by Sam Blake
The lights changed and her attention was back on the road. Beside her Fanning clicked on the ad.
‘This takes you to Merchant’s Quay again. Looks like it sells everything you could possibly need across every conceivable family of narcotic. And plenty of other stuff too.’
‘Discovery Quay and Merchant’s Quay. Sounds like they might be vaguely related.’
He grunted in response, then said, ‘Jesus, you really can get anything on this Merchant’s Quay site, and I mean anything.’
‘Like what?’
He scrolled down. ‘It’s like a marketplace, loads of different vendors. It looks like they pay a hefty fee for space and then give a percentage of their profit to the site owner, who . . .’ he paused, ‘is predictably anonymous.’
‘But there must be a bank account that can be traced.’
Fanning shook his head. ‘All payments are in Bitcoins.’
‘Which are what exactly? I keep hearing about them on the news.’
‘It’s basically a row of code, it’s not a thing.’
‘OK, so don’t even start to explain that, I don’t have the headspace. They work like real money, though?’
‘When the FBI closed down that Silk Road site, they seized about 25,000 Bitcoins they reckoned were worth over $3 million.’
‘Holy feck . . . Argh, Jesus, indicate, you idiot!’ Cathy flashed the car that had cut across in front of her. The driver raised his middle finger. She flashed the blue lights concealed in the headlights and he braked hard.
‘Do we have to stop him? It’s raining.’
Cathy shot him a withering look. ‘No, we don’t, Fanning, unfortunately there’s no law against being an arsehole and us giving him grief isn’t going to earn us any brownie points. We’ll end up creating a traffic jam here that will cause gridlock on the quays.’
She could hear O’Rourke in her head now. And the AA traffic report. It’s Sunday afternoon, where’s everyone going?
The driver pulled off, indicating. At least he’d got the point. Cathy always found it mildly hilarious how people slowed down the moment they spotted a patrol car on the motorway – it was like some sort of Mexican wave. As if the patrol hadn’t noticed they were exceeding the speed limit twenty miles previously.
‘So tell me more about Merchant’s Quay? What do they sell? What’s everything?’
‘What do you need? Fake driver’s licences? Weapons, assassinations – there’s a rocket launcher here – but they don’t do child porn.’
‘That’s good to know.’
Cathy checked her mirror and indicated to change lanes, her focus on the traffic. The point was that if the site was anything like Silk Road, it was generating massive money and presumably trading all over the world. Which meant they weren’t likely to be the only branch of law enforcement interested. Cathy was quite sure Anna Lockharte’s friend – who, she’d explained as they’d left Lauren’s room, was in the CIA – was likely to already be familiar with Merchant’s Quay; particularly if it had taken up the slack in the online drugs trade when Silk Road was shut down.
But how did Discovery Quay fit into the picture? It sounded like it was a sub-site, perhaps run by the same people. Had Lauren’s drug order brought the webcam hacker to her? Maybe the owners of the site had realised that she had access to other students when they saw her university email address, and figured she could be a valuable asset in their drugs supply network.
What sort of a mess had she got herself tangled up in? From everything Cathy had learned about Lauren O’Reilly, she came across as a gentle country girl. Perhaps seeing herself on camera really had pushed her over the edge? Literally. Maybe her suicide had been real?
Fanning cut into her thoughts. ‘Here, this is what was in the FBI documentation from the Silk Road trial. From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were “approximately”,’ Cathy was focusing on the road but out of the corner of her eye she saw him glance at her, ‘ “1,229,465 transactions completed on the site” – holy fuck. That’s on Silk Road. They reckon the total revenue generated was over nine million Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to over half a million Bitcoins. Back then, that was the equivalent of almost eighty million dollars in commission. That’s a lot of fucking money.’
‘Sure is.’ Cathy flipped her indicator again, glancing in her rear-view mirror.
‘I think Lauren was small time – she’d need a lot more stock than she had if she was dealing properly. We should get an idea from her texts if she was buying and selling.’
