No Safe Place

by Jenny Spence

  “So what are you saying?” asks Luke.

  “It’s like . . . it’s sort of like there’s a bit of the report that’s missing, and someone’s quickly faked this stuff and put it in to fill the gap. I think they’re counting on the fact that no-one reads this stuff properly.”

  “Does it matter?” asks Luke.

  “I need to think about that and try to figure out what’s going on,” I say. “I just wanted to explain to Ravi why I asked him to find the document, okay?”

  “Okay,” they agree.

  “Right,” I continue. “So leave that with me, and I’ll see if I can find out any more at this end. Now, the other business. You all know about Ravi’s big breakthrough, finding Peter Talbot’s Flickr photo stream that shows him on top of the mountain.”

  “Yeah, go Ravi,” says Luke, and we all applaud. Ravi assumes a modest expression.

  “And further, we’ve found that those photos were sent from an iPhone, but there was no data spike on Peter Talbot’s phone?”

  Everybody nods.

  “Well, I got Ravi to check out another number, and he’s just told me that there’s a data spike on the relevant day coming from that number. The interesting thing is that the phone with the spike belongs to a guy called Brian O’Dwyer, Talbot’s best mate, who was on the bushwalk too. He was the only person in the camp when Talbot set out on his walk.”

  “The phones were switched,” says Ravi.

  “Looks like it. So we have to ask ourselves how that happened.”

  “If they both had iPhones it could have been accidental,” says Luke. “Talbot just picked up the wrong phone.”

  “Sure,” I say, “but how did O’Dwyer get his phone back? And if he didn’t, why didn’t he say that Talbot had it when they were trying to triangulate the signals?”

  “Awesome,” says Ravi. “Let’s go hunt down Brian O’Dwyer.”

  “Not so fast,” I say. “It’s time we handed this over to the police.”

  Ravi agrees to put all the electronic evidence together, and I have the unenviable task of calling Lewis and owning up to all the illegal activity that went into obtaining it. It’s also time for me to write my promised report to Derek.

  Heady with success, Steve and I toast our victory with mineral water. There’s not much else we can do, because he doesn’t drink at all and I’m not about to get stuck into champagne on my own.

  Before he leaves, Steve asks for copies of the strange document that’s bothering me at work and its clone. I put them on his memory stick and give it back to him.

  Less than five minutes after Steve’s gone my phone rings.

  It’s Nick.

  “Elly? Nobody tell me you’re in Sydney.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry Nick. Trying to lie low for a while.”

  “Yeah, that’s good, Elly. Listen, I’ve been talking to these people I know in Ukraine. The ones did the work for Carlos. They got me worried.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  In his rich Russian accent, he explains. The Ukrainians have organised themselves into different specialist groups, and the mob that Carlos was dealing with outsourced all the phone stuff, analysing the triangulation data, to a group who do that kind of work. This second group, it seems, are not at all fussy about who they work for, and Nick’s contact, one Yevgeny, doesn’t have much time for them.

  Nick’s been fretting about who was intercepting Carlos’s calls to his pizza provider, since Carlos thought his phone system was secure. Nick asked Yevgeny to find out if these other Ukrainians might have been involved.

  “He tells me could be, this is exactly the kind of thing they do,” he says. “He remembered they mentioned another client in Australia. So Anna and I scraped up a bit of money and got Yevgeny to give them another little job. All they had to do is just look at some phone numbers and tell him if they’ve seen them before.”

  “What, would they do that? What about client confidentiality?”

  “These guys are mercenaries, Elly. They’ll do anything.”

  “So, what numbers?”

  “Well, for a start we gave them Carlos’s number. And bingo, they had it.”

  “These people were sitting over there in the Ukraine, intercepting his phone calls? They can do that?”

  “You got it, Elly. Curse of the digital age.”

  “For a start, you said? Were there other phone numbers?”

  “Your number, Elly. They had your old mobile number.”

  I can’t breathe. I’m holding the phone to my ear, and I’m paralysed.

  “That was good move, Elly, shutting down that phone,” says Nick. “They could have tracked you anywhere.”

  I’m shaking now. All that time I was right. Even though that phone is now in pieces, sitting in Derek’s safe, I feel eyes on me.

  I struggle to speak, my tongue thick. “They haven’t . . . This phone. They wouldn’t have this number . . . ?”

  “No, nobody got that number!”

  “Sorry, Nick. But what if they get this number? Can we find out?”

  “Sure, Elly. Look, we’re not going to tell them the number, because we can’t trust them. But we do a deal with them. If that particular client gives them a new number to track, they’ll let our friends know. How about that?”

  “Will it cost money?”

  “Carlos had an account with our friends. There’s still some credit.”

  “Is there enough in the account to get these other guys to tell us who their client is?”

  “They wouldn’t go that far. Bad for their business.”

  “Couldn’t Yevgeny hack into their server or something?”

  “Hey, Elly, they catch you doing that in Ukraine, it’s lights out. No, the important thing is to make sure he finds out if they start tracking you. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Nick.”

