by AD Davies
Meaning we couldn’t even take a screenshot of each page and keep it as collateral. Which left us with Harry’s contact in the West Yorkshire Police.
“Retired contact,” Jayne said. “Which means he was calling in favors to get this. Expensive favors, so when you get your mountain of gold back, I’m sending you a bill.”
She presented us with CCTV stills obtained via two blind contacts, and also a copy of a plane ticket. I looked at them carefully, and everything shifted.
I mean everything. I checked and re-checked the date-stamp and examined the photo carefully. It was impossible.
Well, improbable.
The ticket was in the name of James Pickering, not someone I’d come across before. But it was a two-stop deal, landing in Heathrow on Thursday morning. Yesterday. It originated in Bangkok. The CCTV stills, though, were what really set me on edge.
Walking into the United Kingdom via Heathrow’s arrivals lounge was none other than Agent Frank of MI5. No luggage, a hoodie and jeans, but there was no mistaking his doughy physique and square head. He’d been the guy watching me in The Rex. He’d followed me all the way. He was willing to trail around the world to find that USB stick, and on a fake passport to boot. Something was very wrong with that.
“What does it mean?” Jess asked.
“It means things are more complicated than I thought.” I was tired from the flight, and I ached all over. I dropped a painkiller and rubbed my head.
Jayne said, “You thinking hard there? Because I really need you to have a plan. Harry’s dead in sixteen hours.”
“I’m thinking hard,” I said.
“Don’t you get flippant.”
“I’m not being flippant. I’m thinking.”
“You did this—”
“HARRY BROUGHT ME INTO IT!” I was stood face-to-face with the older woman. I lowered my voice. “I was happy out there, surfing, jumping out of planes, rock climbing...”
“Hiding from the world.”
“Maybe. But I was happy. Isolated from all this crap.”
“A real renaissance man,” she said, turning away. “A travelling man. A man with no home to speak of.”
“I can make my home anywhere.”
“Anyplace but where it matters,” she said. “Where it counts.”
“Jayne,” Jess said.
“No,” Jayne said. “It’s true. All this being ‘in the moment’ or whatever he calls it, he doesn’t think. Just acts. Adam … Harry taught you to keep your head. Stay away from the rough stuff. You shouldn’t be bandaged up like the mummy’s curse. Shooting people in the middle of the ocean … while my Harry is held who knows where.”
I said, “I just stopped running away.”
She slumped in a chair and buried her face in her hands while Jess hugged her. She didn’t cry.
Jess said, “Okay, can I make anyone a tea?”
I thought about the drip coffee kits and felt even sillier than when I bought them. I declined the tea. We weren’t going to get any further like this. I had come up with a last-resort idea on the various planes, and those photos of Agent Frank allowed an actual plan of sorts to glimmer to life. It worked well enough in theory, and even then only if my newly-birthed guesswork was correct.
Unfortunately, it meant placing a call to Roger Bloody Gorman to schedule another meeting.
Chapter Fifty-Two
When I entered Roger Gorman’s office, Jess waited outside. Roger was seated behind his desk in a shinier suit than usual and his big pasted-on smile dulled the room down no end. He offered his hand but I relegated him to the same corner of my life in which Sleazy Stu resided. He didn’t leave it hanging the way Stu did.
“Well, that’s gratitude,” he said. “Our lawyers get your charges dismissed and—”
“My funds are still frozen.”
He waved that off. “A technicality, I’m sure. They are frozen for the police investigation. Nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide.”
“Who’s investigating me?”
“Oh, I think it’s the Serious Fraud Squad or some such. It’s more to do with your unofficial use of company assets, which may—probably not—result in embezzlement charges.”
“The Deep Detect System,” I said. “That’s why you got Jess out of the building. So you could wipe any trace of it from the system in case the authorities want to poke around.”
“Smart fella.” His smile was genuine this time. Smug rather than warm.
“Temporarily, I assume?”
“Better not to have that thing on the company servers at all. Don’t you think it would be advantageous to outsource the running of such software? Somewhere with no extradition?”
“So you finally trusted a source outside the UK?”
“Reluctantly, yes. Perhaps you’d like to move out there and man the department for us.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I have a better deal for you.”
“Really? Seems to me that, right now, you have absolutely fuck-all to offer.” The smile shone, and it was the first time I’d ever heard him use the F-word. It made me want to punch him. He said, “The psychological evaluation will show erratic, irrational behavior, your current injuries suggest violent tendencies, and your actions in running around with company equipment prove you are mentally-incompetent to hold any power of attorney.”
“And you keep on paying me fifty-one percent share of the profits.”
“Huge profits, Adam. With your authority gone, I don’t have your misguided hippie conscience weighing us down. It’s just a matter of time until I force a buyout.”
“Right,” I said. “And yet, when the fraud charges against me are dropped and I get my own lawyers and psychologists to challenge your findings? You know your play is tenuous.”
“It’s not water-tight, but I’ll find a way. You don’t have the stomach to take me on, Adam. We both know that.”
“Maybe we don’t have to go through years of this. What if we both come out on top?”
