‘N14.’
Gheeta was getting even more angry.
‘Jesus, Mark! N14 is the lot that get the SAS out of trouble when they muck things up!’
Mark laughed.
‘Well I never had to do that.’
Gheeta wasn’t laughing.
‘I need time to think this through. You’ve not been honest with me. You’ve used information I’ve given you; that’s the only way your Commander would know Palmer was involved in this case. You should have told me you were involved with North as soon as I talked about the murders. You knew all the time he was doing it and said nothing to me, nothing. And if you are N14, then you will be on the watch lists of Iran, Iraq, and any other country we are in conflict with. Christ, Mark! I could be associated with you, and probably have been. I could be on those lists now too! Being watched, files raised about me and my family! Fuck you, Mark Randall! Fuck you!’
She turned and went back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Chapter 9
Palmer stood in his shirt sleeves at his office window, gazing down at the busy evening theatre crowds and tourists as they window-shopped Victoria Street, and took photos of each other beside the revolving Scotland Yard sign. His mind was miles away. Claire’s results from the mobile phone companies had been just as he had expected; each victim’s last incoming call was from the same unregistered mobile. Yes, they could give him the number of the phone, but he knew full well he’d never find it after what Gheeta had told him about proxy servers. Cul-de-sacs; this case was full of them, and it was full of them because the killer was using technology he knew backwards and bending it to his advantage all the time. The SIM cards, the proxy servers, and the mouse traps; this whole damn internet and mobile phone thing was going to give the criminals of the world a new dawn, a whole new landscape of unregulated criminal opportunities to exploit. He was thankful he had got Sergeant Singh on board; he could use ten more like her.
He sat at his desk and did his customary thing of leaning the chair onto its back legs and against the wall as he swung his legs up onto the desk.
So, Mr George North, you’re going to kill a thousand people are you? And just how do you propose to do that, eh? Ring them all up and…
Palmer’s body froze
Yes… yes indeed! That would be the only way he could do it… but how?
He felt the adrenalin pumping through him.
Just how could he do it? How could he phone one thousand people at the same time? He’d have to use the mobile network somehow.
He reached for his phone.
Sergeant Singh was still angry, very angry; so angry she was shaking a little, and she felt like punching Mark, not a sensible thing to do with a N14 man. She felt that she’d been used, and she had never felt like that before; her defences had been breached by love. Was it love? If it was, it had turned very quickly into anger. Why couldn’t Mark have told her the truth about his job? Didn’t he trust her enough? She had trusted him. That was a big mistake. They sat in silence in her kitchen, picking at a pizza she’d had delivered; she wasn’t in the mood for cooking. The silence needed to be broken by one or the other of them. Her mobile rang. It was Palmer.
‘How would he phone a thousand people at once?’
‘What, guv?’
Her voice was still a little shaky with anger.
‘You all right? You sound out of breath.’
‘I’m fine, guv. Just had a jog.’
‘I should take it slower Sergeant, if that’s what it does to you. Anyway, this North chap has got to phone a thousand people at the same time to put the ultra sound whatsit down the phone to them, hasn’t he; so how does he do that? How does he ring a thousand people at the same time?’
‘I don’t know, guv.’
‘He’d have to use a network, wouldn’t he? Key into it and get it to do the ringing out. So how would he do that?’
‘I don’t know, guv. I’ll find out first thing in the morning.’
‘Okay, get that Randall bloke to help you. But don’t give away too much – I don’t trust him. See you in the morning. Goodnight, Sergeant.’
‘Goodnight, guv.’
She flicked the phone off. Palmer’s words, ‘I don’t trust him’, bounced around her head; Palmer was very rarely wrong in character assessment. She looked Mark straight in the eye, her mind made up.
‘Tonight you are on the sofa. Tomorrow you’re out of my life. No ‘ifs’, no ‘buts’. I want you out of here tomorrow. We will work together on this case in a professional way only. Our personal relationship is ended here and now.’
And she went back into the bedroom, shutting the door and slipping the catch on behind her as tears welled up.
Chapter 10
He glanced at his watch; half past midnight, not too bad. He stepped over his dog Daisy, who raised a lazy eye and wished he’d hurry up and go to bed so she could jump up onto the sofa, which she was banned from for a comfy night. Mrs P. was already in bed so the coast was clear if Palmer forgot to shut her in the hall.
‘Know anything about mobile phones do you, Daisy?’
The dog recognised its name, but the rest was gibberish.
‘No, don’t suppose you do. Mind you, very high ultra frequency is more your line, eh? You dogs hear things we humans can’t, don’t you eh? A different world; amazing.’
Palmer had long since understood that the human race knew very little about what was really going on in the natural world around it, and on a 24-hour time scale of evolution humanity had barely passed the one minute mark.
He went down the hall and into the kitchen for his usual glass of milk before bed, his mind tossing and turning the facts of the case like a mad washing machine. Nothing was clicking together, none of the jigsaw pieces were fitting together yet. He’d read North’s security file, and he seemed an ordinary bloke with no hang-ups: well-paid, bit of a loner, but many scientific types are, it goes with the job. Bit like a copper, a twenty-four hour thing; your mind never leaves the office although you do.
