Gray Vengeance

by Alan McDermott

  His whole life had been about gaining as much power and notoriety as possible, but when the bullet entered his skull half an inch above the right eye, that dream evaporated.

  In the weeks to come, his death barely rated a couple of column inches.

  Having dispatched the last of the assailants, Sonny jogged down the stairs to find Gray standing over Gill, checking to make sure she hadn’t been hit. Smart walked out of the office and stood by the shattered doors, looking out at the bodies littering the parking area.

  ‘When the police get here, do exactly as they say,’ Gray warned. ‘They’re bound to be trigger happy. We’ll leave the weapons in the office, and you two wait outside.’

  The others agreed, and when the marked car appeared, blue lights flashing, Sonny and Smart walked slowly out into the car park with their hands in the air. Armed officers leapt out of the vehicle with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and ordered them to get down on the ground. Both quickly complied, and were immediately cuffed. While they were being searched, another officer entered the building and saw Gray kneeling on the floor with his hands on his head. Behind Gray, Gill sat in the corner, crying.

  Once Gray was cuffed, he was forced to his feet and led out to one of the cars, where a senior rank began the interrogation. Sonny and Smart were already being quizzed, and Gray kept it as simple as possible: they were attacked, twice, and used the force they considered necessary to defend themselves. He told them where to find the firearms certificate that allowed him to possess the weapons, as well as the CCTV equipment covering the building. Once both of these had been scrutinised, the police checked his story against those of his friends.

  With no major discrepancies, they were told that they would still have to attend the station and give statements, though it was unlikely they’d be held overnight. Given the identities of the slain, the self-defence claim looked solid.

  ‘What about my daughter?’ Gray asked. ‘I can’t leave her, and I know you don’t have baby facilities at the station.’

  The constable called over a superior, who, after some persuading, agreed to let Gill take Melissa back to Gray’s house and report to the station at a later date.

  ‘Normally we’d have Social Services take care of her,’ the sergeant said, ‘but no-one will be able to get to us this evening.’

  Gill and Melissa joined Gray in the back of the car, and they set off for his house. It took some time, and large parts of the journey were spent off-road or in the wrong lane, but after forty minutes they arrived outside his gates. Gray leaned over and kissed his daughter, then asked Gill to make sure nothing happened to her.

  One of the cops used Gray’s fob to open the gates and escorted the girls inside, making sure they locked up before returning to the car, and Gray was glad to see the lights come on. At least his place hadn’t been affected by the power outages, and he’d be able to give Melissa a nice warm bath when he got home.

  On the way to the police station, Gray tried to take his mind off his daughter, but it was too hard. He’d been making progress in letting her have time away from Daddy, but under the current circumstances he felt that he needed to be with her.

  As that wasn’t going to happen, he tried thinking of other issues, such as the office. He would need new premises, that was a given, though he could work from home for the time being. It would also mean having the landline transferred over, but the phone company would have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

  One thing was for sure, though: his next office would have a sprinkler system.

  Chapter 21

  16 December 2014

  Andrew Harvey woke to the buzzing of his cell phone, and when the display told him Hamad Farsi was calling, he knew it wouldn’t be a social call.

  ‘What’s up?’ Harvey asked, wearily.

  It had been a long day, and he’d finally accepted the offer of a cot in one of the many upstairs rooms to get his head down. That had been just before two in the morning, and his watch told him he’d been asleep for less than an hour.

  Across the room, Thompson slept soundly, and he kept his voice down to ensure he didn’t wake her.

  ‘We’ve got a phone number,’ Farsi said. ‘Ellis said you could do some magic with it.’

  Harvey took a pen from his jacket and wrote down the digits.

  ‘Whose number is this?’ he asked.

  ‘We don’t know. It called one of the devices that had been planted near Clapham Junction, but it failed to go off. Trace that phone, and you should have one of the bombers.’

  Harvey was instantly awake. After thanking Hamad, he went over to Thompson’s cot. He couldn’t help but be struck by how beautiful she looked as she slept, and he felt reluctant to wake her lest the spell be broken.

  After a few moments, he dismissed such thoughts and gently shook her shoulder.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We finally got a break.’

  He waited for her to wipe the sleep from her eyes, smooth out her hair and slip her shoes on, then led her down the stairs and to the elevator.

  ‘What’s so urgent?’ she asked, as they waited for the contraption to reach their floor.

  Harvey gave her a rundown of the short conversation. ‘If this new system can identify the phone’s owner, we should be able to link it to other devices in their network. Hopefully we can end this within the next forty-eight hours.’

  When they reached the basement level, they went in search of Robert Bryant, who had relieved Manello at the shift change a few hours earlier. They found him at the coffee station, topping up his mug with another shot of caffeine.

  Bryant looked up at them approaching quickly. ‘What have you got?’

