#RedTeam Attack

by S J Grey

Caleb complied, and a few moments later, the guy pronounced him to be clean. Caleb and Collier went through the routine of switching off and swapping phones, and then Collier nodded to Caleb. “Walk with me. Let’s get that coffee.”

  It was all very amicable. It felt wrong as hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Collier angled his umbrella, to cover Caleb from the downpour, and they set off through the gardens that surrounded the centre of government known as the Beehive.

  “Have you done enough now, Mr. Rush? My daughter is on life support, her marriage and business in ruins, all thanks to you.” Collier’s voice was icy.

  Talk about curveballs. Caleb didn’t see that one coming. “Excuse me?”

  “I gave her letter to the police. She said you were blackmailing her. It was very clear.” Collier stopped abruptly and turned to face Caleb. The skin was drawn tight over his face, and his eyes blazed righteous fury. “Whatever deal you’ve cut with the police, I don’t care. I want your assurance that you’ll stay away from Nicole.”

  Caleb had heard enough. “She came to me, asking for help, only I wasn’t prepared to do what she wanted. Do you know she asked me to get rid of her boyfriend?”

  Collier waved his hand, as though Caleb’s protest was of no consequence. Smug bastard. “There was no need to savage her. Did you get a kick out of it? Hurting an innocent woman?”

  —the fuck? “It was nothing like that.”

  “It was exactly like that.” Collier’s control was good. While Caleb was about ready to explode, the other man could have been carved from stone. “She didn’t have a boyfriend. Her marriage was rock solid, until you started making trouble for her. And it ends here, Mr. Rush, one way or another.”

  “Damn right, it does.” Caleb had been quietly angry for most of the past four years. No longer. “Your daughter lied to me. And thanks to her, I’ve been implicated in the murder of her boyfriend.”

  “There is no boy—”

  “Then who the fuck was Freddie Sparks?”

  “There’s no need for harsh language.”

  Caleb snorted. “I haven’t started yet. You wanted to meet me, to do what? Tell me to stay away from your crazy-ass daughter? I don’t want anything to do with her. When she wakes up, tell her to keep the fuck away from me.” He paused and moderated his voice. “I think we’re done.”

  Collier pursed his lips. “Not quite.”

  “There’s more?”

  “You take a message back to your boss. Tell him I’ll do what he wants, but he stays away from my daughter. I need a guarantee on this.”

  The day just took another step into holy-freaking-weird. “Boss? What boss?”

  “The man you report to. The one who told you to drug my daughter and film her being raped. That boss.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  The smile Collier gave him was closer to a sneer. “Forgive me, but I don’t think a thug like you is capable of the intricacy of the extortion in place.”

  Caleb shook his head. He had to walk away, or he was going to hit this bastard. “You’re as insane as your daughter. Stay away from me. Both of you.” He spun on his heel, ready to leave.

  “My phone, Mr. Rush.”

  Yep. Caleb dug into his pocket for Collier’s phone and held it out. “I’ll have mine back too.”

  Hang on. Collier thought Caleb worked for someone who ordered the sex tape. Why would he think that?

  They swapped phones, but Caleb didn’t leave. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said slowly. “Are we talking at crossed purposes?”

  “The situation is pretty clear, from where I stand.”

  But it wasn’t. “See, I don’t think it is,” said Caleb. Where to start? “You think someone employed me to make that video, but that’s not what happened. The first I knew about it was when your daughter asked me for help. I’ve been set up to take the fall on this—and for killing Freddie—when I did neither.”

  “You are a convicted criminal. I would expect you lie convincingly.”

  There was zero point in explaining his innocence, but there were other questions Caleb could ask. “Who do you think I work for?”

  Collier flinched. It was a tiny movement, but a reaction, and the first one Caleb had seen.

  Caleb took a step closer. He could smell Collier’s cologne. “Well? Why do you assume I did this? Who put my name in the frame?” He kept his anger on a straining leash.

