by James Becker
The moment the vehicle cleared the ramp, Bronson swung the wheel hard to the right, tugged on the handbrake to slide the rear of the car sideways, tyres squealing on the tarmac, then continued to accelerate.
Beside him, Angela eased herself upright, her hands clutching at the dashboard and the passenger door, and peered around her, eyes wide with shock.
‘It was that man, wasn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘From the lift?’
Bronson nodded.
‘It was. Now we can see what we’re up against. No discussion, no negotiation.
‘Thank God we got away.’
The road was quiet, and within a few seconds they were travelling at well over seventy kilometres an hour, getting as far away from the hotel as they could.
Every second or two Bronson’s eyes flicked to the rear-view mirrors. And then he saw what he’d hoped not to. A white saloon car, rapidly catching up with them. The gunman in the hotel must have had a backup man.
‘Shit! We’re not out of the woods yet,’ Bronson said. ‘They’re following us. It’s that white saloon car. We need to lose them, and quickly. But I don’t know these streets. You’ve got to get us out of this one.’
70
With the rush of adrenalin, Angela recovered rapidly from the shock of being fired at. She opened the glove box and fished out a map of Madrid plus Bronson’s satnav.
‘I’m on it!’ she said as she plugged in the satnav and riffled through the pages of the map.
‘Right, make sure we don’t go anywhere too busy.’
Bronson had no doubt that both men in the car behind them would be armed, and if he was forced to stop the car, they could outflank him and approach him from two sides at the same time. They absolutely needed to keep moving.
The satnav finally got satellite lock, and Angela was able to see exactly where they were. She looked away for a few moments to study the map she was holding, then jabbed her finger at it.
‘Got it,’ she said, ‘take the next turning on the right, then right again.’
‘Done,’ Bronson replied.
Bronson sped round the corner, then drove up to the junction halfway down it just as the lights were turning red. He quickly checked for other traffic before spinning the wheel hard to the right and powering down the street, followed by the blasting of horns. He doubted very much if the red light would hold up the pursuing car for very long, but the crossing traffic might.
‘Where now?’ he asked.
‘Keep going straight. You pass two junctions on your right, and then take the third.’
As they passed the first junction, in his rear-view mirror he saw a white car make the turn at the crossroads. At that distance, he couldn’t be sure that it was the one containing the gunman, but his instinct told him that it was.
‘They’re still behind us,’ he said. ‘About three hundred yards back.’
As they sped towards the second junction, a car pulled out from it, directly in front of them. Bronson twitched the wheel to the left and overtook it, giving the driver a blast on his horn as he did so.
Angela looked down at the map, then pointed.
‘That’s the junction. Turn right here.’
Bronson eased off the accelerator for barely half a second and stabbed at the brakes as he checked that the road ahead was clear. Then he turned the wheel, accelerating the car again.
The road was wide, cars parked haphazardly on both sides. Half a dozen vehicles were heading towards him on the opposite side of the road.
‘Where to next?’ Bronson asked, his tone clipped. ‘A right turn is better than a left, so I don’t have to cross oncoming traffic.’
‘Don’t worry, I do possess a little intelligence,’ Angela replied. ‘So we’ll go for Plan B, which is the same as Plan A, but only turning right. If you can, take the next right.’
The tyres protested audibly as Bronson accelerated hard right.
‘You still know where we are?’ he asked.
‘You just drive, and leave the navigating to me.’
Bronson would have laughed if he hadn’t had to concentrate. Angela was always good in a crisis, and the blow she’d taken to the back of her head now didn’t seem to be troubling her at all.
Angela directed him from one junction to the next, the traffic lessening noticeably the further they drove from the centre of Madrid.
Bronson had been checking his mirrors constantly, and the white car had been getting progressively further and further back as he’d tried to keep up the fastest speed he could possibly achieve on the roads of the capital city. Yet at the last minute it kept reappearing. But there was one simple trick he could use that would almost guarantee to shake off the pursuit. He just needed to find the right road for it.
71
‘Where are you going now?’ Angela asked, as Bronson turned off down the next street on the right.
‘Just watch,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m following a different road sign.’
About fifty yards down the street was a large blue sign with a white letter ‘P’ in it, and without hesitation he swung the car into the wide opening directly below it. He stopped at the barrier at the entrance to the garage, took a ticket from the machine, and then drove inside as soon as the barrier lifted. There were plenty of vacant parking spaces, and he stopped the car on the second floor level.
‘Right,’ Bronson said, switching off the engine. ‘We’ll sit here for a few minutes. Those guys were probably at least one or two minutes behind us, and with any luck we did manage to lose them. But even if we didn’t, and they saw us heading this way, they’ll probably shoot right past here and keep looking for this car out on the streets. What we need to do now is get hold of another vehicle.’
Angela looked around at the dozen or so cars parked on that level of the garage.
‘You mean steal one?’
‘Nothing so dramatic. What I had in mind was just hiring one.’
Angela nodded slowly. ‘And then what? Can we just drive to the airport and get on to a flight to London? What about George?’
