by Eva Hudson
“Please come in.”
His hotel room was spotless. According to the schedule Jen had given her, Rennie had arrived into Heathrow at 7:30 a.m. It was now nine thirty, and if Ingrid had been working on the same timetable, the floor would have at least two wet towels on it and the contents of her case would be spread over the bed.
“Good flight?” she asked, because that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to ask.
Rennie picked up an aluminum flight case off the floor and placed it on the bed. “Sat next to a toddler. Behind me a couple were breaking up.”
“That’s bad.”
“And that’s exactly how I feel.” He pulled out a rectangular device that looked like an old-fashioned walkie-talkie.
She stared at the gadget in his hand. “Is that what I think it is?”
He started waving it over the electrical sockets and switches.
“Is that necessary?”
Rennie moved onto the phone on the bedside table. “I work in fraud. I can’t take any chances. Unlike you, the Bureau hasn’t created an undercover identity for me. I travel in my own name, on my own passport. Airline networks are extremely hackable.”
“Wow.”
“The people I’m trying to put away make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That’s a lot of motivation to track me and listen in, if ever I slip up.”
The device bleeped as he reached the TV. “Significant?” she asked.
“Nope, it’s a Samsung. Listening devices often use the same frequency as the remote.”
“And do you do this after every maid service?”
“Every time I come back in the room. I check for cameras, microphones and big hairy guys under the bed.”
“Very sensible.”
“They tend to snore.”
So he was gay, then. Ingrid made a mental note to hide listening devices in Samsung TVs.
“So,” she said, putting her helmet on the dark veneered console table, “how can I help?”
He got another gadget out of the flight case, slipped it out of its velveteen pouch and placed it next to her helmet. “Scrambler,” he explained. “For wifi and 4G.”
“They did tell you not to bring your gun, didn’t they?”
He grimaced. “Left it in Nebraska. Feels strange not having it though. How do the cops here cope?”
She shook her head. “After Paris, you know, the Bataclan, and that lorry in Nice, there was plenty of talk about it, but no one I speak to in the Met wants to carry.”
“Yet the murder rate here is about a tenth of the States’.”
“Go figure.”
“Still feels kind of weird not to have one though.” He plugged the scrambler in.
“You didn’t answer my question; what kind of help are you after?”
“You’re the Russian expert.” He looked up. “Am I right?”
Ingrid leaned against the console and watched him scroll through frequencies on his gadget. “One of them.”
“Your knowledge might come in handy.”
“With a fraud case?”
Rennie pressed his lips together. “You following the election?”
Ingrid’s undercover work had been so all-consuming she’d only kept one eye on the presidential election. However, she’d read the endless headlines, so she knew the Republican party’s email servers had been hacked, and private correspondence between campaign staff had been gifted to WikiLeaks. It had been embarrassing for the candidate, Marilyn Banner, and had given the twenty-four-hour news media plenty to fill time with, but nothing had so far come to light to torpedo Banner’s prospects of becoming the first female president. “Sure.”
“Then you know about the hacking allegations.”
“I thought you were from the fraud team?”
Satisfied his scrambler was properly attenuated, he sat on the edge of the bed. “Okay, bit of background for you. A few years back, Omaha investigated a massive savings and loans fraud. Cut a long story short, we stumbled across an extremely elaborate accounting scandal, perpetrated by hackers, and after setting up some neat little traps, we were able to identify the culprits. We developed a certain amount of competence in this area, and now many of the nation’s biggest hacking cases come to us.” Rennie smiled. “I know, and you thought we were just farm boys.”
“Hey, you’re looking at an actual farm girl.”
“Really?”
“Hog farm outside Jackson, Minnesota.”
He stuck his bottom lip out. “Not many farmer’s daughters end up in the Bureau.”
She didn’t answer. The reasons she worked for the FBI were too complicated, and painful, to share. “If you’re investigating the hacking of the election in the US, why are you in London?”
He emptied a small leather backpack and laid its contents out on the bed. “Do you have experience in tracing and identifying hackers?”
Ingrid didn’t.
“Wanted to check before I tried to teach you to suck eggs.” He arranged his possessions—cell phone, notepad, paperback, charger—in a line. “The thing about hackers is that, like all criminals, they eventually leave us a little tiny clue. Sometimes they mean to—they want everyone to know it was them who got into a particular server or brought a company to a standstill—but often it’s unintentional. They’ll slip up, just like regular cons. They’ll forget to encrypt something, or use an old password we’ve already cracked, or they’ll brag about something in a forum… and then use the same username somewhere else. You get the picture. It’s slow, old-fashioned police work.”
Ingrid wondered what she could bring to this particular party. Her technological skills didn’t go much beyond checking the privacy settings on her iPhone and deleting her search history.
“The group of hackers who have delved into GOP and the DNC servers—”
“Wait. The Democrats have been targeted too?”
“You familiar with XT-4 or Panther Systems?”
“Can’t say I am.”
“Between them they manufacture the voting machines used in thirteen states, and the Pelicans have hacked into them too.”
“The Pelicans?” Ingrid’s thoughts were spinning.
