by W. Soliman
“That must be why she’s been meeting so often with Igor recently,” Jasmine said. “Now it’s all starting to make sense.”
It sure was and I didn’t like it one little bit. I knew now what I’d suspected all along. Monk had deliberately lied in order to get me involved, and if there was one thing I couldn’t abide, it was being manipulated.
“Would you be willing to talk to some people I know?” I asked Jasmine, playing into Monk’s hands in spite of myself. “They could protect you and your children in return for any information you could give them.”
Jasmine emphatically shook her head. “No one can protect me from Igor. Anyone who crosses him, especially me, can expect no mercy. He rates loyalty above everything.”
“Yes, but—”
“He has eyes and ears everywhere.” Jasmine’s voice trembled. “It’s impossible to evade him for long. Besides, even if I did manage to disappear, he’d still be able to get to me through Kara and Mum.”
She was right but I couldn’t leave it without giving it one last try. “Look, there’s no harm in just talking to these people. If I can arrange it for tomorrow, will you at least hear them out?”
Jasmine thought about it for a long time and finally nodded her head. “Very well. Anton and I will try to come here at the same time tomorrow but we can’t guarantee anything.”
She abruptly stood up, looking far from happy with the arrangement, kissed her sister, nodded to me and left the room in Anton’s wake. I gave her fifteen minutes to get clear of the hotel and then rang Monk. He answered immediately.
“The Prince Regent Hotel, room 207,” I told him.
Monk hadn’t admitted to being in Weymouth but I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when he and Levine knocked at the door less than ten minutes later.
Nadia’s hands were trembling as she followed Anton from the hotel. Her brave, beautiful sister was putting her life on the line to try to help her, and Nadia knew she didn’t deserve such compassion. She also knew Kara’s efforts were doomed to failure. She was beyond help. Charlie Hunter seemed to think there was a way out for her and her children but he was underestimating her husband’s influence. Igor would find them no matter where they went.
“Come.” Anton gently steered her towards the car. “We’ve been out for too long. Olga spies on you and tells your husband everything.”
“I know, but it doesn’t matter.” She smiled through her tears. “Thank you for taking me to see Kara, Anton.”
He started the engine but didn’t move away from the curb. “You know I could never deny you anything.” He took her hand and kissed the back of it. “But I don’t think we should go to that hotel again. You’re right, there’s nothing that can be done to extricate you from your marriage, and I’d rather endure the agony of seeing you with him than put your life at risk.”
“Oh, Anton!” Nadia was overwhelmed with the desire to kiss him but resisted the temptation. Igor really did have eyes everywhere. “Perhaps it will be better when we go to Spain.”
“I won’t be going to Spain with you.”
“But you must. You can’t leave me now.”
“I have no wish to leave you, Nadia. It’s your husband. He told me yesterday that when you move to Spain, I will be needed at the escort agency.”
“Helping Monika.” She paused, totally confused. “But why?”
Anton shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Why is he doing this now? You’ve always been with us. I like having you with me. The children are comfortable with you.” Nadia, in a highly agitated state, absently rubbed her stomach. Talking of her children unconsciously made her consider the welfare of the one she was now carrying. “I’ll talk to Igor about it.”
“No! That will only make him suspicious.”
Nadia grasped his arm. “But there must be something we can do. Anton, please, I can’t cope without you.”
He looked at her for a long time, considering her words, making Nadia regret the emotional blackmail she was employing. She ought to put Anton’s safety before her own and not interfere with Igor’s plans. She could sense the battle raging inside his head. To keep her safe or risk everything on the outside chance of their finding a way to be together.
“All right.” He ran a finger down her cheek and arrested the progress of a tear. “We’ll meet with your sister’s friends tomorrow but I don’t think there’s anything they can do to help us.”
Chapter Fifteen
I opened the door to Monk and Levine and they stepped inside. Monk looked around, obviously hoping to find Jasmine still with us.
“She’s hiding in the bathroom,” I told him, deadpan.
“Shame she’s left.” He seemed unconcerned by my sarcasm. “I should have liked to talk to her myself. Did you get anything from her that might help us?”
“With her husband’s terrorist activities?”
“Ah, I see.” He nodded several times, not quite able to hide his satisfaction at the turn our conversation had taken. “So she knows what he’s really up to then?”
“And so have you, all along.” I stood up, towering over Monk. He’d arranged his long limbs as elegantly as always in an upright chair beside the window, and my posturing was having no discernible effect upon him. His sangfroid attitude irritated me and I made no effort to keep the anger out of my voice. “Why did you lie to me, guv?”
“Oh, you know how it is, Charlie.” He flapped a hand as though it was a stupid question.
“In our line of work it’s sometimes necessary to be economical with the truth in order to get results.”
“You seem to have forgotten that I’m no longer in the job.”
“You can get out anytime but you can never leave, to coin a phrase.”
I snorted. “I was planning on coming to Weymouth with Kara anyway. You didn’t need to make up stories about Iranian paymasters in order to induce me.”
“Charlie?” Kara was staring at me with open curiosity. “Why would the thought of Iranian terrorists keep you involved with Jasmine?”