Palmer drained his glass and washed it before starting up the stairs. Daisy was up into the lounge and settled on the banned sofa before he’d reached stair three. But just how was North going to kill these people – a thousand of them? He had thought that Sergeant Singh would have known, or at least had an idea of how it could be done with all her IT knowledge, and he had been quite surprised when she hadn’t. Even he knew that cold-calling companies could dial out hundreds of numbers at once and talk to the first one who picked up. She hadn’t seemed herself on the phone.
He had a quick wash in the bathroom, cleaned his teeth and quietly entered the dim bedroom; Mrs P.’s shape took up her half of the bed. He hoped Sergeant Singh and that Randall bloke got some answers from the mobile networks in the morning. That had to be the key…
He stopped in his tracks, his shirt half off. Of course it was! A smile spread across his face. Of course it was – delivery… What had the Commander said? They’d shut down North’s research because the technology required to deliver the weapon would take forty years to develop. No it wouldn’t, Harry my old mate, no it jolly well wouldn’t – bloody North had worked it out already, and was about to prove it! Fuck!
The expletive left his lips by mistake. Mrs P. stirred.
‘I suppose that language means you’ve been with Professor Latin today? He’s a bad influence on you.’
Chapter 11
‘Through a mast. He’s going to get the signal to his victims through a mast.’
Palmer looked up from his desk and the reams of paperwork he kept meaning to make a start on. Singh and Randall had entered his office and stood like errand boys returning with the goods. Singh motioned Randall to a spare chair and sat behind her desk, lowering the laptop from her shoulder as she spoke.
‘We’ve been to all three major players in the mobile network field and each one says the same. You have two methods of delivering a message to that number of people; one,
all their numbers would have to be fed into a computer programme which can then ring them all at the same time and relay the message; or two, you hot-wire into the circuit at the point of delivery, which is a telecoms mast, and deliver the message from the mast to the company server, which then forwards it individually in a split second to all the mobiles that mast serves. Or you can pick and choose numbers, but that needs a lot of time programming at the server end, and North wouldn’t have the time or the access. He is going to hot-wire his little box of tricks to a mast.’
Palmer took a deep breath.
‘Which means that if my or your mobiles were on that server, we’d get the call?’
‘Yes’.
‘Why did North say he’d kill a ‘thousand’ people then? That’s a specific number.’
‘It’s a ball park number, sir,’ Randall explained. ‘But he’s well, well out. The current estimate of the number of mobiles on a mast server is approximately eighty thousand, and each of the three major services comes up with that same figure.’
‘So if each mast is transmitting through its servers to about eighty thousand phones, and there are three main networks tied into that mast’s server, then it’s transmitting to about a quarter of a million phones at any given time?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many masts are there in London?’
‘Well, depends on what you call London; but let’s take it as within the M40 motorway ring… fourteen thousand.’
‘Fourteen thousand masts, and North could choose any of them to wire in his little box of tricks?’
Randall nodded.
‘We can’t possibly physically monitor all those masts, guv.’
Singh cupped her head in her hands.
‘We would need fourteen thousand bodies!’
Palmer thought for a moment.
‘So we have to whittle it down then, don’t we – to probabilities and possibilities. Any ideas?’
Randall took his jacket offm as civil servants tend to do to give a false impression of starting work, and hung it over Palmer’s on the coat stand, which didn’t go down to well.
‘We have a clue, sir. North took consultancy jobs at three mobile companies when he left the service; but only one of those was a service provider. The other two were research companies working on circuit boards and internet viabilities.’
Palmer moaned inside at the word ‘internet’; some more opportunities for the criminal world, no doubt.
‘Which service provider was it?’
‘GT, Global Transmitters.’
Palmer leant his chair back against the wall and swung his feet onto the paper mound on his desk.
‘So, an educated guess at this stage would assume North will use the GT signal to send his deadly call and kill enough people to scare the Mayor into paying the ransom. So he’s going to somehow intercept the signal at a mast and push out his signal. How difficult is that?’
‘Very simple, guv. Sorry.’
Singh smiled apologetically.
‘Would be, wouldn’t it.’
‘It’s all fibre optic cables,’ Sergeant Singh explained. ‘Each one is thinner than a hair, and each one can carry up to ten thousand phone conversations. So, all he has to do is open the box of tricks at the foot of the mast, and divert the cable through his box of death and hey presto, he’s in. And, it’s the same technology for all three major mobile networks, so he could wire into all three at once.’
‘Christ, he’s certainly got the upper hand hasn’t he, eh? Any luck on tracing him yet?’
Randall shrugged.
‘None, sir. Every lead goes stone dead after he went to Germany.’
‘Got it all planned hadn’t he, eh? No loose ends. The clever sod.’
The office phone rang. Sergeant Singh took the call.
‘It’s the Mayor, guv. For you.’
Palmer took the call on his line.
‘Mr Mayor, what can I do for you?... Who?... Have they?... Have they indeed?... Yes, yes… Say about an hour, okay?... Right.’