Fanning said it like it was a given. Cathy wasn’t so sure.
‘Perhaps she was waiting for a new delivery, and that’s why she only had a few boxes. I mean, it was a lot if it was for personal use, but if she was passing it on, four boxes really wouldn’t go far.’ She paused. ‘All these sites work by delivering plain packages through the post. We need to check with the porter to see if she’d previously had a lot of boxes delivered from foreign places. I can’t see Merchant’s Quay being run from Ireland – if you’ve got that sort of money you hole up in Nice or Antigua. Somewhere where the sun shines. Even the big crooks here spend half their life on the Costa del Sol. I can see why they’d target universities, though, so that bit makes sense.’
*
O’Rourke was in his office when they arrived back. As soon as Cathy stuck her head around the door he stood up.
‘Incident room – I want you to brief everyone at the same time.’
She withdrew and headed across the corridor to the rec room. It was already starting to fill up; he must have told the team that they were on their way.
O’Rourke kicked off.
‘So first, Tom Quinn – we’ve an approximate time frame and a list of vehicles that were in the area that we need to check.’
O’Rourke waved at the board behind him. It was a long list. That was going to keep someone busy.
‘There’s a good bit of traffic to both victims’ phones, mainly student banter about essay deadlines and potential dates. Tom and Lauren were in touch that afternoon, but perhaps more significantly it seems that both of them were in pretty much constant contact with two different pay-as-you-go mobiles. Their texts to these numbers would suggest they were in a sexual relationship with the recipients. We’re requesting the call records and the signals are being triangulated to------ find out where those phones were being used.
‘This morning Cat and Fanning went out to Lauren O’Reilly’s room in Trinity and have found some interesting stuff. Over to you, Cat.’
Cathy stood up. It only took her a minute to summarise the findings on Lauren’s laptop and the drug discovery.
‘So we’ve sealed Lauren O’Reilly’s room and a full forensic examination is underway. Anna Lockharte, her year tutor, is contacting a friend of hers in the US security services – in the CIA, to be exact – who is a computer specialist and who recognised that an email she had been sent contained a worm designed to give the sender remote access to the video camera on her laptop. It’s possible this is a wider problem in Trinity but we’ll only know for sure when we have a look through the videos on Discovery Quay. Then we’ll see if we can recognise anyone or the locations.’ Jamie Fanning cleared his throat loudly. Cathy looked at him pointedly. ‘And I think we have a volunteer.’
A chorus of catcalls erupted across the room. Cathy shook her head, rolling her eyes. What was he like?
O’Rourke interrupted. ‘Traffic cams first, Fanning, don’t get too carried away.’ He nodded for Cathy to continue.
‘We’ll see what Lauren’s email traffic can tell us.’ She paused. ‘Lauren’s friend felt there was tension between Lauren and Tom when they came back to uni after the summer. She also felt that Lauren had been moody and preoccupied, as if she was worried about something.
‘There’s one guy we still need to talk to, an international student called Olivier Ayari. It’s clear from Tom’s phone and email traffic that they kne
w each other well. He’s not answering his phone but I’ve left a message.’
‘Good.’ O’Rourke stepped forward as Cathy went back to her chair. ‘When you find him, see if Tom told him more about his personal life than Lauren shared about hers.’
Chapter 23
Sunday, 2.30 p.m.
Anna Lockharte pulled her shaggy scarf out of the sleeve of the jacket the porter had been minding for her and wrapped it twice around her neck before slipping her coat on. The sunshine of the other morning had been short-lived; now sleet-like rain was falling. Anna shivered, not relishing the walk back to her office through the university grounds. It was only about ten minutes, but in this weather . . . But if she walked quickly she’d keep warm and get there faster. Anna glanced back into the cafe area. Paula had eventually calmed down enough for her to leave her. She was now sitting at a table with several of her girlfriends, her dark head bowed. Anna felt relieved that she had close friends, that the whole year group had seemed to gel. They would help each other through this nightmare. You didn’t expect your friends to die at nineteen or twenty.