‘We daren’t risk trying to fly out of Spain now. We know the kind of connections and reach these people have. If I was trying to find us, about the first thing I’d do would be to organize a watch on all our credit card transactions plus red-flag our passports.’
‘Can they do that?’
Bronson nodded.
‘Probably. The only way they could have got an assassin to the café where you met Anum Husani, at the time the meeting took place, would be if they had hacked into his email. You didn’t arrange the rendezvous on the telephone, and there was no other source for that piece of information. Hacking – or even tracking – emails is legally and technically very difficult. It needs either access to something like the Echelon global surveillance system or the assistance of some pretty senior guy in whichever Internet service provider supplied Husani’s email facilities.’
‘And they must have tracked that assassin’s mobile phone as well,’ Angela reminded him, ‘otherwise they couldn’t have known we were in that hotel.’
‘You’re quite right. And if they can do that kind of thing, it’s not too big a stretch to assume that they will also have people working within the banking system who could put a watch on credit card transactions.’
‘But then the moment you hire a car they’ll know about us as well, won’t they?’ Angela protested.
‘Yes … but all the credit card transaction will show is that we’ve hired a car. It will take quite some time for them to get to the car hire company and find out exactly what vehicle we’ve hired, and by the time they do that we’ll be miles away. With a plane, we’d have to wait until we could get on one, and then go through security, where they could have people working for them. We’re much more likely to get away with it in a hire car.’
‘So where are we going to drive to?’
‘London,’ Bronson said. ‘If we keep clear of the autoroutes and pick places to stay where the car can be parked off
the road and out of sight we should be safe. And there’s another reason as well. I think we could do something to help George.’
Angela looked at him, puzzled by his sudden change of heart.
‘But how can you do that?’ she asked.
‘We can play them at their own game. But first we have to find a hotel.’
72
The backstreet hotel Bronson had picked was not exactly the Ritz, but it did have one thing that he needed: a free Wi-Fi system.
‘We have something else that might help us,’ Bronson explained: ‘the mobile phone I took off that assassin.’
‘How does having possession of that man’s mobile help?’
‘Even if you try to delete almost all the personal data from a mobile phone, the unit still holds an enormous amount of information. If you’ve got access to the right kind of computer program, you can read SMS messages, inspect the call register, look at images loaded onto the phone, and a whole lot of other stuff.’
‘And you have software like that?’ Angela asked. ‘Programs you can use to hack into a mobile?’
‘No,’ Bronson replied, ‘but luckily, I know a man who does, and he isn’t particularly bothered about the legal implications. I need to call Billy the Kid.’
Angela chuckled when she heard the name.
‘And he lives around here somewhere, does he? Conveniently on hand?’
‘Of course not. He lives in a small, cramped and incredibly grubby basement flat in Tooting.’
Angela regarded him with suspicion.
‘So he’s a hacker, this Billy the Kid person. How exactly do you know him?’
‘I met him through an operation I was involved in. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or at least that’s what he said. We couldn’t make anything stick, and my guess is that he wasn’t involved. Anyway, I interviewed him a couple of times and we kind of hit it off. After we let him go I kept in touch. I found that having somebody I could call on who was a real computer expert, not the half-trained idiots who staff the IT sections of most police stations, was really useful.’
‘And is he just a kid?’
Bronson nodded. ‘He looks about eighteen, long hair, granny glasses and grunge clothing, but he must be in his late twenties, I suppose. And he lives and breathes computers.’
‘OK,’ Angela said, ‘it sounds as if he might be able to help with this, but how the hell are you going to give him access to the phone?’
‘Let me show you.’
73
Once Bronson’s laptop had loaded, he quickly clicked on the Skype icon, found a number labelled ‘BTK’, and clicked ‘Call Phone’. As soon as the system began dialling, he picked up his dual-function mouse-phone – a cheap gadget he’d used before and found much more reliable than the speakers and built-in microphone on his laptop – and held it up to his ear.
The one thing he knew was that Billy would answer his call, because his mobile phone was virtually a component part of his body. He never went anywhere, not even, Bronson suspected, to the shower – assuming he took one – without taking the phone with him. His call was answered in under three seconds.
‘Yup?’
‘Billy, it’s Chris Bronson, and I need a favour.’
There was a chuckle from the other end.
‘Long time no see, man. How’s it hanging? I know you only call me when you need help, so what’s wrong? Your laptop exploded or Windows 7 crashed?’
‘Oddly enough, no,’ Bronson replied. ‘Look, I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I need you to take a look at a mobile phone for me.’
‘No problemo. Drop it round next time you’re passing and I’ll check it out.’
‘It’s not that easy. I’m in Spain at the moment, and the phone belongs to a suspected criminal. The problem is that I’m not working here officially, so I can’t get the phone examined by the Spanish police. Is there any way you can do it remotely?’
There was a short pause while the man at the other end considered the options.
‘Coupla questions, then. What’s the connector on the phone?’
‘A mini USB, the same as mine, and I’ve got the lead with me,’ Bronson said.