“The hackers. Their digital fingerprints are on the servers of both main parties and in the software used in the voting machines.”
Ingrid realized her mouth was open. “Why don’t I know about this? Why doesn’t the public know about this?”
Rennie shrugged. “Guess the news media is so happy gorging itself on a diet of salacious emails it isn’t questioning how those emails came to light.”
Now warmed up, Ingrid unzipped her jacket. “These Pelicans, are they really… could they really affect the election result?”
He put the scanner back in its foam socket within the flight case. “Hell yeah.”
Ingrid blew out hard. “I mean…” She struggled to comprehend all the implications. “They’re… They’re interfering with democracy.”
Rennie eyeballed her. “So you in, then? You want to stop them, bring them in?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Then we need to get to somewhere called Burnham-on-Crouch?” He struggled with the pronunciation.
Ingrid got her phone out, swiped away the notifications and typed the location into Google Maps. “It’s about fifty miles, virtually due east. What’s there?”
“How do we get to it?”
She tapped her helmet. “I’ve got a spare one downstairs.”
Rennie looked at the helmet, then glowered at her. “You’re serious?”
“Totally.”
He scratched his chin through his beard. “I’d need more than a helmet. You got a spare leather jacket too?”
She looked up from the route Google was suggesting. “You’re not scared, are you, Agent Rennie?”
He crossed his arms. “A tiny bit, yes.”
“I’m very safe.”
“I, er, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I mean, what if…”
; “Yes?”
He stared at the helmet. “I want to say yes.”
“But?”
“Well, I think we should just get a taxi or something.” His phone trilled in his pocket. All the playfulness in his features crumpled when he looked at the screen. “I, er, I should…”
“Take it.”
He checked his watch and then answered. “What’s wrong?”
Ingrid couldn’t make out words but could hear a woman’s voice. Loud, angry, incoherent. Drunk, probably. What time was it in Nebraska? Three in the morning? It sounded like a rant.
She tried to give him some privacy by checking the other ways of getting to Burnham-on-Crouch, a small town, possibly no bigger than a village judging by the map, near the Essex coast. There were regular trains from Liverpool Street Station.
She couldn’t work out why a fraud specialist from the Omaha field office would want to visit a small Essex town. But whatever it was had been of sufficient interest for him to cross the Atlantic, and now she had been assigned to help him. She continued looking at the map, aware her co-worker was having a difficult conversation.
Burnham-on-Crouch wasn’t too far away from somewhere she’d been before on her first investigation in London. On that occasion, she’d traveled by helicopter and been accompanied by the brash Nick Angelis, a private security operative, on a mission to find the Secretary of State’s missing granddaughter. It had taken them around twenty minutes to get there, but Google was telling her the train would take nearly two hours. Ingrid’s thoughts zeroed in on the house she’d entered with Angelis, and the speed with which he had reverted to torture to get a witness to spill. She couldn’t imagine the man in front of her being so brutal: David Rennie had the air of a park ranger wearing his best shirt for an interview on local TV.
He killed his call. “Sorry about that.”
“Trouble?”
“Always. My wife’s sister. It’s not really my problem, but…” He put the phone back in his pocket and didn’t attempt to finish his sentence.
So he had a wife. Her gaydar required a tune-up. “You need anything?”
“Thanks, no. Shall we get the doorman to hail us a taxi?” He scooped up the tools of his trade—notebook, pen, phone, Swiss army knife—and placed them in his neat blue leather backpack. He pulled on a sheepskin jacket that was a little bit Davy Crockett, a little bit Ralph Lauren, and completed his trendy ranger look.
“Sure,” Ingrid lied, knowing damn well that if there was a trip out to Essex, she was going on the Triumph. “Nice bag.”
“Thanks. It’s Italian.”
Maybe gay men have wives these days? Rennie double-checked the door was locked before they left.
“So why are we heading to Essex?” she asked.
Before he could answer, the phone rang in her right pocket. It was Cath Murray. “Cath, hi.”
David Rennie pushed the call button, and the elevator doors immediately opened. Ingrid was taking the elevator a lot these days. She wasn’t happy about it.
“Hi, Ingrid. Thought you’d like an update.”
“Sure.”
“Got the second postmortem back on Yelena Rybkina. You’re not going to believe this.”
6
Ingrid gripped the coffee tightly, waiting for the heat to seep from the cardboard cup through her silk glove liners and into her numb fingers. It had a been a lovely ride out—crisp skies skimming over flat grasslands—once she’d navigated her way beyond the M25, but her heated grips hadn’t done enough to keep her hands warm. She didn’t want to buy handlebar muffs: her Triumph Thunderbird was too beautiful to be disfigured by such an ugly accessory. She was going to have to suck up the cost and get a better pair of gloves. You could get battery-heated ones now. That was the kind of shopping she could handle.
The arrivals board told her Rennie’s train was still twenty minutes away, so she leaned against a low brick wall and soaked up whatever heat the lunchtime sun could offer. The coffee wasn’t great, but soon her fingers would thaw out enough to operate her iPhone.