  Another uneasy night looms. But this phone is pretty secure, with so few people knowing about it. There’s really only Derek, a couple of other work people, and my closest friends. I might have given it to Brett, but he hasn’t put it on any kind of contacts list where I’m working. I might be getting the impression that something is being fiddled somewhere to get that coal mine through, but I don’t think it’s Brett’s work. That innocence can’t be an act.

  Just to be on the safe side, in case I have to get rid of the phone in a hurry, I program all the numbers that matter to me into Luke’s super secret blue phone.

  Then I start composing my report for Derek, setting out the whole story the way I now see it. I include a copy of Talbot’s wedding photo, wondering again if one of those two groomsmen is Brian O’Dwyer. Mai’s description of the Telstra guy could fit either of them, once you add glasses and a cheap grey wig. The shorter one looks a bit more muscular, a man of action. If Brian’s a personal trainer he’d be fit. Someone chased Carlos down, grabbed him from behind, a powerful stroke across his throat.

  I can’t think about that anymore.

  I put the whole thing aside and get into bed with another of my cheap DVDs. My selection is like a sentimental journey through that period of Miranda’s childhood, holed up with her in a tiny flat, where we would snuggle up together and watch the eight-thirty movie, whatever it was. Eventually someone gave us a cheap VCR player and we acquired a few tapes. We played The Princess Bride until it fell apart. I watch it now, chuckling. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Oh, sweet revenge.

  30

  I’m dreading the call to Lewis, but I’m also looking forward to it. I put it off for a while, then take courage over my first cup of coffee in the back booth of a nice little café I’ve discovered in York Street.

  “Lewis,” he says sharply after a couple of rings. My mouth is dry and I can’t speak.

  “Who is this?” he asks, quite gently. He probably has informants who need to be handled with care.

  “It’s me,” I say. “Elly Cartwright.”

  “Hey! The long-lost!” He sounds pleas
ed. “I don’t believe I gave you permission to skip town.”

  “Well, you should have arrested me when you had the chance.”

  “Stay put and I’ll send out a posse. Where are you?”

  “That’s classified. Listen, I’ve got something for you. Remember I asked you to check out Peter Talbot, the guy who disappeared in the mountains?”

  “Yeah, sorry, we couldn’t really . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that. We think we’ve found out what happened to him.”

  “Elly, the police don’t really like it when the general public start trying to do our work for us.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure, but listen, there’s a CD coming over to your office this morning with some evidence on it. I want you to get your IT guys to go through it with you. It’s going to show you that the triangulation data the searchers used when they looked for Peter Talbot came from his phone all right, but he didn’t have that phone with him. He had another phone, and he took it with him to the top of this mountain.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Well, see, he must have found out pretty soon that he had the wrong phone, but it probably didn’t bother him. So he set it up to process the photos he was taking.”

  “Process?”

  “Yeah. I saw you with that iPad, so maybe you do something similar. You set it up so that the photos you take get sent on automatically? He was sending his to a Flickr account, his Flickr photo stream, and they’re still there. Lewis, each one of those photos has a bit of data attached to it called a geotag. It shows exactly where and when the picture was taken. You can use the photos to track him all the way.”

  “What was that about triangulation?”

  “They used triangulation to search for him,” I say patiently. “But they were triangulating his own phone, the wrong one. The two phones went in different directions.”

  “How do you know it was him who took the photos?”

  “He’s in one of them. Have a look when you get the CD. It’s one of those pictures you take of yourself, holding your phone out and using that turnaround button on your phone, you know?”

  “So whose phone was it?”

  “It belongs to Peter’s mate, Brian O’Dwyer, the last person to see him alive. They both had iPhones. O’Dwyer could easily have switched them without Talbot noticing.”

  “You think he’s implicated?”

  “Hell, yes! He must have known Talbot had the wrong phone, and he doesn’t seem to have said anything. Find out what happened afterwards. Did he get his own phone back? If so, how? Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “If this Talbot guy stayed on the mountain, how did the pictures get out?”

  “The way the technology works, they get transmitted automatically if the phone is within range. The person holding the phone might not even know it was happening.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Look, Lewis, if Talbot’s dead, they looked in the wrong place for his body. It could be up near the summit. That’s where he took the last picture.”

  “You can call me Mike, you know.”

  “Just look at the material, okay? Carlos found out about this.

  We’ve been retracing his steps.”

  “Why didn’t he do something with it?”

  “I think he’d only just got onto it. He was still checking it out, figuring out what it meant. And there’s more. Talbot was into something dodgy, something that was earning him a lot of money on the side. That’s why Carlos was interested in him.”

  “What sort of something dodgy?”

  “Well, again, we don’t know. But there’s this shady bank, and when we looked at their records . . .”

  “Elly, Elly . . .” The message gets through, and I shut up. “I didn’t hear that, okay? Let’s just stick with the mountain and the phones for now.”

  “Okay, but can you look for his body?”

  “If there’s enough there for a new search, sure. I can’t promise anything, but we’ll have a look at this CD. Okay?”

  “Okay, good.”

