Before: Sam Ireland Thriller Book 4 (Sam Ireland Thriller Series)

by Finn Óg

  What the hell is he talking about? she wondered, and what does “contact” mean?

  The cameras became more widely spaced as she moved down into the marina. She combed every one, taking it back a few minutes to seek any sign of movement, but aside from the sea lapping, there was nothing.

  Then her phone lit up.

  Just left target boat. Assume they have it. See if it’s sending.

  Áine’s heart began to hammer. At least she knew what that meant. Min had enabled the location to attract the phone’s owners to it, and that also allowed Áine to monitor the device if and when it was eventually retrieved. She felt solidly at ease in bringing up the mapping it would send signal to and waited for it to acquire the data.

  None appeared.

  Not seeing it?

  There was silence for a few more minutes and then the app began to blink – a call. She hit green.

  “What’s happening? Did they not take it?”

  “They took it, alright. I’m on the target yacht now and the phone’s gone.”

  “So why am I not seeing it?”

  “You know why,” Min said. “They were in the boat for fifteen minutes – evidently disabling everything.”

  “Who were?”

  “Two men. Couldn’t really see much—”

  “But how? They weren’t on the cameras and—”

  “I know. They came by dinghy, so get looking again, all round the harbour. Tell me what way they’re headed and I’ll follow.”

  “How?”

  “Just look!” he barked.

  Áine jumped a little at the command and tilted her head to hold the phone on her shoulder as she scrolled. “I can’t see anything!”

  “Keep going. They headed out the mouth of the marina and turned east into the wider harbour.”

  “There’s … there’s nothing. What colour was the dinghy?”

  “Dark, I don’t know. Just dark.”

  “And two men?”

  “Aye, dressed in darks too. Hats on.”

  “Shit!” she said as the phone dropped. She set it to speaker when she retrieved it and left it on the desk. “I’m getting nothing – why am I getting nothing, Min?”

  “Keep going, lassie, keep going. You’ll find them.”

  “Did they have an engine? Could they be out of the harbour already?”

  “Naw,” he replied. “They were paddling, not rowing. Like a canoe – but in a dinghy. There should be movement somewhere.”

  “Nothing east. I’m going west,” Áine said decisively.

  “They definitely went east.” She could sense Min shaking his head.

  “I have them!” she yelled, leaning towards her handset.

  “Where?”

  “West Pier, directly opposite where the fishing boats are tied up.” She heard zipping and a flutter. “Min?”

  His reply was distant. “Keep an eye on them. I’m going over.”

  “How?”

  But the line went dead.

  28

  Áine watched the two men clambering up the pier side. One slipped badly and she noticed that his companion failed to help him in any way, which seemed odd. The first man just stared at the second, as if deliberating whether to leave him dangling down towards the water. Áine got the feeling he was about to turn away when the second managed to catch a grip and began to haul himself upwards again.

  The image was grainy but at least she now knew which of the men had the phone. He was the shorter of the two – but height was the only distinguishing feature, because both had hats pulled low and were dressed in what looked like black clothing. The picture offered wouldn’t allow her to make out any facial features at all. All she knew was that their builds were similar and when both began down the pier walkway, they moved efficiently.

  She stared down at her phone, willing it to light up again, then scoured the water as the men made their way on foot towards the town. There were cars parked alongside what appeared to be yet another yacht club, and she hoped that Min would show himself before they got into one.

  Áine found herself rocking back and forth, willing Min’s arrival on the scene before the men disappeared into one of the many pools of blackness. She scrambled around, working out which camera would lead onto which – how far she might be able to track them.

  Not far, was the answer. The harbour’s CCTV coverage ran out at the main road. The two men were less than two hundred metres from that.

  She looked desperately for other options – there was a fuel garage to the west, which she imagined would have cameras – but by the time she worked out what, if any, chance there was of finding a way to monitor them, the men could be anywhere. She knew the hack wasn’t the difficult bit – it was the working out where to start, and most camera systems remained offline, for internal recording only.

  And then she was able to breathe again as she spotted a figure emerging from the water – fully clothed and with a tube slung over his back.

  That must be a dry bag, she typed as she saw Min bend over and unroll the top of the tube and withdraw the phone.

  What way? she got back.

  South. Two men nearly at road. Be quick.

  The figure left the bag and began a slow run. He must be frozen stiff, she thought, but was surprised at the pace he quickly managed to gather, and then began to worry that the men ahead of him might hear his heavy footfall. He was built like a barrel and she had no idea what level the ambient sound was down there, but there was a stiff breeze and so she knew the boats would be making clanking noises in the wind.

  The men approached the main road and, when they reached it, turned right. That meant left as Áine looked at her Google satellite screen. The men walked casually past the final camera, slowing as they did so, heads lowered.