“You haven’t told her then?” Monk appeared to be enjoying his role of provocateur.
“It’s nothing to do with her.”
“It’s a matter of public record.”
“My mother’s death,” I said to Kara succinctly, my eyes still glued to Monk’s face. “It was assumed she was shot in mistake for someone else by an Iranian hit man.”
“Good God!” Kara stood up to join me and glared belligerently at Monk. “I thought you had standards.”
He shrugged. “Terrorism tends to focus minds, especially in these uncertain times. And your brother-in-law is a world-class terrorist, Kara, make no mistake about that.”
“So he might be but that doesn’t mean you can—”
“The majority of people don’t yet understand the full implications of large-scale cybercrime,” Monk said, talking across Kara’s interruption. “And those who do mostly don’t give a toss.” His eyes fell censoriously upon me. “I guess I can count you amongst that lot, Charlie.”
“Perhaps, but you should have had the balls to tell me the truth.”
“Would you have become involved if I had?” Monk asked mildly. I glowered at him but couldn’t hold his gaze. He was right and we both knew it. “Because cybercrime happens electronically it doesn’t feel personal, until someone has their identity cloned, that is.”
“Well, we’re involved now whether we like it or not, so I guess you’d better tell me everything.” I paused. “And how about starting with who you work for?”
“Fair enough. I am attached, loosely of course, to the U.K. National High Tech Crime Unit. It’s an organisation that does precisely what it says on the tin and fights an uneven battle against, amongst other things, cybercrime. In case you didn’t know it, cybercrime is the fastest-growing major criminal network in the world and, as always, the good guys are way behind the perpetrators. Naturally I’m doing my humble best to redress the balance.”
; I snorted. “Of course you are.”
“Levine here is with Interpol, working in conjunction with the Botnet Task Force, a body set up by Microsoft to try to help combat this type of fraud.”
“Okay.” My temper was cooling in the face of his annoyingly temperate manner. “But why is Kalashov so important that you’d risk involving first Brett Webb and now Kara and me?”
“A few years ago an eleven-man international gang stole almost fifty million from a well-known High Street chain by breaching their computer systems.”
I whistled softly. “I don’t remember that hitting the headlines.”
“You wouldn’t because it never became public knowledge. A lot of the target companies choose to keep quiet and take the hit rather than risk public humiliation and loss of customer faith. They simply tightened up their computer security and tried to make sure it didn’t get breached again.” He lifted his shoulders. “That’s one of the beauties of cybercrime. Apart from being almost untraceable, it also embarrasses the targets into keeping stum.”
“Sounds as though it beats working for a living.”
Monk ignored my interruption. “Kalashov was widely supposed to be the boss behind that big scam but we were never able to prove it. The anonymity of cybercrime is a huge attraction to the perps, you see, as is the phenomenal growth of the world wide web. Just about any transaction you care to name can be carried out electronically nowadays. That makes it the perfect tool for stealing and—here’s the neat bit—equally useful to the criminals when it comes to laundering their ill-gotten gains.”
“Surely there are ways of tracing the culprits?”
“No, not really. Cybercrime outfits bear uncanny resemblances to organized crime families. A boss, in this case almost certainly Kalashov, heads the organisation. He operates as a business entrepreneur and doesn’t commit cybercrime himself. Beneath him is an underboss—”
“Kalashov’s daughter, Monika,” Kara muttered.
“Very likely.” Monk shot her a look. “If that’s what your sister told you, it confirms our suspicions.”
Kara frowned. “If you already knew it, why haven’t you raided her premises?”
“Presumably because he has no grounds for a warrant,” I said. “Suspicion alone isn’t sufficient reason to harass the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur.”
“Precisely. Monika Kalashova operates a legitimate escort agency. The business is properly registered, she pays her taxes on time and does everything by the book. She runs the thing from her home address, which is in a residential area, but applied for and received business use on the premises, so we can’t get her there.”
“How was that approved if you suspect her of illegal activities?”
Monk snorted. “Her father has influential friends in high places. He contributes a lot of cash to both major political parties, so they feel obliged to throw him the odd favour.”
“So Monika’s the underboss in the cybercrime thing,” I said, steering Monk back on track.
“Yes, she acts as second-in-command and manages the operation. She provides the trojans and manages the command and control of them.”
“Trojans?” Kara frowned.
“Malware that appears to perform a function you need but in fact allows unauthorized access to the host machine,” Levine said.
“Monika Kalashova will have several lieutenants operating beneath her, heading their own sections,” Monk continued. “Their campaigns usually enable the criminals to operate in markets highly sensitive to location, language and regional economic trends. Each attack incorporates a crime wave tool kit, trojans and command-and-control servers. It enables them to divert traffic from a specific region, with specific characteristics, using trojans designed for targeting selected businesses.”
Kara pulled a face. “It all sounds pretty technical.”
“It’s like everything else, easy when you know how. And make no mistake, these people sure know how.”
“We think Monika Kalashova’s lieutenants are several of the highly educated and very attractive women employed at the escort agency,” Levine said. “The last people you’d expect to be involved but who are, in fact, at the hub of Kalashov’s latest scam.”
