The Shy Traffickers (Professor Dobie Book 4)

by Desmond Cory

  THIS AREA HAS BEEN ALREADY CLAIMED & YOU ARE TRESPASSING UPON IT. WHO ARE YOU?

  Another interloper, Dobie thought. Well, that in itself was hardly surprising; the corridors of the CRO filing system had to be constantly patrolled by the highly-trained hackers of various criminal organisations who would be extracting one file after another for investigation, altering an entry here, erasing another there. He would do well, he thought, to adopt some kind of protective guise himself, lest his own intervention be traced to its source. Quickly he typed out

  I AM STRANGE ATTRACTOR. WHO YOU?

  An answer (of a kind) immediately followed.

  I AM CAPELLA & YOU ARE AN INTRUDER. GET THEE HENCE 4THWITH OR FACE INSTANT ERASURE

  Really a bit much, Dobie thought, being ordered out of his own file by some cheeky geek who clearly had no business to be in there either. Indignation swelled within him, or would have done had the over-practised computer-crouch that he had adopted permitted indignation to do so. Capella? … Wasn’t that a constellation or something? An unusual sort of nom de hacker anyway. Dobie typed,

  EUROCOM LEGISLATION DOES NOT PERMIT YOU

  and stopped. Because the screen had gone blank. A booby-trap, he thought disgustedly. Maybe even with a Trojan horse attached. Which meant that he’d have to force a re-entry if he wanted to get back into his file and in the process risk contracting a virus. Well, he didn’t want to get his file back, not particularly. He’d found out already what he wanted to know. To wit, that the gizmo currently screwing his pooch had its source in a Special Branch transcom with network access to Central Records, which was just what he’d supposed. What this Capella character was doing rummaging about in his file was another matter. He couldn’t think of any reason why his file would be of special interest to anyone, not even the fuzz; the little that he had seen was a load of cobblers, anyway. All dreamed up by that bloody Pontin. Of course he’d been involved in all those DBV’s – quite intimately involved, in fact, Jennifer Dobie having been his wife at that time – but that was as far as it went. PRIME SUSPECT indeed. He leaned back in his chair, a change of posture which allowed his growing indignation to swell unimpeded. It did.

  … To the point where he decided that this state of affairs couldn’t be permitted to continue. Unfortunately the only way he could effectively stop it was by causing drastic damage to a valuable item of government property, i.e. a fully functional transcom, a step which as a law-abiding citizen Dobie was reluctant to take. On the other hand, as recent Eurocom legislation had indeed established, the SB boys had no right to be using the gizmo at all, or for that matter at all at all at all, without Home Office permission, which Dobie didn’t for a moment suppose had been granted. No, in the circumstances he felt able to do what had to be done with a perfectly clear conscience, the more so because in an unattended car park there wasn’t much chance that anyone would see him doing it.

  He went 4thwith to the toolbox in the pantry and extracted therefrom a mole wrench and a pair of stout pliers, then clumped his way downstairs and round to the car park. It was a good job, he reflected, that Kate wasn’t around to see what he was up to. She’d have disapproved most strongly. He was sure of it.

  Even though Kate herself had her Luddite moods, on occasion. “They’ve packed out all the hospitals with this crummy electronic equipment, you know that? – which costs the taxpayer a bomb and a half and so it’s all got to be used to justify the expense. So instead of doing my job the way I was taught to do it, I fill in forms and send the patients round to the Heath and then wait anything up to a month for the bloody printouts to be sent round. And when I get them, I can’t make head or tail of them anyway. My dad wouldn’t have gone along with it, I can tell you that. He’d have done his nut instead. Or maybe gone and sabotaged the whole caboodle.”

  Yes, but Dobie would be unwise to model his actions upon those of that near-legendary figure and notorious eccentric, Kate’s dad, who had frequently signed his name on the line marked Cause of Death and had got away with it. And Kate’s husband, who apparently carried a gun around as an essential item of his medical equipment, wasn’t much better. It seemed natural to suppose that all these electronic investigations were directed towards Kevin Coyle and the contents of his holdall rather than towards Kate herself, but as it wasn’t Kevin who was being seriously inconvenienced by them, this was hardly to the point. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do and Dobie was going to do it.