  Harvey handed over the number. ‘Can you identify a phone from this?’

  Bryant was already walking towards an operator at a terminal, and he instructed the woman to punch in the details. An entire minute passed before the screen burst into life, with call logs streaming down the page, followed by text messages and a series of images.

  ‘Can you send those numbers to my terminal?’ Harvey asked. ‘I’ll have them analysed by GCHQ.’

  ‘No need,’ Bryant told him. ‘Susie, network those numbers and see what it brings back.’

  The operator’s fingers whizzed over the keyboard, and the waiting game began once more. Seconds seemed like minutes as the screen showed a circular symbol underneath the word Loading. Eventually, something started to happen, but not what they expected.

  Line after line appeared on the screen, each one with the same message:

  Device not found

  Device not found

  Device not found

  ‘Looks like all of his calls were to detonate devices,’ Harvey said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Thompson said, leaning in closer. The display was now buzzing with the details being sucked down from another phone, with yet more numbers to query.

  ‘Can you get a location for these phones?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure. Susie, bring up the GPS co-ordinates for all of these numbers.’

  Another few clicks and the details were overlaid on a map. Dozens of icons appeared, and a legend at the bottom of the screen explained that more than ninety devices were unavailable. Balloons began appearing next to each symbol, indicating the known details of the number. One was a pizza house, another a hairdresser.

  ‘I’d say these two were of interest,’ Bryant said, indicating two mobile numbers.

  Harvey pulled out his phone and called Veronica Ellis, knowing that she would be around the office somewhere, her couch likely serving as her bed.

  ‘Looks like we have two suspects,’ he said. ‘You might want to send SO15 in as soon as possible.’

  ‘Gerald got us access to the servers again. Have the locations sent to my desk,’ Ellis said. ‘Are we sure these are our guys?’

  ‘Tha
t’s what the computer says.’

  ‘Okay, get what information you can. I’ll start the ball rolling.’

  The phone went dead, and Harvey asked Bryant for the information from both devices.

  ‘It’s now three,’ the American said. ‘We got another match a few seconds ago. Susie will send them over to your terminal.’

  Harvey jogged over to the hot desk he’d been allocated and logged into the terminal. The first thing he did was ping a message to Ellis with the co-ordinates and phone numbers. Then he began to sift through the information that had been dumped in each folder.

  Suspect number one was in north London, another was to the west, and the last sat south of the capital. Harvey thought that they’d probably split the city between them, though how just three people could inflict so much carnage across the country was beyond him.

  He went back over to Susie’s terminal, where Bryant was overseeing the incoming data.

  ‘Have you found anyone else in their network?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Bryant said. ‘Most of these are established companies.’

  ‘Is there any way to filter them out? These guys will probably be using burner cells, so can we just look for numbers that aren’t registered to anyone?’

  Bryan tapped Susie on the shoulder. ‘See what you can do.’

  Susie opened a new window and began typing furiously. The code made absolutely no sense to Harvey, but it brought back the results he was looking for.

  ‘These are the only three numbers that don’t have a corresponding name and address,’ she said.

  ‘There’s no way just three people caused nationwide destruction,’ Bryant said, echoing Harvey’s earlier thoughts. ‘They must be organised into cells, acting independently.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Harvey said. ‘How easy is it to add a new keyword to the search list?’

  ‘It takes seconds,’ Bryant said. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘We’re likely to find other devices when we bring these guys in, and I want to be able to download everything on them. If we can add an obscure keyword to the list and get our guys to enter it on the device, we can analyse the contents without having to wait for them to be delivered here.’

  ‘No problem. Choose a keyword and I’ll upload it now.’

  Harvey scribbled down a string of letters and handed it over, then returned to his desk, where he called Ellis again and confirmed the three targets.

  ‘Once you take these guys down,’ he said, ‘I need SO15 to turn on any devices they find. Tell them to enter tango alpha elephant, all one word, no spaces, all lowercase. Once they do that, the data will be downloaded onto our servers and we can start rounding them up.’

  Ellis promised to let him know the moment they had the first suspect in custody, and Harvey went back to dissecting the data he had from the phones. He started with the browsing history, working on the basis that there must be a central point where the cell leaders got their instructions, but nothing jumped out at him. He checked them all anyway, clicking each URL to see where they took him, but most were benign. A few news sites, a couple of online stores, and Wikipedia.

  He then checked for social media accounts, and found a Facebook profile in the name of DJ Maxwell. Mr Maxwell had more than a thousand friends, and as Harvey flicked through them he could see that most were in London, with almost every single one a wannabe gangster. The older timeline entries were the typical violent, racist banter, but in recent hours the posts had been advocating rioting in one particular area of London.

  It was an area he knew quite well, having been there a few times.

  The most recent post mentioned Minotaur Logistics, and Harvey felt that it was no coincidence that Gray’s business lay directly in their line of fire.