At that age you didn’t expect your friends to die at all. Or your family. The thought made her start, made her ache for Hope, for all that she had lost. Anna closed her eyes and focused on centring herself for a minute. There was too much happening right now; she couldn’t let herself slip back into the dark place that paralysed her, that kept her behind closed doors. It hadn’t happened for ages, not now she was here in Dublin, so far away from a terrorist threat, but every now and again something unexpected triggered it and she found herself overcome.
But not today, not now. She had students that needed her, and if Cathy Connolly was right, there could be more students in Trinity whose computers had been compromised. It was something she was going to have to discuss with the head of Trinity and make students aware of. Anna felt her temper rising. It was so wrong – there was every chance other vulnerable young students had been targeted and that made her really mad. As soon as she got back to her office she’d call Rob and see how he could help. Perhaps his team would be able to find something in her computer that could help guide the Garda investigation. The photos, the drugs – they had to be factors in Lauren’s death. Rob would do everything he could, she knew. She trusted him absolutely.
She stuck her hands deep in the pockets of her coat, turning everything over in her mind as she hurried along the wide pavement, rounding the corner before she waited at the lights to cross the road. These deaths didn’t make any sense whichever way you looked at them. First Tom and now Lauren, two deaths in such close proximity, two people who knew each other. How could they not be related?
The green man appeared and Anna hurried across the road, heading for the entrance to the university beside the science blocks. She glanced into the gym as she passed, the glass wall opening into Pearse Street like a stage, the fittest, keenest students lapping up the attention. The ridiculousness of having a gym with a glass wall level with a busy public street always made Anna smile. There should have been a sign on the door: ‘exhibitionists only’.
Anna was quite sure that Lauren O’Reilly hadn’t been an exhibitionist, that the video they had seen had been filmed without her permission. Anna cringed inside, feeling Lauren’s embarrassment as she opened that first email, her shock at the image. Because Anna was completely sure that’s what it had been – shock. If Lauren had wanted those shots to be made public she would have worn make-up, would have stood more provocatively, like the girls on Instagram mimicking the models they saw in magazines. Her stomach twisted at the thought of Lauren’s reaction to the contents of those emails, the intrusion into her personal space. The unspoken threat that came with it. Anna would rather be facing a guy with a knife any day.
Turning into the gate, Anna hurried on, weaving through knots of students. There was rarely a time when Trinity College was quiet.
‘Professor Lockharte?’
Lost in her thoughts, Anna started, turning to whoever had spoken, and her heart almost stopped. Xavier Ayari. All six foot of him looking just as devastating as ever in a thick, navy blue padded ski jacket, a purple tubular scarf at the neck. Very French. His smile was disarming, a flash of white in olive skin, his jet-black hair cropped short.
‘Xavier, how are you?’ Anna couldn’t think of anything else to say, was aware that the few students milling in the science block had noticed them, were looking their way. Suddenly she felt like she was the centre of attention. This was all she needed.
‘I’m good, thank you, Professor. I wondered if you had got my email, about speaking to the society?’ Xavier smiled at her, his hands thrust in his pockets.
His inner confidence disarmed Anna slightly. She suddenly remembered one of the other female tutors commenting that it was his nonchalant sophistication that made women swoon. He was also quite brilliant intellectually, according to her colleagues. He was wealthy, good looking, he had it all. He reminded Anna for a split second of Rob; he had that same blend of charm and talent.
But the combination of Xavier’s accent and looks made her mouth go dry. She tried to mentally focus on the sound of the chatter around them, on the cold, on everything that wasn’t Paris in the spring. Everything that wasn’t the sound of another dark-skinned Frenchman, his voice echoing out across the hushed lobby of the Banque Nationale de Paris, a voice followed seconds later by automatic gunfire.
‘I did, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to reply. Of course I’ll speak to your society. Let me know when you’ve got it organised.’
Anna flicked him a smile and turned to hurry on, deliberately dismissing him. It seemed to work. She held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t call her back. Leaving him standing there, Anna focused on the sound of her boots on the concrete, on getting to her office before the memories closed in on her.
