I Dare You: A gripping thriller that will keep you guessing (A Kate Blakemore Crime Thriller Book 1)

by Murray Bailey

  “She’s looking along the line. Yes! Now she’s spotted someone.” They tracked Kate to the end of the barrier and saw the confusion on her face.

  Weaver sniffed then said, “Mistake? Did she see someone or not?”

  Ramirez said nothing but watched closely. Kate was seen to head back along the line, searching. Then she did a sudden turn and walked to the washrooms.

  Women! Weaver smirked.

  “Zoom in on the washroom and fast-forward until she comes out,” Ramirez said.

  They watched the tape at double speed. Weaver stopped it a couple of times by mistake then continued. After ten minutes Ramirez said, “Where the crap is she?”

  “Shall I go back?”

  “Yeah, let’s go through, normal speed.”

  Weaver wiped his nose and restarted the clip. Ramirez leaned in and he was distracted for a moment by the line of her breast. Nice figure under that suit.

  “There!” Ramirez said and pointed.

  Weaver’s attention snapped back. “I don’t see her.”

  “Black wig and baggy blue coat. She’s disguised herself. But she’s still carrying the backpack.”

  Smart too, this special agent.

  “Where’s she gone?”

  Weaver picked up the woman in a wig on another camera. See, I’m not so dumb either. “Camera eighteen covers exit C,” he said, but was disappointed she didn’t seem impressed as he reset the time and picked up the woman going through the door. “She’s heading for the car park.”

  “Cameras there?”

  “On it.” He switched again and now they were looking at a bird’s-eye view of a parking lot. Lots of movement, cars pulling in and out, people with luggage.

  “What’s going on there?” Ramirez asked, and he zoomed in, still too far out for detail. Two people seemed to be arguing. A woman with black hair had her hand on the doorframe of a silver car, but her posture said a refusal to get in. The other was a man, brown hair. Then confirmation. The man threw a bag on to the rear seat before they both got in.

  The car, a station wagon, backed out.

  “What sort of vehicle is that?”

  “Volvo—XC model, I’d say.” He gave the agent a smile as she glanced at him, impressed. “Hey, what can I say? I know my cars.”

  “Good. Now anything we can do to improve the quality. I need that plate.”

  Weaver flicked to another screen and set the time. The exit barriers. Within a few seconds the Volvo appeared, now clearly a silvery blue, the registration plate easy to read.

  “Local car,” Weaver said. “Probably not going far.”

  She patted his shoulder then held her phone to her ear. “And they won’t get very far either.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  As Kate told her story she paced the room, finally standing at the patio doors overlooking decking. At one time this might have been landscaped, but after a short patch of something akin to a garden it became wild, long grass and bushes. Beyond, the lake glinted in the afternoon sun. The woods on the far side, with their splash of autumn leaves, reminded her of the last day with Joe walking through Windsor Great Park. All of a sudden she felt drained.

  Matt stood beside her. “Thank you,” he said. “I needed to know the full picture. What I’m going to tell you may come as a shock, but the reality is that it changes nothing. You are looking for Joe and I can help you.”

  She turned to him and this time read concern in his eyes. “What is it?” A pain welled in her chest as she waited for Matt’s response, time stretching. Was he going to say Joe was dead? Was that it? He could help find his grave?

  Matt said something. It didn’t register.

  “What?”

  “Danny Guice is dead. He has been for two years.”

  She staggered back to the sofa. She felt relief tinged with guilt. “So Joe’s alive?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And your connection with Danny? You said he was your friend.”

  “No. I said I was a friend. I know Joe. I never really knew Danny.”

  “So Joe sent you?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I was waiting for you to make contact with me.”

  Her head buzzed with a thousand questions, but she let Matt talk and bit her tongue.

  He continued: “The document you found had my contact details not Danny’s. I don’t know why you received the photograph of Danny. Maybe, as you said, Peter Sikorski sent it from Prague. I don’t know everything—just that I expected to hear from you. When you started posting messages about Danny, a search algorithm picked it up. Joe must have known you might try that. Maybe it was a backup plan in case you didn’t find the document in the calendar.”

