Remember Me 2

by Ian C. P. Irvine

  As she had climbed into a taxi, Stuart had texted her, apologising for having to leave the night before, but wishing her luck with the meeting that morning. He’d also suggested the restaurant where they could meet for lunch.

  She’d tried calling him back, but it had gone to voice-mail. He must already have been at work.

  After texting him back, she’d stopped by her house to pick up the information she’d needed, taken a quick shower and then dressed.

  This time around, her visit to Ben Venue Capital Assets had been short and sweet.

  The Finance Director had met her in reception, asked her a few questions, taken copies of the information requested, and then given her a letter with directions to the event in the evening where it had now been confirmed that she would meet the First Minister of Scotland, who would formally present a symbolic cheque for thirty million pounds made out to her charity.

  “Would you like to bring a guest? Perhaps a significant other?” the Finance Director had asked. “Please feel free to do so. And may I ask, did you manage to speak with your friend at Ben Venue last night, about their possible nomination as someone who we could second to work with your charity in Poland?”

  “Yes, and no.” she had replied. “We discussed the idea. But he hasn’t given me his answer quite yet. I’m meeting him for lunch. And he’ll let me know then.”

  Marie had arrived early at the restaurant.

  She’d been sitting there already for almost thirty minutes when Stuart had texted her saying that he might be late.

  Something had come up.

  She’d replied, ‘no problem.’

  Until that moment, she had not once worried about Stuart, but it was then that it occurred to her for the first time that perhaps she was coming on too heavy.

  Why had he really left her last night, after they had made love so beautifully?

  Was she scaring him off?

  Was he having second thoughts?

  Was this, after all, going to prove too good to be true?

  -------------------------

  12.35

  Lynch sat back at his desk and considered what he’d just learned.

  Almost immediately a possible link between Maggie Sutherland and Hamish Hamilton popped into her mind. It was certainly feasible.

  According to what they already knew, from what Daniel Grant had told Grant and McKenzie, and which he had since checked and corroborated, Maggie Sutherland had studied Psychology and Philosophy at St. Andrews University.

  Maggie’s first job had been at St. Andrews, working in one of the Union Bars. From that Lynch had learned Maggie’s National Insurance Number.

  With that number, and her personal details, the HMRC were then quickly able to provide the details for a series of employers for Maggie after she left university.

  It turned out that she had become a Psychiatrist.

  What Lynch had just now discovered, having called the Hospital which had been recorded by the HMRC as paying her first wage, was that while studying for further qualifications, her first job straight out of university was working in a hospital with soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Bingo!

  The time-frame was excellent and coincided with exactly the time Hamish Hamilton would have returned from serving in Afghanistan in early 1997.

  Hamilton had been wounded whilst rescuing a friend. According to the Army file they’d been sent, he was sent back to the UK for further hospital treatment.

  What happened if Maggie had helped treat him for PTSD, and they’d formed a relationship of some kind?

  PC Lynch sat and stared at his notes.

  Then he nodded to himself and walked across to speak with DCI McKenzie.

  -------------------------

  12.45

  Ray Luck stood by the desks of the Blue Team, appraising their progress. They were doing well.

  They had started with the number plate of the white van and gone back the full two weeks to when it had first been reported stolen. Ray’s organisation, ACT, had significant resources at its disposal. Some in the UK and answerable to UK legislation. Some not so answerable, and not in the UK.

  Technically, nothing his team did in the UK was against UK law or illegal. Anything which was, was not done in the UK.

  What the Blue Team was doing now was above board, although the resources at their disposal were greater even than those available to the National Crime Agency.

  On an ongoing basis, the systems available to ACT were able to hoover up all the data gathered by the Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems throughout the UK, and store it for at least six months in vast server arrays buried deep under the ground in air-conditioned bunkers.

  The cameras of the ANPR system were able to examine the number plate of any car that passed by underneath one of its cameras, and then identify the car, its owners, and process any details recorded against that number plate. For example, was it stolen, had the owner paid its car tax, or did it belong to a Subject of Interest being investigated or followed by any of the UK law enforcement agencies?

  In this case, the Blue Team had simply typed in the number plate and waited for the system to do its work and tell them what it found.

  In the old days, the system would spew out a vast list of undecipherable data, which would take a police officer days or weeks to go through and understand.

  Nowadays, complex data analytics were able to interrogate the data, find patterns amongst that data, and then draw pretty pictures, maps, or charts and project them up onto the overhead screens.

  In this case, when the data first started populating the screens above their desks, the Blue Team were immediately able to see that there were several distinct clusters showing where White Van had been spotted in the past few weeks. Two of those clusters were of particular interest.

  One was close to the old Portobello High School in Edinburgh in Scotland. This was not a great surprise, since it was suspected that the van had been used to deliver the murder victims to the school where they were imprisoned and then killed.

