The Fine Art of Invisible Detection

by Robert Goddard

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘She’s the woman Caldwell was planning to meet in London.’

  ‘The one who was supposed to give him some dirt on Driscoll?’

  ‘I have information about Driscoll’s past that could be damaging,’ Wada cut in. ‘But I think we should concentrate for the present on what his company is doing in Iceland. Can you help us find that out?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because you care. According to Kristjan.’

  ‘Well?’ Kristjan grasped Ragnar’s shoulder. ‘Don’t you?’

  Ragnar gave the question some thought, aided by a deep swallow of lager. Then he said, ‘You want me to get you in?’

  ‘Já. All the way.’

  Ragnar shook his head. ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘You let us worry about that.’

  Ragnar snorted. ‘It’s me I’m worried about.’

  ‘We’re not asking you to come with us. Just tell us how to do it. We’ll share what we get with you, Ragnar. Abe will be able to tell you exactly what Driscoll’s plan is.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to know what his plan is.’

  ‘Yes you do. It’s eating you up.’

  Ragnar nodded slowly. ‘It’s true. Those bastards laugh at me. Not because I’m funny. But because they know more than I do.’

  ‘Then …’

  ‘I can get you in. And on to the system. Sure, I can do that. You’ll be on your own, though. You understand? I can’t help you after that.’

  Kristjan squeezed his shoulder. ‘We understand.’

  There was another lengthy pause, then Ragnar said, ‘How soon do you want to do this?’

  ‘Before the launch.’

  ‘That could be any day this week. Something’s brewing.’

  ‘Very soon, then.’

  ‘You’d have to go in at night.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Why wait until tomorrow?’ asked Wada.

  Ragnar gave her a scornful glance. ‘I thought you people were famous for your patience. You know. Tea ceremony. All that painstaking shit.’

  ‘I do not like being called “you people”,’ she said levelly.

  ‘Sumimasen, I’m sure.’

  ‘And you have not answered my question. Why wait until tomorrow?’

  ‘Because I’ll be prime fucking suspect if it’s discovered the files have been accessed without authority, as it will be sooner or later, probably sooner. So I’ll need an alibi. Tomorrow night I’ll stay over with my parents in Akranes. I can give you the entry codes to the building and Quartizon’s office and the password for one of the terminals. You’ll have to memorize them. I don’t want anything written down or recorded.’

  ‘That all sounds good, Ragnar,’ said Kristjan.

  ‘Yeah? Well, what sounds good can end bad. You remember that, Kristjan.’

  ‘I will. So … do we get the entry codes and the password? Or do I have to buy you another beer first?’

  FOURTEEN

  SUNDAY IN REYKJAVíK was no less bleak than saturday, with drizzle, sometimes intensifying into rain, drifting across the grey city. Wada could do little but wait for the day to pass. She wasn’t due to meet Kristjan until midnight. Until then she was on her own. Kristjan himself was meeting Ragnar at some point, before his departure for Akranes, which lay twenty kilometres or so north along the coast. That was when the entry code and password were to be disclosed. Ragnar had refused to reveal them the night before, perhaps fearing they wouldn’t wait until Sunday to use them. Or perhaps, as Erla no doubt suspected, he needed time to set the trap they were going to walk into. Wada conceded this possibility to herself, but she’d decided to trust Kristjan’s judgement of Ragnar and there was no turning back now, because to turn back would be to admit defeat. And it probably wouldn’t stop there. If she didn’t go after Nishizaki, he’d ultimately come after her.

  She did the small amount of reconnaissance she could in the morning, by tracking down the address of Quartizon’s Reykjavík offices. They occupied the upper floor of an unremarkable building in Hafnarstræti, one street north of the main shopping street, Austurstræti. The physical evidence of the company’s presence amounted to no more than the embossed letter Q on a brushed steel plaque. There were no cameras trained on the entrance or any other sign of overt security, but the windows on Quartizon’s floor were made of reflective glass. Wada looked up at them and saw nothing but a mirrored image of gulls in flight across the sky.

  The location wasn’t far from the Hotel Borg, an elegant Art Deco building standing on the eastern side of Austurvöllur Square. On the southern side was the Icelandic parliament. The proximity caused Wada to wonder if Driscoll had dealings with Icelandic politicians in the course of whatever his business was. There was a pattern to everything he did, she sensed, but as yet she couldn’t see what the pattern was.

  She was tempted to go into the Borg and ask if Driscoll was a guest, but reckoned it was safer to sit in the pleasantly Parisian Café Paris on the northern side of the square, sip coffee and monitor the comings and goings at the Borg from there. No limousine drew up outside. No one resembling the Peter Driscoll she’d seen in the Facetrail report strolled obligingly into view. If Driscoll was in residence, he was keeping a low profile.

  She kept up her vigil for the better part of an hour, then left, deciding the only sensible course of action now was to lie low at her hotel and wait out the hours.

  It was going to be a long day.