‘No problem. It’ll just look like an external hard drive. OK. You still got that remote access program I gave you? TeamViewer?’
‘Yes. Do you want me to run it right now?’
‘In a sec. I’ll talk you through it, step by step, ’cause I know you’re not too bright at this kind of thing.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ Bronson said.
‘OK,’ Billy went on, no hint of humour in his voice, ‘the first thing is, you need to take out the SIM card.’
‘But surely the SIM card holds all the data?’
Billy chuckled again.
‘Wow, you really are out of date, aren’t you? These days, about all the SIM card usually holds is the phone number. Modern mobiles have big internal memories. They have to, because of all the crap people load onto them: emails, photographs, cached web pages, games and all the rest. If there’s anything useful on this phone you want me to take a look at, it’ll be inside it. So, take out the SIM card, put the battery back in for now, and then plug it in to your laptop.’
Bronson did so.
‘When you’ve done that, run the TeamViewer program and I’ll do the same at this end, then we’ll see what we can find out.’
Within about two minutes, Bronson was able to see the pointer on his laptop apparently moving of its own volition, as Billy took remote control of his machine. Then things started happening quickly, as various windows opened and closed and different images and lists of information popped up and then almost as quickly vanished. Billy, in the meantime, was silent, presumably because he was concentrating.
‘All righty,’ he said finally. ‘There’s good news and bad news, I guess. First, you need to take real good care of Angela Lewis, if that’s who that pretty blonde woman is. There are several pictures of her on that phone, and she’s mentioned by name in a couple of emails as well. My Spanish isn’t that good, but what they’re saying seems to be simple enough. She’s supposed to die. And the man who owned the phone, who called himself Jordi, was supposed to find something, some relic, and hand it over to the man who sent the emails. And his name, before you ask, is Pere, no surname, so it’s probably just the name he’s using for this particular operation.’
Bronson nodded, a pointless gesture, as he realized immediately.
‘Any information about where the handover of the relic was supposed to take place?’
‘No,’ Billy replied. ‘The last email just tells the man whose phone we’re looking at to call when the job is complete, and then Pere will tell him where the rendezvous is to hand over the cash. Seems to have been quite an expensive job. One of the earlier emails quoted fifty grand, euros not pounds, as long as the relic was recovered. And that’s another good reason for you to take care of Angela. Like the advert says, she’s worth it.’
It was Bronson’s turn to smile at that.
‘You don’t need to tell me that, Billy. I already know she’s worth it.’
Bronson glanced at Angela as he said the last sentence, and she looked back at him with a puzzled expression on her face.
‘Tell you later,’ Bronson mouthed, covering the microphone, then turned his attention back to what Billy was saying.
‘Listen, there’s a whole bunch of data on this phone. Easiest thing is if I just pull the whole lot off it and copy it onto your hard drive. That OK with you?’
‘That’d be great, Billy. Thanks a lot.’
‘I’ll expect a more tangible show of appreciation for my services when you get back to London, my friend. Gonna charge you for an hour of my time, and you’re getting away lightly with that.’
‘You can make it two hours, Billy, and I’ll buy you a drink as well. I really appreciate what you’ve done for me.’
‘Deal. OK, I’ll create a new folder on your hard drive, and I’ll just
call it “Mobile”. You’ll find everything in that.’
The line went quiet and then, a couple of minutes later, Billy spoke again.
‘Right, that’s done it. Do you want me to delete the data from the phone? Be an idea if you’re planning on using it yourself. I can put it back to pretty much the way it was when the guy bought it, and I could change the language to English as well, if you’d like.’
While Billy had been effecting the data transfer, Bronson had been wondering if he could extract any more useful information from the mobile.
‘No, just leave the phone as it is, Billy. It might be more useful to me to have the information still recorded on it. One other thing. You said that the guy in charge, the one who was pulling Jordi’s strings, was called Pere. I’d quite like to find out where he is, because he’s got something – or rather someone – that I want. Is there any way you can work out where he’s been operating from?’
‘Ah, now that, my friend, is pretty serious hacking. I’ll have to identify which local provider his phone is registered with, and then work my way inside the system to trace which cells it’s been in contact with.’
‘I didn’t ask how you’d do it, Billy,’ Bronson said. ‘I just asked if you could do it.’
‘Of course I can. But before I even start, Chris, you do know that this is completely illegal? You and I could both end up in the slammer if anybody finds out about it. You sure you want me to do this?’
‘Going to jail is the least of my worries right now. Listen, I believe that this man Pere has probably kidnapped a colleague of Angela’s, who was out here in Madrid, and they’re almost certainly going to kill him unless we manage to find him first. This man called me on the phone that you’ve been looking at just over three hours ago, and if you can find out where he was when he made that call, that would be great.’
‘Right, this is your funeral, and if some guy from the thin blue line comes knocking on my door, I’ve never met you and I’ve never heard of you, OK?’
‘OK.’
‘Make sure you leave your laptop on and I’ll call you as soon as I get anything.’
