by Graham Marks
‘Pretty much the same as the other one, lots of capital letters and stuff in bold, lots of banging on about increasing surveillance, the growth of the fascist state, the money it’s all costing.’ Salter shrugged. ‘Nothing we haven’t heard before. It’s the comment at the end where it gets interesting.’
Mercer picked up one of the folded sheets of paper and turned it over. ‘Last para?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Not more stuff about the remotely piloted flights, is it?’
‘No. It’s the bit under the “We are Omega Place” heading.’
‘Got it…’ Mercer perched on the edge of her desk, eyes scanning the words on the page. ‘“We are Omega Place…”’ she read out loud. ‘“But who is really running the multi-million CCTV programme in this country? Who looks at all the pictures taken by all those cameras? Who stores them all, and for how long?” Who indeed?’ Mercer glanced at Salter, then continued. ‘“And here are the big questions… who is making all the money from installing, running and upgrading all this technology? Do you know? Who decides where to put cameras, and why? Do you know? We know someone is pulling strings out there. And we know who it is. Names will be named in Manifesto 5.”’
‘Told you it was interesting.’ Salter pointed at the piece of paper Mercer was holding. ‘Got a real sting in the tail, right?’
‘And makes you wonder where they’re getting all their information from.’ Mercer stood up, went round her desk and switched on her computer. ‘If they were right about the RPAs – which, unbelievably, they were – then it’s a safe assumption that there is at least a possibility there’s something in this latest assertion.’
Salter was about to reply when he was interrupted by a phone ringing. Mercer picked up her handset.
‘Yes? OK, fine, I’ll get it picked up.’ She listened for another second or two, then put the phone back down. ‘We’ve got a delivery, which needs signing for. Probably the rest of the vids. Can you go down and get them, Ray?’
‘Sure. Can’t wait to numb my brain with yet more of the world’s worst quality surveillance video.’ As he opened the door to leave, Salter found himself face to face with Perry and Castleton, the rest of the team. ‘Ah, at last, the cavalry!’
Perry stood to one side to let Salter out. ‘You going for doughnuts?’
‘Unfortunately, no. Video tape.’
‘Oh, joy…’
The lights were turned down in the Viewing Suite and it was cool, the hum of air conditioning just audible in the background. Jane Mercer came in to find everyone waiting for her.
‘Did you bring them up to speed, Ray?’
‘Thought you’d want to do that, boss.’
Mercer nodded and pulled out a chair from one of the video consoles. Sitting down, she opened the file she was carrying.
‘OK, this is everything we’ve got, until we go through those tapes. As far as we can tell the “incident” kicked off late Friday night, with stickering and leafleting in and around Canary Wharf, Farringdon Road and High Street Ken – specifically in the vicinity of the newspaper HQs. Then there was the more direct stuff along Oxford Street, real guerrilla action, with cameras being paintballed and otherwise tampered with.’ Mercer turned over a couple of pages in the file. ‘And, finally, there were the emails, just in case the papers had somehow missed that something was going on.’
Castleton shifted in his seat. ‘Why the sudden change in tactics?’
‘For some reason they want to get their message to a wider audience.’ Mercer shrugged. ‘But why now, I have no idea.’
‘And what’s the High Street Ken footage, boss?’ Salter asked. ‘Why’s that so important?’
‘After this whole thing broke a report came in from the transport police.’ Mercer referred to her file again. ‘Two officers on the late shift at High Street Ken on Friday night lifted a boy they thought had been pickpocketing, but had to let him go because of lack of evidence.’
‘And?’ Perry made a questioning face.
‘And when they searched him all he had in his backpack was a pair of thin, white cotton gloves. Plus, there were some bright green flyers and a few stickers. At the time they didn’t mean anything to them, but when they heard what had gone down outside the newspaper offices, they realised that this kid probably had something to do with it. He’d got some story about being out with a mate, and he was acting very suss, but there was no reason to keep him. They did, though, run his Oyster card, and guess which stations he’d been to?’