  “My security team are watching us from a distance. If you threaten me any further, they’ll step in.”

  Caleb learned a bit about intimidation while he was locked up. He moved right up into Collier’s grille. “Tell me who you think I work for. And why. Two questions. That’s all.”

  Rain trickled down Caleb’s neck. How? He was underneath the umbrella. He glanced at Collier’s hand. It clenched so tight around the handle that his knuckles were white, his grip trembling.

  “Tell me,” whispered Caleb.

  “Can you prove the video had nothing to do with you?” Collier threw the words at him.

  Could he? Thanks to a hidden camera in his office, he could make a convincing argument. “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I have CCTV footage of my meetings with Nicole. I can share those with you, along with a taped recording of a phone call I had with her.”

  Was Collier rattled? Possibly. Time to push some more.

  “Who do you think I work for? Whose name are you so scared to mention?” Caleb asked.

  Collier wrenched his gaze away. He stepped back. The brolly moved with him, and Caleb was instantly wet, but he didn’t care. He was getting somewhere. Finally

  “Prove your claim first, and then we’ll talk,” said Collier, looking at him.

  “You need to come back to my office. My team can access the footage, unless you don’t want to be seen there with me?”

  There was another pause. Caleb could practically see the cogs going around in Collier’s head.

  “I was encouraged to look the other way,” said Collier. “There was an enquiry, and it was suggested that I don’t support it. That I shut it down. I refused.” He sighed. “It was pointed out that my daughter must mean a lot to me and it would be awful if anything happened to her.” He stopped. His face looked ashen.

  “Go on,” said Caleb.

  “I ignored the threat. Next thing, I’m sent a link to that disgusting piece of filth. Just that.” He rubbed his eyes. “I wish I’d never seen it. My poor Nicole.”

  She really was a victim. It didn’t excuse her interactions with Caleb, but he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. “I’m sorry, but what has any of that got to do with me?” asked Caleb.

  “I received a text message like the others, but with a picture of Nicole leaving your office in tears. The message said you would continue to make life difficult for her, if I didn’t do as they wanted this time.”

  Caleb wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he had to ask. “Did they ask for something else?”

  “There’s a new bill proposed. They wanted me to squash it.”

  “What kind of bill?”

  “It’s for relatively minor changes to immigration law. I don’t give in to blackmail, though. That’s why I decided to approach you.”

  Immigration again. Caleb was getting sick of the word. “I guess you didn’t tell anyone about the threats.”

  “No. I ignored the first few, but then when they hurt Nicole, I had to pay attention. Can you imagine how this feels, Mr. Rush? You’ve seen what they did to my daughter so far. What will they do next?”

  “You could go to the police.” A suggestion Caleb rarely made.

  Collier stared at him. “I can’t. I’ve been told Nicole will be killed if I do. The only thing I can do is resign. I’ve spent my career trying to get to this point, but it’s meaningless if I lose my only child in the process. I hope you never have to make a decision like this, Mr. Rush.”

  Caleb didn’t know what
to say. He turned and headed back to the office.

  Will and Nat caught up with him. They’d been lurking by the coffee cart and carried cups of coffee.

  “Problem?” Nat asked.

  “Yeah. Another one. I’ll brief you when we get back to the office.”

  Caleb thought best when he was moving. He picked up his pace. He was missing something, but what? He recapped the conversation. Nicole was being used as leverage to blackmail her father into making political decisions. Caleb was now implicated, which meant it was now his problem. Who sent Collier the picture of Nicole leaving his office?

  Caleb had to find who took and sent that image. They were the key.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  By the time Caleb walked back into his office flanked by Nat and Will, he had an idea. He updated the team on his conversation with Collier.

  “I think we know who took that picture,” he said. “Remember the courier outside? The one we tried to trace? What if he took her photo on the way out? He’s our guy.”

  “Okay,” said Nat. “We only looked at the local CCTV feeds. We’ll widen the search.”

  “He was in the right place at the right time,” said Jonathan. “We need him.”

