Fuelling the Fire

by Roland Ladley

  He stopped and turned off his incisive voice. Softer now. “I’m sorry to be so direct, Sam, but we need to be clear. If you break down again, I’m going to have to ask for your pass. Is that understood?”

  Sam was on her feet, catching Jane off guard, who rose just after her.

  “Understood, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  Let’s not count any chickens, Jane thought. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that head of yours, Sam. Not all of it helpful. I hope you can keep it together.

  Cafe Schinkelwache, Theatreplatz, Dresden, Germany

  Wolfgang was convinced that the latest air crash fitted into the Lattice somewhere. He knew it would take him a good chunk of time, considerable effort, and probably some travel to sort it out. But the truth would be out there. He had read all of the newspaper articles that he could find online—certainly anything in English, French, and Spanish, the languages he spoke fluently. He had scoured the Internet for TV clips and video shorts. It was early days, but he was confident that this was all part of the pattern. It had to be.

  He took a sip of his very decent coffee, served in a delicate china cup and matching saucer. He looked around the cafe, opulent in deep oak, etched mirrors, and rather odd but bright art, suspicious that someone might be paying attention to him. In his more aware moments, such as when his mobile rang and nobody was on the other end, he thought the Federal Intelligence Service (BfV) was on to him. None of his work—well, almost none—broke any law. He was just doing his own investigations, that’s all. Looking for patterns. Trying to piece together a series of events that, if he were right, was the worst atrocity since his country executed the Holocaust. He thought “execute” and “Holocaust” knitted together really well.

  He might only be twenty-eight, but Wolfgang had fitted a lot into his short, but privileged life. Like visiting Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Auschwitz, trips that sucked out any sense of decency you thought you might have. They unquestionably made him see the worst of humanity. It was all murder on an industrial scale, committed by men like himself. He didn’t necessarily think it showed a predilection for Germans to follow orders, no matter how inhumane—although some of that was true. He had met enough central Europeans and some British whom he thought capable of being party to mass murder. But it was definitely men, not women, who had that one loose wire somewhere that enabled them to commit any crime if it was disguised as an order. An edict from hell.

  He sipped some more coffee and opened up the cover on his iPad. He typed in his passcode and noticed immediately that it was connected to the cafe’s WiFi. That was good and bad. Good that his machine was somewhat disguised by communicating through the cafe’s router. But bad in that someone in the cafe might be watching him. Checking on what he was doing, making notes just as he was. He knew his iPad had none of the encryption his tower had back in his flat, so he was always doubly careful.

  Of course he’d have to go to the crash site. He needed to feel the pain of those who had lost their lives. It wouldn’t necessarily be as intense as Belsen, where the gardens were soundless—even now no birds could bring themselves to visit. Or as grotesque as Auschwitz, with some of the chicken sheds still standing. Sheds where thousands of pyjama-wearing inmates were housed—working to their death, or until they were just infirm enough to stagger to the gas chambers, where death was often a welcome visitor.

  No, he felt sure that the crash site, incongruously nestled among the chalets of the Abondance Valley, would lack the depth of depravity of the Nazi death camps. But, as he had felt before, there would be a modern-day rawness, mixed with a media-fuelled explosion of grief, which would allow him to place this latest “accident” into context. A context he was convinced was as diabolical as the mass murder carried out three-quarters of a century ago.

  If I am right about the Lattice.

  Some people called him a crank. A rich kid with nothing better to do than while away his inheritance, chasing incomprehensible theories. Theories that cast shadows wider than international boundaries, that were darker than the deepest conspiracy. The few friends he had, following his three years at music college in the UK, had drifted away. They were now all playing in orchestras in Paris and Vienna or teaching their instruments to kids who often didn’t want to learn.

  He had come away from the Royal College of Music, or “College,” as it was colloquially known, with a First and was immediately offered a postgrad slot—if he brought his violin with him. But his father had died during that fateful summer, and whilst one outcome was an inherited new title, a second was that his world fell apart. Count Wolfgang of Neuenburg had a ring to it. But the associated cost had been almost unbearable.

  He loved his mother; that was true. She had dealt with her husband’s death stoically, more prosaically, like the ageing countess she was. And Wolfgang drew some strength from that. But he adored his father. He was a man of great intellect, of huge talent—his violin playing was masterly against Wolfgang’s—and of the widest compassion. Everyone who had ever met his father had loved him.

  None more so than Wolfgang.

  Anyway, enough of that. He was staring into space whilst he should have been researching. His finger hovered over the glass keyboard. Would his father be proud? Proud that he hadn’t taken his music to the next level? Proud that he’d shaken off the shackles of privilege, hired a shabby bedsit in Dresden, and devoted his young life to chasing metaphorical hurricanes across the prairies of humanity? OK, so his choice of metaphors wasn’t necessarily anything to brag about, but that’s what you get from a student of classical music—he was better with a musical score.

  When he really thought about it, he reckoned Papa would be gently nodding approval as he looked down from his throne—he would definitely have one of those up there. Nodding kindly at his friendless son who was trying to piece together a bit of modern-day history that nobody else—as far as he knew—was anywhere close to reconciling.