  The second cluster of sightings appeared as white lines going back and forward on a map of the roads south east of Edinburgh along the roads between Edinburgh and North Berwick.

  What was of particular interest to the team was the fact that the lines which connected where White Van had been spotted seemed to come to an abrupt end on the same spot on a long stretch of road south east of Gullane.

  At first this puzzled the team.

  It could indicate that White Van was being parked on the road somewhere, and could indicate a possible location for where the subject, or driver of White Van, was living.

  However, when one of the Blue Team suggested that they should look at Google Maps to see what was there, they found only a clump of trees and a small patch of gravel.

  At that point another member of the Blue Team suggested using CCTV feeds from a nearby garage a mile further down the road and to look for any similar white vans seen passing through that stretch of road at similar times to those when White Van had disappeared from the ANPR feeds.

  The result was interesting.

  In almost every case they checked they found that about twenty minutes after White Van had disappeared from the ANPR system going south-east or twenty minutes before it first appears heading towards Edinburgh, a similar white van had passed the garage, but with a different number plate.

  “Clever bastard,” one of the analysts had announced, as he realised what was happening. “The driver is passing the garage en route to or heading back from Edinburgh, then pulling into the clump of trees, and changing the number plates on the van before carrying on down the road.”

  “Yep, he’s protecting his den.” Another member of the Green team had agreed.

  Even more interesting was when they ran a check on the other new number plate, they found that it belonged to a car that had reported its number plates stolen, although the owner still had the car. “Clever,” the a
nalyst mused. “Everyone would assume it was just kids that had stolen the number plates, and no one would be taking any real action to track them. The police have got better things to do.”

  When they ran the new number plate through the ANPR system, they found that they had records of the White Van driving further up and down the road towards North Berwick, but somewhere along that road it disappeared off the screen.

  This time however, when they repeated the same trick, they found it brought no new answers. The nearest CCTV camera on the road was on the other side of North Berwick, miles away, and White Van never showed up again.

  The van also never showed up on the cameras on the roads into North Berwick.

  The team then concluded that White Van had taken a turn down a side road either into the countryside inland or in the other direction towards the coast roads.

  A quick scan of the ANPR showed that there was practically no CCTV or ANPR coverage for that part of the world once you left the main road.

  Which meant that the van had effectively disappeared into an area covering hundreds of square miles.

  They’d learned something, but not enough to win the cookie-jar full of £5 notes.

  The Green Team however was also doing quite well.

  They had started with ANPR and upon finding the two clusters of sightings, as the Blue Team had done too, they had immediately chosen the tactic of instructing Bloodhound to sniff out their Subject of Interest.

  Although the ACT team were now getting used to its capability, every time they used the Bloodhound system, they still couldn’t help but be impressed by how much better their capability was than the Zeus system which the NCA and national cyber teams were stuck with using. The Bloodhound system could best be described as Zeus on steroids. Like Zeus, its tiny little sister, Bloodhound was a facial recognition system, but it used a digital array of quantum processors about twenty times more powerful than Zeus, and was powered by a self-learning AI algorithm. Whereas Zeus could take hours to go through its databases and pull up all the matches to the digital map created from a human facial image, and often got it wrong to boot, Boodhound seldom made mistakes and could trawl through the databases in about a fifth of the time.

  What’s more, the ACT databases went back further than the NCA databases. Because ACT was not based entirely in the UK, it was able to store more data, for longer.

  Which meant that instead of trying to find out where a person was last week, they could dig down historically through all their image databases and establish almost exactly where the person had been seen not just last month, but up to two years ago, when the system first started collecting and storing data.

  The only caveat they applied to working with Bloodhound was that when they were in a hurry, the longer they asked Bloodhound to search backwards in time, the longer it took to find anything.

  The best practice was always to first see what you could find as close to the original time of an incident, and then to work backwards from there.

  Not everyone was able to use the system. Yet. One day it would turn the world of fighting crime upside down, but for now, only ACT had access to it.

  Starting with the cluster of ANPR recordings for the first number plate of White Van, the Green Team had told BloodHound to show them wherever the aged facial images of Hamish Hamilton could be found in a period going back three weeks.

  Five minutes later, they had a list of thirty sightings.

  It wasn’t much, but as they started to look through what BloodHound had found, they realised that a lot of the time, the Subject of Interest, or the SoI, as they normally called their suspects, was routinely walking around or wearing a hoodie or baseball cap to cover or shade his face.

  Scanning through the sightings they found them to be fairly random, not belonging to any particular pattern and not revealing anything in particular.

  Knowing that a prerogative for them was to find an identity for the SoI, they decided to filter down the sightings to places where the SoI might choose to make a purchase using a credit card.