  The van was still parked in the same place and still unattended. Dobie paused and surveyed it for a few moments. From where he stood, he could see that unusually complex roof aerial projecting in semi-silhouette against the sky; a few of the local no-goods were wandering up and down the street beyond the wire fencing, but things were quiet enough to suit his purpose. He took a firm grip on the pliers and went busily to work, not without a certain feeling of regret. It was a remarkable piece of equipment, after all, an electronic sensor that could pluck telephone conversations out of the air, scramble them into computerese and reassemble them instantly in aural form for the benefit of the listener-in at the earphones … It would also, of course, incidentally have recorded the voyage of his own computer over the network, or would have done if Capella hadn’t contrived effectively to black it out. It wasn’t of course intended to scramble the images on his TV screen; that was a seemingly inevitable by-product, a glitch that the research engineers had still to be working on. This seemingly miraculous mechanism had the additional drawback that it could be reduced in less than a minute to a tangle of wires and aluminium struts, if you happened to be carrying a wrench and a pair of pliers about your person; Dobie, stepping back, surveyed his handiwork and found the degree of wreckage achieved to be satisfactory. There’d be a DFA, naturally, somewhere inside the van but that didn’t matter. All in the vicinity of the van might now, he thought, be accounted secure against further electronic invasion.

  … Which didn’t mean, of course, that the Special Branch and that not very pleasant gentleman from Eccles might be now expected to desist from their enquiries. Indeed no. Dobie’s mood of unease was in no way diminished as, mission accomplished, he plodded back to the flat. He was well aware that Kate was doing everything she could to ensure that he didn’t become in any way involved in whatever it was that her husband had inveigled her into doing, but that, in turn, clearly suggested that she herself had serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the enterprise. Humping unlicensed guns around in the back of her car was in itself hardly one of her favourite activities and all this technological espionage, whether legal or illegal, implied that there might well be a whole lot more to it than that. Dobie, changing obediently into his Sunday-go-to-meeting dark grey suit, noticed that he had put his trousers on back to front, surely a sign that he was seriously disturbed. Of course she’d spoken to her husband that morning over the telephone. Could it be that …?

  Obviously it could.

  Dobie went through into the kitchen and picked up the notepad from its place on the sideboard beside the telephone. The last entry, made in Kate’s neat sloping handwriting, said,

  Codron Corp

  Wern Gogh opposite the garage

  8 o’clock

  There could be no possible harm, Dobie thought, in his going round to … well, keep an eye on things. Make sure she didn’t get into worse trouble than she was in already. No, there couldn’t be any harm in that.

  Could there?

  Back in the Honda, Olly was in earnest conversation on the cellular with Columbella Watkins. “You fucking crazy, man,” Columbella was saying, employing the parlance current in her days at Lady Margaret Hall. “No way this is going to work out, no fucking way.”

  “No? You fink not? … Well now, you lissen ’ere.” Olly was in no mood to be upstaged by snooty Oxbridge graduates. “I been to see this geezer an’ I’m about to tell you he’s some kind of major weird, like world class quality, know what I mean?”

  “Gives you the shivers, does he?”

/>   “Oh wow, duzzy ever … Like Edwid Woodwid usta be when he was on the telly but kinda … I dunno … distant … like he’s out there living in anuvver world … Oh jeez, wotta creep …”

  “So okay, but what did he say?”

  “He knows all about little yellow spring flowers an’ that’s for sure. An’ it’s got to be true wot Crumbo told me. They got the heaters out on that one, it ain’t just a rumour.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “He’s not handling that little matter himself, or he says he ain’t. They’ve hired an associate of his to do it. But he’s like, he wouldn’t come right out with the name. Well, you wouldn’t expect him to, would you?”

  “Hardly. An associate?”

  “Yeah, that was the word he used.”

  “He doesn’t have any associates. At least, there’s no mention of any associates on the CRO files. He’s strictly a loner. Incidentally—”

  “Incidentally schmuggins. All this I’m telling you is straight from the horse’s, baby.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You get back to the network and find out who this other mechanic is and then we’ll have our story. An’ it’ll be a hot one.”