  Boiler suits, she typed, and then swore, realising the ridiculousness of sending messages. She lifted the phone instead and watched Min slow to a jog and the phone rise to his ear.

  “They’re on the main road,” she said.

  Silence.

  “Can you hear me, Min? They’ve turned right ahead of you and are walking up the footpath beside the main road.”

  He was barely panting and still said nothing. Then it dawned on her, he wouldn’t speak for fear of attracting attention.

  “I see, I think. If you can hear me, get to the main road and turn west – that’s right to you, and they’re ahead of you in boiler suits and have hats on. The smaller one has the phone – and he might leave the tall fella behind him if things get tight.” She stared at the camera and imagined she could see Min nod. His clothing was sticking to his legs – his cargo pants clearly displaying the girth of his legs, even on the gritty camera feed.

  Áine turned her attention to the two men but they’d vanished into the night.

  “I’ve lost them. They were about a hundred metres ahead of you, maybe less. They could be in a car by now.” She could hear her voice beginning to crack as their last desperate throw to get Sinead slipped away.

  Min turned the corner under the final camera and made his way into the gloom. All went black for Áine – she was blind.

  “We’ve given those bastards the only leverage we had,” she said into the phone, her head shaking despondently.

  “Easy,” he whispered. “I can see them.”

  And the line went dead.

  Áine held her head in her hands, realising that she should have set Min’s phone up for tracking. To set up cellular tracking now would take hours – it would have been so much easier if they’d given the phone permission in the first place.

  She kept telling herself that he was just following the men, quietly, and that he had severed the call to allow him to do that.

  She forced herself to resist the urge to call him back. To distract herself and feel like she was doing something useful, she got back to the sensors in the madam’s phone and tried to make sense of what, if anything, they were telling her.

  She began to hunt all the channels s
he had access to from past employments at Dublin’s blue chips and found a stack that discussed user testing with application sensor access. It took her fifteen minutes to scan-read the huge amount of information recorded. The project had come to nothing – it looked like one of the developer lunch-hour challenges. She’d sponsored plenty of those in her time. Devs who were happier sitting at their computer terminal than taking a break and getting some sun would often come up with mad concepts to try and prove while eating sandwiches and pizza.

  The information was useful, though. She became fascinated with the gyroscope. Some keen programmer had made assumptions about its use: prolonged horizontal orientation suggested the owner was resting or watching videos, so it was a good time to target advertising for what they termed “wind-down entertainment”. Such information would be enormously advantageous to big companies seeking to expand their user base and she followed the thread to find that the only way to collect gyroscope sensor data was through an application on a phone. Her heart sank a little – it was a process that had to be planned in advance – until she found a list of apps that harvested such data – including an off-the-shelf mirror app, a video editing application and, to her excitement, a VPN designed to mask the device from prying eyes. Áine’s heart beat a little faster as she scoured the phone’s downloaded data for an app she was sure she’d seen stored on it, and sure enough the VPN appeared.

  Then the hunt began – more developer channels with information on how to crack into the VPN data. That part didn’t take long, and soon she was able to match the rudimentary sensor data she had already obtained to the recent history of the phone through the app.

  But the going got tough. She was able to use the accelerometer to tell how fast the phone had travelled – it was generally used for things like fitness steps or running – but Áine was interested in adapting it to a simple physics equation. Speed equals distance over time; distance equals speed multiplied by time. Which was fine, so far as it went.

  Then she took the data from the digital compass and was able to twist and turn the phone’s movement and match it to the distance and speed travelled, which gave her a twisty line in the middle of nowhere because she had no way of telling where it had started or stopped. She had a route, but no map on which to place it. She used green on her screen to map when the device had moved at anything above walking speed, and red to denote a slower pace. Ok, she thought, I’ve got a wiggly line.

  She stared at the green, which went repeatedly from zero miles per hour, to about sixty for seven miles. Weird. A delivery driver? she wondered, thinking of the main traffic on the roads during lockdown. A postal vehicle?

  The stopping and starting seemed strange, but not as strange as the consistency of the speed when moving. She dismissed it for later and instead looked at what she imagined was the walking pace: red. It was higgledy-piggledy, which led her to look again at the green – a series of straight lines.

  Then the phone started buzzing.

  “I’ve lost them.”

  “Where are ye?”

  “I dunno. They began acting up, so I drew back a bit. Then they went down a set of steps and I couldn’t follow cos I thought they might have copped me. But I’d be bloody surprised if they had.”

  “What do you mean acting up?”

  “They made a call and then stopped dead. They dithered a bit and changed the direction they’d been heading – like they’d been told something new. That’s why I thought maybe there was someone keeping an eye.”

  “What do you mean?” Áine’s frustration burst through her excitement.

  “Well, if I was them, I’d have eyes on from above – cameras or vehicles as well as folks on foot. That’s what we used to do, anyway.”

