“Our police minister?” Daniel was incredulous.
“Yes, John. The very same. I think there are others too. Can’t say, won’t say. Not until I know. Have you ever questioned why he only has one Protection Officer? He plays those cards very close to his chest. Damned good politician, mind you, came from nowhere. But I distrust him.” He looked at the lift progress. The neon lights were changing quickly.
“But you lot, I trust. Either that or I misjudged you all. Ground floor coming up. We meet in person, no emails, no calls. This wave you keep referring to Jack? It’s coming and for the life of me I don’t know where from or how.”
The lift arrived, the door opened and Blake was already walking. “You can buy your own bloody coffee!” Fifteen seconds later he was in the back of a government car heading to his office.
Cade stood in the foyer. “Well, I fancy one. Anyone want to join me? My treat. I need something to get over the eleven floor debrief we’ve just had.”
“I’ll have a soy latte. And can we have one of those cake fancies? The orange gluten-free ones?” Roberts was hopeful.
“Is there anything you can eat, Jason?”
“Two slices of humble pie, twice a week.”
They laughed. Petrova too, although she had no idea why.
Daniel opened the main door to Scotland Yard – ever the gent. “It’s good to be back on the old patch.” He allowed Elena through first, a chance to discreetly admire the view. Why should Cade have all the fun?
“If it’s any consolation, it’s good to have you all here. Blake was right, we’ve got some fun times ahead. At least now we have staff and a budget. That’s more than can be said for the rest of the thin blue line.”
Roberts turned to Cade. “You OK?”
“No, Jason, I’m not. But I learned a long time ago that attitude to an operation like this can change everything, call it a viral response. If the team see me lose it then slowly their morale will collapse too.”
“But you have every reason to lose it mate.”
“And that is the reason why I can’t. It doesn’t mean I’m not volcanic below the surface.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In two different countries, three different men were about to carry out activities that could at best be described as precarious, at worst, plain reckless. Two of the men led a group, one acted alone.
In England, Constantin Nicolescu was in charge, leading three of the team from the disused fireworks factory. They were en route to their three target destinations.
One team, three towns, two banks and a preliminary reconnaissance mission. Their role was simple. Create a diversion. It would be the first of many. Money was not the goal, but it helped shore up their living expenses, Jackdaw had assured them they could keep every penny.
Get caught? Don’t come crying to me. He made it quite clear.
Constantin had left enough men behind at the old site to ensure the two remaining captives would not escape. They all knew the risks, and their brief was simple. If people came to the site asking questions, escape. Do not engage with them. Burn the place down if given the opportunity. Leave no trace. They have succeeded in doing just that so far. Hiding in plain sight was working.
The team of four would be gone all day. They needed to swap their van for another, no point in burning the current one out as the bastards in blue would only get their forensic people onto it. And he respected them – and their ability to find a clue in a single fibre.
In Bucharest, on the Bulevardul Ion Mihalache, Scott McCall walked confidently along the street. He needed a caffeine fix. That was his cover anyway. The coffee stall diagonally opposite the nightclub answered his plea and provided him with a perfect, unobstructed view across the road. Close enough. Far enough away.
“Can I get an Americano to take away? Extra hot. You have a beautiful city. Great weather!” He had banked on the long-haired white male speaking English.
The young guy behind the counter wiped his hands on a towel and spoke. “I love your Australian’s and your sense of humour. So sarcastic. It is freezing today!”
“Good call, mate. It is pretty cold, I’ll give you that.” He shuddered to reinforce the temperature. “You been to Aussie?”
“Yes, mate, I have. I got to Sydney, then walked across country to Perth. Took me months. I love to travel.”
“Marvellous effort!” He was extending the drawl now, hoping that the young man would only recall him as Australian and not a Kiwi. He was also hoping he didn’t get pinned down on where he lived. Always talk about what you know or steer the conversation back. Quickly.
“You like to travel then?” Scott was leaning against the counter, watching across the road. “Must be expensive to get to my country from here, young guy like you?”
“That is why I have three jobs. I do modelling in the evening, I work here and I am a barman across the road at Byzantin.” He pointed with his head whilst he handed over the coffee.
‘You’ve just struck gold Scottie.’ His mind was flooded with the potential to work this new source. But he didn’t have long.
“Oh wow, good on you, mate. Can’t be easy? I’m backpacking my way across Europe. I was thinking of looking for work too. Is it good across the road? I can throw a cocktail shaker around a bit if it helps?”
“The team is OK. They pay in cash. I don’t ask questions. No one does.”
“Looks like someone is doing well out of it. Nice Rolls Royce.”
“It is a Bentley. A GT. Belongs to the owner.”
“Lucky man, should I ask for him? You know, about getting a job?”
The young man smiled and looked awkward, started serving a new customer. “No, I wouldn’t say that would be a good idea.”
“Does he not like Aussies?” McCall was laughing, acting at his very best.
