The Locker

by Adrian Magson

  “Hi,” he said, pushing his spectacles back on the bridge of his nose.

  “Can you run this through whatever machinery you have and see if you can rescue a file? It shows up blank. It might be something that got caught up and loaded in error, but I’d like to check it out.”

  He smiled and nodded as if thrown a challenge. “Sure thing, uh …”

  “Ruth. Ruth Gonzales. Thank you.”

  “Sure. Are you OK? You look pissed—and I don’t mean drunk.”

  “Actually, I wish I was drunk. I’d feel a hell of a lot calmer than I do right now.” She pointed at the smart card. “As quick as you can, please?” She handed him a card with her phone number.

  He nodded. “I’ll call you.”

  She turned and went back up to the ground floor. She had to get out of this place. The atmosphere was suddenly cloying and she wanted to throw something—especially at Claas the Arse.

  Aston was waiting for her. He looked faintly amused and said, “Got that out of your system?”

  She said nothing at first, not trusting herself to be discreet enough to remain professional. Finally she asked, “Am I fired?”

  “No. I confess he tried, but there are areas where I still hold some authority. Bob Zitterman backed me up, but I wouldn’t count on that lasting long. They’re much too close and Claas has powerful connections. He’s also a big-money man in the investment community. But your comment about the damage to our reputation was right on the button; it won’t be just Cruxys affected—any fall-out will include Greenville as well, and they wouldn’t like that.”

  “So where does that leave me?”

  “Until the police step in you’re still working this case.”

  “Thank you. Zitterman’s the new American board member?”

  “Yes. He arrived yesterday from Washington. He has friends, as they say, along the Beltway and he’s taken an active interest in the Hardman case—I suspect prompted by Claas.” His expression remained blank. “I’m not sure why, but they form a formidable front if they want this to go away. Never underestimate the powers of accountants, Ruth.”

  “If that’s all it is.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, it’s obvious Claas wants this assignment stopped in its tracks. But why? I don’t buy his argument about bottom lines; I may be a simple employee but I know we have enough paying clients on the books who never make a claim to make this division profitable.”

  He looked worried. “I know. There’s been a sudden change of atmosphere in our connections with Greenville, that’s all I can tell you. Almost as if somebody threw a switch. I don’t know where it stems from, but I’m trying to find out.”

  Greenville was the American half of the Dutch-US parent company that now owned Cruxys, Ruth remembered. “You mean they’d be happy to see us lose our reputation and go to the wall?” The security and crisis management sector had already been hit by several scandals; walking away from a kidnapping and being seen to be lambasted by the police and press would surely finish Cruxys overnight. What would make Claas and Greenville take that lying down?

  “I wouldn’t overestimate our financial value to them,” he cautioned her sombrely. “We’re probably little more than loose change on their balance sheet. But in PR terms, even a hint of bad news in the current climate means they’d let us go like a snake shedding skin.”

  “Thanks for the warning. So what do I do now?”

  “I spoke with Sir Philip Coleclough about Hardman after you left yesterday. He made a few phone calls, called in some favours. He got back to me with an answer just before you arrived this morning.”

  Ruth waited.

  “Michael Hardman is not, and never has been in the employ of Her Majesty’s armed forces, the Security Service or Secret Intelligence Service. Sir Philip ran the name and photo you supplied through all the agencies. They’ve never heard of him. In fact they came up blank.”

  Blank. It was an odd word. At the level of checking to which Coleclough was rumoured to have access, there would surely have been something—even a parking fine. “Blank as in—?”

  “There’s nothing. He’s a ghost.”

  “How can he be? He has a bank account in Kensington.”

  “It shouldn’t be possible, I agree. But that’s not all: the passport office has no record of him, either.”

  “What?”

  “All I can say is that Michael Hardman has now become a person of some interest.”

  “And the dead European in Herat?”

  “An import—a Chechen fighter in his mid-twenties. He has a tattoo on his back linking him with a hard-line Islamist group with its roots in Grozny. There’s been a steady flow of young men from the area into Afghanistan and now Syria, and he appears to be one of the latest casualties.”

  “But he had a phone on him with Nancy Hardman’s number.”

  Aston gave a cool smile. “There were reports of a fourth man, although he’s rather conveniently vanished. Think about it: what would you do if you wanted to disappear, believed dead? You have an item identifying you … and a dead body with no face.” He shrugged. “Classic misdirection.”

  forty-five

  Ruth was halfway back to the Hardman house when James Ellworthy called.

  “The smart card you left me?” he said. “There’s definitely a file on there, but the data’s corrupted. Could be it got hit by a virus in the original system, but I don’t have enough to work with.”

  “You didn’t get anything at all?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He chuckled. “I managed to lift off maybe five lines of text, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. I need some kind of context. It looks to me like it could be a list, but it’s mostly numbers and like, file references. If you could get the original source data, I’d have more of a chance of building a pattern.”

