Say You're Sorry: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A DCI Campbell McKenzie Detective Conspiracy Thriller No 1)

by IAN C. P. IRVINE

  She agreed and Mrs McNunn put her on hold, while they processed the news they had both just been given.

  Card by card, account by account, they had gone through all their details.

  Each time the woman on the other end of the line had informed them, at first stating it simply as a matter of fact, then with a hint of suspicion creeping into her voice, that the accounts which they were quoting simply did not exist on their system.

  She also searched for their personal details and found that there was no 'Tommy McNunn', or 'Mrs McNunn' of any sort on their records with their address and personal details. There was a Miss Fiona McNunn in Glasgow, but she was the only one. McNunn was, apparently, not such a common Scottish name. "Sorry, just to be sure... Are you saying McMunn with an 'M' or McNunn with an 'N'? We've got lots of McMunns..."

  "You think I don't know how my own name is spelt?" Tommy had started to shout. "It's with a bloody N not an M!"

  At that point, the woman had suggested she put them through to a supervisor, reminding them also that the phone conversation was being recorded.

  It made no difference. The supervisor had also confirmed very categorically that no accounts of any sort existed for any McNunn in Scotland, other than the Fiona McNunn in Glasgow.

  "Are you sure you have the right bank?" she had asked, which was the point that Mrs McNunn had taken over and put the call on hold again.

  Mrs McNunn tried to calm her husband down, but he had started swearing repeatedly, every second word being a verb of procreation, and he was shaking with rage.

  Mrs McNunn was scared.

  "What are we going to do?" she had asked her husband. "We need to pay the electricity bill tomorrow morning or we can't get the heating and lights back. I've got a thousand pounds of meat, salmon and caviar in the freezer. It'll all go off!"

  "Shit!" he swore again. "If we don't have any electricity, I'll have to smash it open myself!" he shouted.

  "What? The freezer?" she asked, confused.

  "No, the bloody safe! I need to get the guns out. I need them so that I can go visit Burns!", and with that he opened up the car door and jumped out.

  "Where are you going?" she asked.

  "To the shed. To get the spade to dig up the emergency stash in the garden."

  For a few seconds Mrs McNunn sat in the car frozen, not sure what to do next. To go after Tommy, or to speak to the bank again.

  She chose the second option.

  "Hi, It's Mrs McNunn again. Are you still there?"

  "Yes, Mrs McNunn. I'm still here. And while I've been waiting, I've been going through the accounts again. I've checked the back-up files which were last spooled to the server, and there's nothing on them either. No matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to find any record of you ever having been a customer of this bank."

  "Listen to me please Miss. We're not lying to you. We're telling you the truth. Something very strange is happening here. I'm not a computer expert or anything, far from it, I don't even know how to print anything on our printers, but I can say that it looks like someone has stolen money from our accounts and then possibly stolen our accounts too. Is that possible?"

  The woman on the other end hesitated.

  "Frankly. No, that isn't possible. We have the best cyber security systems in the world. No one would ever be able to hack into our bank and do what you've suggested. It just wouldn't be possible."

  "Are you sure? Has nothing like this ever happened before?"

  There was another hesitation on the phone. The woman was clearly thinking about her response.

  For a second the manager in the call centre pondered what her reply should be. She knew the official company line, and she knew the call was being recorded.

  She also knew that cyber attacks on banks were happening at an increasing rate. Almost on a daily basis now banks around the world were losing millions of pounds, and in general, the thieves were never identified or caught.

  However, truthfully, she had never heard of anyone losing all their accounts like this before.

  The most likely truth of the matter was that Mrs McNunn and her husband were actually hackers trying to fool her and her colleagues into giving them valuable information which would help them get into their systems.

  They even had a special name for it: 'Social engineering.'

  There was also another name for it.

  Fraud.

  "No." The manager replied.

  "In fact," the manager continued. "To be quite honest, I'm struggling to believe any of your story. In fact, I'm quite worried about your motivations in asking so many questions on this call tonight, and if you're actually the Mrs McNunn you claim to be. If I ask my computer system if you are or ever have been a customer of our bank, the computer says 'No!'. And frankly Mrs McNunn, or whoever else you may claim to be, I think that at this point, that I should perhaps log this call as an attempted fraud and get the police involved..."

  The line went dead.

  The manager in the call centre smiled to herself and looked at her watch.

  Her suspicions were obviously correct. The McNunns had been trying it on.

  Trying to break into their bank to steal their money.

  She mentally patted herself on her back, took her head phones off and went to get herself a cup of tea.

  -------------------------

  Andheri

  Near Mumbai, Maharashtra

  India

  Wednesday

  7. a.m.. India Standard Time (IST)

  It had been a good night's work. The adrenaline had kept him going, flooding his body and his brain and fighting off the exhaustion that lay lurking just around the corner after every action he completed.

  Now he had achieved everything he had planned to do, a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him, and he almost fell over.