I placed a manila file on his desk with several sheets of A4 within. I’d prepared them before coming here, which ate up more time than I wanted to spare.
Gorman speed-read it. “Is this real?”
“Bring in the lawyers. But make it quick. You have thirty minutes to decide. I’m on a pretty tight deadline.” It was already eleven a.m. Thirteen hours.
He made a call and within seconds four dour men in suits joined him, taking turns to examine the document. Nods aplenty followed, and a need to draw up a preliminary agreement mooted and the most junior of the four dour men departed to prepare it.
I said, “Just so we are clear: I take full charge of this company until midnight tonight. I get a free run of all PAI’s systems and clientele. You cooperate fully, no matter what I ask. If I need help from someone you shouldn’t be in business with, you will still provide it. Everything you tell me is confidential. I cannot reveal it without surrendering all my liquid assets back to you as a penalty. You. Do. Not. Question. Me. You just do it. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, still stunned by my offer.
“In return, you buy out my share of the business for twenty-two million pounds sterling, around half what it would be worth if you go the forced route, not including any legal fees or bribes to dodgy psychiatrists. This is not a negotiable amount. Okay?”
“Okay. It’s … a surprisingly … good deal. Why are you doing this now?”
“I said don’t ask questions. The price is up to twenty-five million. You got that?”
The dour lawyers all nodded and made notes.
“Twenty-five million. You pay that and use whatever contacts you have to get the fraud case dropped and my other assets unfrozen.”
“Done,” he said. “And you relinquish all title and deeds at midnight.”
“Under the final condition you change the name of the company and all mention of me from its books, nullifying my non-compete agreement. If you can live with this deal, I can live with it, but I t
ake full control right now. Objections?”
“No.” Gorman stood and came round the side of the desk. Gestured to his chair. “It’s all yours.”
“Jess!” I called.
She entered, curtsied, and said, “Yes, sir?”
I said, “You’re no longer suspended.”
“Good to know.”
“You’re fired.”
“Thank you,” she said, and left the room.
Naturally, there were clauses that forbade me from altering the structure of the company, meaning I couldn’t fire Gorman and the rest of the board, then appoint my mates as trustees. I could, however, hire Jess as an outside contractor investigating the movements of a suspicious individual in a blue Ford Mondeo, and who travelled to Saigon to spy on me in The Rex Hotel.
But that was just the jumping-off point for my new hypothesis. Jess called me a nutter and asked if I thought the moon landings were faked too. Yet, to me, with all I’d seen, and Curtis Benson’s insistence on my returning more than the USB drive, it was the one thing that made sense. We now had twelve hours to prove it and use Agent Frank against Benson and his little pit-bull.
Park Avenue Investigations employed a team of six full-time investigators, although in truth two of them were covert communications specialists recruited from the Royal Signals whose work rarely saw an official stamp, and never ventured inside a courtroom. They were currently out on a job that I didn’t want to know about, and three others were out of town. That left Phyllis Dunleavy as Roger Gorman’s representative to approach XenoTrope Security, for whom we did a job a couple of years earlier. She was a lawyer by trade, well presented and greying gracefully. More accustomed to forensic accounting, when I outlined what I required from her today and how her relationship with the XenoTrope board may benefit us, she almost danced a jig.
Jess lifted the block on her own PAI account in minutes and delved into Benson’s financials at a level she could only dream of on a domestic machine.
Meanwhile, I studied the flights in and out of Ho Chi Minh City over the past three weeks. There was no other James Pickering, although I did find Gareth and Sarah’s French alter egos with ease. I cross-referenced the names with those arriving back in England on a predetermined set of dates, and entered them into a database that excluded women, couples, families and men older than fifty and younger than thirty. It was over a hundred people.
Phyllis was gone an hour when she called me. “I’m sending you a little prezzie,” she said.
When it came, the image confirmed my theory in less than half a gigabyte of pixels.
Phyllis’s mission was to utilize technology that XenoTrope, once upon a time, temporarily lost to a disgruntled technician who wanted to sell it to the Chinese, and they recruited PAI to retrieve it. The technology was a piggybacking algorithm, completely legal but highly confidential. They’d been contracted by the government to improve facial recognition software and to that end, XenoTrope was granted free access to all UK airport, seaport, and railway camera systems, something it was felt the general public would be less-than enamored by. Still in its infancy two years ago, it had now improved exponentially. Phyllis’s pitch was for them to trail a live subject, one who would be incognito, possibly in disguise.
They picked out Agent Frank on the date that hoodie-Frank appeared, the one that Jayne sourced, and used that as a model to whizz through every face that entered Britain over the past four weeks. It picked up on Agent Frank in a bald-cap and glasses and a passable moustache. He came in via Heathrow ten days ago. But this wasn’t the image I was interested in.
It was Agent Frank’s companion whose face now occupied the terminal in Roger Gorman’s office, and made me wonder if the moon landings really could have been a hoax. He was travelling with none other than Gareth Delingpole.
