The Locker

by Adrian Magson

  Nancy had beaten them to it.

  When she looked up, Nancy was staring at her defiantly. She looked angry, but there was something else lurking in her eyes, too.

  Was it an expression of triumph? Christ, how could she?

  “Who are you in contact with, Nancy? Is it Michael?” Ruth tossed the phone to Vaslik, who caught it and dropped it into his pocket. “Never mind, we’ll have our techs look at it and they’ll know exactly who you’ve been talking to. Trust me.”

  Nancy remained silent. She tucked the dressing gown around her in a belated show of modesty and stared at the floor.

  Ruth sat on the bed. “Nancy, I don’t know what you’re doing—or what you think you’re doing. But this isn’t going to help us find Beth. You do want her back, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” The answer was a whisper. If she had any fight or resistance left, she had pushed it down deep inside where they couldn’t get at it.

  “So what’s the thing with the secret messaging? Did Michael arrange for the phone? How did he get it inside? Was it hidden here in your room?”

  Nancy’s head jerked up in surprise.

  Ruth continued, “What—you think we couldn’t tell when you began communicating with him? You really think we haven’t had this place locked down ever since we arrived?” She pointed towards the window, hoping the fabrication didn’t show in her voice. “There’s a unit out there can tell when you call or send a text message … and when you receive one. It also has the capability of back-tracking on Michael’s texts and pinning down his location each time. Sooner or later, we’ll know where he is to within a few metres. Is that how you want this to end? Because we’re not the only ones who can do this, you know. There are others—and they’re not so forgiving.”

  A double blink of the eyes. Nancy whispered, “I don’t believe you.”

  “Tell her, Slik.” She reckoned it would sound scarier coming from Vaslik, and hoped he would pick up the baton and run with it. They had to do something to shake her composure otherwise this could go on forever.

  “Cell phones use microwaves,” he said easily. “When you talk, your voice is encoded into signals which are transmitted to the nearest tower, which bounces them on to the destination device in what’s called a pathway or control channel. The nearest tower then tells the device to ring and that’s how you get contact. When you send or receive a text message, it’s pretty much the same; the signal goes over the pathway in a small packet of data. Darned thing is, Nancy, people think text messaging is easier to hide because it’s smaller and faster … the signal doesn’t last long enough for anybody to fasten on to it.” He smiled coolly. “Fact is, your cell phone is constantly active, exchanging data with the nearest tower, or if you’re moving, checking to find the next tower and so on. Cell phones are like little lost dogs—they hate being out of contact. Didn’t Michael tell you that?”

  She said nothing, eyes dulled by the shock of what she was hearing.

  Vaslik gave a snort of disgust and said, “Over to you two. I’m done here.” He turned and left the room and went downstairs, his footsteps soft on the carpet.

  “Where is he, Nancy?” Ruth asked softly. Hard soft, hard soft; it was a common enough technique to wear away at a person withholding information. Hit them with something that would frighten them, then soften them up to coax them into talking. It was a variation on the good cop, bad cop approach. But like many such techniques, it wasn’t guaranteed to work every time.

  And bad cop had just walked out.

  forty-seven

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Nancy muttered, and stared out of the window. “Why don’t you all leave if you distrust me so much?”

  “What did he say in his message just now?” Gina asked. “The one you just deleted.” She ducked her head, forcing Nancy to look at her. “Michael told you to do that, didn’t he—right at the beginning? He told you to wipe every message and hide the phone. Why would he do that? What is he hiding? What are you hiding?”

  “That’s rubbish.” But Nancy sounded uncertain and was looking at Gina with a new sense of awareness, as if her confidence had been dented by how much they knew.

  “Does he know about Beth?” Ruth asked, piling on the pressure. “He must. He must be worried for her.”

  No response.

  “What have you told him, Nancy? What did he tell you? He knows we’re here, right—from Cruxys?”

  Not a flicker. It was like talking to the wall. She decided to go for broke instead, to push her emotional buttons.

  “The thing I don’t get, Nancy, is what kind of father won’t come back for his daughter? It’s not the action of a reasonable man, is it—leaving you to handle everything? Why is he hiding? What’s so important that he’ll risk Beth’s life—and yours—to keep it safe?”

  Nancy said nothing, but slid down on the bed and lay down on her side, cutting them off.

  Ruth shrugged and left the room, with Gina close behind.

  As the door closed, Nancy could not prevent a tear rolling down her cheek. But she refused to cry. Whatever happened next, she had to believe in Michael … and fate.

  Vaslik was waiting for them in the kitchen. He’d put the kettle on to boil but it wasn’t to hide anything they might say. It had gone too far for that. He felt irritated with the reaction of the woman upstairs and her unseen husband, and wanted to explode at her. But that wouldn’t help.

  He’d encountered a variety of responses in the families of kidnap victims over the years, ranging from the helpless to the outright hostile, as if the police were actively seeking the worst possible outcome. Some were ashamed by whatever had brought about the kidnap—even if it was simply the wealth sought by the kidnappers; some were defensive, closing in on themselves as if that might offer some protection; others were noisily and emotionally fearful of what might happen to the kidnapped person; others still were clearly hiding something—a very few concealing something so awful that they were willing to risk the death of the victim to keep hidden.

