Jason shoved him away and Stuart gasped for breath. Before he could catch it, Jason ran out of the alley and catapulted down the street opposite, where Lizzie had her phone pressed to her ear beside the bike.
“Jason!”
“Move! Now!”
She jumped on as he fired up his baby and sped off into the night, taking with him something precious—the knowledge that Stuart Williams hadn’t killed Damage. Who was left then?
Chapter Forty: Follow the Code
Jason parked the Harley in front of Dylan’s garage, giving them both time to catch their breath and for Lizzie to put on her helmet.
“We’re both fine now. Well, his face looks like a Picasso, but otherwise fine.”
Jason twisted, making a slicing gesture across his throat. But Lizzie just smiled sweetly, her lips still a little red and swollen from their kisses, and held out her phone.
Jason reluctantly took the phone, tearing his eyes away from Lizzie’s mouth, sure he was in for a bollocking.
“You get your stupid self back here right now. I’m not asking twice.”
“You’re pretty angry.”
“No shit. And don’t even think about going after Mickey or anyone else. You’re coming home.”
The word home soothed like a warm, sweet cup of tea and Jason found himself smiling. “Now why would I do something like that?”
“Because you have pickled onion where your brain should be. Come home.”
Jason laughed. “Pickled onion?”
“Shut up. It’s late and I haven’t had any coffee for five hours.”
“You must be withdrawing.”
“Home. Now.”
She hung up and Jason smiled stupidly at the phone for a moment.
“Your mistress summoning you home?”
Jason bristled at the word mistress. Amy didn’t own him, and her sister didn’t get to make those kind of judgements. He had forgotten Lizzie was even there, and he handed back her phone without rising to the bait.
Suddenly, his desperation for home faded. He wanted to avoid going stir-crazy in Amy’s grandmother’s attic. At least he felt useful out on the streets, even if that was far from the truth of it. He needed the pavement beneath his blistered feet, the solid slabs that told him he was home. If he ever took another stroll in the country, it would be too soon.
But he knew it was suicidal to stay out here, exposed and unprotected. How could he discover anything useful while wearing the face of Cardiff’s Most Wanted? The gangs would shank him on sight and no upstanding citizen would tell him anything.
Jason glanced up at the peeling paint of Dylan’s small garage, converted from a terraced house to create their sanctuary from the demands outside, a haven for stolen parts and quiet afternoons with only the spanners and radio for company. Maybe there was something he could do.
“Where are you going?” Lizzie asked, a threatening edge in her voice as he dismounted the bike.
“Two minutes,” he said and walked up to the closed gate guarding the tiny forecourt.
Jumping the gate was easy enough and the old padlock was just for show, not actually holding anything shut. He looked around quickly, eyes roving over the vehicles within, their innards spilled out over benches, silent gutted ghosts.
Then he saw it. The white van perfectly matched the description Amy had given, the one belonging to the blokes with Damage’s mobile. Jason doubled checked there was nothing else that looked similar before rummaging through Dylan’s paper files. The name on the record was Joe Kerr—subtle.
He took down the mobile number on the sheet and stuffed it in his pocket before returning to the vehicle. He didn’t want to sabotage it, knowing the blame would land back on Dylan, but there was something useful he could do.
He slid the smiley bee badge out of his pocket and prised out the door panel to shove it inside. If the badge was what he suspected, the van would now be on Amy’s radar, and she could trace him through her sister’s phone until she rustled up another way to bug her assistant.
His usefulness expired, Jason headed for the exit, the warm promise of home returning to his mind, affected only by the certainty that Amy would be absolutely fucking furious.
Occupational hazard, he thought, and hopped the gate again. He was surprised to see Lizzie standing awkwardly beside the bike, clutching the helmet in her hands.
“Y’all right?”
“Look, I need to—I’m gonna head back. To my hotel.”
Jason shifted his weight, suddenly uncomfortable. He could guess what had triggered this. “About what happened—”
“Amy can’t know about that,” Lizzie said immediately. “She doesn’t...she just can’t, all right? It was for protection and now it’s over.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Jason was sure there was something not being said here, but was really glad of the outcome. He had no idea how he would ever be able to explain that to Amy.
“Good. Great.” Lizzie smiled but the tension didn’t leave her body. Jason recalled all too easily how that tension felt up close and personal. “I’ll be going then.”
“Trust me now, do you?” Jason grinned. If things were different, if she wasn’t Amy’s sister...
“Not even a little,” she said, setting down the helmet and walking away, taking a little bit of mystery with her.
* * *
Amy’s skin was flushed, her breathing still uneven as she fought to regain control. Her fingers gripped the chair arms as she sat in front of Ana, feeling utterly impotent without the power of AEON at her fingertips.
When Lizzie had called her, panicking and half shouting something about Jason getting beaten up in an alley, Amy had been two seconds, five heartbeats away from calling the police.
But he’d returned to Lizzie, and she’d heard his voice, and anger had replaced fear. The adrenaline left a bitter taste in her mouth and she wanted to fetch wine to wash it away, but she had to stay alert, stay focussed. She had to monitor the cameras on his way home, ensure he wasn’t followed.