  “You still haven’t explained the numbers.”

  “It has rotational symmetry.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “611089680119. Rotate the block and you get 611089680119. Use any combination of these numbers and then repeat them in reverse. Joe was into that sort of thing—cryptology, it’s called. I think he liked it because it was a bit like reflectional symmetry, or mirror images. Also, reversing is an old trick. Did you know that in the Second World War British POWs used to write dates or phrases backwards in letters? It told the Intelligence Services—MI9—”

  “MI9? Surely there’s just MI5 and 6.”

  Matt shrugged. “The Brits used to have a whole bunch of departments—up to MI19, but you’re right, it’s just the two main ones nowadays. MI9 was disbanded after the Second World War, or got merged into another department. Point is, reversing something meant there was a coded message or other meaning. A reversed sequence of numbers therefore meant a code. He left you the document but it was encrypted. That won’t be it. It’s too blatant. There will have been another way to find him—a simpler message but less obvious unless you know where to look.” He looked at her expectantly. “Can you think of anything?”

  Kate pulled her handbag from the rucksack. “There’s this photograph,” she said, handing over the picture of her and Joe.

  “Dare or truth. The expression is, usually, truth or dare, isn’t it?”

  “So there is a hidden message?”

  “I hope so.” He took it into the kitchen and she saw him take a bottle from a cupboard and put drops on the paper, then moved it to and fro, finally blowing on it. He then walked through the lounge into a bedroom and she heard a hairdryer for a few seconds. When Matt returned, there was a grin on his face.

  “Success!” he said, handing the photograph back. On the reverse was a series of brown numbers. He was still grinning. “Did you know that the word ‘cryptology’ comes from Greek, meaning ‘hidden writing’?”

  The numbers were:

  1 4 0 1 5 1 4 8 3 3 6 0 6 0 6 9 7 1 6 4 1 4 5 1 7 5 1 9 1 0 9 2 4 9 5 1

  At the bottom of the page was a smiley.

  “What does the code mean?”

  “I have no idea.” He went to a drawer and pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil. He wrote the numbers down then on a separate sheet wrote the numbers one to twenty-six in a column. Beside these he wrote the alphabet and then translated the numbers from the photograph. Having done this he wrote the numbers out in a square and stared at the letters. He said, “Sometimes the letters aren’t sequential. Since there are thirty-six it might be in blocks of six and then be read vertically.” He shrugged. “But I can’t see anything here.” With that, he moved all the letters by one. Nothing sequential or vertically in the square.

  By the time Matt had progressed through the whole alphabet in this fashion, Kate was finding it hard to concentrate.

  “If you yawn one more time, I swear you’ll put me to sleep,” Matt said.

  “Time difference is catching up with me. I’m struggling here.”

  He smiled. “Not the most exciting thing to watch. This could take hours so I suggest you get some sleep. Before you go, are there any words or phrases that he might have used. Cryptologists often use these first rather than have the sequential alp
habet.”

  “I dare you, was a password he used. Maybe my name… or Tolkien, the name of my cat.”

  Matt wrote this down. “Both good, neither has repeated letters, which makes it simpler. What about a favourite book? Tolkien, that suggests Lord of the Rings.”

  “Pride and Prejudice.”

  “Hmm, OK, worth a go. Try and think of some more while you’re resting.”

  “But you’ll wake me if you crack it?”

  “Sure. There’re three bedrooms. Take your pick.”

  Kate chose a room with a vanity table and chair then quickly got ready. As she passed from the bathroom to the bedroom, she noted Matt had refilled the cafetiere and was frantically scribbling. Back in the room, she closed the door, moved the chair over to it and jammed the back under the handle. It wouldn’t stop someone intent on getting in but it would at least wake her. Some comfort! She crashed on top of the covers and, within minutes, was fast asleep.