  “But what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m going to have to play it careful on the net because there’s someone else been moseying around with this bucko’s file and that means there’s someone else taking a friendly interest in what he’s up to. Which means you better play it careful, too.”

  “Someone like who?”

  “I don’t know. Someone called Strange Attractor. Not another of the tabs, or I don’t think so. But we only had time for brief converse before the trap shut. Got to be a computer geek, though, that’s obvious.”

  Olly sighed. “We don’t want anyone else breaking in on this one, Columbella. This is our story, right? … And Dobie’s my pigeon. Let’s keep it that way, huh?”

  “You haven’t got a story till someone makes a move. And no one’s going to make a move while all your pals on the Force are sitting around breathing down chummy’s neck. I just hope you know what you’re doing, Olly.” Columbella was sounding rather distant, too.

  “Oh, I do, I do,” Olly said. Ringing off.

  6

  … When you think (Kate thought) about it, she had to have changed, too, over the past eight years. Or anyway … matured, as she’d always hoped. Eight years ago, a girl who looked like she’d just stepped off the catwalk in a spray-on body-hugger might have aroused in her the faintest twinge of envy … not so much, or not at all, of physical attractiveness but rather of the way of life that such an appearance implied; it would have been nice, she’d then have thought, to be able to spend a lazy, sunny weekend on the Côte d’Azur without anything very much to do other than paint one’s toenails. Instead of busting one’s hump trying to revive a half-defunct medical practice when one’s professional (and marital) partner has conveniently taken it on the lam. Of course she knew that the real fashion models worked every bit as hard as she did and if they got paid a good deal more, well, maybe you could argue it was wrong for a model to make so very much more than a doctor but she’d never got uptight on that old score, no, it was only a part of the grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side philosophy that had prevailed in the great days of Yuppydom and which might in some ways be taken to account for Kevin’s own defection. Because even with the two of them it hadn’t been easy to get the goddam clinic rolling and with all the energy and hard work she’d had to put into it … Yes, well, you had to admit that the sex thing hadn’t gone all that swimmingly and with all those other sources of friction coming up between them the chance of a unilateral walk-out had always been there … if only she’d been smart enough to see it. But she hadn’t. And it was no good trying now to find excuses for it, to convince herself that with her maturer outlook she didn’t blame Kevin …

  Because she did.

  Though not, oddly enough, in the present instance. The mess she’d gone and got herself into was entirely her own fault. The bastard had caught her unawares, showing up like that out of nowhere, she’d been stampeded into making snap decisions without giving the matter due consideration, and the first decision of the lot had been to handle the situation entirely by herself, so that Dobie could stay right out of it. Even rudely rebuffing, when necessary, his well-meant attempts at intervention (which had been pretty footling, anyway). He had enough worries on his plate already, and of a kind that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend … It’s difficult to be married, or next best thing, to a genius, which quite a few people seemed to think he was. Though the whole point was that after all she wasn’t married to a genius, she was married to some kind of a … con-man or something … which is what most doctors are, if you faced the facts, though of course all the little confidence tricks indulged in by medical practitioners are supposed to work to the overall benefit of the human race, while the things that Kevin had been up to these eight years past couldn’t surely have redounded to the benefit of anyone, other than himself. Not that he seemed to have reached the heady heights of material success; he looked … what? … Seedy, perhaps, was the word. But then … perhaps he always had. It was just his youth that had disguised it. Youth, yes, and a certain amount of undeniable charm. Which had now worn off together with the other, at least (Kate thought with a snort) as far as I’m concerned. That brief chapter of our lives is finished for ever.

