Текст книги "Saint Death"

Автор книги: Mark Dawson

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

19

It was early the next day when Anna stooped to position her eye over the iris scanner, the laser combing up and down and left to right before her identity was confirmed and the gate opened to allow her inside. The guard, his SA80 machine-gun slung loose across his shoulder, smiled a greeting as she passed him. An exhibit in the main entrance hall contained treasures from the history of British code-breaking: the Enigma machine was her favourite but she passed it without looking and went through the further two checks before she was properly inside. GCHQ had the feel of a bustling modern airport, with open-plan offices leading off a circular thoroughfare that was known as the Street, offering cafés, a bar, a restaurant and a gym. Anna walked to the store and bought a copy of the Times and a large skinny latte with an extra shot of espresso.

Most of the staff were dressed conservatively; the squares on their morning commute might have mistaken them for workers on their way in to the office. Suits and blouses, all very proper. But they would not have mistaken Anna like that. She wasn’t interested in conformity and, since she was not ambitious and didn’t care whether she impressed anyone or not, she wore whatever made her comfortable. She was wearing a grey Ministry t-shirt, a black skirt, a battered black leather jacket, ripped Converse All-Stars and red tights. She cocked an eyebrow at the attendant working at the x-ray portal; the man, beyond the point of being exasperated with her after the last six months, readied his wand and waved her through. She smiled at him and, when he smiled back, she winked. She had a sensuous mouth, a delicate nose, and well defined cheekbones that would have suited a catwalk model.

She followed the thoroughfare to the junction that, after another five minutes and a flight of stairs, led to the first floor SigInt Ops Centre where she had her desk. It was a busy, open-plan area, staffed by mathematicians, linguists and analysts scouring the internet for intel on terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy security, military support, serious organised crime and counter-espionage in different regions. Computer engineers and software developers helped make it possible; the Tempora program alone, responsible for fibre-optic interceptors attached to sub-surface internet cabling, siphoned off 10 gigabits of information every second. Twenty-one petabytes a day. The Prism and Boundless Informant programmes added petabytes more. That huge, amorphous mass of data needed to be sorted and arranged. GCHQ’s gaping larders were stuffed full of data to be harvested by their algorithm profiles against a rainy day.

There were hackers, here, too. A small team of them, including Anna.

Most of them had never considered a career in intelligence.

Anna had wanted the job specifically.

They had instructed her to get it.

And, as it turned out, it had been easy.

Thackeray was an anglicised name that she had adopted when she had moved to London. She was born Anna Vasilyevna Dubrovsky in Volgograd in 1990. Her father was a middle-ranking diplomat in the Russian diplomatic service and her mother worked for the party. She was their only child and her prodigious intelligence – obvious from a very early age – was a source of tremendous pride to them. She had been precocious in school, a genius mathematician, quickly outpacing her peers and then her teachers. There was an annual children’s chess competition in the district and she had won it for two straight years; she had been banned from entering for a third time. She had been inculcated in data and analysis almost before she could read. The day she had been given her first computer – a brand new American-built Dell – was the day that the scales had truly fallen from her eyes. She was taught everything there was to know about it and then, once again, she outpaced her teachers. Volgograd was a dreary backwater and the internet spread out like a vast, open vista, a frontier of unlimited possibility where you could do anything and be anyone. She was taught how to live online. It became her second life. She became addicted to hacking forums, the bazaars where information was exchanged, complex techniques developed and audacious hacks lauded. It became difficult to distinguish between her real self and ‘Solo’, as she soon preferred to be called.

Her instructors were pleased with her.

The family travelled with Vasily when he was assigned to the Russian embassy in London.

Her hacking continued. Questions of legality were easily ignored. Property was effectively communal; if she wanted something, she took it. She set up dummy accounts and pilfered Amazon for whatever she fancied. A PayPal hack allowed her to transfer money she did not have. She bought and sold credit card information. She joined collectives that vandalised the pages of corporations with whose politics – and often their very existence – she disagreed. After six months, they told her to draw attention to herself. She left bigger and bigger clues, not so big as to have been left obviously – or to have been the mark of an obvious amateur, which would have disqualified her from her designated future just as completely – but obvious enough to be visible to a vigilant watcher. She was just twenty-two when, from the bedroom of her boyfriend’s house, she had hacked into ninety-seven military computers in the Pentagon and NASA. She was downloading a grainy black-and-white photograph of what she thought was an alien spacecraft from a NASA server at the John Space Centre in Houston when she was caught. They tracked her down and charged her. Espionage. The Americans threatened extradition. Life imprisonment. The British pretended to co-operate, but then, at the last minute, they countered with a proposal of their own.

Come and work for us.

She appeared to be all out of options.

That was what she wanted them to think.

She had accepted.