  She awoke in the middle of the night with a start, her heart pounding. Bad dream or a noise? She lay hardly breathing, listening for something. It was so quiet. Living in Windsor, she was used to aircraft and the constant hum of the distant motorway. Here the silence was so absolute it made her uncomfortable. You can tune noise out but silence had a way of filling space, the way darkness seemed to fill space left by light.

  Unable to relax, she decided to get up. The chair was still in place under the door handle and she removed it as quietly as possible then crept into the dark lounge. Turning on the light, she saw Matt had been through the whole pad. His early attempts were obvious—converting the digits into between one and twenty-six so that they could be converted into letters.

  She stared at the results like she supposed Matt had. An anagram? Foreign words? Nothing obvious jumped out, and she noted the large number of awkward consonants.

  He repeated this many painstaking times, staggering the conversion letters and circling any words that made sense. However it was only ever single words or abbreviations, no full sentence saying, “Here I am!”

  What had started so clinically looked like it had degenerated into random guesses. Then he tried putting the numbers in a six by six square and began again with the conversion of numbers to letters, working his way through the alphabet. Then he seemed to transpose the square and start again.

  On one page he had scrawled:

  Why numbers not letters?

  Keeping as quiet as possible, Kate showered and made herself a pot of coffee. Then she sat on the floor with all of Matt’s attempts around her. When he’d found a word he’d circled it. Most were English, but occasionally there were other languages, mostly Spanish, she suspected. She knew Joe could speak Czech. Could he speak other languages too?

  On a number of pages, Matt had scribbled notes.

  Polybius Square—but not 1 to 5?

  0 to 4 and 5 to 9 can’t be right. Try double.

  Then the numbers had been split halfway and the second half placed below the first and then he’d tried converting these into letters again. Nothing appeared to make any sense.

  His notes said:

  Problem with the Z’s. Could this be a triple-level code?

  There were a few pages of tables converting one letter to another, sequentially A becoming B, Z becoming A. Still making no real progress, he had written:

  What’s the key?!

  This must be how the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley felt before they got the captured machine, Kate thought. Surely Joe wouldn’t make it so complicated would he? I’m missing something obvious, I know it, Kate kept saying to herself. Her eyes started to ache and she closed them for a while, wondering what the key word could be. And was there a significance to the numbers? Could it be something to do with symmetry? What was Joe telling her?

  “Good morning.”

  Matt’s voice jolted Kate from her sleep. She was slumped on the sofa, paper strewn all around. Her mouth felt and tasted like it was stuffed with sawdust and her head throbbed.

  She forced her eyes open and groaned.

  Matt handed her a glass of water. “Advil,” he said. “May help with that headache.”

  Reflexively, she took the tablets and washed them down. Then in a moment of panic she wondered what the tablets really were.

  Matt was studying her and shook his head, irony in his tight smile. “Still don’t trust me, eh? I promise they were just Advil for your head. I am here to help. I promise.”

  After a hesitation, she nodded meekly. “Yeah, sorry. Did you have any luck making sense of the numbers?” she asked, pointing to the papers.

  “No, I think we need two things. First of all a computer, and second of all someone who has the skill to use it.” He read her next question before she articulated it. “Yes, I know someone who has both. Did you think of any other key words or phrases—anything at all, no matter how remote a possibility?”

  “Well, you could try: Windsor, Laughing Train, possibly The Laughing Train. I don’t know.”

  “Anything around about the time he knew he was going to have to leave the message?”

  “Maybe: Windsor Great Park, parrots, deer, the Queen, Windsor Castle.” She shrugged. “Changing the Guard, or Mounting the Guard, I suppose. Oh, the week before… Henley, Marlow. There is a pub in Henley called The Idle Hour. And there’s my favourite pub, The Two Brewers, near the castle in Windsor.”

  Matt wrote all these words down and nodded, impressed. “Quite a bit to go on. I’m sure Myron will be able to run through these in no time.”

  “Sorry, who’s Myron?”

