Deciding that this was going to be her base from now on, Amy returned to the locker room, retrieved her NCA laptop and backpack, and returned to the office. If she could work out the programming code for the keypad, she could reset the passcode and be guaranteed some privacy. Owain wouldn’t like it, but she was done trying to please Owain.
Logging back in to the laptop, Amy tried to locate any maintenance logs. She found the reporting mechanism easily enough, but couldn’t see the previously submitted logs. The former TD1 must’ve had some way of accessing them and of being informed when there was a new request. Amy checked the secure messaging system to see if there was an additional tab and found all her messages were gone. In their place, she had four unread maintenance requests and hundreds more archived.
She was now TD1. Agent Lane had been put to rest, and she had inherited an identity.
Scrolling through the previous maintenance requests, Amy started to get a feel for the previous technician’s abilities. The basic IT support skills were evident, including familiarity with NCA software, as well as a reasonably high degree of practical technological know-how. Most of the requests concerned the surveillance of the inmates, as Owain had told her – fixing and replacing broken cameras, finding better angles, increasing the gain on microphones, improving the night vision, and a list of a hundred impossible things. She was sure that the agents wanted an accurate heat map of the building, but they weren’t getting one any time soon.
If she was to maintain the surveillance systems, there had to be a map of the system somewhere. She had a list of camera feeds, but no sense of the shape of the compound or where the surveillance devices were located. She could probably get a sense of it by watching the feeds for an hour or two, following inmates as they moved through the building, but that wouldn’t help her locate the blind spots or the positions of the broken cameras.
It made sense that the map might not be available to all the agents, as there might be feeds that the supervisor kept privileged or that ID1 and IN1 used to follow their top-secret inmate. It might even be the case that there wasn’t supposed to be a map, but the technician had to keep track of their assets. In a situation like that, they might even have to resort to paper.
She started hunting around the room for a large marked piece of paper but came up empty. She did locate cleaning supplies – yet another function of this multi-purpose room – and briefly panicked that it might be her job to tidy up. Jason would break himself laughing if he found out.
Yet something was wrong here. Would any decent IT technician allow bleach near their precious server? The smell was strong in that corner, so it seemed that some had already spilled, but the bottle appeared sealed. As she bent closer, she realised the mop was sitting in a bucket half-filled with murky water – and the stench of barely-diluted bleach.
She experimentally moved the mop, and it caught on something floating in the water. Lifting it a couple of inches clear of the bucket, she found greyish clumps sticking to the fronds of the mop. She knew better than to try to touch them, but they looked a lot like soggy bits of paper. The aftermath of an attempt to destroy a paper record, perhaps even the map she was looking for.
She put the mop back, leaving it all exactly where she'd found it. Until she could reset the lock, she wanted whoever had tried to destroy the papers to believe they were undetected. Returning to her laptop, she double-checked the maintenance request. The last read message was from 2nd March. The first unread message was from 6th March, listing several broken cameras. Deliberately broken cameras? Cameras that TD1 hadn’t repaired on purpose?
This couldn’t be a coincidence. The person responsible for maintaining surveillance disappears at the time when the need for surveillance was at its peak. Where was the former TD1? Had they disappeared, or had they been disappeared?
And now that Amy wore that identity, was she in danger of disappearing too?
Chapter 19: A Cold Front
Jason had thrown together a passable vegetable pasta for lunch. He was rooting out the ingredients for a corned beef hash for dinner, when Lewis knocked on the door.
‘He’s all right with me,’ Lewis said to Stoker.
Stoker hesitated for a moment, before nodding slowly. With his departure, Jason lost his shadow for the first time since he'd arrived. He grinned at Lewis and pulled him into a hug, nearly squeezing the life out of him and receiving a bone-crusher in return.
‘Y’alright, butt?’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Jason hadn’t expected that level of disbelief, or the edge of anger that sat beneath it.
‘I’ve come to rescue you, haven’t I?’
‘Rescue me? From what? The best deal I’ve been offered since I went inside?’
Jason blinked at him for a moment, before shaking his head slowly. ‘What deal?’
‘Early release, no more record, free as a fucking bird. What are you sticking your nose in for? How did you even find out about…’
Lewis trailed off, and then his expression turned stormy.
‘I will murder that little fucker.’
‘Don’t fuck Alby up,’ Jason said, holding up his hands as if to defend them both. ‘He genuinely seemed worried about you.’
‘Like hell he did. He was just pissed off that he didn’t get to finish the Project, because he can’t stop thieving for five fucking minutes. What’s there to worry about anyway? This place is safer than inside – their people must watch us twenty-four hours a day. What could go wrong?’
‘It’s fucked up, Lewis! You’re talking about twenty-four hour watchers as if that’s a good thing? That’s before you even consider that a man was fucking murdered.’
It was Lewis’ turn to stare.
‘Is that what Alby told you?’ he said slowly. ‘That Mole was murdered?’
Jason was thrown again. ‘Wasn’t he?’