  … Not that she knew (or cared) very much about the later chapters of Kev’s action-packed autobiography. Except that it just had to be scurrilous enough to sell several million copies, should he ever get around to writing it. A well-paying job in Libya, he’d once told her (a long-distance call from Benghazi, abruptly cut off by the operator or maybe by some woman or other pressing down the switch) … but of course he hadn’t kept the job for long, if indeed it had ever existed. And from then on, nothing but rumours, intelligence passed on to her by former mutual friends. The Emirates, the Lebanon, Turkey; even the PLO had been mentioned – though she’d taken that one with a grain of salt. But up to no good, wherever he was. Doctors know a lot about drugs, is the trouble. He’d have been tempted, no doubt, to put his knowledge to use … and Kev had never been much of a dab hand at resisting temptation, that was for sure. Kate, who spent a fair amount of her time trying to tidy up what might have been the results of his drug-peddling operations – that kid on the bicycle, for one – couldn’t sympathise. Someone was trying to kill him, he’d said. Fine. Though whoever it was would probably find himself standing in a pretty lengthy queue and with Kate herself, by rights, at the head of it. The silly bugger had even gone and given her a gun to do it with. Well … She had been known to yield to temptation, too.

  She had the bag in the boot of her car right now. And the car parked in a lay-by well away from Ludlow Street, just in case that sod from the Specials should turn up there again. And where it would be safe, of course, from prying hands … such as Dobie’s … Well, you never knew with Dobie … In ten minutes’ time she’d be rid of it. And of bloody Kevin. She unlocked the car door and got in.

  No bomb went off. That was something.

  It didn’t occur to her, at that time, that although of course you never knew with Dobie … in her understandable preoccupation with the job in hand and her determination that he shouldn’t become involved in it in any way she had omitted, for the past hour or so, to keep her usual maternal eye on Dobie’s movements, thereby to prevent him from blithering into yet another goddam situation he couldn’t handle. A full-time job, you might have thought (if you did know Dobie) but all the same …

  Oh dear, yes …

  A great mistake …

  … And Crumb was indeed at that very moment going quite spectacularly spare.

  “What’s he what’s he what’s he doing?” he was wailing, cavorting about like an erotically-stimulated chimpanzee. “I don’t believe this. I can’t believe it. Who let that bugger loose I’d like to know.” It wasn’t a question and Jackson didn�
��t try to answer it. Instead he watched Dobie march vigorously up the steps and into the building without so much as a disassociative shrug of the shoulders. In a way, Jacko wasn’t surprised. If he had been asked to think of one person in the world who might wander myopically into the midst of a major drugs bust that the fuzz and (what’s more) the Special Branch had spent the best part of a week meticulously preparing and setting up, the name that would certainly have sprung to his lips was that of precisely the person who even now was wandering myopically etcetera and it was no bloody good at all asking what the hell Dobie was doing, nobody ever knew what Dobie was doing and least of all (Jackson reflected sadly) Dobie himself.

  … Though here he was doing the Professor an injustice. Dobie knew perfectly well what he was doing. He’d come to see what Kate was doing and to stop her from doing it, if necessary. Not that this amounted to more than a forlorn hope, as Kate wasn’t easily dissuaded from doing things when her mind was set upon doing them, but at any rate Dobie reckoned he could try. He hadn’t got much else to do that evening, anyway. Other than mope around the place awaiting Kate’s return, which wasn’t a very appealing prospect to one who (like Dobie) regarded himself as essentially a man of action. He’d dealt with that telesnooper’s aerial speedily and effectively, hadn’t he?

  Yes.

  Well, then.

  The only trouble was that the address Kate had jotted down on her notepad was obviously that of an office and the building he had now entered didn’t look very like an office block. It was more like a block of residential flats, really. He paused for a moment on the first floor landing, peering uncertainly to left and right. Codron Corp? … Nope. No directional sign or plaque. Just doors. To left and right. The door to his right at that moment opened, catching Dobie characteristically in mid-dither. The young lady who had opened it, he immediately decided, had to be this Codron character’s secretary, though she didn’t look much like a secretary or, to be more exact, didn’t seem to be dressed much like a secretary. However, after a fifteen-minute exposure earlier that day to Oliver Smirk’s skintight bell-bottoms, Dobie was determined that nothing in the way of ultra-mod female get-ups should surprise or deter him and this was as well, since (virtually) nothing was what this other young lady appeared to be wearing. “Good evening,” he said, showing no surprise.