  “A cryptologist friend.” He headed for the kitchen. “I’ll fix up some breakfast and I’ll go see him. Shouldn’t be long. You all right with that as a plan?”

  Kate stretched and shrugged. “It’s better than anything I can come up with.” Then, sounding serious, she added, “But I’m coming with you.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Thirty-one months earlier

  Mirrorman held Boomer for a long time. Gradually he realized his lack of movement was due as much to his own weakness as it was his grief. His chest injury was bleeding again and the burn in his right leg told him of another wound. The flames from the jeep were fading and the faintest hint of pale blue appeared on the horizon. Maybe an hour to sunrise.

  He tied a tourniquet on his right thigh then checked Boomer and the command sergeant for a Medikit, but found nothing. From the command sergeant he took the satphone.

  “Cobra to Mongoose. Cobra to Mongoose.” Noise. Mirrorman continued anyway. “Kilo Indigo Alpha Topcat, Dogtag, Tinman, Gopher, Boomer. Whisky Indigo Alpha Mirrorman. Repeat five Kilo Indigo Alpha. With the package. Emergency extraction requested. Break.” He listened to the static and repeated the message before putting the phone away.

  Struggling now, his fingers both trembling and stiff, he pulled out the codebook and checked for today’s emergency extraction symbol. Then he gradually made something, using clothes and equipment, that he hoped would be picked up by the satellite—as long as they were looking.

  When he had finished he took hold of Boomer and tugged him. Got to get him to the rocks, out of the sun, he told himself. Then come back for the command sergeant. He took four paces and stopped, two paces, stopped, then gasped for air as a searing pain shot through his chest. He gritted his teeth and looked at the rocks. Maybe twenty-five more paces. He began to walk again, two paces and rest. Soon he was taking one pace and rest.

  By the time he reached the rocks, the sky had a gentle arc of morning light. There was blood on the rocks, lots of it. The prisoner. Then Mirrorman saw the Arab. He was sitting in a shallow cave watching.

  “Help me,” Mirrorman said with effort.

  The prisoner didn’t respond.

  Mirrorman tried to pull Boomer through the rocks, but something snagged and the extra effort made him sink to his knees, coughing. Specks of blood appeared. He could pull Boomer no further without help. When he felt he could move again he crawled to the cave. />
  The prisoner hadn’t moved, and although he watched, his eyes didn’t move and his head hung, his posture limp. Even in the poor light, Mirrorman could see the man sat in a dark patch, his blood soaking into the sand.

  Mirrorman crawled into the hole and finally the man’s eyes shifted towards him but stayed strangely unfocused. When the Arab spoke, the tone was bitter, the voice a thousand miles away. “You are fools.” A long pause. “You would never… get me back. Too much…” Again a long pause, and his head rocked back on an unsupportive neck, like a young baby’s. The prisoner took a breath and refocused. “He wouldn’t dare… risk it.”

  Mirrorman propped himself opposite. What was the prisoner talking about? He managed to pull water from a pack, took a sip. Then he reached out and poured some into the Arab’s mouth.

  The man nodded his gratitude. “We are… both dying, my friend… And for what?” Another long pause and a suggestion of a smile on the Arab’s lips. “For who?”

  Although Mirrorman’s brain was fogged by pain and blood loss, he wanted the Arab to talk. He wanted to understand. And using his mind would keep him from slipping away, may keep him alive.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  The Arab tried to shake his head. “You wouldn’t… understand.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  A real smile this time. “No it doesn’t.” A series of shallow breaths then: “I am a prince.” He said a name, thick with Arabic that Mirrorman vaguely recognized.

  “You are al-Qaeda.” Intel confirmed the man organized attacks in Iraq.

  The Arab shrugged ever so slightly. “Of course… your people have known… and do nothing… because…” The prince’s eyes hardened. “…it is in his interest.”

  “Who?”

  By the time the Arab prince drew his final breath, he hadn’t told Mirrorman everything. But he’d told him enough.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Present day