  Something niggled at Caleb. “Hang on.” A detail didn’t make sense. “The picture showed Nicole in tears when she left here—that’s what Collier said. But that was the second time she came here, not the first. There was only me and Devin here that first time.”

  “But the courier was here the first time,” said Devin. “Does it mean it was someone else who took the pic?”

  Of course. It was obvious, when Caleb thought about it. “No. It means the courier was here that day as well.”

  “I’ve been monitoring the camera feed every day since you asked me to,” said Devin.

  “Yeah, but that was after she came here the second time. Can you pull the feed from that morning? It was… uh… Wednesday. See if the mystery courier is hanging around the building.”

  “On it,” said Nat. “I can’t see her crying for long, so he must have been close.”

  Sure enough, when they checked the footage of Nicole dabbing her eyes with a tissue as she went, there was a guy in a familiar uniform in the lobby. The courier. And this time, they got a look at his face. As Nicole walked past, he lifted his phone in her direction, and then followed her, his bike helmet dangling from one hand.

  “Gotcha.” Caleb leaned closer to the screen and stared at the image frozen there. He’d never seen the man before. Light skinned, thin faced, clean shaven, with close-cropped dark hair. “Tell me you guys have facial-recognition software you can apply to this.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny,” said Jonathan. “But leave it with me.”

  “I’ll search to see which CCTV cameras picked him up outside,” said Nat. “Give me ten minutes.”

  It didn’t take that long. Caleb was in the middle of brewing coffee, when Nat called to him.

  Nat grinned. “Got him. Nicole hopped into a cab a few doors down, and our boy climbed behind the wheel of a new-looking Mercedes C-Class Coupe. I’m processing the registration plate as we speak.”

  “A new Merc,” said Caleb. “Not cheap.”

  “About a hundred grand. Not the typical car your everyday motorbike courier drives.”

  “Collier said he didn’t think I was capable of this kind of extortion. I was too busy feeling pissed at the insult, to think about what he said. What he implied. This blackmail is bigger and more complex than it looks.”

  “Like it’s not complex enough at the moment?” Jonathan murmured. “And believe me, we’re used to complexity in our line of work.”

  It felt like they were on the edge of a breakthrough.

  Caleb paced, coffee abandoned. If this guy was tailing Nicole, what else was he doing? Could he be involved in the sex tape? “Will?” He paused, to lean on Will’s desk. “This might be a long shot, but do the Merc plates match any that were parked at the Metropole Hotel? They use a concierge service. Emma told me about visiting there once, and how the valets park and retrieve your car. They must have records of who was there.”

  Will nodded. “I’ve got a list of the cars recorded there over that weekend. It’ll take a few minutes to cross-match.”

  What time was it? Caleb glanced at his phone, still switched off. Damn. Did he miss Mark’s check-in? There were no texts when he fired it up. That was the arrangement they had—Mark would text if Caleb’s phone was offline for whatever reason. And Mark was around half an hour late, according to his schedule.

  As if Caleb didn’t have enough problems to deal with…

  Also as per Mark’s instructions, if he was over two hours late, Caleb was to contact Mark’s ex-colleague, Aiden. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  There was nothing more Caleb could do until Nat and the team finished their checks. It was a promising lead, for the driver of the Merc to be involved in the video. Was he one of the men who appeared? Or the organiser? And how did Freddie fit into the picture, if he did at all?

  Caleb might as well continue working on the mining tool, if he could focus. Or was there another way to figure out where Kaali might be? The Immigration servers wouldn’t have that information or anything close to it. That search was more about identifying the people at the head of the trafficking organisation, not the people further down the tree.

  Devin captured notes of the briefing Andi gave them. Was there something else they could look at?

  Caleb asked to see Devin’s notes. They were brief. Kaali remembered a basement building with something above it, like a pub or club, only noisy at night. She must have been close to the waterfront, because she hid in a moored boat and walked naked past a skip, which suggested building work of some kind.