‘Farringdon and Canary Wharf, by any chance, boss?’ asked Salter.
‘Spot on, Ray. And I think we should have him, and anyone he was with, on the station footage. So let’s take a look, shall we?’
18
Monday 14th August, Thames House
No one had gone home on Sunday night. Everybody had taken turns to sleep for a bit, catnapping, really, and had kept going with a combination of black coffee and Pro-Plus. Consequently Ray Salter’s eyes were red, his mouth felt like it’d been lined with fuzzy felt and the muscles in his neck hurt like shit. The end result of a night spent looking at hours of videotape. Frame by bloody frame. He stared at himself in the mirror above the sink in the toilet: a face not so much pale as grey, like processed meat, stared back at him. Oh, the glamour, he thought, checking his watch and seeing it was six thirty-ish; probably half an hour or so before any of the local cafés would be open for a restorative bacon sandwich. He was soaking his face with cold running water when the door opened and John Perry poked his head in.
‘Ray, you should come and take a look.’
Jane Mercer leaned across the desk and tapped the button that stopped the tape running, freezing the picture on the screen. Then she cranked the tape back a few frames and kept it on hold. The grainy black and white image sort of shivered, making Salter blink involuntarily a few times to try to make it clearer.
‘What’s this?’
‘The kid that got stopped at High Street Ken, Ray.’ Mercer nodded at the screen. ‘Just before he got picked up.’
Salter examined the high-angle shot. The boy, he didn’t look much more than seventeen, eighteen years old, appeared to be stretching up as he pushed through the crowds, trying to search ahead over people’s shoulders.
‘He’s looking for someone.’
‘That’s what we thought.’ Mercer leaned forward, pulled up the exterior shot on a second screen, ran the footage backwards for a few seconds and then let it play. ‘Take a look at this.’
The new film sequence showed the pavement outside the tube station; the time and date code said it was 23:47:15 – 11/08/06; the eventful Friday night that had so successfully screwed up the team’s weekend. In the crowds milling towards the entrance Salter spotted the kid, straggly black hair, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He was talking to someone, an older man, and then, in the random choreography of street life, as the boy stopped for a moment to get something out of his backpack, a surge of people filled in the space between him and his older companion, who, as he carried on walking out of shot, appeared to be putting a pair of phones in his ears. Neither noticed what had happened, and, when the kid looked up, you could see a look of puzzled consternation track across his face.
Mercer paused the tape and stood up, stretching and massaging her neck. ‘He got separated from his friend, then, before he could find him, was picked up by the transport guys because they spotted him pushing his way past people and thought he was steaming the crowd.’
Salter’s eyes dodged between the frozen images on the two screens in front of him. ‘We know who he is, by any chance?’
‘No.’ John Perry opened up a notepad and flicked over a couple of pages. ‘But we know where he’d been.’
‘I love Oyster cards.’ Salter smiled. ‘They save the general public money, and us time.’
Perry nodded again. ‘We don’t have his name because it turns out it was a stolen card; we do, though, have a list of the stations he went through on Fri
day night, and, unless you really believe in super-coincidences, matey-boy and the older type were definitely the ones doing the stickering and everything.’
‘We don’t know where he went afterwards?’
‘Unfortunately not, Ray.’ Mercer popped a Tic Tac. ‘However he got back to home base, wherever that is, the little shit didn’t use the card again.’
Salter raised his eyebrows. ‘Young, but not so stupid. Must’ve chucked the thing away when they let him out. Still, I suppose having two faces is better than nothing. It’s unlikely to work for the boy, boss, but d’you think we should run the other bloke’s mug through the system and see if he crops up? You never know, right?’
‘Good thought, Ray.’ Mercer nodded, turning to the other two team members. ‘We’ve still got at least a couple more hours of vids to trawl through, guys, so don’t let me stop you…’
The door opened and Jane Mercer looked up from reading through the field reports that had come in about Friday night’s Omega Place activity in the West End. ‘Ray?’