Anna sat down at her desk. It was, as usual, a dreadful mess. The cubicle’s flimsy walls were covered with geek bric-a-brac: a sign warning DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES; a clock designed to look like an over-sized wristwatch; replicas of the Enterprise and the TARDIS; a Pacman stress ball, complete with felt ghosts; a Spiderman action figure. A rear-view mirror stuck to the edge of a monitor made sure it was impossible to approach without her knowledge.

She took a good slug of her coffee, and fired up both of her computers, high performance Macs with the large, cinema screens. On the screen to her right, she double-clicked on Milton’s file. Her credentials were checked and the classified file – marked EYES ONLY – was opened. A series of pictures were available, taken at various points throughout his life. There were pictures of him at Cambridge, dressed in cross-country gear and with mud slathered up and down his legs. Long, shaggy hair, lively eyes, a coltish look to him. A handsome boy, she caught herself thinking. Attractive. A picture of him in a tuxedo, some university ball perhaps, a pretty but ditzy-looking redhead hanging off his arm. A series of him taken at the time that he enlisted: a blank, vaguely hostile glare into the camera when he signed his papers; a press shot of him on patrol in Derry, camouflage gear, his rifle pointed down, the stock pressed to his chest; a shot of him in ceremonial dress accepting the Military Medal. Maybe a dozen pictures from that part of his life. There were just two from his time in the SAS: a group shot with his unit hanging out of the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk and another, the most recent, a head and shoulders shot: his face was smothered with camouflage cream, black war paint, his eyes were unsmiling, a comma of dark hair curled over his forehead. The relaxed, fresh-faced youngster was a distant memory; in those pictures he was coldly and efficiently handsome.

Anna turned to the data. There were eight gigabytes of material. She ran another of her homebrew algorithms to disqualify the extraneous material – she would return to review the chaff later, while she was running the first sweep – reducing it to a more manageable three gigs. Now she read carefully, cutting and pasting key information into a document she had opened on the screen to her left. When she had finished, three hours later, she had a comprehensive sketch of Milton’s background.

She went through her notes more carefully, highlighting the most useful components. He was born in 1973, making him forty. He was an orphan, his parents killed in an Autobahn smash when he was twelve, and so there would be no communications to be had with them. There had been a nomadic childhood before that, trailing his father around the Middle East as he followed a career in petrochemicals. There were no siblings, and the Aunt and Uncle who had raised him had died ten years earlier. He had never been married and not was there any suggestion that he enjoyed meaningful relationships with women. There were no children. It appeared that he had no friends, either, at least none that were obviously apparent. Milton, she thought to herself as she dragged the cursor down two lines, highlighting them in yellow, you must be a very lonely man.

David McClellan, the analyst who worked next to her, kicked away from his desk and rolled his chair in her direction. “What you working on?”

“You know better than that.”

McClellan had worked opposite Anna for the last three months. He’d been square – for a hacker, at least – but he had started to make changes in the last few weeks. He’d stopped wearing a tie. He occasionally came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt (although the t-shirts were so crisp and new that Anna knew he had just bought them, probably on the site that she used, after she had recommended it to him). It was obvious that he had a thing for her. He was a nice guy, brain as big as a planet, a little dull, and he tried too hard.

“Come on – throw me a bone.”

“Above your clearance,” she said, with an indulgent grin. McClellan returned her smile, faltered a little when he realised that she wasn’t joking, but then looked set to continue the conversation until she took up her noise cancelling headphones, slipped them over her ears and tapped them, with a shrug.

Sorry, she mouthed. Can’t hear you.

She turned back to her screens. Milton’s parents had left a considerable amount in trust for him, and his education had been the best that money could buy. He had gone up to Eton for three terms until he was expelled – she could not discover the reason – and then Fettes and Cambridge, where he read law. He passed through the university with barely a ripple left in his wake; Anna started to suspect that someone had been through his file, carefully airbrushing him from history.

She watched in the mirror as McClennan rolled back towards her again.

Coffee? he mouthed.

Anna nodded, if only to get him out of the way.

Milton’s army career had been spectacular. Sandhurst for officer training and then the Royal Green Jackets, posted to the Rifle Depot in Winchester, and then special forces: Air Troop, B Squadron, 22 SAS. He had served in Gibraltar, Ireland, Kosovo and the Middle East. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and that, added to the Military Medal he had been given for his service in Belfast, briefly made him the Army’s most decorated serving soldier.

She filleted the names of the soldiers who had served with him. Emails, telephone numbers, everything she could find.

McClennan returned with her coffee. She mouthed thanks, but he did not leave. He said something but she couldn’t hear. With a tight smile, she pushed one of the headphones further up her head. “Thanks,” she repeated.

“You having trouble?”

“Why —?”