Burnham-on-Crouch was pretty, with lots of red-brick cottages and thatched-roof pubs, but it didn’t seem to have a purpose. In the States, similar settlements had grown up around a steel mill or a farm or at least an intersection, but this tiny town had no discernible industry or reason to exist except to provide a nice place for City workers to commute from. She had figured out the name—it was a village called Burnham on the banks of the river Crouch—but still had no idea what such a sleepy backwater might have to do with the hacking of the presidential election. She was having difficulty processing how serious a crime it was. American democracy was being undermined, and no one seemed to care. She had relatives who had gone to war to uphold democracy, but somehow, because no one was launching a navy or releasing bombs, the public either didn’t know or didn’t care.
She balanced her coffee on top of the wall and reached into her jacket pocket. She checked Natalya’s phone for messages. Just a few events to RSVP to. Then she went through her own phone and saw the report from Cath had arrived. She hadn’t believed what Cath had told her on the phone and had asked to see it in black and white. It was like something from a Victorian penny dreadful. But there it was, signed off by the Met’s senior pathologist. Name of deceased: Yelena Ekaterina Rybkina. Date of death: 12/OCT/2016. Cause of death: spider bite.
Britain didn’t have any poisonous spiders. It certainly wasn’t home to the brown recluse spider the pathologist named as the killer. And as Yelena Rybkina hadn’t recently visited the parts of North America where the recluse is usually found, it pointed to deliberate poisoning. She felt for Cath and Inspector Faulkner: finding the murderer would be next to impossible. It was almost the perfect crime. Whoever had introduced Rybkina to her assassin could have been miles, if not continents, away by the time she died. By the time the train from London pulled in, she had become so engrossed in the report she’d almost forgotten where she was. David Rennie bounded toward her with more energy than a man who hadn’t slept on the plane should have.
“You seem very excited to be here,” she said.
“Look,” he said, pointing at the clock as its yellow numerals flipped over to reveal the time was 13:21. “And look,” he added, showing her his ticket.
She couldn’t make the connection.
“See? My fare cost £13.20, and I arrived at 13:20.” He looked at her with gleeful eyes. “Isn’t that brilliant?”
“Um, yes. I guess.” She scrutinized him, trying to work out if he was joking.
“I may never take another journey in my life that does that.”
She thought about it for a second. “You could be right.” Perhaps it wasn’t such a weird thing to point out. “Are you some kind of savant? Got some OCD issues I should be aware of?”
He gave her that cute smile again. “Nope. Just like numbers. Particularly fond of palindromes.”
“Well, that’s nice and neat.” A bit like your shirts. She picked up her helmet and tossed the coffee cup into a municipal trash can. “Was that your specialism? Math?”
“Yup. Yours?”
“Languages.”
“Guess the Russian is coming in handy these days.”
“Pravilno. You going to tell me why we’re here? You mentioned something about an internet café.”
Rennie looked at his phone. “Yup, Google says it’s a six-minute walk. This can’t be a big place.”
He looked around and got his bearings. “Reckon it’s this direction. So,” he said, leading the way, “in Omaha we’ve been tracking and tracing the Pelicans for years, gathering any iota of intel we can get our hands on and storing it in the kind of database all crime agencies would be jealous of.”
“Okay.”
“Well, yesterday our database paid out. An email address associated with one of the Pelicans was used to log in to the wifi at the Current Bun, which—” he checked his phone “—should be right around this corner.”
“And that’s w
hy you jumped on a plane?”
He gave her a bashful look. “Correct.”
Ingrid thought about what he’d said. “So you think someone just got sloppy?”
“It’s what I’m hoping. We’ve got someone who needs to get online, has to give an email address to get access, doesn’t want to give their real one, and in a moment of thoughtlessness uses an old one.”
“How do you know someone didn’t just make it up?” They were hurrying.
“Good question. Maybe someone did. And if the email address was mickey-at-mouse-dot-com, I wouldn’t be here, but this email isn’t something you would make up.” He looked at her, a serious expression on his face. “It’s got a name and a series of letters. The chance of an individual making up that particular email address at random I calculated at over seventeen million to one.”
Number nerd.
“But the thing that made me get on a plane is the fact that this internet café we’re looking for is opposite a branch of Barclays Bank.”
They were rushing now. “I don’t get it.”
A car roared past at top speed, its engine momentarily drowning out every other noise in the village.
“So as well as monitoring the hackers, we’re also going after the people funding them. One way or another, the money comes from the Kremlin.”
Maybe her Russian knowledge was going to come in handy after all.
“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring bank accounts associated with the Pelicans, and they are receiving funding from a reclusive billionaire, one of the oligarchs.”
“Which one?”
“Igor Rybkin. You heard of him?”
Ingrid stopped walking. Rybkin? “You do know his wife was murdered last week?”
Rennie turned to her. “I heard it was natural causes.”
“I was reading the autopsy report while I was waiting for you at the station. She was poisoned.”
Rennie was silent for a moment. “Well, I guess someone really did need to get online.”
Ingrid moved her head from side to side. This wasn’t adding up. Rybkin was dead, wasn’t he? There’d been no sightings of him for two years. Not since he’d been humiliated at an auction at Christie’s. “So he’s not dead, then?”