  Harvey knew he was paranoid when it came to Gray, the man who’d pulled the wool over his eyes on more than one occasion. And not just his. The government had fallen for Tom’s scheming, too, and Harvey knew that when Gray’s name came up, nothing was what it seemed. But was Tom likely to incite a riot on his own doorstep? To what end? An insurance scam?

  Harvey knew he wouldn’t be able to move on until he had an answer, one way or the other, so he began searching the downloaded data for the name Tom Gray.

  Nothing came back.

  That eased his concern a little, but not entirely.

  Despite it still being dark o’clock, he dialled Gray’s mobile number.

  ‘Hello?’

  Harvey didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Can I speak to Tom, please?’

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Andrew Harvey.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Harvey, but Mr Gray is currently being interviewed. This is Duty Sergeant Hamilton at Oak Cross police station.’

  Oh, great. Harvey thought. Tom Gray strikes again.

  ‘What is he supposed to have done?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Fine. Then get the commissioner out of bed and have him call Thames House and ask for me. He’ll have the number.’

  ‘Sorry, but I can’t do that—’

  ‘Listen, Constable, I am up to my eyeballs countering these attacks, and the last thing I need is to have to come down there. Now either tell me what he’s done or put him on the phone.’

  ‘It’s Sergeant.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Harvey shot back.

  It took a few seconds for the custody officer to make up his mind. ‘Mr Gray and two friends shot dead six people a few hours ago. His place of business was under attack, and from what I can gather, it looks like self-defence. CCTV backs up their story. They should be released on bail within a few hours.’

  Self-defence.

  That was the same line Gray had given him a year earlier, and Harvey had serious doubts about that other case. However, if the police had video of this incident and were satisfied, he would have to give his old friend the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Okay. Please ask him to call this number as soon as he’s done there. If things change, I want to know about it.’

  Harvey gave the number of his new phone and hung up. On the one hand, he was glad that his friend was safe. On the other, the fact that Gray’s office had been the focal point of the rioter attacks couldn’t be coincidental. What Gray had been doing there at midnight was anyone’s guess, and he couldn’t wait to hear his explanation.

  Robert Bryant tapped Harvey on the shoulder, rousing him from his ruminations.

  ‘We got a hit on your keyword,’ Bryant said. ‘I’m having the data pumped to your station.’

  Harvey switched screens and saw the download in progress. While he waited for it to finish, he called Ellis.

  ‘I see we picked the first one up. Who was it?’

  ‘Billy Eccles,’ Ellis said, ‘aged nineteen. Claims he found the phone last night. They entered your code word on his laptop. Does it give you anything?’

  ‘I’m just scanning through the data now,’ Harvey told her. Nothing in the browsing history stood out as remarkable, and there were very few text files saved on the hard drive. The majority of disk space had been taken up with pictures of kids doing what kids do.

  ‘I can’t see anything that points to him being our man,’ Harvey said. ‘Did he have any other computers?’

  ‘There’s another phone, too. You should be getting that data as well.’

  Harvey checked with Bryant, who told him that everything had come down from both devices.

  ‘What you’re seeing is an aggregation of all data. The key in the first column of the result designates the device it came from.’

  Harvey opened a secure chat window and copied the list of numbers from the phone’s call history into it, before sending it off to Ellis.

  ‘I just sent you a private message,’ he told her. ‘See if the g
uys back at the office can get anything on those numbers. In the meantime, we’ll run them through this system to see if it leads us anywhere.’

  ‘Will do. The other suspects should be picked up shortly, so watch out for the next download.’

  Harvey ended the call and turned to Bryant. ‘I’m not convinced this is our guy, but the two others will hopefully be in custody within the hour, so expect a few more downloads.’

  Harvey returned to the data, though he felt there was little chance of finding a lead from suspect number one.

  Hopefully, two and three would prove more fruitful.

  Chapter 22

  16 December 2014

  Erik Houtman was instantly awake at the sound of footsteps on shingle. A lifetime of paranoia had made him a light sleeper, and the slightest noise often shook him from his dreams. Usually it was nothing, but when he heard the sound of shifting gravel again, he knew it could mean only one thing.

  He crept out of bed and looked through a gap in the curtain to see several armed figures dressed in black lined up near the front door to the block of flats. With his suspicions confirmed, he grabbed his phone and sent a one-word text message to Conran:

  Freedom

  He was in the middle of typing the same coded warning to Roberts when the sound of boots on creaky stairs told him the police had gained access to the building. He quickly sent the message, then retrieved his pistol from underneath the pillow.

  Only now did he wonder how they’d found him, but it was too late to worry about it. He’d known the time would come. They all had. There had been no suggestion of an exit strategy during the long months of training, just the sure knowledge that one day they would be tracked down, and they could handle that any way they wished.