“You’re frowning.”

She shrugged. “Seriously, David. Enough. I’m not going to tell you.”

He gave up.

She pulled the headphones down again and turned back to her notes.

The next ten years, the time Milton had spent in the Group, were redacted.

Classified!

Dammit! she exclaimed under her breath.

She couldn’t get into the contemporaneous stuff?

They were tying both hands behind her back.

It was impossible.

She watched McClellan, scrubbing a pencil against his scalp, and corrected herself: impossible for most people. Hard for her, not impossible.

Anna picked up the fresh coffee and looked at her précis for clues. Where should she start looking? Nothing stood out. Control had been right about him: there was no-one that she could monitor for signs of contact. She clicked over into the data management system and calibrated a new set of “selectors”, filters that would be applied to internet traffic and telephony in order to trigger flags.

She started with his name, the nub of information around which everything else would be woven. She added his age – five years either way – and then the names of his parents, his aunt and uncle. She ran a search on the soldiers who shared record entries with him, applied a simple algorithm to disqualify those who only appeared once or twice, then pasted the names of the rest. She inputted credit card and bank account details, known telephone numbers and email addresses. He hadn’t had a registered address since he had left the Army, but she posted what she had and all the hotels that he had visited more than once.

His blood group, DNA profile and fingerprints had been taken when he joined the Group and, miraculously, she had those. She dragged each of them across the screen and dropped them in as new selectors.

Distinguishing marks: a tattoo on his back, a large pair of angel wings; a scar down his face, the memento of a knife fight in a Honolulu bar; a scar from the surgery to put a steel plate in his right leg after it had been crushed in a motorcycle crash.

Each piece of data and metadata narrowed the focus, disambiguating whole exabytes held on the servers in the football-pitch sized data room in the basement. She spun her web around that central fact of his name, adding and deleting strands until she had a sturdy and reliable net of information with which she could start filtering. Dozens of algorithms would analyse the data that her search pulled back, comparing it against historical patterns and returning probability matches. “John Milton” alone would generate an infinitesimally small likelihood rate, so small as to be eliminated without the need for human qualification. Adding his age might nudge the percentage up a fraction. Nationality another fraction. Adding his blood group might be worth a whole percentage point. The holy grail – a fingerprint, a DNA match – well, that happened with amateurs, but not with a man like this. That wasn’t a break she was going to catch.

She filed the selectors for approval, took another slug of coffee, applied for capacity to run a historic search of last month’s buffer – she guessed it would take a half day, even with the petaflops of processing power that could be applied to the search – and then leant back in her chair, lacing her fingers behind her head and staring at the screens.

Control was right. Milton was a ghost and finding him through a digital footprint was going to be a very long shot. GCHQ was collecting a vast haystack of data and she was looking for the tiniest, most insignificant needle. Control must have known that. If Milton was as good as he seemed to be, he would know how to stay off the grid. The only way that he would surface was if he chose to, or if he slipped up.

She stood, eyes closed, stretched out her arms and rolled her shoulders.

Anna doubted John Milton was the kind of man who was prone to mistakes.

She started to wonder if this job was a poisoned chalice.

The sort of job that could only ever make her look bad.

20

Five in the morning. Plato looked at the icon of Jesus Christ that he had fixed to the dashboard of his Dodge. Feeling a little self-conscious, he touched it and closed his eyes. Four days, he prayed. Please God, keep me safe for four days. Plato was not usually a prayerful man, but today he felt that it was worth a try. He had been unable to sleep all night, the worry running around in his mind, lurid dreams of what the cartel would do to him and his family impossible to quash. In the end, with the red digits on the clock radio by his bed showing three, he had risen quietly from bed so as not to disturb Emelia and had gone to check on each of his children. They were all sleeping peacefully. He had paused in each room, just listening to the sound of their breathing. Satisfied that they were safe, he had gone downstairs and sat in the lounge for an hour with a cup of strong black coffee. His service-issue revolver was laid on the table in front of him. It was loaded and the safety was off.

The kitchen light flicked on and Emelia’s worried face appeared at the window. Plato waved at his wife, forcing a broad smile onto his face. She knew something had happened last night but she had not pressed him on it and he had not said; he didn’t want to cause her any more anxiety than he could avoid. What was the point? She had enough on her plate without worrying about him. He might have been able to unburden himself but it would have been selfish. Far better to keep his own counsel and focus on the light at the end of the tunnel.

Four days.