But it was too late. She could feel her heart rate increasing, feel the cold sweat running down her back. In her mind she could see the figure dressed in black standing over them, gripping his Heckler & Koch MP5. From where she lay on the floor, out of the corner of her eye she had watched him scanning the huge, ornate entrance hall. Every muscle in her body had tensed as he’d sent out another spray of bullets at what had been, until his arrival, an unexceptional line of business people and tourists waiting for service in one of Paris’s busiest central banks: native French, Algerians, a couple of Polish students, an American and an elderly German couple. Suits, smart pinstripe pencil skirts, stiletto heels, backpacks and Birkenstocks.
The images fighting for her attention, Anna put her head down and headed straight for her office, praying she wouldn’t be stopped on the way. Her mouth dry, her heart thumping, just like that day . . .
*
It had only been May but the sun had been hot, creating shadows on the broad pavements behind them as they left the Hôtel de Pontalba on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the US Ambassador’s residence in the 8th arrondissement, heading for Paris’s main shopping area. They shrugged off suggestions that they should take a car, walking instead along the sun-dappled pavements, cherry trees heavy with blossom, Jennifer’s secret service minder following at a discreet distance. The plan had been to have lunch and then to find a dress for Hope for an embassy event. The three of them out on the town. Together. Simple.
But then suddenly, not so.
Anna’s overpowering memory was the confusion and the smell of blood.
As they’d entered the bank, Jennifer had seen someone she knew, someone who had insisted on introducing the ambassador’s wife to her mother. Jen’s secret service minder hovering in the background, Anna had slipped around the group, urging Hope into the queue before it got any longer. Hope had rolled her blue eyes, not needing to be asked twice.
And then behind them a heavily accented voice had announced that infidels would be punished . . . and the shooting had started and they’d hit the floor. Anna was sure that the gunman closest to her had been muttering a prayer. Her Ar
abic wasn’t good but she recognised the phrases from the videos she used for students on her course. There were two of them, dressed in black military combats, their automatic weapons trained on the people who now lay injured and dying on the cold, hard, tiled floor of the bank. Anna reckoned the whole episode had taken less than sixty seconds. Sixty seconds that had lasted a lifetime.
She’d known the men were likely to be on a suicide mission. The most dangerous sort of terrorists were those who didn’t give a damn about their personal safety. If they hadn’t been completely dedicated before, six months in an ISIS training camp would have turned them into killing machines. For the first time in her life Anna wished she knew a bit less about terrorism. Living her PhD thesis hadn’t been part of the master plan for this trip.
‘Play dead,’ she’d whispered into Hope’s hair, so quietly Anna had wondered if the girl could hear her. But Anna had felt Hope relax, felt her slow her breathing. Having something – anything – to focus on, would help get them through this.
If getting through was an option.
And then Anna had suddenly caught the sound of sirens, distant but getting louder.
From where she lay, Anna couldn’t see if the terrorists were padded up with explosives. She’d prayed not. If these men were valuable operatives perhaps they had been instructed to cause maximum damage and then get out.
The sirens had grown louder. If she’d had space in her head, Anna would have imagined the pandemonium in the broad elegant street outside. But she didn’t. She was focused on only one thing. On getting Hope out of this alive.
And suddenly the men were shouting, and there had been another hail of bullets, this time sprayed across the entire hall, the high-pitched whimpers of those left alive, and then another round of gunfire, absorbed by wood. Anna wasn’t about to turn her head to look. The sound of a door banging shut.
Then silence.
*
Striding into the Arts block, Anna punched the call button on the lift to her office, her heart beating so loudly she thought it would explode. She could feel her breathing accelerate, panic nipping at the edges of her conscious mind. But she couldn’t panic. Everything the counsellors had taught her was coming into play right now. It was anxiety, she knew, her fight or flight mechanism kicking in. She just needed to hold it all together long enough to get into her office so she could lock the door and fight the images in her head, to breathe.