  Dover Docks, Dover, England

  Sam scrolled through the images on the Nexus secure tablet that Jane had issued to her earlier in the day. It was WiFi enabled, and, after a lot of clicking and whirring, it had established a secure connection with the SIS portal, which gave Sam access to all of the photos on the cloud. Plus, all of the material shared among David Jennings’s staff. She knew she was in a privileged position. None of the other four analysts from Jane’s team had been at the meeting earlier in the day. And none had her level of access to all of the intelligence.

  David had explained to his people at the briefing that Sam was one of two analysts—the other was Frank—who would now be exclusively assigned to Operation Glasshouse, the title given to the search for the three members of the SRR team taken by terrorists in northern Yemen. Their role was to unearth clues in previous and new images to establish where the soldiers might have been taken. The fact that Sam was crossing the Channel and mixing work with rehabilitation was not mentioned.

  She stopped for a second and closed her eyes. As she did, the pain in her right hand congealed with the horror of reliving Uncle Pete’s last few moments. Without restraint, she gently sobbed. She found crying so much easier nowadays.

  He was just sixty-two. Recently made redundant from a local factory, Uncle Pete was spending some of that money on a holiday of a lifetime. He’d told Sam just before he left, somewhat prophetically, “I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow—I can’t take it with me!”

  She held her eyes closed and couldn’t stop herself from nodding gently as tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto her jeans.

  The anger, the fury, was gone. Left was a pathetic mass of jumbled nerves and an enveloping sense of grief. It was all so unfair. A man who had worked tirelessly all his life, for not a great deal, had decided to spend a couple of grand on the holiday of his dreams, only to have everything snatched away from him. Just as he was probably at his most content—she could see him on the plane, talking excitedly with some hapless neighbour—death about to steal the very
essence of his joy.

  All because? Well? Because of what?

  She wanted to call it an accident, but these things were never accidental. Someone, somewhere, had made a decision that had sent her uncle’s aircraft crashing to the valley floor. She was not a vindictive person, nor was she ever particularly interested in establishing fault. It always seemed a futile exercise, when what everyone needed to do was clear up the mess and look forward.

  Until now.

  Now she wanted answers. Not answers to satisfy a vengeful curiosity. Answers so that she could put her uncle to sleep, both for his sake and for hers. She knew if she couldn’t find out why, his death would join the events of Camp Bastion as gate crashers to her dreams. Both whilst asleep and sometimes in the starkness of the day. An ever-present reminder of the truly rubbish things that dogged her life.

  She wiped her eyes clumsily with her bandaged right hand, and with her left she swiped at a photo on her iPad, which exposed another. It was taken by Captain Tony James. She had found his name in the briefing material; he had a wife and a daughter—I wonder if they know? They had assumed that he was either dead or in captivity. The photos were good. Crisp and relevant. She was looking for vehicles and the camp accoutrements. Trying to match what she saw with previously shot images in other locations. Places to which the terrorists might return. A tear dropped on the screen, amplifying the pixels as if looking through a tiny fish-eye lens.

  She dabbed it off with her bandaged hand.

  This was what she was best at. The detail of photographs, looking for the absence of the normal—not necessarily looking for things that were out of place, more likely things that should be there, but weren’t.

  Sam had an outstanding memory, which continued to surprise her when there was so much fog obscuring everyday life. She could recall details from thousands of photographs and access them from the cloud, even if they had been deposited in the most unlikely places. She was particularly good at the nuances of an image. Small things: a badge here, a change of hairstyle there. Her military training had honed her skill, but her instructor at Chicksands had put her forensic ability, to dissect, compartmentalise, and then recall photos, down to a form of autism. “You’re not normal, Green, you know that?” She guessed she could have reported him for some form of abuse, but he did have a nice bum, which suited his tight-fitting combat trousers. So she forgave him for his gentle daily insults, taking them as backhanded compliments instead. He was just a man, after all.

  She spread the photo with her left thumb and index finger—her bandaged right hand as useful as a Plasticine teapot. The zoom picked out the front end of one of the white twin-cabs in the camp. She looked for dents and other marks. She swiped slowly left and found a green trailer. She dwelt on that for a bit. She did the same for the black Toyota Hilux that Manning and Bell had turned up in. Moving right, she zoomed in further on the two Westerners and the two Arab-looking men they were talking to. Pretty clear. She hovered there for a second, making mental notes. She swiped back out again, until she had the whole photo. She studied it for a second, then moved on.

  Her concentration was broken. A man with a high-viz jacket was knocking on the driver’s window of her van. He pointed to the vehicle in front, which was moving in the direction of the ferry. Apologising with a nod, she closed her tablet, swivelled around in her chair, started Bertie—her four-year-old, bright yellow VW T5 camper and the only constant in her life—and, with a twist of the ignition key, followed the van ahead onto the ferry.

  Chapter 5

  No. 2, Block 12, Pillnitzer Strasse, Dresden, Germany

  Wolfgang took his small black suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. He had just booked a Lufthansa flight from Berlin to Geneva, leaving later in the afternoon, and a hire car to take him into the French Alps, up to the Abondance valley. He would bother with accommodation when he got there.