Salter looked at his watch. ‘Everything’s been gone through, boss. We can carry on looking, but I think the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in… I know it’s taking me three times longer than normal to do anything and I’m not really paying attention to what I’m looking at, like I should.’
Mercer glanced at the clock on her computer screen; it was almost two in the afternoon. ‘OK… but tell them to be back here tomorrow, early.’
‘You staying much longer?’
‘At least as long as it takes me to finish writing a report for Markham so he can send something to the Home Secretary.’
‘The story so far?’
Mercer nodded.
‘Need any help? As long as it doesn’t entail looking at video tape then I’m good to go for a bit longer.’
‘Thanks, it’d be useful to just run through what we’ve got one more time before I commit thoughts to paper.’
Salter picked up a phone and dialled an internal number. ‘Let me tell the boys they can piss off… John? OK, look, file and store everything and be back here at sparrow fart, all right?’ He nodded. ‘Yeah, see you tomorrow.’ Putting the phone down, Salter pulled over a chair and sat down. ‘Fire away.’
Picking up her notebook, Mercer leaned back in her chair and chewed the end of her ballpoint as she scanned the notes she’d written. She glanced up at Salter.
‘You got any ideas as to why there’s been this sudden change in tactics?’
‘What change, boss?’
‘I’ve been through everything Threat Evaluation gave me when I took this gig over and I can’t find any evidence they’ve ever done anything like this before Friday night.’
‘Them moving things up a gear?’
‘Could be… but going from undercover tactics that were more of an irritation than anything else to headline-grabbing activity, kind of overnight. It’s a big shift.’
‘I reread the latest Manifesto.’
‘And?’
‘And I think this whole thing was to communicate the threat.’
‘Threat? Oh, yeah,’ Mercer nodded. ‘You mean the stuff about revealing who’s “pulling strings”. Naming names, right?’
‘Yeah.’ Salter stood up and slouched around the room. ‘Someone somewhere on the inside’s obviously been feeding them information, and maybe they’ve stopped. Friday night could’ve been a very public warning, you know, “carry on giving us the info, or else”?’
‘Tomorrow.’ Mercer pointed at her second-in-command.
‘What about it?’
‘I want you to concentrate on the leak, see if you can get any closer to where it’s coming from.’
‘OK…’ Salter stopped pacing. ‘You want to know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘I think it’s Home Office, and, if it is, they are not going to give me shit, even if I ask nicely.’
‘So don’t ask, Ray. Don’t ask.’
19
Monday 14th August, Strand, London
The phone went, exactly on time, and Henry Garden grabbed the receiver. ‘Nick?’
‘Who else?’
‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘You tell me, sunshine. You’re more in the know than I am. All I know is what I read in the papers and see on TV.’
‘But…’ Garden momentarily took the receiver away from his ear and looked at it, frowning. ‘What d’you mean? This is your game, Nick, you’re supposed to be calling the shots here!’
‘Cut the crap and just tell me what you know, Henry. I haven’t got time to listen to you whining on. What’s happening on your side of the fence? What response has there been to Friday night’s extravaganza?’
Garden took a deep breath and made himself calm down, made himself remember that his relationship with Nick Harvey was completely different to his relationships with just about everyone else he knew. But that was because Nick Harvey knew him so much better than most people. Knew so much more about him. Had baled him out of a series of fairly significant gambling debts that could seriously have stalled his career, and still could, if the wrong people found out about them. So he owed Nick, in more ways than one, a fact that the bloody man never let him forget.
He was only supposed to be passing on fairly innocuous information that would assist Nick’s company, AquiLAN, and its subsidiaries, get rather more than their fair share of local and central government contracts to supply, install and operate CCTV systems. Nothing more, and no great harm done, really. All that happened was that Nick Harvey, a very rich bastard, got richer. And, as long as he did what he was told, Garden understood his debts would remain gone, if not forgotten.
