“Shay?” I asked. “How hard is it to access Caledonian MacBrayne’s bookings data?”
“The whole database or just a single account? Because you’d need a decent hacker to penetrate their database, but if you managed to obtain the login details for a single account, you could just check it yourself.” He stopped what he was doing and turned to face me. “Damien Price, right? They probably just cloned his phone. That would be the simplest solution. Or I suppose they could have paid someone inside the ferry company, with access to their booking system, to let them know if he was planning another visit.”
“Cloned his phone?” I repeated. “Isn’t that a little high tech for our two?”
He just snorted. “Don’t be daft, Con. An organisation like Locke’s would definitely have bought themselves an illicit software package for a simple little thing like that. Do you think they’d just recruit random dopes like Whitaker without an easy way to check them out first, and to keep an eye on them once they were in? Call logs, keystrokes, messages, browser history, location, everything, they’d want access to all of it. They probably even have a hub set up, to send all the collected data to. Which reminds me, that phone you confiscated from Whitaker needs to stay off, and he’d better get himself a new one when you move him.”
Seriously? You’d think it might have occurred to him to mention all this earlier. That sounded like it could be very useful. “What if it didn’t stay off?”
“Then they’d soon realise he was in this building if they happened to look. That’s not what you want, is it?” He eyed me suspiciously. “You’ve got that ‘great idea’ face on. What are you thinking?”
“Could you modify their software and turn the tables on them, using Whitaker’s phone to access all their collected data?”
“Probably.” He shrugged. “It might take a while, depending on how sophisticated their package is. Why, do you want me to try it? You always complain that you can’t use anything I get like that, anyway.” Well, that was true, but it often gave me the chance to find evidence I could certainly use and wouldn’t have found otherwise. “Besides, that’s not our case,” he added rather emphatically.
I knew that Shay didn’t want to get involved in the smuggling investigation, which was understandable. He had no intention of volunteering to help anyone lock more little guys like Whitaker up, and I wasn’t about to ask him to. That wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
“What are the chances that Cory Phelps uses his own personal phone for business purposes?” I ventured. “I think he’d have taken steps to protect that against anything Locke might try to install if he knows about the cloning system. Nobody wants their employer snooping into their personal life so invasively. So he’s probably got a second phone, supplied by Locke, and you just said that you might get a location from a cloned phone.”
“Not if he’s turned that one off too, but yeah, I’ll have a go at it. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go.”
So that wasn’t going to happen just yet then. My cousin had probably already mentally queued it on his current task list, but he wouldn’t budge until he’d finished whatever he’d decided was a higher priority. I’d allowed myself to become distracted, anyway. I was still no closer to knowing why Damien Price had been murdered.
I pulled up Cory Phelps’ record again and began to read through it for the second time. With no clear motive for either of our suspects to attack Price, I was really beginning to wonder how much psychiatric damage his time in prison had left Phelps with. Was it possible that Damien Price had merely reminded him of someone he’d hated so much that the mere sight of him had been enough to trigger some kind of psychotic episode?
Delusions, violent behaviour and even hallucinations were not unusual in such instances. As a theory, it made as much sense as anything else I could think of. Maybe the testimony given by the advanced undercover operative who’d worked alongside Phelps for over five months, before the NCA task force took the whole operation down, could help give me a better picture of how mentally stable Cory had been before he was arrested.
I soon ran into a brick wall with that line of research. The operative in question, Sean Osborne, had not been called on to testify at Phelps’ trial. Nor were more than a few of his bare, factual statements attached to the case record. Well, their handlers did all they could to protect undercover agents from exposure and scrutiny, a rather self-serving policy as it meant they could keep them useable in the field for longer, advisedly or not.
As for what Phelps may have gone through in prison, nothing of note had been documented in his records. Who had the time or the inclination to intervene in every altercation between inmates these days? If you weren’t injured badly enough to require a trip to the infirmary, then, from an official standpoint, nothing had happened. No wonder the self-harm and suicide rates kept rising dramatically year by year. But Cory Phelps had seemingly served his time quietly, with no more than a few, minor disciplinary charges on his prison record. There was no mention of him being prescribed any of the available psychotropic medicines during his time in custody, not even antidepressants, and I knew prescription rates were much higher in our prisons than they were in the general community.
So no, nothing at all to indicate mental disturbance, and I was back to square one, for now. I’d still like to look into what Osborne had had to say about him, though.
“Poking around for a motive?” Shay asked, interrupting my reading. I’d been so engrossed in my thoughts that I hadn’t even noticed that the constant tapping sound to my left had finally stopped. “It’s irritating, isn’t it? I can’t figure it out either. Want to get Whitaker’s phone for me to play with?”
“Yes.” I did. With Shay’s skills, that, at least, had a good chance of getting us somewhere. I got up to go and sign it out. “Could you do me a favour and have a quick look into Sean Osborne for me while I’m doing that?” My cousin had access to a lot of personnel records that were closed to me, and there was no harm in seeing if Osborne had said anything useful about Phelps when he was debriefed. I could look through that while Shay was busy with the phone.