He put the phone down and sat thoughtfully for a moment.
‘Well, we have underestimated Mr George North haven’t we, eh?’
Randall shifted uneasily.
‘Underestimated how?’
Palmer took a deep breath.
‘Our friend the Mayor has had the MDs of all three major mobile phone networks on the line to him. Each one has had a ten million pound ransom demand, and each has been told to refer to the Mayor’s office for details.’
The Mayor’s office was very quiet. Palmer finished explaining the situation to the three astonished mobile phone network MDs and sat back.
‘So you see, gentlemen, he can do what he says; he’s proved that. And by doing it he not only kills roughly a quarter of a million innocent customers of yours, but as I am sure you have already realised, puts you out of business.’
The Mayor frowned.
‘How?’
Palmer eyed him seriously.
‘Have you answered a mobile phone call since the other day?’
‘Not likely!’
‘Exactly, and nor will anybody else once this whole thing goes public. Nobody will want to know about mobile phones, let alone use them.’
‘We’d be finished overnight,’ the Celcall MD said.
‘Pay him off. We have to pay him off,’ said Mr Premier Network, sounding very worried.
‘And then what?’ said Mr Global Transmitters, in a state of near panic. ‘He’ll still have the means to do it!’
Sergeant Singh had been watching. She caught Palmer’s eye.
‘May I say something, sir?’
‘Of course, go ahead.’
Singh looked from one to the other of the MDs.
‘How easy is it to close your networks down? And by that I mean keep the mast transmitters live, but block any calls from coming into them.’
Silence greeted this for a moment.
‘Close down?’
Mr Celcall saw his company’s revenue stream stopped in its tracks.
‘Why close it down? North will just wait until we start up again and then do it.’
Singh smiled.
‘Okay, just let me run this past you. Let’s say North says he’s going to make the calls at midday; so, at 11.59, by which time he’s got his little box of tricks in position and ready, you shut the incoming call circuits down. He won’t know the circuits are dead, and when he makes his call he will be the only person making a call in the London area. His UHF transmitter has to be powerful enough for us to be able to pick him up on cross-positioned scanners, and pinpoint him by marking his signal from two different positions.’
‘It could work. The theory is sound,’ said Mr Top Phone, sounding impressed.
Palmer saw a plan forming.
‘So, can you gentlemen arrange for a total shutdown of your incoming call systems without it going public in advance? We need Mr North out there with his signal so we can nab him.’
‘If we want a business left afterwards we have to, Chief Inspector.’
The Celcall MD was still counting beans. Palmer nodded.
‘It’s Chief Superintendent. Good, then my Sergeant will be your contact point. When she says ‘cut’, you cut.’
Gheeta smiled benevolently at the three MDs. She addressed the Global Transmitters MD.
‘I need a meeting with your server engineers, as our man is on your network. I’ve an idea that may be of use, but I need to work it through. Can we arrange that?’
‘Of course, anytime you like.’
Global Transmitters MD was grabbing at any straw.
Chapter 12
George North looked down from his sixth-floor hotel room window onto London’s busy Park Lane traffic. A smile of self appreciation crossed his face. Forty million pounds; a nice thought, that, a very nice thought indeed.
He checked the BBC News Channel on the hotel TV, and then MSN news on his laptop; still nothing in their bulletins about the May
or being killed. North would have loved to have been there when he took the call on his mobile. Probably the police had put an embargo on the story; can’t frighten the population by telling them their Mayor had been murdered by a phone call. He laughed out loud. Forty million; yes, a very, very nice thought.
He picked up his passport from the bedside table. Ahfed Garranchi, Diplomatic Attaché, Italian Embassy, Peru; amazing what money can buy.
Two floors above him on the hotel roof, a mobile phone mast stood grey against the sky, buzzing softly as it facilitated ten thousand calls every second. In four days’ time, if no money was paid, it would become a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Chapter 13
‘It looks like it’s got the measles.’
Palmer stood in the team room with Randall, looking at a map Sergeant Singh had spread out on a table. It was a map of London’s mobile phone masts, and she had inked the M25 in green as a border, and within that circle was a mass of red dots, each one being a telecoms mast.
‘I hope all those signals in the air really can’t have an effect on the human brain, guv. What with radio and telecoms and satellites and the rest of the signals buzzing around out there, think of all that going through your head every second of the day!’
Palmer smiled.
‘Yes, and you still can’t find a programme worth watching on a Friday night can you, eh?’
Randall leaned over the map.
‘So where do we start? Needle in a haystack is an understatement looking at this lot.’
‘You two start with this.’
Palmer picked up a spiral bound engineer’s reference book and handed it to Randall.
‘This is a full list of all the aerials and where they are. See if we can discount any because of their position or access; for instance, if an engineer needs a forty- foot ladder or hoists to get up to the mast, cross it off the list. It won’t get rid of many, but any that we can find to whittle the number down is a bonus. North will have sorted his mast out by now, and it’s going to be one with easy access and a reasonably secure location where he can do his work unnoticed. Chop chop then, let’s go. Get on with it.’
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 14