  He rolled backwards onto his back and stretched on the floor, closing his eyes.

  Almost immediately he started to dream.

  A sequence of strange thoughts and weird experiences started to flood through his mind, yet strange though they were, to Anand they all seemed to make some sort of incredible sense.

  He was standing in a garden surrounded by flowers, admiring the smell of the roses and the daffodils, which were both growing and in bloom at the same time of the year.

  A man with a green woolly hat on his head was walking towards him waving a green scarf.

  He waved at Anand.

  "See lad, I promised that I'd bring you here when my car was fixed, and here we are!" he announced proudly, opening his arms up and gesturing at the space all around him.

  Anand looked around and saw for the first time that they were now standing on the grass of a football pitch at the centre of a massive stadium. The stadium towered above them on all sides, reaching up high into the sky.

  He knew at once that he was standing in the middle of Easter Road, the home of Hibernian Football Club. And the man was Jonathan Stuart. He didn't need to ask his name. He just knew it was. They were old friends.

  "But where are the team?" Anand asked.

  "Dead." Jonathan replied. "All dead."

  "How?" Anand asked again. "How?"

  "Killed. They were all killed by Mr McNunn."

  "Are you sure?" Anand asked, smiling.

  It was Jonathan's turn to looked puzzled.

  "I don't think he could have killed them, Jonathan, because Mr McNunn doesn't exist anymore. He wouldn't say he was sorry, so I deleted him."

  Just then, a crowd of men came running into the stadium, all wearing a green football strip. They were carrying a man who they dumped on the ground in the middle of stadium, then surrounded him, chanting and pointing at the man cowering before them.

  Suddenly the whole football stadium was filled with people. They were all standing and shouting. All pointing their fingers at the man lying on the ground in the middle of the pitch.

  "Say you're sorry. Say you're sorry," they repeated, time after time, their wor
ds growing louder and louder, forming a sound that began to pulse rhythmically within the confines of the stadium.

  The pressure of the words built and built until the man curled himself up into a ball, pulling his knees into his chest, closer and closer.

  As he watched, the man began to shrink, his arms, legs and torso morphing into the shape of a round football.

  The crowd standing around the ball - which was all that remained of the man - opened out and looked at Jonathan Stuart.

  They began to clap their hands in unison. Slowly the sound began to build until a million people filling the stadium were all clapping in sync together.

  "Say you're sorr-y! Say you're sorr-y!" they clapped and chanted.

  Jonathan looked at Anand, and Anand nodded.

  Jonathan took a few steps backwards then started running towards the ball.

  Fast and faster he ran, as fast as he could ever run when he was young.

  As he came towards the ball, he pulled his right foot backwards and then launched it forward with all the might he had in him.

  His foot met with the ball, and it soared away from him, up and up and up, into the sky.

  It flew higher and higher, over the top of the stadium walls, and disappeared into the clouds beyond.

  "Goal!" a million voices shouted at the tops of their lungs.

  "Goal!" Anand shouted from his sleep.

  Then he smiled, turned over, and began to snore.

  -------------------------

  Anand had good reason to be proud. He had achieved a lot in the past few days. Most importantly, as events had begun to accelerate, he had managed to stay ahead of the curve. Although perhaps only just.

  During the past few days, Anand had managed to successfully guess the password for the email account which belonged to the email address that was on his file in the Swiss Insurance database. Having got access to Tommy’s email account, he had then managed to read all of Tommy McNunn's private emails and he’d begun to get a sense of the type of man he was. He had made a list of his contacts and sent phishing emails out to most of those who had sent McNunn emails in the past few days. These included Mrs McNunn and his accountant.

  Once the recipients of the emails clicked on the links embedded in the emails, they unknowingly executed the malware that Anand had sent them.

  This would ultimately end up doing several things.

  Firstly, Anand would gain access to their email accounts.

  Secondly, the malware granted Anand full user permissions and remote access onto their laptops, computers and mobile devices... depending what they were using when they clicked on the email.

  Thirdly, Anand was then able to take full control of the apps and services on those devices.

  Lastly, other malware which he subsequently uploaded to their devices then enabled Anand to monitor and intelligently record all their keystrokes on the keyboard of each device, dumping everything that was then typed into a file which Anand would be able to export from the device and review on his own computer, whenever he so desired.

  This in turn, would enable Anand to see all the login details and passwords that his victims typed into their devices, along with any credit card details, PIN numbers or security codes.

  In short, his little pieces of malware gave Anand the keys to the castle.

  He was now king, and could do anything, whenever he wanted. Whatever it was that he wanted to do.

  Amongst all the tricks he could play, if he so wished, was the ability to switch on the camera and microphones that almost all laptops and mobile phones now had imbedded within them.

  With just a few remote keystrokes he could sit back and listen to anything they said in a conversation and watch them as they looked at the camera embedded in each device.

  In fact, he could not only see their faces. Depending upon how light it was, he could often see anything in the room behind them.