“Mr Stefanescu doesn’t really like anyone. He has an apartment over the top of the club, the whole floor. He’s probably looking out at us now. They say it is filled with beautiful things. So yes, he is doing very well. He has a brother too, Stefan, big guy, strange eyes. The girls like him. That’s his white Mercedes. They say they are millionaires, many times over.”
“Any other criminals in this area?”
“No one challenges them – not even the police.”
“They don’t sell drugs, do they? I’m not going if they do. Killed my cousin. Filthy stuff.”
“I’ve been offered them by customers. But I have never seen the customers again.”
He served the business woman and then shook Scott’s hand. “Alex does not allow drugs in his clubs, nor does he sell them. Brother, I should stop talking, the security guys are watching. Alex owns this place too, in fact he owns everything around here except the hospitals. His men keep them quite busy with patients that disagree with their boss!”
“Hey brother, I really appreciate your help. Can I say you sent me, you know, give you chance for a bonus for finding a good bloke like me?” McCall was overt in his hand gestures. He had his reasons.
“No. Please don’t sir.” He meant it. The boy had genuine fear in his pale brown eyes. “Just stay away if I were you. If criminals aren’t watching the place, the police are. People say they are desperate to lock up the boss. They are possibly watching right now. I feel like I am in a bowl with the goldfish sometimes!”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. It is. Look man, I have to get on, I like you, you remind me of my older brother. He is a soldier. Good luck yeah. You’ll need it if you upset the Jackdaw.”
McCall feigned a look of confusion.
“That’s his nickname. Like the bird. The one that steals pretty things.” He was barely whispering, covering his mouth in case someone was watching that could lip read. Paranoia did that to a person.
“You will know it is him by the way he laughs.”
“Nice. I’ll do my best to avoid him then. Keep the change.” McCall walked away with his coffee and operational knowledge that was priceless.
“Vasile to Andre.” The comms hissed a little, but they were clear enough. Using first names only, on a secure digital network, they could never be too careful. Accept nothing. Believe no one. Challenge everything. It was the same the world over in their job.
“Go ahead.”
“Two outside the door. Both vehicles in place. Usual foot traffic. No new visitors for nearly half an hour now.”
“Received.”
“Stand by. The male we saw the other day. He’s back. Stood at the coffee stall across the road from the target.”
“One hundred percent sure?”
“Yes, sir. One hundred percent.”
“OK. Who is he? Why is he there? Is he a tourist?”
“No idea, boss. Right now all we know is that he’s a European male, with black hair, well built, drinking coffee. He’s just shaken hands with the coffee guy, but they look like strangers. A lot of hand gestures, as if they are not speaking the same language.”
“Received. Confirm he’s the only repeat target this week?”
“Yes, sir. Images coming through to you now.” Vasile hit send, and the image appeared on his commander’s screen.
It appeared a second later. The man was a new player and did not look like a local.
“We shall call him Tourist One.”
Andre Grigorescu – son of Grigor was known as Grig by his colleagues in the Special Intervention Brigade, an arm of the Romanian Gendarmerie, the military branch of the national police. Their role was normally counter-terrorism, hostage rescue and riot policing, however, someone, somewhere with more stars than Capitan Grigorescu had earned in his eighteen years, had made the decision that their number one target was Alex Stefanescu.
‘Find something on him and make it stick. He must be arrested and kept in prison for a long time. He is destroying our reputation as a good country with good people. Get rid of him, or convince him to leave this country and never come back.’
The briefing was as covert as their operation. Deniable, too. No one knew quite how well their target was connected. He had apparently walked free from a Bulgarian prison without being challenged. At least that’s how the story went.
“Can we deploy someone to talk to this male?” It was a call that wouldn’t normally be made, but Grig’s team were ready to hit the club. The warrant had been prepared weeks before, pending a judge’s signature.
‘I want you to watch the premises for a week. If there are no obvious risks to the public, then yes, you may enter by force.’
The warrant was explained away as being necessary to search for drugs. However, they intended to search for one commodity only.
“We go in thirty minutes. Repeat three zero. All units.”
They started calling in. The covert vehicles parked around the corner. The observation team, across the road in a telecommunication company maintenance tent and a further surveillance team opposite the club. All were ready.
They watched for five more minutes.
“Stand by all units. Male target – Tourist One – is moving towards the club.”
Twenty minutes later, the radio chatter started again.
“He’s gone, sir. Tourist One has disappeared.”
“No one disappears. Did he enter the club?”
“Cannot confirm.”
“You have no idea? Could he be there?” It was a tactical question. The last thing he wanted was a bloody tourist, if he was a tourist, standing in the way when his team went through the door.
“No, sir. Sorry. He just vanished.”
“Then we wait to see if he shows.” Grig punched the desk and swore.
In the apartment overlooking the street, Alex had risen from a drunken coma. He needed to learn how to drink again; the legal potion they had consumed most of the previous night was smoother, sweeter and easier to swallow than the foul, but highly alcoholic prison cocktail that he had overseen the manufacture of in Pazardzhik Prison in that brutal regime that called itself Bulgaria. The problem with it being sweeter was that he drank more. And now his head was reminding him why he needed to stop drinking. He was losing interest in its effects, in the endless stream of girls too.
