt you down, and trust me, you don’t want that to happen.”

  With his contact book containing zero entries, Gordon had no qualms on that score, and the weight of the envelope had felt good in his hands. The money would enable him to buy some of the equipment he’d only been able to dream about, and the threat was soon forgotten.

  Until now.

  Whether he gave up his employer or not, he was facing jail, and that didn’t make for an easy decision.

  * * *

  Jeff Campbell helped his wife Anne prepare the evening meal while the Levines dealt with yet another teenage tantrum. Alana was facing her third night in the tent and wasn’t about to go quietly.

  “I hate it in there,” she pouted, arms firmly crossed against her chest. “There isn’t even a toilet.”

  Carl Levine sympathised with her, having spent countless evenings sleeping rough during his time in the Army, but she had a roof over her head to keep the rain out and the inconvenience of having to squat behind a bush just didn’t rank very highly in his book.

  “It won’t be for much longer,” he told her for the hundredth time, but when pressed for a firm date he admitted he had no idea. All he could do was reiterate the offer to make amends once things were back to normal.

  Alana noticed movement outside the window and suddenly her demeanour changed.

  “Okay, but I want a new laptop when we get back home.”

  “Deal,” her father said, glad that there wasn’t going to be a scene.

  “Can I just go for a little walk?” Alana asked in her sweetest voice, and Levine nodded, but not before reminding her of the rules.

  “Your name is Alice and we’re here on holiday from Essex, okay?”

  “I know, Dad.”

  She was up and out the door before Levine could say anything else, and his wife took the vacant seat.

  “Are you sure about all this?” She asked her husband. “There hasn’t been anything about us on the news, and no-one seems to be looking for us. Is there a chance you’ve misinterpreted the message?”

  Carl wondered if it was possible. Had he turned their lives upside-down for no reason? Alana had missed over two weeks of school and the authorities would soon be taking an interest — if they weren’t already. On top of that, his wife Sandra hadn’t told her employers that she would be taking time off, which meant she would probably find herself out of work once the situation was resolved. Finding another job at her age — given the current economic climate — would be no easy task.

  If he’d got the message wrong, this whole mess could have been avoided, but in his heart he knew he was doing the right thing.

  “I know it seems strange that no-one appears to be looking for us, but I’d much rather be safe than sorry.”

  Sandra wasn’t about to argue with her husband. She might have if Alana wasn’t a consideration, but her daughter was her whole life, and she wasn’t about to let anything happen to her.

  Levine took her hand in his. “We’ll have a family holiday when this is over,” he told her. “Somewhere nice and sunny, just the three of us.”

  “As long as it isn’t camping,” Sandra said with a hint of a smile
.

  While the Levines discussed possible destinations, Alana struck up a conversation with the girl from the adjacent caravan.

  “You look like you’re enjoying this as much as me,” she said.

  The girl rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe they call this a holiday. I’d rather be at school.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far!” Alana laughed, and got a smile in return.

  “I’m Melissa,” the girl said.

  “Alice,” she replied, remembering her father’s instructions. “So why aren’t you in school?”

  “My dad works away most of the year,” Melissa said, “and he’s only back for like two weeks. I can’t believe we have to spend it here, though.”

  “Yeah, same here. Dad disappears for months at a time, but I’d rather stay at home than go camping. It sucks, big time.”

  Alana looked at the girl’s handset. “What phone have you got?”

  Melissa handed it over. “It’s the new Samsung.”

  “I prefer the iPhone,” Alana said, though the one in her hand was very similar. “Would it be okay to text my boyfriend? My dad forgot to pack the chargers, so all our phones have run flat. I haven’t had contact with the real world for days.”

  Melissa said it was no problem, and Alana tapped out a quick message:

  Hi Sam. Hope 2 b back soon. Luv U & miss U. No need 2 reply. A.

  She hit the Send button, waited for confirmation, and handed the phone back. “Thanks.”

  “That’s okay. I get, like, five hundred free texts a month, so you can use it any time.”

  They chatted for a few minutes about music and Facebook before Sandra called her in for her dinner.

  “I gotta go,” Alana said. “See you later.”

  “See ya.”

  Alana trudged back inside, the thrill of her communication fix wearing off quickly, replaced by the dread of another night under the stars.

  * * *

  “We’ve got our man,” Farsi said over the phone, “but his equipment is booby-trapped. He’ll only give us access if we offer immunity from prosecution and give him a change of identity.”

  “What about Gerald?” Veronica Ellis asked. “Can’t he get access?”

  “If we open the door to the room it triggers a device which wipes the hard drives. He said he has a similar detector on the windows, though we haven’t been able to check that yet.”

  “Then go through the wall,” Ellis said sternly. “I haven’t got the power to authorise immunity. That’s down to the CPS, and I wouldn’t build his hopes up.”

  Ellis knew that the Crown Prosecution Service could offer Gordon the deal he wanted, but there were no guarantees. They had famously done so with Bertie Smalls back in the 1970s after the armed robber offered to give evidence against over twenty others in return for his freedom and the chance to keep what was left of his ill-gotten gains. The men Smalls helped to prosecute were given a combined total of over three hundred years in prison, but with Gordon it was unlikely that the catch would be so big, meaning the Director of Public Prosecutions would have little incentive to let him walk away a free man.

  There was also the fiasco of the previous year to consider. Even though Tom Gray had died, his associates — the very men they were looking for — had been released without charge following a deal done with the Home Secretary. That had come back to bite him on the arse at the subsequent general election, and there was no way the incumbent minister was going to be handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards any time soon.