  “All right. But I’ll need your number. You’ve got it blocked.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  I give him my number and that’s it. Friday morning. Will they take notice of this? Will they look today? I can’t bear the thought of going through the weekend with this whole question hanging. What if O’Dwyer finds out we’re onto him? If we’re right, he must have found out before, and I still can’t imagine how.

  Steve calls me as I’m heading back to work.

  “Do people work late at your office?”

  “I doubt it,” I say. “The place is deserted at the best of times.”

  “Good. I need you to work back tonight, and let me in when everyone’s gone.”

  “Steve! I can’t do that!”

  “Yeah, you can. I want to take a look at a few computers there, see what’s what with this funny document of yours.”

  I dread to think what would happen if we get caught, me with a false identity and all. But it will certainly take our minds off the agonising wait for news about the Talbot affair, and I’m beginning to realise that there’s something immovable about Steve when he gets an idea in his head.

  “Okay,” I say, resigned. “Let’s talk at lunchtime.”

  We work out the details over the phone while we’re eating a Vietnamese lunch, sitting at opposite ends of a little food court near Woolworths. Steve suggests the place with an SMS as I’m leaving the office, and I stand behind him at the counter, then order the dish he’s having. I’ll be going back there again.

  I pass on what Nick told me about the Ukrainians. Steve is fascinated, and wants technical details about exactly how it’s done.

  “I don’t know that!” I say. “Talk to Nick.”

  Afterwards, I take a long walk around and through Hyde Park. There’s no more rain but the weather’s turned cold, and it’s like a Melbourne winter’s day. The difference here, though, is that the freeze doesn’t seem to last.

  When I get back, I recheck the figures that lead up to the professor’s bogus conclusions. I’ve been in two minds about whether to contact him, but now I’m looking for an excuse to make an innocent query about this earlier section, steering clear of the other bit. It takes a while, but eventually I find something: two sets of figures from different sinkholes that are identical. Could someone have accidentally entered the same figures in two different places? It’s been done before.

  I’ve been given a contacts list with phone numbers for all the contributors, and I try the professor’s mobile first. It gives a long beep, and I get a recorded message informing me that the number is no longer in use.

  That’s annoying. I look at the date on the contacts list. Okay, it’s six months old. And the report is nearly a year old. These things do take time. People do change their mobile numbers.

  Next, I try the landline number next to the professor’s name. All indications are it’s the university department where he works. You never know where these professors are in real space, with secondments, sabbaticals and all the perks they get.

  After a lot of rings a tired female voice answers, and I ask to speak to Professor Bartholomew.

  “What’s this concerning?” she asks, a little more sharply.

  “It’s about a report he wrote,” I say. “It’s included in a study that I’m editing. I have some questions.”

  “Could I have the full title of the report, please?”

  I read it out to her.

  “Date?”

  I oblige. I can hear the tap-tap of computer keys. There’s a pause.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s no-one here who can help you with that.”

  “Can’t I speak to the professor?”

  “Professor Bartholomew is on extended leave.”

  “Well, is he at another university? Do you know how I can get hold of him?”

  “That’s extended sick leave, Ms . . . ?”

  “Ca . . . Elliott, Jane Ellio
tt.”

  “Professor Bartholomew is seriously ill, Ms Elliott. I’m afraid there’s extensive brain damage. He’s not expected to make a full recovery.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry. I had no idea. Was it . . . Is he . . . Was it a stroke?”

  Her voice is a little softer now:

  “It was a car accident. Several months ago. I’m sorry, but I can’t give you any more details.”

  “Of course, thank you for telling me. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  I put the phone down and stare at it, not focusing. Then I start searching through news archives. But there are car accidents all the time, and they rarely give the names of the victims. It doesn’t look like Professor Bartholomew was important enough to get a news story of his own. There was something on the New England Highway in January, where the male driver had to be cut from the wreckage and was in a critical condition with head injuries, but then there was another male driver a week later, thrown from a car on the Pacific Highway just north of Newcastle. Either of those could have been him, and that’s just assuming it happened somewhere near the scene of the crime, so to speak.

  There’s something spooky about this. Either Professor Bartholemew wrote that odd section of his report in a deliberately obfuscating way, for reasons I can’t guess at; or someone else substituted that junk for whatever he wrote – something detrimental to the project? Something concluding that the promised technology wasn’t going to work?

  And now Professor Bartholemew is conveniently off the scene.

  As I’d expected, people start leaving early, and the office is pretty much deserted by five o’clock except for one of two IT contractors, who are probably trying to keep their hours up. Brett looks in on his way out.

  “Working hard, Jane?”

  “Yes, I’m staying back tonight until I’ve finished this section. Gotta stick to that deadline.”

  “That’s great. The sooner you get through it the happier we’ll all be. See you on Monday, then.”

  At six-thirty on the dot the last contractor goes past my office to the lift. I stand up, stretch and follow him out. My idea was to get something to eat, but everything seems to be closed, so I just call Steve as arranged and he follows me back to the building. He’s wearing a puffy jacket and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. As I let myself in he comes up behind me, pretending to fumble for his security card. The door swings slowly shut and he grabs it just in time and slips in. We ride up in the lift, not looking at each other.