“The covert agent on the smuggling op? Sure.”
When I got back with the bagged up phone, Shay beckoned me over to look at his screen. “What do you think of that, Cuz?” He’d put a good, clear headshot up for me to see.
“That looks just like a younger Damien Price, maybe ten years ago?”
“That’s what I thought too. The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it? But no, that’s a twelve-year-old photo of Sean Osborne from his MI5 file. Nice catch, Cuz! That’s the closest to a genuine doppelganger I’ve ever seen.”
I stared at the photo, studying it more closely. The cheekbones and jaw weren’t quite right, and if you compared the two men carefully, you’d find that the eyes and mouth were also fractionally off. Still, after such a long time, I wouldn’t blame anyone for failing to notice tiny little details like that.
Phelps had probably thought about what he’d do if he ever got his hands on Sean Osborne during every day of his time in prison. He’d been a pal, a workmate, a trusted ally. From Cory Phelps’ point of view, operatives like Osborne were the lowest kind of lying, backstabbing bastards on the planet. And then Osborne, or so Phelps must have thought, had turned up here out of the blue, snapping pictures like a tourist and pretending to be some Scottish drinks merchant. Up to his filthy old tricks again. Maybe Damien Price had even looked right through him, not remembering or recognising Phelps at all because he’d never met him. That, surely, would have really pushed the man’s buttons. There was no way in hell he’d let Sean Osborne be responsible for ruining his life a second time. I’d say we’d definitely found our motive.
Sixteen
Shay
However Conall’s seemingly random mental processes worked, I’d seen them produce remarkable results a surprising number of times. I think his ‘investigative mode’ brain functioned a bit like Flex’s nose, sniffing around for anything
that smelt out of the ordinary. It wasn’t an efficient system, if you could even call it a system. Con had his mental equivalents for every time-wasting bag containing unusual but harmless teabags or spices that Flex decided her partner should look into, but the important thing was that he also mirrored her successes. I wasn’t sure precisely why Conall had wanted to look into Sean Osborne, but it didn’t matter. Opening that bag up for a little nosy had certainly paid off.
His idea about seeing what I could do with the spyware on Whitaker’s phone was a worthwhile one. I should have thought of it myself, really, because I’d naturally assumed that Locke’s organisation would be using spyware on all their recruits. And if they did have a hub set up, then infiltrating their system would give me access to the locations of every active phone on their network. Even if Phelps had turned his off, at least we’d be able to see if any of Locke’s other people were in the area. That might at least give us a possible location for Jordan and Phelps, because they may well be hiding out with them.
I got my laptop packed up and pulled my jacket on before picking up the bag with Whitaker’s phone in it. “Where do you want to go to turn this thing on?” I asked Conall, “Because I’d prefer to work on it somewhere quiet, maybe in the car, if that’s alright.” Without having to worry about anyone seeing what I was doing. Our hotel didn’t seem like a good idea. I’d rather be overcautious than not careful enough. Too many people knew we were staying there for my liking. I wasn’t paranoid or anything. It was just a good habit.
“I’d suggest driving out to Whitaker’s place, but Trish sent a pair of her DCs out there to keep watch in case Phelps or Jordan decide to pay him a visit. We could just nip down to South Beach car park and find a good spot, if that would do?”
That sounded alright. Anyone checking on Aaron could easily discover he’d taken a sick day by calling the distillery. He could have come into town for a number of reasons. Conall was leaving his own laptop here, but I was pleased to see him shoving his new coffee maker and the thermos into his bag. I was rather chuffed by how much he liked his unexpected little present.
“South beach sounds fine.” It was where the Port Authority had its offices down on the waterfront, only a few minutes from here. I put the bagged phone in my jacket pocket, and we headed out.
Once we were parked up, I pushed my seat back a bit and gloved up. Whitaker was an android guy, so I picked out a USB-C cable from a side pocket on my pack before pulling my laptop out and opening it up on my knees. Conall was frowning over his own phone, reading through the file I’d sent him. Sean Osborne’s handlers had left him out in the field for far longer than they should have, and Osborne had eventually cracked, like most people doing his job did, sooner or later; medical discharge, head totally messed up. Some of the bosses on ‘our side’ were as bad as their criminal counterparts when it came to treating their human assets like disposable, replaceable tools.
I could have found a way into Whitaker’s phone easily enough, if I’d needed to, but he’d willingly offered up his password during the interview, and I’d been listening along while Conall went through the recording. Aaron had been very keen to give the police his fullest cooperation after his little chat with my cousin, the poor chump. I could just imagine how that had gone.
Once the phone was on and good to go, I plugged it into my laptop and passed all the files through my Contain and Analyse routines before starting to dig around. It didn’t take long to find the spyware by searching on a few commonly used code strings. It wasn’t the dumbest package I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t super smart either. It had the capability to dig itself in well enough so that deactivating and uninstalling the system update service wouldn’t get rid of it, but apart from that, it wasn’t much better than the commercial packages that way too many people subscribed to for monitoring their kids online activity or checking up on cheating spouses.