  The normal practice for this was to look at BloodHound sightings recorded on CCTV cameras within petrol stations, or in supermarkets, or betting shops.

  Frustratingly, Bloodhound came back with six sightings of Hamilton being picked up in petrol stations, but in the first five they looked at, in each case, Hamish Hamilton was seen to pay for the petrol in cash.

  The sixth image they looked at however, was different.

  Bloodhound had identified a man with a face similar to Hamish Hamilton walking into a petrol station, recorded on CCTV video footage from a petrol station on the route heading south east out of Edinburgh towards North Berwick.

  The man was seen to look at the papers on the shelves before approaching the kiosk to pay for his petrol.

  His hoodie was up, but the CCTV camera still had a good enough view of the front of his face for Bloodhound to identify him.

  As the man – Hamilton – turned towards the desk, the analyst watching the video feed saw him reach into his pocket and pull out a phone. The SoI looked at the screen of the phone and then touched the front of it to accept the call. He spoke to someone for a moment, then hung up, before placing the phone back inside his pocket.

  “BINGO! SHOW ME THE MONEY! Show me the money!” the analyst jumped up from his seat and started to dance.

  The others in the Green Team got up from their positions and walked across to Kyle, the analyst of the moment, and patted him on the back.

  “Do it!” the team-lead laughed and watched as Kyle went to work.

  First, after shaking his fingers and hands in the air, Kyle sat back down at his station and clicked on the icon on his desktop that opened up the program called Audirex.

  Audirex was another of the wonder apps that those at ACT now found indispensable. As with CCTV and facial recognition images, the massive server farms under the auspices of ACT were also able to collect and store almost a year’s worth of data downloaded to them from all the national Communications Service Providers, which they mostly nicknamed the CSPs. The data from the CSPs provided them with everything they needed to know about phone calls made across their networks, both from mobile or fixed landlines.

  If an analyst provided Audirex with a telephone number, the system would tell him who the phone belonged to, who that person had called in the past year, and who had called that person, all with a whole host of metadata describing those calls. In combination with another system, it could also tell you what IP activity took place on that phone, for example, it could tell you what websites the phone’s user had visited, or which social media sites they were active on and what they had said on any forums. It could also provide an analyst with insight into any messages that had been passed back and forward via that phone.

  If the analyst didn’t know the phone number, but knew a location, Audirex would listen to all the calls that had been made in that area at that time, and by triangulating the signals from all the different phone masts, it could provide the analysts with a list of all the phone numbers of phones active in that area at that time.

  If you didn’t know their identity, it couldn’t tell you exactly which one belonged to the SoI, but you would know that at least one of them did.

  In the case of the petrol station, Kyle soon discovered that there were one hundred and twenty-six phones active within an area of eighty-six square metres around the petrol station.

  Kyle was disappointed, but not surprised. His mood sobered slightly, and the others in his team returned to their stations.

  Sometimes they got lucky and only found one or two phones, but the location and time that Kyle had given Audirex was in the middle of the afternoon, and on a busy main road with lots of passing cars.

  Nevertheless, Kyle was not despondent.

  One of those phones on the list belonged to the SoI.

  He just had to find out which one.

  Looking over at the clock on the wall, he noted the time.

/>   Only fifteen minutes had passed since the challenge had been kicked off.

  He saved the list of phone numbers on his system and logged the details of what they represented and then went back to work.

  He knew exactly what to do next.

  Chapter 51

  Wednesday

  Fettes Row Cyber & Comms Unit

  12.50

  Dean sat beside the cyber team in Fettes Row, totally impressed by the capability and expertise which they possessed. These guys were sharp. They knew their stuff.

  As soon as they had been given their brief, they had started to search for and find CCTV feeds for the area around the port in Oban where the ferry had come in.

  Within minutes the map on the computer screen had located all possible CCTV feeds which they had access to – an increasing number of CCTV feeds were now digital, and online, and often the NCA had direct taps into the systems, or were able to access the servers where the video from the cameras had been stored.

  Not all CCTV feeds were yet connected to the system, which meant that as Dean had done in Leith, you still often had to trudge around the streets looking for shops and private cameras which might pick up images of SoIs passing by. However, the official ones run by the councils, police or military were increasing all included.

  The team in the cyber centre in Fettes soon had a number of screens showing CCTV footage of people coming off the boat and streaming into the streets nearby, most of them in cars that rolled off the ferry and soon headed out of Oban to other destinations.

  Several bicycles came off the ferry in quick succession when the doors came down.

  One of them was Hamish Hamilton, easily recognised by the clothes and training shoes he was wearing.

  The team followed the bicycle as it headed through the gates of the ferry terminal and tracked the cyclist as he went from one street to another.

  They followed him for what would have been fifteen minutes in real-time, but only minutes when fast-forwarded on the screen, from one camera to another.