Never forgotten…
‘So, Henry? Spill the beans, I haven’t got all day.’
‘OK… from what I can gather, they nearly caught one of the Omega Place people, or I think he was at least in custody for a bit.’
‘They let him go?’
‘Apparently this youth was picked up by the transport police, suspected of pickpocketing, and released because they didn’t find any evidence of it. Something like that.’ Garden watched the people walking past the phone booth, the flow of humanity, none of whom had the problems he’d got to deal with. He forced his mind back to the business in hand. ‘It was only later, after the event, that the officers involved heard what had gone on outside the newspaper offices, remembered the flyers they’d seen the kid had on him and put two and two together. They have him and his collaborator on video tape, though.’
‘They do? I need stills, OK? Get me stills.’
‘How on earth am I supposed to do that?’
‘Your problem, Henry, entirely your problem.’
‘What d’you want them for?’
‘Like you said, this is my game, and I’m calling the shots.’ Nick laughed, like he’d made a joke, although Garden had no idea what it might be. ‘I want to show them to somebody, so just get the damn things, Henry. Or cats might be let out of bags.’
The phone went dead and Garden was left, the hiss of an open line in his ear, wondering how the hell he was going to finesse this situation. How on earth was he supposed to get hold of copies of what had to be classified material? And what exactly did Nick want them for anyway?
Garden put the receiver back down and exited the booth, standing on the pavement, still as a statue, wishing he could stay like that, put his life on hold for a moment while he tried to sort things out in his head. Why he’d ever thought he could get away, unscathed, from the mess he’d made of his private life he didn’t know. It was bad enough that he’d run up the gambling debts, acting like some over-paid footballer at the roulette table and playing poker with people way out of his league, but to let himself be put in a position where an upmarket shyster like Nick Harvey basically ran him like an employee was rank stupidity. Except that’s exactly what he’d done, and here he was.
Someone almost bumped into him, brushing past without a word of apolo
gy, and the spell was broken. Garden looked at his watch and straightened up his slumped shoulders. Back to work.
As he strode along, the very picture, on the outside, of a man in control of his universe, he reran the last thing Nick Harvey had said to him: he wanted to show somebody the pictures of the two people caught by the cameras in High Street Ken. Nick never did anything without a reason, so he must have a plan. And you showed people pictures of other people so that they’d recognise them. Therefore, logic dictated, Nick wanted these two found, presumably so they could be persuaded to stop what they were doing.
Garden stopped walking. Persuaded. The word had flashed an image up from his memory banks of one night in one of the casinos he frequented – he couldn’t remember which. Not important. What was important was the man who’d been with Nick Harvey that night. He couldn’t think of his name, but he could see the man as if he were right there in front of him: average height, but very fit-looking and giving off a kind of don’t-mess-with-me aura; wiry, reddish hair, cut quite short; a pale, freckled complexion, piercing blue eyes. He had a way of looking at you, sizing you up, that was extremely disconcerting, like it only took him seconds to get your number. At first glance nothing special to look at, but someone, he’d realised as he’d observed him, who was dangerous.
The man had hardly spoken all evening, playing blackjack in between working one particular roulette table and ending up a good few thousand pounds better off by the time they left. Nick had introduced them – the name still would not come back to him – and had said something like ‘If whatever-his-name-was couldn’t persuade somebody to do something, no one could’, and then he’d laughed, patting the man on his shoulder and said, ‘The army’s loss is my gain.’ That was it, pretty much word for word.
Picking up his pace again, Garden continued on his way, racking his brains for the man’s name and as sure as he’d ever been about anything that this was who Nick wanted the pictures for. Whoever was running this Omega Place outfit – and just when the hell had it become an actual, real thing for heaven’s sake? – was going to be in for a shock if Mr Persuader ever walked in the front door.