It wouldn’t be hard to ‘turn the tables’ on this little sucker. Whoever had put it together was a second-rate programmer, at best. I considered popping my earbuds in and putting some music on to listen to while I worked, but my cousin’s occasional swearing under his breath indicated that he’d probably want to vent a bit sometime soon. I duplicated the spyware bundle, split my screen and started on my modifications.
I set up my own laptop as another, hidden, destination device and pulled up the phone’s web browser. After visiting a few recently viewed pages, I checked that all of that had come through okay. All good. It had also obligingly bounced everything off to another IP address. Their hub? I’d soon find out. There was something very satisfying about improving a shoddy piece of work, and I tapped away happily as I composed my little counterstrike package.
“Bastards!” Conall’s volume had gone up a bit there. I paused, waiting. “Did you read through all this?” he asked, quietly fuming.
“No, just Osborne’s work history. I didn’t open up any of the case files I pulled.” I hadn’t felt like depressing myself with a refresher on how shitty the life of an undercover operative usually was. I’d had my fill of brooding over crap I couldn’t fix already this week. It wasn’t healthy, or productive. Conall scrolled back up a bit and offered me his phone.
“Read from there.”
I scanned the section that had set him off. It was nothing unusual. At his debriefing, Osborne had recommended maximum leniency for Cory Phelps and been adamant that he should be released on bail until he could be tried. Phelps, he insisted, was not a flight risk. He was just a dumb kid who had no idea what he was really involved in. Osborne’s character assessment and recommendations had all been buried, of course. It wasn’t politically expedient to be seen to be lenient with arms smugglers.
Besides, Osborne’s judgement was not to be relied upon. Long term undercover operatives couldn’t help but sometimes feel as if they really had made friends with the subjects they ‘wrongly perceived’ to be harmless and insignificant, not after interacting with them on a daily basis for months on end.
“You can’t pretend any of this surprised you, Cuz. You know what the politicos are like, and the kind of pressures they’ll apply when they decide it’s necessary. By the time the psych boys had finished reconditioning Osborne and declared him fit for active duty again, I bet he was perfectly willing to agree with their assessment and retract his earlier recommendations.”
Conall looked suitably disgusted at the thought of it. “In that case, those people are also indirectly partly responsible for the murder of Damien Price.”
“To some degree, perhaps,” I agreed. “And also for ensuring that that arms shipment never got into the wrong hands, thereby preventing who knows how many armed robberies and shootings.”
If you really wanted to kill someone, you’d find a way, gun or no gun, although I detested the use of firearms for a lot of very good reasons. Something as irrevocable as purposefully ending a life shouldn’t be so easy to do and so hard to prevent. I shrugged and handed him his phone back. That was one thing in favour of the laws here, despite how many stupid ones there still were. The statistics spoke for themselves. Give more people guns, and your crime figures spiked proportionally, pure and simple.
Conall had finished reading and made himself a coffee by the time I was happy with my code bundle. “Did you hit the ‘wipe’ link I sent at the end of that file, Con?” It was always better to check. He nodded.
“All gone.” As if it was never there. “And you were right about Osborne’s retraction.” Again, not surprising.
I overwrote the spyware on Whitaker’s phone with my own package and pulled up a few more pages on the browser to give it something to communicate. We waited a couple of minutes, and then I typed in a query: the location coordinates for the other IP address the phone had contacted came up on my screen. I set my system up to feed all incoming locations into the map and brought that up on the left half of the screen. It was in Aberdeen, the warehouse district down by the quays.
“That’s probably the hub. We’ll
see soon enough when the rest of the bundle’s installed and deployed itself.” I set up my next query and waited for a system ready notification before sending it out. A few more green dots appeared on the map around the city. Tagged phones. Yeah, that first dot had been their hub, alright.
“What about Lewis and Harris?” Conall asked, and I switched the map view over.
One green dot appeared for Whitaker’s phone, sitting right on top of us, and another also flashed to life, out on the open sea, about a quarter of the way to Ullapool. Bother! That made things a bit more complicated. Well, at least I had my laptop with me, so I didn’t need to call in to ask for a satellite feed. I could get that for myself. Our moving dot was on a stubby little motor cruiser travelling at about twenty knots.
At that rate, it would take another hour and a half to reach Ullapool, if that was where it was heading. I pulled up my access to the Port authority information on the other half of the screen and checked recent departures. Only one looked like a match for our boat. ‘Jeanie’ was a little weekend cruiser, less than ten metres from bow to stern, nothing like Herre Nielsen’s fancy yacht.
I opened up a new date check for her alone. She’d paid mooring fees in Stornoway during the weeks of all six of the collection dates we’d got from Whitaker. The owner was listed as Mr William Butler, which didn’t ring any bells. He definitely hadn’t been on my list.
I disconnected Whitaker’s phone and turned it off again. My laptop had full, covert access to the hub now, so the phone could just go back into its bag, and I could take the nasty, clammy latex gloves off. Powdered or not, those things always made my skin feel like it was damp, and they were no fun to type in. Once I’d put my laptop away, Conall pulled us out, and we headed back to the station.
Blood in the Water: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller Page 15