Three days after his murdered body was supposedly found on a Saigon garbage dump.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Agent Frank obviously got to Vietnam ahead of me and—with far better resources—pinpointed Giang as a bent copper, then rewarded him for his help in faking the photographic evidence by passing on Gareth’s credit card. He didn’t care if it would lead me to the Major. The death of one suspect sent me after another, while Agent Frank was free to interrogate Gareth alone. His second trip to Vietnam meant either Gareth gave up nothing or Sarah was holding the thing he needed.
I floated one option: “What if Agent Frank is dirty?”
“Okay,” Jess said. “MI5. No problem.”
I left her to it in a smaller office, while I synched into XenoTrope’s system to run more facial-recognition scans on the country’s infrastructure. Unfortunately, the system wasn’t a magic portal. You needed to manually set which systems you wanted to scan, and then input date parameters and the acceptable range of accuracy. While Phyllis remained at XenoTrope working on train stations, bus stations, and law-enforcement, I took the motorways, which yielded nothing. Phyllis snagged Frank in Leeds a number of times, including one with me in frame on the night I sent Lily on her way, and this morning at Leeds-Bradford Airport at eleven-fifteen. Around the time my original flight should have landed.
Only Benson could have tipped him off as to my itinerary.
Jess rushed into Gorman’s office. “Gareth’s house in Birstall. It’s been empty since they ripped off the safe, right?”
“Right.”
“They why, ten days ago, did the ’leccy turn back on.”
“Electricity?”
“And gas and water.” She smiled. “Am I a genius? Come on, you can admit it.”
It was seven p.m. I packed a bag of kit I thought I might need, and Jess drove me in Harry’s Land Rover. Back at my apartment, Jayne collated all the evidence on Benson and held onto the USB drive. If we were in danger of missing the deadline, she insisted she would deliver the drive herself and explain I was still trying to trace the “other item” that I was now sure was related to Benson’s packages to the Caribbean. The USB drive, I figured, showed payments from the nameless network to Benson, the money laundered through his clubs, but it likely showed Agent Frank’s back-handers too. Hence his interest.
Two separate threads, wound together.
Jess and I hurtled through the Saturday evening traffic, out to Gareth’s street in Birstall. Jess parked on the main road. I handed her Harry’s Taser, showed her how to press it into a subject and zap manually. She tested it and seemed scared that I thought she might need it.
“Well,” I said, “you told me you wanted to be more than my Felicity Smoat.”
“Smoak,” she said. “DC Comics, Adam. If you’re going to take the mick, get it right.”
We walked toward the house, the kitbag in my hand. An Asian family at the end of the road was holding a street-party, a wedding or some celebration in which orange scarves waved and music blared, but we didn’t need to venture that far. Gareth’s house was a large red-bricked terrace, with an external cellar door down a damp staircase. The basement window was caked in grime. Jess tried the door, but it didn’t budge.
“Solid,” she said.
The music wasn’t loud enough to conceal breaking glass, but I’d brought along my trusty roll of gaffer tape. I attached lengths of tape to the panes, took out a hammer. Dull cracks sounded with each swing, but not enough to carry over the party. A firm swipe with the claw end embedded it in the tape, and I pulled out the remaining pane. I repeated that with the other three and kicked in the squares of wood that once connected them. I shone a light inside.
Boxes. Four dining room chairs stacked. An old bedframe.
“Hello?” I called.
No reply. I folded myself into the window, ribs jolting with each readjustment as I took care not to cut myself. I dropped to the stone floor. More pain. I called again and got the same response.
Jess landed behind me, hands on my shoulders. I asked if she was okay and she bit her lip. Nodded. I found a pull-string and a bare bulb turned on in the musty storage space.
&n
bsp; Then I heard a scrape. Jess did too.
“There,” she said.
A wall ran along the side of the stairs, and when we found a recess at the far end, it turned out to be a spacious under-stair nook, the sort you’d expect to find firewood stored.
In place of logs, however, lay Gareth Delingpole.
Someone wrapped him in a duvet, tied it with rope, and gagged him. He wriggled like a maggot, eyes bulging. I ripped off the tape.
Gareth said, “I don’t care if he’s a spy, I don’t care! He can’t do this to me. He’s crazy as a rabid badger. Come on. Untie me.”
“We aren’t police,” I said, and dragged him out into the open by his feet.
Jess and I stood over him, arms folded across our chests. Gareth blinked a few times until I decided to untie him. He unshelled himself from the duvet and got shakily to his feet wearing only a pair of filthy briefs. He stank of feces and urine.
“Who are you?” he said. “Are you with him? You his bosses? Cos I wanna file a big complaint.”
“You are Gareth Delingpole,” I said. “What happened with the guy you came back to England with?”
“Who are you?”
I slammed my forearm into his cheekbone and he staggered to the wall.
I said, “Talk.”
He came back towards us and said, “That bastard held me here for two weeks. If I didn’t tell him anything, I’m not telling you.”
I hooked my left fist into Gareth’s belly, concealed the little finger’s pain as an angry snarl.
I said, “Tell me what you told him.”
Gareth wheezed on the floor. “I told him to go fuck himself. Now I’m telling you too.”
My next blow was an elbow that demolished his nose. Blood dropped down his front and he lay on his back.