She checked the monitor again. The bike hadn’t moved. Abruptly, a figure jumped over the gate from the garage. Amy gritted her teeth. Fuck, she was going to kill him.
And then Lizzie walked away, vanishing into the night, and Amy was at a loss. Had they fought? Was Lizzie on her way to call the cops?
But Jason just put on his helmet and rode off in the opposite direction, seemingly unbothered that he’d let her infuriating sister wander through Cardiff’s back streets alone with the knowledge of his continued survival and exact whereabouts.
Amy took another steadying breath. With the CCTV feeds automatically updating in the top corner of the monitor, she could check on her other leads and distract herself from the thought of Jason out on the streets alone. And her sister.
Indira had emailed “Owain” the evidence report as requested—obviously before she’d heard of his arrest—and Amy sifted through it quickly.
Multiple partial footprints in the mud around the van, but no way to size or number them, most of the evidence trampled by sheep. Two bodies. One blow to the head that had triggered a massive subarachnoid haemorrhage, and one snapped neck. Neither man had suffered. No fingerprints, no DNA, no witnesses. The black box recorder had been ripped out and had not been found. The rain had washed away any evidence of an escape route.
The only useful piece of information was the location of the crime scene. It was just over five miles from Junction 36 of the M4 and surrounded by farmland, with a small village a little farther along the road. With no houses close by, it was the perfect place for an ambush.
The report noted that there were farms either side of the road, one arable and one livestock. Indira’s analysis showed a variety of sheep wool, but the sheep themselves had been rounded up by the first officers on t
he scene and returned to the owner before she could take samples. Inconveniently, the report did not note where the sheep had come from but it wasn’t unreasonable to assume they were from the adjacent field.
Amy checked the Land Registry and cross-referenced it with the Council records. The farm belonged to one Thomas Wertham. One arrest when he was fifteen for being drunk and disorderly at a Young Farmers rally and nothing since. He’d grown up entirely in the Valleys and inherited his grandfather’s farm upon his death ten years ago, though it seemed he’d been running it single-handed for far longer. He had no connection to Stuart Williams, Madhouse Mickey or anybody else in the case. Coincidence then. Amy hated those.
With one potential lead exhausted, Amy checked on Jason’s progress. He was taking a slightly longer route through the centre of town and studentville, which at least meant there was better CCTV to track him. “Good boy,” she murmured, and went back to work.
She logged in to her blackhat forum and flicked through her personal messages. Her minion had recalled where she’d seen the satnav post—an IRC chat called #navsat.
“Cute,” Amy muttered. Did the kids think they were hiding in plain sight or was it some obscure reference to A Clockwork Orange? Probably neither, Amy decided as she slipped in as a shadow and turned on her chat logger.
The contents were a police officer’s dream. While infiltrating the satnavs of security companies, delivery services and government officials was the high-end usage of the channel, it seemed most members just wanted to mess with their parents. Their usernames contained such lunacy as their birth years and their real initials! Even the more security-conscious of the group had only gone with their Twitter handle or their Star Wars name, where a simple decoding through the meme’s rules would produce enough information to identify them. The mind boggled.
There were three possible approaches. She could remain invisible and see what came up naturally (probably pictures of breasts); she could pretend to be a n00b and act like them, but she might be scorned; or she could use her carefully cultivated persona and hope they had enough knowledge and respect to heed her.
She decided that there was power in force and that she had forgotten how banal and cruel teenage boys could be, so she prepared to log out and don her @d@l hat.
Except the boys then presented her with all the information she needed on a platter:
22:51 roshambo1999 who inherited da wizzards hacks
22:51 roshambo1999 wasnt me
22:52 copperrawk stilll in his cloud i reckon
22:52 roshambo1999 we can hack dat
22:52 roshambo1999 piece of piss
22:53 jora_rotor dont be so fukkin disrespectfull
22:53 roshambo1999 think of da money
22:54 roshambo1999 wizzard fukked da police
22:54 roshambo1999 everyone wants a piece of dat
22:55 copperrawk u wanna mess wiv crims? fuk no
22:55 jora_rotor shut it rosh b4 i boot u
22:55 jora_rotor da mage fukkin died
And in an instant, it all became clear.
Damage hadn’t been some random gang kid caught in the crossfire. He had been Da Mage, a blackhat hacker whose skills had been utilised to break open a prison van and God knows what else.
If the Cardiff criminal underworld had direct access to their own personal hacker, the possibilities were endless. Arrest records erased, entire cell blocks arranged for prison comfort or destruction, untraceable communications—if these drug runners harnessed the power of technology, they could become omnipotent, omniscient and untraceable.
Except Damage had become a liability—or he had outlived his usefulness. What it boiled down to was that all roads led to Stuart Williams, again. Damage was part of his gang. Stuart ran cocaine. He had personal hatred for Jason and the motivation to want him both framed for murder and then deceased. He also had the cash and influence to bribe a police officer—though she liked to think it would take a lot to bribe a man like Owain.