  Was it as simple as checking out the venues near the waterfront area? He asked Devin to pull up a digital map of Wellington, and they both stared at it. “Most of the boats are parked here.” Caleb pointed to Chaffers Dock near Waitangi Park. “Apart from those, you get a few at the ferry terminal end. Assuming she wasn’t out as far as Oriental Bay, if that was where she slept until daylight, how far did she walk—barefoot—to get there?”

  “Let’s overlay with pub, clubs, and restaurants.” Devin clicked a few options. The map was cluttered with over forty locations.

  “Maybe not restaurants,” said Caleb. “They aren’t noisy. Bars, clubs, and pubs. Let’s exclude the classy joints, the ones that sell wine and expensive nibbles. Again, not noisy.”

  Between them, they excluded another twelve venues. That still left too many options.

  “The skip is bugging me,” said Caleb. “Gotta be a renovation or a re-fit, so there can’t be many around. More likely to be on a back street, so nobody would see her. She can’t have walked naked through Courtenay Place. She’d have been seen.”

  “So,” he continued, thinking aloud, “we’re probably looking at a small area, in terms of the city. The nightclubs and strip bars are concentrated around Courtenay Place. We could take a walk around the area and check it out on foot. Look for skips on the back streets.”

  “Do you think it’s likely to be an extension of one of the registered brothels?” Devin asked.

  Good question. “I’ve never been in one.” Caleb shrugged. “I wouldn’t know what to expect, but does this sound like a normal offering? Or more specialist taste?” The kind of venue that would be promoted in a discreet way. “I need to go hunting on the dark web. If it’s advertised anywhere, it’ll be there.”

  There were many places Caleb didn’t venture in, in the dark web, and this was one of them. He had the skills though, and a good idea of what he was looking for.

  “Is it that easy?” Devin asked. “I mean, do you just fire up the TOR browser and do a search?”

  He had to smile at the guy’s innocence. “Not quite. It’s constructed differently. Have you ever used TOR?”

  “Uh… no.”

  “I’ll give you a primer sessi
on sometime. Thing is, you need to know where to look, so it’s gonna take some time.” Something Kaali didn’t have. Caleb looked out the windows at the fading light. “Fuck it. Let’s head down there and take a look.”

  He explained his thinking to the others before they left.

  “You’ve given me an idea,” said Jonathan. “It’s illegal for under-eighteens to be used for sex work in brothels or for sex workers to be coerced into working, so this isn’t a regulated establishment. If it’s a private concern, catering for the darker tastes, it may be on the police’s radar. I’ll make some enquiries.”

  Caleb and Devin set off to walk across the CBD to Courtenay Place, the area as well known for its nightlife, as for its cheap cafés. This time of day on a wet autumn afternoon, there were few people around. The bars were quiet, the clubs not open yet, and the shops mostly empty.

  Caleb’s phone rang as he walked. It was Mark.

  Caleb answered. “Hey. How’s the fishing?” It was one of the code phrases they’d agreed on, before Mark left.

  “Not biting,” said Mark, the connection clear despite his being thousands of miles away. “Good fishing at your end?”

  Caleb hesitated. Mark had no idea of the mountain of shit that had descended over the past twenty-four hours, but that was for the best. “Yeah, all good. I’m in the middle of something, though. Talk tomorrow?”

  “Before you go, I might be here longer than first thought.”

  Caleb paused in his stride. “What’s happened?”

  “Eh, it’s a long story. It’ll keep for another time. But look after Emma for me.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Wait,” said Caleb, but the line disconnected. Shit. What was wrong now?

  “Problem?” Devin asked.

  “Nah. It’s all good.” Caleb put his phone away. “Let’s go. We’ll start at Chaffers Dock and walk to Courtenay Place from there.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they stood at the edge of the marina. “It’d be easy enough to hop into one of the boats,” said Caleb.

  Devin gazed up at the lampposts. “They look like private security cameras. I’ll ask Nat to see if the footage is available.”