He started the engine and flicked on the headlights. He backed the car down the drive, putting it into first and setting off in the direction of Avenue 16 de Septiembre and the Hospital San José. He turned off the road and rolled into the underground car park. As he reversed into a space he found himself thinking of the Englishman. It was out of character for him to break the rules, and he was quite clear about one thing: giving a man he did not know the details of where the witness in a murder enquiry was being taken was most definitely against the rules. The man wasn’t a relation and he had no obvious connection to her. He was also, very patently, a dangerous man who knew how to kill and had done so before. Plato had wondered about him during his night’s vigil. Who was he? What was he? What kind of ex-soldier. Special Forces? Or something else entirely? He had no reason to trust the man apart from a feeling in his gut that they were on the same side. Plato had long since learnt that it was wise to listen to his instincts. They often turned out to be right.

Plato rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The girl was being kept in her own room; they would be better able to guard her that way. Sanchez was outside the door. He had drawn the first watch and his eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep.

“About time,” he grumbled.

“How is she?”

“Sleeping. The shoulder is nothing to worry about – just a flesh wound, they’ve cleaned it and tidied it up.”

“But?”

“But nothing. They shot her up to help her sleep and she’s been out ever since.”

“Has anyone told her about the others?”

“No. I didn’t have the chance.”

Plato sighed. It would fall to him to do it. He hated it, bringing the worst kind of news, but it was something that he had almost become inured to over the course of the years. How many times had he told relatives that their husband, son, wife or daughter had been murdered over the last decade? Hundreds of times. These two would just be the latest. He hoped, maybe, that they would be the last.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll take over. Have you spoken to Alameda?”

Sanchez nodded. “He called.”

“Alright?”

“Seemed to be.”

“He’s still relieving me? I’ve got to start looking into what happened, for what it’s worth. I can’t stay here all day.”

“He said he was.”

Sanchez clapped him on the shoulder and left him.

The room was at the end of the corridor. There was a chair outside it and, on the floor, a copy of El Diario that Sanchez had found from somewhere. The front page had a number as its headline, capitalized and emboldened – SEVEN HUNDRED – and below it was a colour picture of a body laid out in the street, blood pooling around the head. It would be seven hundred and eight once they had processed the victims from last night. Plato tossed the newspaper back down onto the ground, quietly turned the handle to the door and stepped inside. The girl was sleeping peacefully. She had been dressed in hospital issue pyjamas and her right shoulder was swaddled in bandages. He stepped a little closer. She was pretty, with a delicate face and thick, black hair. The silver crucifix she wore around her neck stood out against her golden-brown skin. He wondered if it had helped her last night. She had been very, very lucky. Lucky that the cook had been there, for a start. And lucky that the sicarios had, somehow, failed to complete their orders. That was unusual. The penalty for a sicario’s failure would be his own death, often much more protracted and unpleasant than the quick and easy ending that he planned for his victims. It was a useful incentive to get the job done and it meant that they very rarely made mistakes.

It also meant that they often visited hospitals to finish off the victims that they had only been able to wound first time around.

Plato was staring at her face when the girl’s eyes slid open. It gave him a start. “Hello,” he said.

She looked at him, a moment of muddied confusion before alarm washed across her face. Her feet scrambled against the mattress as she pushed herself away, her back up against the headboard.

“It’s alright,” Plato said, holding his hands up, palms facing her. “I’m a policeman.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“I know I’d say this even if I wasn’t, but I’m one of the good ones.”

She regarded him warily, but, as he took no further step towards her, smiling what he hoped was his most winning and reassuring smile, she gradually relaxed. Her legs slid down the bed a little and she arranged herself so that she was more comfortable. The movement evidently caused her pain; she winced sharply.

“How’s the shoulder?”

“Sore.” The pain recalled what had happened last night and her face fell. “Leon – where is he?”

Plato guessed that she meant the man she was with. “I’m sorry, ma’am” he said.

Her face dissolved, the steeliness subsumed by a sudden wave of grief. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she closed her eyes, her breathing ragged until, after a moment, she mastered it again. She buried her head in her forearms with her hands clasped against the top of her head, her breathing sighing in and out. Plato stood there helplessly, his fingers looped into his belt to stop them fidgeting. He never knew what to do after he had delivered the news.

“Caterina,” he said.

She moved her arms away. Her eyes were wet when she opened them again and they shined with angry fire. “The girl?”

Plato shook his head.

“Oh God.”

“I’m very sorry.”

She clenched her teeth so hard that the line of her jaw was strong and firm.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, not knowing what else he could say.

“When can I get out of here?”

“The doctors will want to see you. It’s early, though. I don’t think they’ll be here until morning. A few hours.”

“What time is it?”

“Half five. Why don’t you try and get a little extra sleep?”

She gave him a withering look. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“One of my colleagues watched over you through the night and I’m going to stay with you now,” he said. “The men who did this might come back when they find out that you’re still alive.”

“And you can stop them?”

There was the thing; Plato knew he would have no chance at all if they came back, and the girl looked like she was smart enough to know that too. “I’ll do my best,” he told her.