  Nick and Kate went out for Sunday lunch and strolled home afterwards through Greenwich Park. Nick encouraged Kate to talk about what she and her friends had got up to in Tuscany, but that didn’t distract her for long from the subject she was finding increasingly fascinating: the identity of Nick’s father. ‘I’ll want to know everything that happens in Reykjavík as it happens,’ she told him. And he assured her she would. In the circumstances, it was an assurance he felt he had to give. Even though he had no idea what was actually going to happen when he presented the card Miranda had given him at the auction. From that point on, all bets were off. Which was something Kate definitely didn’t need to know.

  Night came to Reykjavík at last. Wada ate a room service supper, then sat through a couple of hours of Icelandic Sunday night television before heading out for her rendezvous with Kristjan. It had stopped raining, but a chill mist clung to the streets. There were few people about. Even so, Kristjan wasn’t easy to spot in his black jeans, baseball cap and hoodie, one vertical shadow amongst many in the gulf of darkness between the city centre and the Harpa opera house.

  ‘Ready?’ was all he said before leading the way by an indirect route to the deserted stretch of Hafnarstræti where Quartizon’s Reykjavík branch office was located.

  They walked slowly past the door, then doubled back when they were sure no one was following them or just wandering along the street behind them. They appeared to have this quarter of the city entirely to themselves.

  Not that there would have been anything dramatic to be seen by anyone who’d happened along. Kristjan keyed in a six-figure number, the door unlocked itself with an obliging buzz and they entered the foyer. Motion-sensitive lighting revealed a space of marbled nothing. From there they took the lift two floors up, emerging into a featureless hallway. The lighting was motion-sensitive here as well. Double doors ahead had the distinctive and faintly mysterious Q inscribed on a plate beside them. They opened when Kristjan keyed in a second six-figure number.

  And low lights came up as they entered Quartizon’s office.

  It had the look of standard administrative premises: pastel carpeting and walls, with offices and conference rooms opening off a central reception area. The silence and the emptiness were eerie, but no more so than was to be expected from a workplace out of hours. ‘Third office along on the left,’ whispered Kristjan. ‘That’s where the terminal is that Ragnar says we can use.’

  ‘Not his terminal, I suppose,
’ murmured Wada.

  ‘Definitely not. I guess it belongs to some colleague he’s happy to land in the shit. Come on.’

  Kristjan loped ahead and Wada followed.

  He turned in through an open doorway. There were Venetian blinds at the window. He adjusted them to blank out the glass and the night beyond, then turned his attention to the computer. He pulled a small roll of insulating tape out of his pocket, tore a piece off and placed it over the camera above the computer screen. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said, catching Wada’s eye. Then he switched the computer on. ‘Leaving machines on standby is verboten, according to Ragnar,’ he added. ‘We’d better hope the code he’s given me works.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it?’ asked Wada.

  ‘No reason, I guess. Just … you know.’ The screen lit up. ‘Well, here goes.’ He carefully tapped in eleven digits. A moment passed. ‘Yes. We’re in.’

  Wada sat down beside him. A crowded desktop appeared, with file names in Japanese. Scanning the names, she spotted what she was looking for almost immediately. Emergence. She pointed to it and whispered into Kristjan’s ear, ‘There.’

  He clicked on it. A forest of sub-files appeared, again with titles in Japanese. Emergence parcel 1, 2, 3 and so on. She translated for Kristjan.

  ‘I don’t see any numbers,’ he objected.

  ‘They have used kanji instead of Arabic numbers,’ Wada explained. ‘Unusual, I would say, in an administrative system.’

  ‘Harder for a non-Japanese speaker to understand.’

  ‘This is true.’

  ‘Lucky I’ve got you.’ He stood up and ushered her into the seat.

  She opened parcel 1. More numbers appeared in kanji form, in groups of four. Each group appeared to be linked to a set of notes elsewhere in the document. This was all she could glean at a glance. It would clearly take time to understand what it all amounted to.

  ‘Well?’ asked Kristjan.

  ‘Not sure what to make of this. It’s … complex.’

  ‘But you can read it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then let’s load the whole fucking lot on to a memory stick and get out of here.’

  He slipped a stick out of his pocket and plugged it into the back of the computer. Wada looked at the groups of numbers as they waited for the machine to recognize the stick. At that point, she noticed the kanji for north and west imbedded amongst the numbers. North and west? Appended to groups of six numbers? They had to be geographical coordinates, surely, with the kanji for degrees, minutes and seconds omitted.

  The machine’s recognition of the stick distracted her in that moment. She triggered the download. And … nothing. The download didn’t happen. The message Invalid procedure flashed on to the screen.

  ‘It’s not working.’

  ‘Why the fuck not?’ Kristjan almost pulled Wada out of the chair and started whirling the mouse and clicking. It didn’t go any better for him, though. Invalid procedure. ‘They’ve blocked downloading.’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to sit here and read it all.’

  Kristjan grimaced. ‘The longer we’re here the more exposed we are. That’s a bad idea.’

  ‘You have a better one?’

  ‘Maybe.’ More clicks of the mouse followed. ‘It looks like we might be able to print the file even if we can’t download it. Which is good enough, right?’