Lewis leaned against the countertop, seeming to give the question serious thought. Jason picked up the bottle of Worcestershire sauce and threw it hand to hand, watching Lewis’ face for any signs of where this was going.
‘I found him out in the garden,’ Lewis said, eventually. ‘It was cold out and he…well, he was blue and stiff. There was frost all over him. He was lying in one of the furrows we'd dug for potatoes – maybe he'd been trying to keep warm.’
‘In the garden? What would he have been doing out there?’
‘He'd put the compost out after dinner. Maybe the wind caught the door—’
‘‘Maybe the wind caught it’? Are they growing weed in that garden, Lulu? Open your fucking eyes!’
Lewis shifted awkwardly against the countertop. ‘Maybe he took too long—’
‘Maybe someone murdered him and stuck the body out in the elements.’
‘Murdered him how? There wasn’t a mark on him, Jay. I saw that much.’
‘Drowning,’ Jason said.
‘Where? In the shower?’
‘Right here, in the sink.’
Lewis pushed away from the counter, throwing his arms up in despair.
‘You are fucking raving.’
‘You don’t think it’s a possibility? We’re not exactly surrounded by angels here.’
‘Mole was all right, though. Nothing about him that any man could object to. Not enough to off him and dump him.’
‘Alby was convinced he was murdered.’
‘Alby has always been a scared kid, Jay. You know that. If they hadn’t voted him out, he would’ve been wailing to take the other bastard’s place.’
‘You think there’s nothing to it then? That Mole just died of cold out there, because the door closed on him?’
Lewis turned back to face him, and sighed, bone-deep and weary.
‘Well, now I don’t.’
Jason flashed him a smile. ‘So, you’ll help me find who killed him
?
Lewis still wasn’t smiling. ‘If you fuck this up for me, Jay…’
‘The record’s gone, Lulu – I’ve seen it myself. You’re already walking free as soon as this thing’s done.’
‘You gonna cover my 10K too?’
Jason gave a low whistle. ‘Alby got 10K out of this?’
‘Not Alby, no. It’s for the Project – and don’t even fucking ask me about it. Stoker’s warned you once.’
He sighed in exasperation, briefly sounding exactly like his mother.
‘Fine. I’ll be your better half again. Though what’ve you done with your girl?’
Jason was about to protest that Amy wasn’t his girl, but that wasn’t really true anymore, was it? The hesitation was enough to bring a wicked grin to Lewis’ face.
‘That took you fucking long enough. What you done with her then? I thought she was the NCA’s bitch now?’
‘She’s out there somewhere.’ Jason gestured towards the walls. ‘Keeping an eye on things.’
‘She’s probably not, y’know. They’ve got some kind of signal blocking in this place – a couple of the lads smuggled in tech, but it’s useless.’
‘She’ll find a way,’ Jason said. ‘It’s what she does. Or she’ll be beating down the door.’
‘That’s proper terrifying that is. What do you need me to do then?’
‘Is there anyone we can rely on in here, to help me out even if they don’t have the whole picture? What about that Stoker bloke?’
‘Ben? Yeah, I guess Ben is trustworthy enough. He’ll want to know why though.’
‘Ben’s one of the upper class though, isn’t he?’
‘Only because no one else has got the size for it. He’s fair, so the norms like him, and he’s hard, so the elites don’t mess with him. And don’t call him Ben. He won’t like that I told you.’
Jason looked at him strangely. ‘Private name, is it?’
‘Something about reputation,’ Lewis said quickly. ‘What you doing for dinner then?’
‘Corned beef hash. What reputation?’
‘Wind your neck in, Jay.’
‘All right, all right.’
Jason threw the bottle of sauce and Lewis caught it in his right hand, flipping it over in the air and into his left.
‘What’s your first move then?’ Lewis asked.
‘Oh, easy,’ Jason said. ‘I need to speak to the Governor.’
Chapter 21: 2πr
With Catriona’s dad safely tucked up at his sister’s, they were free to test out her new toys.
Cerys hadn’t been able to follow half of what Catriona was saying, but it was something about a raspberry and a dongle, which sounded more like a sex game than a piece of tech. Whatever it was, it made Catriona act like she'd stuffed her face with cotton candy and was riding the buzz until she crashed out in the car on the way home.
It was already dark when they arrived at roughly the position where Jason’s GPS signal had disappeared. Cerys parked the bike up on the verge, and Catriona waved her box of wires around.
‘I’m detecting a jamming signal,’ she said. ‘It’s working on multiple frequencies, as we suspected. How far along do you think the entrance was, where you were ambushed?’
‘About two hundred yards, maybe three hundred. It’s a dead end up ahead.’
Catriona juggled her tablet with the box, struggling to hold both in one hand and mark the spot, while sporting a pair of bright pink gloves that clashed with everything else she was wearing.
‘Give it here,’ Cerys said, taking the tablet and removing her leather glove with her teeth.
She walked a few paces back down the road, until the tablet found a signal again. Dropping a pin on the map, she then followed the road ahead with her finger and dropped another pin where the gate was. The map Catriona was using had it down as a ‘private road’, but Cerys hadn’t seen any signs.