“That’s clever,” I remarked. “They have legitimate reasons to be at Monika’s premises and, let’s face it, when you think of large-scale crime, it’s usually men you suspect. It hadn’t even occurred to me that women might be involved, which is a pretty chauvinistic view because there’s no reason in the world why they shouldn’t be.”
“Exactly. None of the girls live permanently at Monika’s, unless they’re new in town. She does keep a few rooms to put new recruits up until they get places of their own, but that’s all.”
“So, what’s the organisation up to that’s got you so worked up?” I asked.
It was Levine who answered. “We think they’re about to target one of the U.K.’s leading banks and take them for millions in order to finance Kalashov’s grandiose building plans in Spain.”
“Yes,” Monk agreed. “He’s going back and forth to Russia, tidying up the last of his business interests there. What’s frightening about that is the crime families have stopped killing one another and started cooperating. Kalashov is selling off the last of his stockpiles of contraband to his once deadliest rival. For a return on the profits, naturally. He doesn’t seem to be able to turn his back on it altogether.” He grimaced. “You can take the thug out of Russia…”
“If you know the fake transactions are emanating from Monika’s house, can’t you trace them electronically from there?” I suspected it wasn’t that straightforward but felt the question needed to be asked.
Monk raised a cynical brow. “Hardly. They’re routed through a dozen different servers in various countries simultaneously. That’s why it’s so difficult to prosecute the culprits and make charges stick, even if we do manage to catch them.”
“So why bother?” I stared out of the window and stretched my arms above my head.
“Why not warn all banks to be especially vigilant and leave it at that?”
“Because they’d simply identify an alternative target and we’d be back to square one. At least we have some idea where to start looking this time, and if we can trace their activities we stand a good chance of prosecuting successfully. A high-profile guy like Kalashov in the dock would act as a deterrent to others. We have a team of computer specialists who can unravel the trail and specialist lawyers standing by ready to take the cases to court, but in order to do so—”
“In order to do so you need access to one of the machines from which the scam is operated,” I finished for him.
“Precisely.”
“But Jasmine wouldn’t be able to get to one,” Kara protested. “She knows nothing about it.”
“No, but if she’s no longer kindly disposed towards her husband, you might be able to persuade her to spend some time in town with Monika—”
“Wouldn’t work. They don’t get on.”
“Perhaps not, but when she goes to town with her husband they sometimes stay in Chelsea with her. Monika may not like her stepmother but I doubt that she mistrusts her.” Monk cast a speculative glance in my direction, as though an idea had just occurred to him. Knowing him as well as I did, I wasn’t taken in by it. “Who knows what she might come up with if she snoops about a bit?”
“You’re clutching at straws, guv,” I said. “Jasmine seems to resent her husband now but he controls her and her kids absolutely, and she’d never do anything that would separate her from them.”
“Ah, but if she was in London, willing to help us, we’d find a way to protect her children and get them to her.”
“How?” I glared at him, annoyed at the hope that flared in Kara’s eyes. “The children are guarded by his goons, who probably carry guns and aren’t afraid to use them.”
“Oh, we aren’t without a few tricks of our own up our sleeves.” Monk straightened the already razor-sharp creases in h
is trousers. “This suspected raid on a U.K. bank wouldn’t only be embarrassing but also one liberty too far. So I have carte blanche to do whatever it takes to stop Kalashov, and almost limitless means at my disposal with which to do it.”
“But not a search warrant, apparently.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Charlie.” He stretched his legs in front of him, looking almost amused by my words. “I dare say I could fabricate a reason to issue one, but the ink wouldn’t even be dry before Kalashov got to hear about it. Computers can be wiped clean or moved within minutes and the trail would go cold.”
“Jas might come back here tomorrow—”
“Kara!” I threw her a warning look. Too late. Both Monk and Levine swivelled their heads and focused their attention on her.
“I agree she’s in an almost untenable position, but I think she should listen to what Mr. Monk has to say and decide what she wants to do for herself,” Kara said defensively. “It’s not up to us to make up her mind for her.”
“Thank you, Kara, that’s all I ask.” Monk inclined his head. “But what’s your take on the guy who was with her, Charlie? You said he was a computer expert. Do you think he’s in on the scam?”
“No.” I rubbed my chin, trying to put into words something that had been bothering me.
“And Jasmine seemed pleased when he explained what was going on.”
“I think she was surprised, that’s all,” Kara said.
“Yeah, possibly.”
“Perhaps this Anton could throw some light on matters. Point us in the right direction.”
“I doubt it. He deals with the legitimate side of Kalashov’s operation. But he is stuck on Jasmine so I reckon he’ll follow wherever she leads.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see where that takes us then, won’t we.” Monk stood, indicating to Levine that it was time to go. “We’ll catch you here for breakfast in the morning and take it from there. Thanks, Charlie, I appreciate your help. And yours, Kara.”
The room seemed very quiet without them. I looked at Kara, for once at a loss for words. She tossed her wig aside, walked across to me, wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her head on my shoulder.