  ‘Sure. But I see no printer.’

  ‘It must be in another room. Let’s see what happens if I …’

  A few seconds later, the sound of a printer operating carried to them along the corridor.

  ‘Check it out,’ said Kristjan. ‘It looks like I’ll have to move it on from one sub-file to the next, so I’ll stay here.’

  Wada followed the chunking sound down the corridor and into a windowless room where several PCs faced each other across a large table, cabled up to hard drives that hummed away gently behind louvred steel cabinet doors. There was a heavy-duty printer as well, currently flicking pages into a tray. She lifted the latest page out. Yes. It was what she’d seen in Emergence parcel 1.

  She was about to head back to give Kristjan the good news when the printer suddenly died. Silence fell. And a red light blinked on the machine’s control panel. It was out of paper. Wada began opening cupboard doors in search of more. And then—

  She heard a voice that wasn’t Kristjan’s, raised in what sounded like a command. A man, speaking in Icelandic. Another man, equally insistent.

  Then Kristjan said, loudly and clearly, in English, ‘You’re police officers. Why are you here?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no one else here.’

  Wada’s mind raced. Kristjan was covering for her as best he could. He was speaking English so she’d know what was happening. And he’d pointed out that the men talking to him were police officers for the same reason.

  Had they triggered some kind of silent alarm when they entered the office? Or had Ragnar betrayed them? The answer didn’t really matter for the moment. Wada scooped the twenty or so pages that had already been printed out of the tray and rolled them up. She grabbed a rubber band from a stationery basket as she headed towards the door and sheathed it on to the roll.

  Peering out carefully, she could see the uniformed back of one of the policemen blocking the doorway of the room Kristjan was in. ‘What are you doing?’ was the next question she heard them fire at him.

  ‘I’m working late. Catching up with a project.’

  ‘Our information is you don’t work here.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Wada looked along the corridor to the reception area. She might be able to make it to the exit before they intercepted her. But the lift was the only way down from there and another police officer could easily be waiting in the foyer. Looking the other way, she saw a door at the far end with the green fire escape symbol on a sign above it. She glanced back. The policeman hadn’t moved.

  ‘Stop operating that computer.’

  ‘Why?’

  The response came in Icelandic. The policeman moved suddenly into the room. Shadows of some kind of struggle spilt into the corridor. Wada heard several grunts, followed by the crash of something toppling over. ‘Let go of me,’ came a muffled shout from Kristjan.

  He’d done the best he could for her and now was her chance. She stepped into the corridor and began running towards the fire escape, shoving the roll of pages inside the waistband of her trousers as she went.

  She reached the door, glanced over her shoulder to check she still hadn’t been spotted, then turned the handle, bracing herself for some kind of alarm to sound.

  None did. She stepped through on to a narrow landing above flights of plain concrete stairs. The lighting was low but adequate. She closed the door gently behind her, then started down the stairs, making as little noise as possible.

  There were doors on each landing and by Wada’s calculation she’d gone down into the basement by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs. She eased the door open and found herself in a small underground car park, occupied by exactly one car. A ramp took her up into a yard at the rear of the building from which an access alley led round to the street.

  Wada moved cautiously, following the alley. As she rounded the corner of the building, she saw a steel gate ahead. It was too high to climb and she began to worry that she was trapped, but, as she approached, she saw there was a narrow pedestrian gate to one side. She could only hope it opened from the inside.

  It did, though there was an initial squeak from the hinge that made her stop. Then she went on pulling it open, much more slowly. There were no more squeaks.

  She held the gate open and peered out along the street. There was a police car parked outside the entrance to the building. An officer was standing beside it, leaning against the roof of the car as he spoke into a microphone from which a cable snaked b
ack into the vehicle.

  She was going to have to close the gate and walk away along the street. The policeman might turn round at any moment and see her, of course. Or his colleagues might emerge with Kristjan and spot her.

  Or they mightn’t spot her. As was often the case in her life. This was the only chance of escape she had. The odds were probably a little better than fifty-fifty, though probably not a lot better.

  But they were the best odds she was going to get. She eased the gate shut and started walking.

  She didn’t look back. She didn’t break into a run.

  And no one shouted after her.

  FIFTEEN

  ONCE SHE WAS a safe distance from quartizon’s offices, wada phoned Erla. Calling her was a risk, but she had to be told what had happened. And she had to be told without delay.

  ‘Halló.’ The speed of Erla’s response suggested she hadn’t been asleep.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘It went wrong, didn’t it?’ She had feared it would, of course. And it had.

  ‘The police arrived. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Ragnar.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where’s Kristjan?’

  ‘They took him in.’

  ‘But you got away?’

  ‘They didn’t see me. I got out by the fire escape.’

  ‘Kristjan’s got a record. He did time in prison for throwing a petrol-bomb at a banker’s house after the crash in ’08. This’ll go badly for him. It would’ve been better if they’d got you.’ The words came out like an accusation.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Did you get anything?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I have to look at it.’

  ‘Look at what?’

  ‘We should not talk about this on a phone.’