‘What do we do now?’ she called to Catriona.
She walked down the road to join her, her hiking boots shedding dried mud on the road. ‘How far were you escorted before you got to the tunnel?’
‘I don’t know distances. We were walking maybe twenty minutes, but slow.’
‘Let’s call it a mile. In a straight line?’
‘Hard to tell in the dark, but not too twisty.’
Catriona retrieved her tablet, exchanging it for her box of bits, and dropped a translucent circle about a mile distant from the gate in the same direction.
‘Some of the jamming fields are unidirectional and some are full circles, or half-circles. It makes sense they'd have a jammer pointed at their gate, but they might not have one covering their arse. If we drive around to the other side, we can get a better idea of where the middle is.’
Catriona sent directions to Cerys’ phone and they returned to the bike. Catriona was a good pillion passenger, leaning with the twists and turns of the Welsh country roads, and not anxious like Amy or complaining like Jason. She'd only pouted a little when Cerys had pointed out how badly her flame red hair clashed with Cerys’ pink passenger helmet.
They drove as close as they could get to the spot Catriona had marked, which was in the middle of some farmer’s field. They climbed over a gate with a sign that read ‘PRIVATE KEEP OUT’, because Catriona liked to ramble and Cerys had never paid much attention to warnings. It was white paint on wood, which made it unlikely to be a Ministry of Defence warning, but then they hadn’t advertised their presence anywhere else in the area.
Holding her weird little tracking box in front of her like a divining rod, Catriona marched across the field, with Cerys in her wake, shining a torch to light their way and carrying the tablet with the map. They had overshot Catriona’s estimate by about five hundred yards by the time the little box started beeping, right on the edge of the woodland bordering the field.
‘If the woods are where they’re lurking, it makes sense that their field covers only their lands,’ Catriona said. ‘They probably have the ability to customise the borders to a certain extent and it’s better to overshoot on their private road than on some farmer’s land.’
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a border collie lunged at them from the darkness, barking and snarling as it leapt at them. Catriona yelped and dived behind Cerys, who found herself squaring off against the dog with nothing but a torch.
She swung the high-intensity beam into the dog’s face and the creature leapt away, yelping.
‘Oi! Haven’t you ramblers done enough damage? I’ve got a gun, you know.’
‘South Wales Police.’ Catriona shouted into the darkness. ‘Call off your dog!’
A sharp whistle, and the collie was off like a shot. After a couple of minutes, a middle-aged farmer in a bodywarmer and a tweed flatcap entered their circle of light.
‘What are you doing out here then?’ he said, suspiciously. ‘You’re a bit far from home.’
Catriona held up her badge for him to inspect.
‘Detective Constable Catriona Aitken. We’re investigating your complaints of trespass. It’s, uh, part of a national operation.’
The man’s suspicion melted away to be replaced by a triumphant smirk.
‘I knew there was something fishy about the whole business. I thought that young copper was having me on when he told me to report all the goings-on, but maybe he had the right of it.’
‘Just to clarify the information we have,’ Cerys said, knowing they possessed precisely no information, ‘when did you first see the trespassers?’
‘That was about two full years ago, that was. Thought they could come use my gate to move things into the council’s woods by there. I told them to get gone, but they just moved it all in the night. Back and forth they were, for two or three weeks. Since then, it’s just been a few odd blokes – all wearing black, like they’re in a spy movie or something. Me
g likes to go for them, but the last lot sprayed her with something. Affected her eyes real bad, it did.’
‘Can you remember what things they were moving?’
‘Fence posts and rolls of that chainlink stuff, like they were going to enclose the woods. However, I’ve never seen any sign of it from my fields, and I’ve got land on two sides of them. When your lot didn’t do much, I called up the Council, and they said the land had been quarantined. Quarantined! Wouldn’t tell me why though. We’ve had no trouble here with disease or the like, and we’re Farm Assured, so we'd know about it. It’s probably the military acting up again.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Catriona asked.
‘It’s always them round here, coming in where they’re not wanted. Mind you, the pubs haven’t seen any squaddies and there’s no noise or nothing. It’s all a strange business, if you ask me. As is sending you two young girls out here at night with your fancy gadgets.’
‘We’re just checking for radon,’ Catriona said brightly, then noted the look of horror on his face. ‘Nothing to suggest we’ll find any, but as you say, the Council was a little vague on the particulars. Private contractors. You know how it is.’
‘Bloody Tories get everywhere,’ the farmer said sagely. ‘I’ll leave you to it then. Don’t suppose you’ll take a whisky after?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Cerys said, amused.
‘Suit yourselves. Don’t get lost in those woods now. There’s trouble in there.’
Chapter 21: Taking Stock
Securing an audience with the Governor turned out to be surprisingly easy.
Lewis had a word with Stoker, who had a word with Dreadlock, who told Jason the Governor would expect him at nine o’clock with an up-to-date requisition list. Jason spent the next hour trying to make sense of dear departed Mole’s system, before he discovered a dusty clipboard of lists in the storage cupboard out in the hallway.
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