  “If we go through the wall, we still need him to log on to his computer,” Farsi told her. “He claims to have encrypted his disks, and if we get the password wrong three times or remove the disks from their housings, they get wiped. Gerald confirmed that this is easy enough to do.”

  “You’re the lead officer on the ground, Hamad. Do whatever you need to do,” Ellis stressed, “but get him to co-operate. We need to let Andrew know what he’s up against.”

  The phone went dead in Farsi’s hand and he stuck it back in his pocket.

  “No promises,” he told Gordon, “but we’ll do everything we can.”

  Gordon thought long and hard about his prospects, and eventually nodded in resignation. He pointed towards the door. “I’ll let you in.”

  Farsi told Zimmerman to remove the cuffs and stayed close as Gordon made his way to his office.

  “Wait here,” he said. “Once I get inside I have a few things to do. I can’t disarm it if the room is full of people getting in my way.”

  Farsi nodded to the others to hang back and Gordon opened the door. Once inside, he felt for the top of the frame and then walked to desk, leaned over his chair and drummed out a command on the keyboard. Finally, he walked over to the rack and reached deep into a gap between two servers as if searching for something on the back wall. His shoulder was hard against the rack and he grabbed one of the metal uprights with his free hand.

  The procedure had taken seven seconds.

  “I can’t go to prison,” Gordon repeated, and screwed up his eyes in anticipation of the end.

  Farsi saw what was about to happen but was too slow to react. He managed just one step into the room when the capacitor vented its charge, sending over a hundred megawatts through the prisoner. The discharge lasted a little over a microsecond and Gordon was thrown across the room, slamming into the far wall with enough force to make a body-shaped dent in the plaster.

  Farsi ran over and checked his pulse while Small headed to the computers. The mains electricity had tripped and he sent someone to find the fuse box. In the meantime he unplugged one of the servers and took a screwdriver to the back.

  “He’s dead,” Farsi said.

  “So is this,” Small said as he noticed the scorch marks on the hard drive. “As I suspected, he was using SSDs. I doubt we’ll get anything from them.”

  “I want you to try,” Farsi said. “Load everything into the van and search for any hard copies. Look for a notebook, backup drive, anything that might tell us who’s on the other end of that site.”

  He dug around in Gordon’s pockets and found just a mobile phone and some loose change. The phone refused to turn on, obviously affected by either the impact or electrical surge. Farsi handed it to Small and told him to see what he could get off it, and then made two phone calls. The first was to call in a clean-up team, and the second was to break the news to his boss.

  * * *

  “We’ve found them!”

  The call from Todd Hamilton came through to Farrar as he was entertaining guests, and he excused himself, finding a quiet spot in his study.

  “Where are they?” He asked.

  “It looks like a caravan park in Dorset. We intercepted a text sent to the Levine kid’s boyfriend and traced it back. She wasn’t using her normal phone.”

  “Can you pin-point the caravan they’re in?” Farrar asked.

  “We narrowed it down to a thirty metre radius, and slap-bang in the middle is one owned by Tom Gray’s solicitor.”

  “I told you to check connections to all friends and acquaintances,” Farrar said angrily. “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

  “It’s registered at the camp in his wife’s maiden name,” Hamilton said. “We just hadn’t dug that far.”

  The phone went quiet for a while, and Hamilton took the opportunity to deflect some of the blame away from his team. “If we’d drilled down to relatives of friends, where does it end? Relatives of relatives of friends? Friends of relatives of friends? We’ve had our hands full just looking at known contacts.”

  Farrar knew he had a point, but wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “I want this finished tonight. Get in touch with Matt Baker and work up a plan.”

  “Baker’s a liability,” Hamilton objected. “My team can handle this.”

  “He gets the job done,” Farrar replied, hoping the insult registered. “It must look like an accident, you understand?”

  “Got it.”


  “Make no mistake, if you don’t end this in the next six hours, you certainly will ‘get it’!”

  Farrar killed the connection and put the phone back in his trouser pocket. His watch told him it was just after eight in the evening, which meant it would be a few hours before the team were in place. Despite this, he wanted to end the dinner party early so that he could get to the office to listen in to the take-down over a secure connection.

  After dishing up the meal he informed his guests that an emergency had come up at work and he would have to disappear shortly after dessert. They made consoling noises, not envious of the hours he kept.

  Throughout the meal, Farrar wondered whether or not to tell Palmer about the find. There was no longer a need to get the information from Baines and Smart, but it would be satisfying to have them go through one of Palmer’s interrogations. Then again, Palmer was a valuable asset, and the men he would be going up against had proven themselves rather resourceful. It would be totally unprofessional to ask Palmer to take on these two as well as Gray when three bullets could solve the problem.

  Actually, four bullets, he reminded himself. There was a fourth passenger on the ship, though he had no idea who the other might be. Whoever else was with Gray was obviously a fugitive, otherwise they wouldn’t be tagging along. That made them desperate and potentially dangerous.

  Farrar decided that he would tell Palmer to simply kill the targets. However, he would wait until his team confirmed that Levine and Campbell were well and truly dead. Given the incompetence shown by his team in the last couple of weeks, he wasn’t going to go as far as demanding heads on plates, but he did want to know that they were no longer breathing before signing the task off as complete.

  * * *

  Alana Levine muttered to herself as she angrily stuffed a change of clothes into her rucksack. Carl knew the night ahead wasn’t going to be a pleasant one for his wife, and he apologised in advance, but Sandra ignored him. She wasn’t too happy with the new sleeping arrangement, either, but she held her tongue as she finished making the last of the sandwiches.