  Even when they thought their computer or mobile was meant to be ‘switched off’, Anand could switch the camera and the microphone back on.

  He could see them all the time. And listen to every word they said.

  It was like Big Brother on steroids.

  But better.

  -------------------------

  Not only had Anand been able to remotely access almost every aspect of Tommy McNunn's private life, along with those of many of his friends and contacts, but he had also begun to access and take control of the services upon which Mr McNunn's life depended.

  The first of these was the bank.

  By hacking into the central server of the bank of which Tommy McNunn was a good customer, Anand had taken over his account and after removing his money from all the accounts he could find, he had then followed this up by removing all the accounts.

  Remove, as in delete.

  From that point forward, as far as that bank was concerned, there was no reason to believe that Mr McNunn had ever been a customer of theirs.

  In their eyes, he had never existed.

  Yes, Anand had already achieved a lot.

  But the fun was just beginning.

  Chapter 30

  Tommy McNunn's House,

  Edinburgh

  Wednesday

  02.38 a.m. G.M.T.

  Tommy's dog eyed him up curiously as he approached the kennel at the bottom of the garden.

  A large brown German Shepherd, he sauntered up to and padded around Tommy, as he put down the spade, and pushed the kennel off its base and to the side.

  Drooling and panting, the dog cocked his head to one side and watched as his owner knelt and lifted the wooden base underneath the kennel.

  His large, mournful eyes stared at Tommy as he picked up the spade and started digging, carefully piling the earth on the ground beside the kennel so that it could be replaced afterwards.

  Tommy dug down half a metre until the tip of the spade grated on the top of five large metal boxes which were buried under the home of his faithful guard dog.

  Kneeling forward Tommy bent down into the hole and pulled on the handle of one of the boxes and lifted it up and out. Peeling back the protective plastic bag that prevented moisture from rusting the box or seeping inside, he placed it at the side of the hole.

  Taking a small torch out of his pocket, switching it on and sticking it in his mouth pointing towards the lock on the side of the box, he extracted a set of keys from his pocket and fiddled with one of the keys on the end of the chain, wiggling it into the lock and turning it.

  Before he opened the box, and even though the dog was quiet and showed no alarm, he nervously looked over his shoulder just to check that he wasn't somehow being observed.

  His garden was very large and not overlooked, and he was surrounded by trees. The kennel itself was at the bottom of the garden away from the house, tucked away far from any other neighbour or road.

  Opening the lid on the metal box, he quickly scanned the contents and satisfied himself that the two hundred thousand pounds it contained in bundles of used fifty pound notes in sealed plastic bags was intact, and not in any way damp from the moisture of the ground.

  Tommy McNunn was a businessman, and like most businesses Tommy's had a cash flow problem: in his line of business, the money sometimes flowed like water, and the biggest problem he had was what to do with it. Being rich was wonderful, but only if you could spend the money you had.

  In Tommy's case, he often got so much, so quickly, that there was nothing he could do with it. After many years of being in the trade, he was still trying to find more effective ways of laundering it, of making his ill-gotten gains acceptable in the eyes of the law, and avoiding giving it all to the tax man.

  He had many bank accounts, but even so, there was only so much he could stuff into each account before the banks started to ask questions.

  Most of his money was now invested abroad, and under several of his different names and identities. He loved his wife dearly, but the 'where is the money?' and the 'how much do we have?' question
s that she asked, always made him nervous, forcing him to change the subject quickly. Yes, he did love her now, but that wasn't to guarantee that he would still love her tomorrow.

  She was very lovely. And very sweet.

  But 'let's face it', Tommy would argue with himself, 'she's getting older every day.'

  A little prudent forward planning for his old age was just common sense! In which case, the less she knew about their finances, the better.

  In the meantime, the best solution to his cash flow problem was the same that men had been adopting for thousands of years... dig a big hole and bury it in the ground.

  So far, he had three different holes in his garden.

  Each contained five boxes.

  And each box contained two hundred thousand pounds.

  Not only was it the best way of dealing with the problem short of burning it, which would be undeniably stupid, but it also provided a brilliant source of readies in times of need, like now.

  What made this box extra special, however, were the two guns that were buried in two plastic bags alongside the money, with several boxes of ammunition.

  Both were unused, new, and clean, never having been used in any crime before.

  He pulled out one of the bags, together with a box of ammunition, stuffed the gun into his trouser belt and dropped the box of bullets into his jacket pocket.

  Extracting one of the sealed bags of banknotes, he closed the lid, turned the key and placed the metal box back into its plastic bag.

  Taking the torch out of his mouth, he put it with the money into his other jacket pocket.

  Leaning forward, he put the box back into the other protective plastic bag and replaced it in the ground. He then stood up and backfilled the earth on top of it.

  After he had replaced the floor and the kennel back over it, he turned to his dog and clapped his hands.

  The dog barked, and immediately bounded forward towards him, jumping up and licking his face.

  "Good boy, McKenzie!" Tommy said. "Good boy!"