The key was in finding out the grand scheme of things. Was the prison van hack the sum total of his ambitions? Or had Damage performed another function before he died?
The #navsat boys had spoken of Damage’s cloud drive, though they clearly didn’t know how to get in. If Amy could uncover its location and overcome its security, all of Damage’s work would be within her grasp and she could catch a glimpse of the master plan. And with it, she could prove her own innocence and get AEON back.
Chapter Forty-One: We’re Off To See The Wizard
When Jason trudged up the attic stairs with a bag of frozen peas against his cheek, Amy could’ve kissed him. His nose had clearly been broken—again—but she was just glad he was able to walk through the door of his own accord.
“You’re alive then,” she said. “Good. Funerals are expensive.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and Amy mined him for information on what had gone down in the alley, her second cup of coffee in an hour resting by her mouse.
“Stuart Williams? Haven’t you been punched enough by that man?”
“He didn’t kill Damage.”
Amy cocked her head to one side. “Sure?”
“One hundred percent. That was the reason he was gunning for me.”
Amy could list half a dozen reasons why Stuart might have a problem with him, not least that Jason had landed him in jail for five months, but she kept those thoughts to herself. Well, that messed with her Damage theory. They needed to go looking for another culprit.
“Find out anything else?”
“Owain’s clean.”
Amy gestured towards Ana’s monitor. “Yes, I saw from Cerys’s feed. Helping out Cerys explains the cocaine and the Butetown wanderings, but it doesn’t account for the satnav cracking programme on his work laptop.”
Jason gawped. “What? He really did it?”
“I doubt it. The laptop was programmed to upload the data to my server but I gave him the Read Only password—the data was captured and quarantined on a flash drive. The process originated in the depths of the laptop’s registry and was entirely automated. It would be a sophisticated plant on his part, but I think someone was trying to set up one or both of us.”
“Bryn asked Cerys to set Owain up with an alibi.”
“That won’t do any good. The programme could run remotely from any computer. It could’ve been set up hours, even days in advance. As long as someone knew your court date and which transport was allocated, it would just run the scenario automatically. It would have to because Damage was already dead by that point.”
Amy could tell she’d lost Jason again. Maybe Stuart had hit him harder than she’d thought.
“What’s Damage got to do with the prison van?”
“Because he wrote the hack?”
Jason looked completely blindsided by that statement. “Damage? Little Dai Jones?”
Amy remembered that she hadn’t actually told him that part yet. Good to know he hadn’t developed telepathy as a mutant power. “Ah. Yes. Damage aka The Wizzard aka Da Mage. A hacking prodigy, seeing as he only got into the game two years ago. It took me at least three years to reach his standard, and then I wouldn’t have had the guts to pull off something so risky. Brave boy.”
“He just decided to hack a prison van? What, for fun?”
Amy got up to pace, waving her hands around as she expounded on her therapy, lost in the puzzle. “No, for profit. Because he was paid or because it earned him status. My original theory was that Stuart had talked him into it, but that makes no sense if Stuart didn’t kill him.”
“You reckon one of Stuart’s lieutenants double-crossed him?”
“Someone Damage respected. Or wanted to impress. Know anyone?”
Jason frowned, then swore as the motion aggravated his nose and cheek. “I don’t know
any of those Canton boys. I’ve got three or four years on the oldest of them. Young crew.”
Amy hoped Sebastian had a map of the gang’s structure, as that would save her a lot of legwork. If she could persuade Bryn to give it to her. However, with Owain in a police cell, she suspected Bryn would suddenly be a lot more interested in what she had to say. Even if she could only get him to open up his computer for her again, she would have a window into the police operation and additional evidence.
“There was something else. Something I heard in that alley.”
Amy was amused. “This isn’t really the time for a shaggy dog story.”
Jason poked his tongue out past his scabbed lip. “It’s about the way drugs are shifting in Cardiff.”
Amy waved her hand at him to continue. He looked smug as hell—he obviously thought it was a juicy titbit for her. For a moment, he reminded her of her grandmother’s tomcat, presenting Lizzie with a decapitated mouse.
“The dealers are moving online.”
Amy sat up straight and grinned. “Oh, that is perfect. Where are they operating from?”
“Well, I don’t know that. One of the blokes had this black shiny card with a web address on it. Couldn’t make it out though.”
Amy deflated. She was good but she wasn’t that good. The amount of web traffic through Cardiff was immense—one little start-up website wasn’t going to make an impression, especially if it was non-indexed in the dark web.
Yet Jason was still looking pleased as Punch. “So I went down to the students’ union and I found a couple of cards lying at the bottom of the stairs outside the club.”
He threw the card like a Frisbee and it fluttered down to rest on Ana’s keyboard. Amy snatched it up and typed in the URL, a nonsense string of random letters. It prevented word-of-mouth marketing, certainly, but that also meant no one was going to talk about it in front of an undercover cop. It also created an air of exclusivity, as if the kid with the card had a passport to a magical kingdom. And after you’d been once, your browser could just take you back again and again.
Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2) Page 23