  He watched Gina and Ruth enter the room. They were clearly as puzzled by events as he, filled by equal parts frustration and anger at the lack of progress.

  “She’s talking to him, isn’t she?” Ruth said. “She’s in touch with her husband. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He nodded. There really wasn’t much more to say, no other conclusion to reach. She’d fooled them and got round their precautions, even though they were trying to protect her. Short of beating the information out of her with a big stick, they were up against a brick wall.

  “What do we do now?” asked Gina. “This isn’t a crisis, is it? Why are we even still here?”

  “Because there’s an innocent child out there,” Ruth murmured. “What’s going on is not her fault. And we don’t know for sure if Hardman’s got any control over what’s happening. He must have told Nancy everything’s all right but he’s hardly proven himself Father of the Year material so far, has he?”

  “Right.” Vaslik nodded in agreement. “Whatever’s keeping him from coming in, it must be serious. Which means he must know the people who snatched Beth and that they want him bad.”

  “If so, what won’t they do to get him? And what’s he got that’s so damned important?”

  Vaslik was about to reply when his cell phone rang. He took it out, checked the screen. No caller ID. Probably Drybeck with more threats. “Vaslik.”

  “Hey, Andy.” It was Eric LaGuardo. He sounded excited. A buzz of background traffic told Vaslik he was outside, away from the office. The geek must have found something good.

  “What’s up?”

  “Uh … those faces? You sure about them being in London? I mean, absolutely certain?”

  “I’m sure. I saw them myself in a vehicle not a hundred yards from where I’m standing.” He turned on the loudspeaker and told Eric to keep talking, that the
other people in the room were trustworthy.

  “Uh, right. Hi, folks.” Eric sounded guarded.

  “Why do you ask, Eric?”

  “Because,” Eric’s voice echoed around the kitchen, “if you’re right, they both used to work for you-know-who.”

  “Langley?”

  “Jeez, don’t say that! Haven’t you heard of keyword analysis?”

  “I have, but come on—a single word in the ether? They’d need more than that.”

  “They wouldn’t, believe me.” He didn’t sound mollified.

  “Okay, no more keywords. What have you got?”

  “Well, these two subjects are listed as ex-employees, but that’s all I can tell you, except that … hell, how do I put this?” He breathed heavily, the noise coming out of the speaker like a snorting bull.

  “Just say it, Eric,” Vaslik told him coolly. “Spit it out and you can go home.”

  “OK. The work these … two used to do—they were in a specialist unit overseas. Then they ran into some trouble over their treatment of detainees.”

  “Abu Ghraib?” The Baghdad prison where systematic abuse had been discovered being meted out against detainees, including water-boarding and mental abuse. It had created a storm of international protest and sullied the US military for a long time.

  “No, not that. Field prisoners.”

  “Fighters.”

  “Yes. Some disappeared after being taken. Others had accidents.”

  “They probably deserved it.” Gina’s voice was flat. She shrugged at looks from the other two and a signal from Ruth to zip it .

  “Pardon me.”

  “What happened to these two?”

  “They disappeared. Shipped out fast on a military transport … then gone like smoke. Google their names and you get zilch. Believe me, it takes muscle to disappear a person just like that.”

  Vaslik grunted. It certainly did. But for some the muscle was there. If you wanted things to vanish off the radar, they could. All you had to do was know who to call.

  “How come they’re still around?” said Ruth.

  “Simple: they never left. It’s smoke and mirrors. You’d be amazed at how much of that shit goes on around here. These guys went private sector and their records disappeared into a big, black hole. It happens all the time. Nobody’s admitting it but there’s talk, you know? You get a feel for the subtext when you work in this business long enough.”

  “And what are they doing now?” Vaslik asked. He was guessing Eric knew; this was way too juicy a subject for the geek to have ignored, and he’d have done a lot more digging to find out more.

  He was right.

  “What I hear is they do contract work for some shadow organisations with connections in you-know-where.”

  Washington. The centre for all things shadowy, where the very air was heavy with intrigue. Vaslik exchanged a look with Ruth but said nothing. He was suddenly wishing he’d taken this call in private. Too late now, though.

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. But it can only be one thing, right? Heavy stuff. What else is there for their kind?”

  Anti-terrorism. The biggest game in town and for people like Eric was describing, the only game they knew how to play. For seasoned pros who had seen it and done it all, there was always a call for their skills, always a budget for their deadly commitment.

  Vaslik found himself holding his breath, trying to entertain just a healthy glimmer of doubt. But there was none. Either Eric had been drinking or what he’d stumbled on was absolutely genuine and buried in a file deep in the archives.

  But Eric wasn’t interested in booze; his kicks came from a different source. Eric had a wild imagination and an enquiring mind. It was what made him so good at his job. Put the two traits together with the kind of computer skills he possessed and he couldn’t fail to go hunting bugs. Or, in this case, spooks. And because he was trusted and had undoubtedly been vetted down to his grandfather’s socks and back, he had access to some seriously scary information. All it would have needed was a start, like the photos Vaslik had given him, and a couple of lines of data that hadn’t been correctly expunged by the keepers of the records, and it would have been enough to set him off.