  “Explain, Min. I don’t know any of this shit.”

  “If you’re worried about someone being followed, you keep an eye on them. You double up and watch their back through overt cameras or coverts if you have them.”

  “Hidden cameras?”

  “Assuming you’ve got some. Anyway, that doesnae apply here, but they could have scouts in houses above. There’s loads of big houses round here.”

  “Where are you? What can you see?”

  “Flags, mainly. Foreign ones.”

  “Street name?”

  “Hang on …” She heard him walking.

  “What flags?”

  “Well, I saw Pakistan and now I can see Poland.”

  “You’re in embassy land. Merrion Road?”

  She listened to him walk for a while.

  “Nah, Ailsbury … Aye, Ailsbury Road.”

  “You’ve covered a good bit of ground there. That could be like, four miles?”

  “They’re moving fast. Where it’s dark they run. Then they walk where they could be seen.”

  “So where were these steps?” she asked, scrolling around a Google map.

  “Fifty yards back.”

  “What way are you facing?”

  “Eh, west, I reckon.”

  “So the steps are east?”

  “Aye.”

  “You moved away from them?”

  “Aye, if one of their people has spotted me, I need to be able to extract. This way they don’t know for definite if I’m following or not.”

  Áine thought for a moment. “Was there a bridge or anything at the steps?”

  “Aye, but no other way down. If I’d followed them down at this time of night, they’d have made me, for sure.”

  She looked at the green lines on her screen.

  This time of night?

  Áine turned her gaze slowly to the clock. Three o’clock in the morning. “Min, they’re using the rail track – the Dart. It doesn’t start running again until six. Nobody will expect people to walk the lines. That’s where they are.”

  “Shit. Ok, I’ll have to find another way.”

  29

  Áine was confused. Min didn’t appear willing to walk the train track, and from her view of Google Maps, there was no way he could catch the men by road. No streets ran parallel, and there wasn’t a more direct route into Dublin city centre than the Dart line.

  She was learning to stop second-guessing what these men – Sam and Min, might do. It was seldom what most people would expect – like following the people he was supposed to be tailing instead of stopping. What the hell was that all about?

  She settled on pursuing her own expertise and leaving Min to his.

  The spidery line in front of her wasn’t really making a great deal of sense. She followed it with the point of a nail file along the screen, imagining what it might represent. Was it Dublin? There was some suggestion the phone had travelled in the north too. It could be any other Irish city.

  Áine knew her own city as well as any recluse does – she’d grown up in it, after all. But it was a major European cosmopolitan town, rising from the ground with nude glass cages. It was a place anyone could be held anywhere and not even a neighbour would know. Áine didn’t even really know the people who lived on her own landing.

  She gave up on the accelerometer and the compass and turned to the gyroscope. The research had suggested its horizontal axis could denote rest. So where do you rest? At home in bed, she reckoned.

  The data available was limited, but she was able to determine the time at which the phone tended to be turned on its side – as if it were being watched or, she shuddered to think, used to take pictures or videos.

  Then she mapped that with a stylus onto the time and distance line she had created on another screen. What she ended up with was a wiggly red line that ran from the bottom right corner of her wide screen through a series of straight green lines that took her beyond the end of that monitor and onto another, before turning red again and almost doubling back onto the original screen before becoming yellow – which marked the time at which the phone’s screen had been turned sideways.

  She performed the process three times using dated data from the app, and each time the green and yellow lin
es stayed broadly consistent, while the red ones varied massively.

  Áine sat back and held the nail file to her lips, looking at her work and trying not to conclude that it had been a massive waste of time. What it told her was almost exactly nothing. It was a very bad drawing in three different colours.

  “Right, so there’s good news and there’s bad news,” Min told her as she opened the door of the apartment to find him standing there.

  “Bloody concierge, how did you get up?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You didn’t find them?”

  “I found them, alright, and I got a wee bit o’ luck too.” He squelched into the apartment, not quite dripping but not far off it.

  “I could really do with the good news, Min.”

  “Ok, well, there was a taxi passing, so I flagged him down and he agreed to take me – eventually.”

  “Cos you’re soaked?”

  “Naw, cos he’s only taking frontline workers in and out to hospital. Anyway, I says tae him it’s an emergency, so he ran me up tae Lansdowne Road.”

  “The rugby ground? Why?”

  “Cos I remembered it’s on the train line – from being over at the matches, and I could see the stadium and it made sense tae get ahead of them. I knew if they’d clocked me before, they wouldnae be expecting me tae be in front of them, aye?”

  Áine smiled as her head shook.

  “So I did a wee deal with the taxi man, went down into the station and along the line and waited. Sure enough, along they came.”

  “Ok?”

  “And I could hear them, and they were on the phone, and I can’t say what they were talking about but they didnae seem one bit concerned that they were being followed, which is good.”