He had never abused drugs, so the only thing left was instilling fear or gaining respect. He smiled as he watched a good-looking stranger shaking hands with his coffee boy across the street.
He knew that McCall would show soon. His sort always did. Such greed, they should learn to earn it by crawling on their knees, like he had. Again and again until they bled so much that only bone was visible. It taught a man a great deal about sacrifice and greed. He still had the scars.
“Time for the next wave.”
Stefan was also moving about the apartment, slowly, deliberately, and actually nowhere near as drunk as his brother.
“What’s that brother?”
“Nothing, my dear. Just watching the world pass me by. We should eat something and then plan tonight.”
“Tonight? What is happening?” He was genuinely surprised.
“It’s Byzantin night, Stefan! Every night is party night. Have you forgotten? Let’s open the doors, get the drink flowing, the pretty girls will be everywhere, get the place buzzing like it used to, when we were the kings of this city. Make some calls today. Come on. Do it. Yes?”
He was smiling for the first time since he had walked out of prison and turned left onto the highway, heading home.
Stefan knew it was a fait accompli. “Of course, brother. Yes.”
Two thousand kilometres to the north west, Alex’s men were approaching their first target. In broad daylight, the first operator approached the ATM of a busy local bank. As the van he had arrived in screeched theatrically to a halt nearby, and everybody turned to see what had happened, he pushed the false aperture onto the machine.
Technology had changed at a real pace since the last time the team had hit London. New data gathering equipment, slimmer phones, all helped to capture the evidence and information they needed to exploit the bank accounts. They chose busy branches as they were the most lucrative. Not without risk, but lucrative just the same.
One device could gather enough card data in two to three days to convert to tens of thousands of the local currency. In a few days they would return and removed the device, leaving nothing but a slightly tacky change in the surface of the host machine. Detectable to those that knew what they were looking for. Those people made up a few small teams of detectives. In Kent, where this machine was, there was no one looking at this type of crime. They were too busy fighting more international matters and what was known as volume crime – burglaries, theft and occasional street robberies. In other words, things that caught the media attention and lost votes for the politicians.
Across the county boundary into Greater London there had been a team – once. The Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit had become famous for its arrest rate, targeting Eastern European, Baltic, and smaller groups from Malaysia and Singapore. They had achieved greatness under the leadership of Jason Roberts. Just as the team began to really perform, to win cases without challenges from the defence, they were shut down.
It happened. Teams were cyclical, often changing at the whim of a new commander. Sometimes they went full circle.
Roberts had harboured a professional grudge ever since as he saw the crime as damaging. Most saw it as victimless – ‘oh the banks will refund the money so no one loses out.’ What the public failed to grasp was how their data was exploited in the world of the dark net – where parcels of data sold for thousands and the new owners could then continue to exploit the accounts. In turn damaging reputations and increasing bank costs and charges. Victimless indeed.
Banking was changing rapidly. Branches were closing, the rate at which online banking was escalating was considered by many to be the reason. Why get wet trudging to a bank when you could sit in the bath and carry out the transactions? For Roberts, that meant potentially fewer crimes. For the Seventh Wave teams, it meant fewer pot
ential victims. As a result, their focus was shifting rapidly, onto online attacks.
But this whole thing, this entire component of the operation was a Trojan Horse and as per the fabled attack on Troy, only one side knew.
The ATM attacks had been relatively quiet, even Roberts had released his iron grip on the problem, now forced to target a rolling set of criminal problems in the biggest city in Britain. Roberts, like Cade, could never truly let go though and ran a private spreadsheet of bank related crime in the area. He considered it a professional distraction from knife crime.
“We’ll keep a weather eye on these cases, Nick.” He had said only a week ago. “Until something new comes along.”
“You mean like hordes of villains using mopeds to target vulnerable people in broad daylight boss?”
“Jesus, don’t even mention that outside this place. Can you imagine?” he trembled at the logistical nightmare that would bring to his favourite place in the world.
Whilst Roberts sat in his office, reading the stats and working out which way he was going to write them up this week, the first victim approached the HSBC branch, slid her card into the mouth of the ATM, tapped in her PIN and selected mini statement.
The understated machinery in the false housing was reading everything it needed to, her personal identity number and the card data. There was nothing to gain in inserting a device to grab a twenty here or a ten there. Those days were long gone. The Lebanese Loop had become a museum piece, laughable when compared to its modern equivalent.
The customer selected fifty. She needed a treat, had been working hard, nothing like retail therapy. The operator who had placed the device in place only minutes before couldn’t agree more. In twenty-four hours, what she had in her account would be gone. Her and a few hundred others.
The first aspect of their operation was under way. They would carry out similar attacks on banks in north Kent throughout the day. Disturbed at one branch, they ripped the device from the wall and ran. Winter provided sufficient clothing and headgear to make their detection challenging. Gloves and forensic awareness made it almost impossible.
Seven of Swords (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 3) Page 27