  Ruth thanked him for his efforts and disconnected. It was probably nothing—a wild goose chase and a waste of time. But it left her feeling dissatisfied. For reasons she couldn’t explain, it was simply another oddity about this whole business. Why would a document file find its way onto a smart card for photos? Whoever had transposed the photos onto the card must have lifted it along with the JPEG files; yet wouldn’t they have noticed the difference in icons? Then she recalled that the Hardmans didn’t have a computer. That pre-supposed that they weren’t too computer-savvy. And if Nancy had done it at work, where she did accounts, it might explain the list aspect of the data that Ellworthy had come up with.

  She pulled up in front of the Hardman house and walked up to the front door. The 4WD from earlier was gone. It was pointless being discreet now; she wasn’t supposed to be here, but if Claas got his way, the place would soon be swamped by police. Better to get in and out again before they turned up. They would undoubtedly want to interview her along with Gina and Vaslik, but she wanted to warn Nancy about what was going to happen first.

  Vaslik opened the front door. He looked worried and she wondered if he’d heard the news.

  “We need to talk,” she said. It felt better to take control of this; no way was she going to play the loser who’d been dumped.

  He nodded and jerked a thumb towards the ceiling to indicate that Nancy was upstairs, then turned and led the way to the kitchen, Gina was watching the monitors with the radio playing music.

  “I’m officially off the case,” Ruth said shortly. It was no good delaying the news, and they’d soon find out if they hadn’t already heard.

  “Shit,” Gina swore. “Why?”

  Ruth recounted what had been said in the briefing room, including what Aston had told her afterwards about the dead Chechen, and Ellworthy’s call about the corrupted file on the smart card. If she was off the case and the cops came in and took over, then it was only right these two should know everything, even if it was a blind lead.

  Vas
lik said nothing all the time she was talking, and he hadn’t lost the worried look.

  “I’m surprised you’re here,” he said finally. “In your shoes I’d be taking time out, working my way down a bottle or two.”

  “I will. But first I need answers to a couple of questions. Whatever Claas might think, there’s a little girl still out there.”

  “What questions?”

  “If Hardman was one of the men in the gun battle, what was he doing with a bunch of Islamist fighters? Or did the four men happen on him earlier and steal his phone and charity documents?”

  “If they did,” Vaslik commented, “he’s dead and buried in a deep gulley or ravine somewhere.”

  “Agreed. But what if Aston’s right? What if Hardman was the fourth man and left his phone on the body to blur the trail?”

  “What would that accomplish?” Gina queried.

  “That’s the big question. If Aston hadn’t told me what Coleclough had found, I’d have said Michael Hardman was Special Forces, and he’s been working undercover all these years. But they’ve never heard of him and neither have the passport authorities.”

  “Oh, boy,” Gina murmured, reaching the obvious conclusions. “So what is he?”

  Ruth looked deliberately at Vaslik. “Search me. But if he’s not one of ours … maybe he’s one of yours. How about it?”

  Vaslik pursed his lips. “I can run it by a guy I know … but I don’t expect any answers. If he’s with one of the really elite black ops units, there’s no way his name will come to light; they bury those guys so deep not even their old colleagues can find them.”

  Vaslik stood in a patch of shadow under the front porch overhang, staring along the road and checking everything while barely moving a muscle. After Ruth’s news, he needed some fresh air. She was being treated like dirt and he didn’t like it. But short of putting himself back on a plane to the US in protest, there was nothing he could do about it other than continue until the police stepped in and took over. At that point his assignment would be over, too.

  The road looked pretty normal; a few cars, a couple of pedestrians, an old lady wrapped in a raincoat pottering in her front garden. No more signs of cars with steamy windows or houses with the blinds pulled 24/7, but then, he hadn’t expected them to hang around.

  It was probably a waste of time worrying about it. If the watchers were still in the area, they’d have already chosen another location and settled in, their neighbours none-the-wiser. In fact, if they had the means they could have paid off a neighbour to get lost for a few days, leaving their house as an OP with no fears of anybody stumbling on them. It was a tactic used by Homeland Security agents when a suspect turned up in some quiet neighbourhood and had to be checked out through careful surveillance. Su casa es mi casa, Jimmy Marriot, a fellow DHS agent used to say when persuading a householder to go on a few days’ vacation so he could take over the place as a base. Your house is my house. Most were only too pleased to comply, especially knowing they could talk about it in the neighborhood afterwards and gain kudos for helping out in the fight against terrorism.

  His survey flowed across Nancy’s car parked on the driveway where she had left it after rushing in from the gym. It probably needed a run sometime soon to keep things ticking over. Cars were like dogs; they needed exercise and a chance to blow off some dust. This one was a Nissan and looked about ten years old, with a couple of rust spots over the fenders and a small star-shaped crack in one corner of the windshield. Plenty of life left in it yet, though. Not that he knew much about cars; live in New York and you got used to public transport.