  As a fairly serious environmentalist, he should probably be travelling by train or rental car—he didn’t own a car—but, as the aircraft was flying anyway, he might as well jump on board. It was a poor excuse, and he knew that he needed to work harder on his green credentials. He found it difficult when his wealthy background hardly set him up for an eco-friendly lifestyle.

  He packed meticulously, layering each of his neatly ironed clothes on top of each other so that nothing creased. His toiletries were next, carefully laid down in the checked Burberry waterproof bag that his mother had bought him last year. And then, finally, a pair of well-buffed brown English brogues, which he double-wrapped in the cloth he had recently cleaned them with. As footwear, they should be at the bottom of the suitcase, but they were his favourites, and, as everyone knows, suitcases have a knack of travelling in whichever orientation they damn well please after they disappear down the airport’s grey conveyor belt.

  He gave himself a once-over in the full-length mirror in his bedroom: tall, a bit gangly; a narrow-striped Pinks shirt; a deep red, long-sleeved cardigan with leather buttons; a pair of medium-green Ceruti chinos; and his Timberlands. Ordinarily he would have worn a pair of loafers, but they wouldn’t do for wandering around the crash site.

  Yes, he was particular with the way he dressed. He could afford the finest clothes; at the Munich family home, he had wardrobes and drawers full of the very best from Milan to New York. Since he had taken up residence in Dresden, he had downsized to a single wardrobe and a chest of drawers. He still wanted to look his best, but he was also keen not to be too showy, not to stand out from the crowd. Dresden, certainly central Dresden, was old-fashionedly upmarket, so he had chosen his clothes appropriately. He could easily blend in with the local menschen in the restaurants, cafes, and even at the opera. After all, he had brought his white tie with him.

  He had no idea where he had got his fascination for clothes from. His mother had always made a particular effort to dress him—maybe it was that he had never had a sister, and she felt the need to clothe him like she would a daughter. At one point, one of his College friends implied that he might be gay: “You spend far too much time choosing the right shoes. That can’t be straight.” But, as far as he knew, he wasn’t gay, although he wasn’t sure. He’d steered clear of all relationships. There had been a number of offers from both men and women, but none of them had stirred anything inside him.

  With a touch of royal blood and the interbreeding that was associated with the realm, he thought maybe he was just a little odd. Clothes—good; relationships—bad? It had probably always been that way with the Neuenburgs. He should really ask one of his many cousins next time he met up with them.

  He looked at his watch. He had thirty minutes before the taxi arrived to take him to Berlin’s Schönefeld airport for the late-afternoon flight. He needed to set up his computer tower to do some work for him whilst he was away.

  Wolfgang closed the suitcase, checked for his wallet, which, as well as cash and cards, held his photo ID. He reached for his passport from the bedside drawer. He put them all in the small over-the-shoulder “man bag,” grabbed his suitcase, and placed both in the centre of his lounge, a room dominated by a single room-height sash window. Second in prominence and set against an adjoining wall was an old mahogany desk. On top of that was a thirty-two-inch LED screen connected to a home-assembled top-of-the-range computer tower.

  Wolfgang started the machine, and within a few seconds the screen was up, displaying the desktop that he had designed. He was a concert-standard violinist—he still practised at least two hours a day when he wasn’t travelling—and, if there were an equivalent grading in computer coding, he’d be concert standard at that as well. Music, maths; maths, coding. They were all interlinked. If you have an aptitude for one, you could do the other. He loved maths. Equations and trigonometry had the same beauty as an orchestral score. Coding, therefore, was something that came naturally to him.

  He didn’t start to piece the computer skills together until his music degree dissertation: “Programming a Symphony.” For which he was aw
arded a graduation prize. He was sure his tutor didn’t get it, but Wolfgang knew it was a good, if slightly clunky, piece of work. Write the violin melody and his programme would deliver complementary viola, cello and bass lines. It wasn’t genius. But it was his.

  He had learned how to code in C++ and was soon pretty adept with all Unix systems. As a bit of fun, he had hacked the College’s computer system using a simple hashing algorithm that he had designed. Once inside, he rewrote some of the code to leave a “back door” for him to get in at any time he wanted. He never used the access to alter his grades—he didn’t need to—nor to spy on anyone in the College. It was just inquisitiveness that made him do it.

  Since leaving London, and only when he had a need, he used his newly acquired skills to open a few computers’ doors for him. For example, he wanted to know the details of everyone who had been on Flight FY378. He could have waited for the details to be released to the press, but he wanted them now. He had pinged all of the mainframe ports of Fly Europe using a Rainbow Table—a highly powerful password-cracker running on the tower’s graphics card. Within half an hour, he had access to all of the airway’s data. He’d not yet had chance to look at the list. He would study it on the flight—the irony wasn’t lost on him.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk as he thought. Then, skilfully touch-typing, he wrote a couple of lines of Python script, another of the hacker’s best friends. The code would set up the tower to ping a number of gateways around the world where he had spotted activity that might be of interest to him. He checked the lines of code, verified their destinations, and pressed “Enter.” The tower would run in his absence and e-mail an alert to him if it found anything of interest. He turned off the screen.