  For that reason, the glimmer of doubt faded and vanished.

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Hell, yes. If I was you, I’d get out of that place right now and find a deep hole to hide in. From what I’ve heard, if they’ve got you under surveillance it’s for a reason—and they’re not trained to take prisoners.”

  forty-eight

  James Ellworthy looked nervous. Maybe it was being out of the office, as if he were afraid the great outdoors was waiting to ambush him now he was away from his electronic toys and subdued lighting. He followed instructions and came in via the back garden like a ghost, and unfolded a neat laptop on the work surface. He eyed Gina with awe when he saw the butt of her semi-automatic showing under her jacket, and she smiled coyly and asked if he wanted coffee. He shook his head and focussed on the smart card, slipping it into a plug-in reader and waiting while it loaded.

  “How much do you guys know about encrypted data?” he asked, generally.

  “Me? Nothing,” said Gina.

  “I’m a dunce,” Ruth told him. “Speak slowly and in simple words, otherwise I’ll get Gina to shoot you in the kneecaps.”

  He blushed again and eyed Gina with a glint of respect. “Right. That’s good to know. Uh … how can I put this? I’ve got a high-spec decryption program on here; it unravels codes and looks for passwords and back doors into protected programmes or documents, like I think this might be.”

  “Does it work quickly?”

  “Pretty much, yes. If I can get the smart card to download without crashing, I’ll run it through the program and see what it comes up with. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” He smiled “How’s that?”

  “Awesome,” Gina murmured throatily. “No guns for you today.” She smiled when he went bright red and walked out of the kitchen, deliberately twitching her hips on the way.

  “Wow,” he croaked, looking at Ruth. “Is she for real?”

  “She is, but not for you,” Ruth warned him. “You’ve got work to do.”

  Ellworthy hummed vaguely while waiting for the decryption software to do its tricks, then gestured for Ruth to take a look.

  “It’s some kind of spreadsheet,” he explained. “Like Excel. Only this is something tailor-made. Some of the cells are individually encrypted—see the hashtags? I’m not sure I can punch through them without losing the data.”

  Ruth studied the screen and scrolled down through line after line of numbers and letters, each in their own cells. Some were filled with hashtags, but enlarging the cell didn’t automatically reveal the contents as she knew the Excel programme would do. Neither did hovering the cursor over the cell. She tried to make sense of the blocks of letters, hoping they would form a pattern, but they were a meaningless jumble. “OK. What do you think this is?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before, so I’m only guessing. But you won’t like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “I did an exchange program a while back with the DEA—that’s our Drug Enforcement Administration. They’d liberated a ton of DVDs, flash drives and paper from a Mexican cartel. The stuff on the drives looked like this, only much bigger. It was transactional data used by the drugs gang listing sales by volume, product and market. It was huge—those guys deal in millions, maybe billions.” He flicked a hand towards one side of the screen, where some of the cells contained a series of abbreviations, like words in text messages. “The one thing they didn’t encode is this column here.”

  He was pointing at a cell containing the alphanumeric HNDA650L, and another with HNDACG125.

  “OK, thrill me,” said Ruth. �
�What are they?”

  “Honda motorcycles. Small, fast, and Chinese-built.”

  She stared at him. “How the hell do you know that? It could mean anything.”

  He grinned. “My kid brother’s a bike freak. He races these things in indie meetings. Every time I see him he bores me to death with the numbers. It’s like he wants to race every two-wheeler on the planet.”

  She scowled. “So this spreadsheet comes from a bike dealer? I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither, but that’s what it says.” He pointed further down to where other cells contained the letters DUND606 and CONTTKC80. “And see these? They’re tyre makes. Tyres for motorcycles. I’m pretty sure they’re off-road models.” He indicated other cells. “And these look like parts numbers for spares.”

  “If they are,” said Andy Vaslik, entering the kitchen and leaning over to take a look, “somebody’s been buying bikes and replacement parts. Big deal.”

  Ruth took a turn round the kitchen, eyeing the laptop as if she wanted to hurl something heavy through the screen. What on earth was a bike dealer’s transaction record doing on a digital photo-frame? Was it simply a random error, picked up by mistake from another computer? Or something less innocent?

  “Damn.” Vaslik murmured softly. He tapped a fingernail against the screen, watched by an anxious James Ellworthy, protective of his high-tech toy. “What if these aren’t bike parts?”

  “Say again,” said Ruth.

  “What if they’re code for something else? I mean, if the rest is encrypted like Boy Wonder, here, says, then why leave this column in clear?”

  “It’s only in clear,” Ruth countered, “if you know about motorbikes.”

  “Exactly. Which would be enough to put most people off the scent. But what if the transactions in this column are for bikes and parts … but others are for something else entirely?”

  Ruth scowled. She was getting a glimmer of an idea and she didn’t like it. “Go on.”