  A flicker of light caught his eye on the driver’s side, just inside the glass. He stepped across and peered at it. Shiny, like gold, and rectangular. He leaned closer and knew instantly what it was: it was a smart card, like they use in digital cameras, and stuck on the windshield side of the sun visor.

  He remembered what Ruth had told them a few minutes ago about the corrupted file from the photo frame, and wondered. Could there be two of them? He turned and went back inside, and came out moments later with the car keys.

  He opened the car and slid behind the wheel, then pulled the flap out and up against the car roof. The smart card blinked back at him, the gold colour slightly dulled in the reduced light. He took out his visa card and fed it behind the card until the adhesive used to hold it in place gave way.

  The card looked innocuous in the palm of his hand; a tiny piece of chip technology most people never saw, never realised was even there. They clicked away with their cameras and only downloaded what they needed direct to their PC or Mac without realising that given the correct piece of kit, you could store stuff other than photos on the memory card inside.

  He sat watching the street for a few moments, his chest thumping as he thought about what he might be holding. If what Ruth had suggested was right, this might hold the key to the corrupted file she’d handed Ellworthy.

  But what if it held more than that? What if it gave a clue to the whereabouts of Michael Hardman? Of Beth?

  He took out his cell phone and stared at the smart card. It might be nothing, of course, in which case he was barking at the moon. This should go to the techs in Langley; they would have the machinery and software to open the card up like soft butter and prise out its secrets. Corrupted file or not, it was what they were good at. If they said it was a dud, then so bit it. But he had to find out and duty was leaning on him to go the correct route.

  He touched the button that would connect him with Drybeck in Washington. Hand him this and the rear-admiral would forget all about his rebellious refusal earlier. It wasn’t that Vaslik wanted his old job back, but he could do without the kind of trouble a heavy hitter like Drybeck could bring down on him. Common sense said it was better to play safe and stay on the side of the angels.

  But.

  There was always a but. What if he said go fuck the angels? They’d had their turn, and he had a more powerful instinct driving him.

  He pocketed the cell phone and walked back inside.

  He handed the card to Ruth and told her where he’d found it. “Hidden in plain sight. It could be a copy of the other one, could be nothing. Weird place to stick it, though, if it means nothing. Kind of place someone with a secret to hide would leave it.”

  Ruth took it and smiled gratefully. “Thanks, Andy. I’ll get Ellworthy to open it.”

  Vaslik lifted an eyebrow. “Andy? Just as I was getting used to Slik, too.”

  Ruth’s phone rang, cutting off her reply. It was Ellworthy. He sounded breathless, as if he was on the move.

  “I just got a call from our Siege 2 operator. I’m on my way to your location right now.”

  “Why—what’s up?”

  “Are any of you guys using your cell phones?”

  Ruth looked at Gina and Vaslik, both with hands in plain sight. “No. Why?”

  “We got low-level signals less than two minutes ago from inside the house. Somebody there is sending and receiving text messages.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  forty-six

  Ruth charged up the stairs with Vaslik and Gina close on her heels. This had gone far enough; she’d had it with all the twists and turns and—what was it some politician had once said about being economic with the truth? How about plain bloody lies and evasions? As far as she could tell, that was all Nancy had done so far. She had no solid proof yet, but somehow the shocked mother act was looking just a little shy of the genuine article.

  Now this.

  She twisted the handle and pushed at Nancy’s door. It didn’t give. Damn, she hadn’t given a thought to a lock before; there had been no need.

  “Slik.” She stood aside. There was no time for niceties; this needed a fast entry.

  Vaslik pushed the door with his hand to test it, then threw his shoulder against the centr
e of the panel close to the lock. It burst open with a shriek of wood, and a long splinter came away from the jamb, carrying the metal strike plate with it.

  There was a sharp cry of alarm inside the room and Ruth saw Nancy on her bed. She was dressed in a T-shirt top, her legs bare. A dressing gown lay across her feet.

  She was thrusting her hand beneath the pillow.

  “What are you doing?” she protested. “You have no right!”

  “Tough,” said Ruth. “Give me the phone.” She held out her hand, although she guessed it was too late. “Now.”

  But Nancy shook her head like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, denying all responsibility.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she muttered, unnaturally calm and leaning back against the pillow. “I don’t have a phone—you kept mine downstairs, remember?” Her eyes were wide and she was almost smiling, as if innocent denial would be enough. She eyed Vaslik, standing by the door, watching silently. “Has he come to watch the fun or are you two dykes going to gang up on me?” She gave Vaslik a coy look and deliberately parted her legs, the cotton T-shirt shifting up her thighs. “What do you think, Andy? The charity widow needs a bit of action, is that it?”

  “Stop that!” Gina stepped forward, eyes blazing with anger. “What the hell are you doing?” She grabbed the end of the pillow and ripped it from under Nancy and hurled it across the room, then dragged the dressing gown over her bare legs.

  As she did do, a slim, black cell phone slid off the bed and bounced to the floor.

  Ruth picked it up. She checked the log, listing calls missed, received and dialled. Empty. She checked the messages log. The same.