The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4)

by Gregg Dunnett

  “Hans Hass,” she read, a few moments later, “was an internationally famous marine biologist and underwater diving pioneer. He was known for being among the first scientists to popularize coral reefs, stingrays and sharks, becoming something of an early celebrity in the field. He was particularly known for his pioneering use of technology, including underwater cameras.”

  Black stopped what he was doing, looked at his results for a moment then screwed the paper into a ball.

  “Hmmm.”

  The hire firm kept on file photocopies of the documents Hass had used, and these were quickly shown to be fairly crude fakes. Meanwhile the forensics team examining the actual car found no end of fingerprints and fibers, as might be imaged with a rental. Most were not on record, but plenty were found to come from Billy Wheatley.

  In the afternoon, West and Black went to search Wheatley’s Boston apartment. It was clearly a moment of great excitement for his housemates, who gathered outside while the team broke down the door to his dorm room. West told Black to wait outside with the other students while she pulled on a pair of silicone gloves and went inside.

  It was a fairly typical student room, not unfamiliar to her from her own student days. The bed, wardrobe and desk were all cheap, and well used, but the computer equipment on the desk wasn’t. Wheatley had an expensive looking second monitor, alongside that of his laptop, which looked expensive enough on its own. The computer was quickly unplugged and taken away, for further investigation.

  Most of the paperwork in the room seemed to relate to the course Wheatley was studying, yet West did find a wire frame document holder, on the windowsill, which held various different designs of posters for the campaign against Fonchem. They focused on the habitat destruction for sea-dragons, and from these West learned they were a type of seahorse type creature that was only found in this area. The room was neat. Nothing else looked out of place or wrong.

  After the search, West and Black interviewed Wheatley’s housemates, one after the other, in the apartment’s communal dining room. They got the same story from each of them. Wheatley hadn’t adjusted well to college life. He didn’t go out with the others. He didn’t seem to have made any real friends there. Most of the time he stayed in his room, doing stuff on his computer – they didn’t know what. A lad named Guy Musgrove seemed to be the most forthcoming. He claimed to have been the one to make the most effort with Wheatley, in the first weeks after they both arrived.

  “You said he was a loner,” Black led the questioning, while West sat back and watched. “Did he ever go out?”

  The boy shook his head, his eyes wide with the excitement of what was happening. “We kind of made him, a few times when he first got here. But he was…” He looked away, and seemed to be searching for the right word. “Kind of arrogant, you know? Like he was too good for us.”

  “Uh huh,” Black nodded. “You ever see him with other friends? A girlfriend, anything like that?”

  “No. He didn’t seem to have any other friends. He was like a loner. Say, you guys are really saying he was actually doing a bombing campaign, the whole time he was here?”

  Black scratched at his ear irritably. “We’re not saying anything. We’re asking you what he was like, when he was staying here. That’s all.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, he have any girlfriends? Or other friends we might want to talk to?”

  Musgrave shook his head. “Oh wait, there was someone.”

  West sat forward. “Who?”

  “A girl…” Musgrave thought for a while. “She dropped him off, when he first got here. She was,” he turned to Black, with a smirk on his face, “you know, she was hot, in a kind of punky-goth way.”

  “She have a name?”

  Musgrave thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Amber something. That’s all I know.”

  Chapter Thirty

  They spoke to Wheatley’s tutor, a PhD student named Lawrence Hall. He suggested meeting in the cafeteria on the top floor of the Marine Biology building, saying his office was a mess.

  “What was Wheatley like as a student?” West began, sizing the man up. He was good looking, but seemed to know it, and he dressed for attention. Hall didn’t answer at first, instead forming a steeple with his fingers while he considered the question.

  “Unusual.” He finally responded.

  “How so?” Black asked, and the man turned to him instead.

  “He wasn’t like any other freshman I’ve tutored,” Hall went on. “He was unusually precocious. He knew a lot, and he wanted to show people how he knew a lot. He dominated the few tutorials he actually attended.”

  “He didn’t attend that often?” West cut in.

  “At first he did. In fact he came to see me before we were even due to meet. Right here, as it happens. And for the first few weeks he would be waiting outside the door before the session started. But more recently, he missed a couple of weeks. And the ones he did get to, he seemed distracted. Less engaged.”

  “Would you say he was the kind of guy you could imagine had some kind of secret agenda? Some kind of secret life? Like running a bombing campaign, against chemical companies?” Black asked, and again there was a long delay while the tutor considered this.

  “I can. He’s exactly the kind of guy I could imagine doing that,” he answered in the end.

  “What kind of a question was that?” West asked when they got back to their car, parked in the lot below. It was the first thing she’d said since they shook hands with Hall and left him, still sipping on his cappuccino.

  “Huh?” Black frowned.

  “You wanna ask it in a more leading way, or can’t you think of one?”

  “What? What’s up with you?”

  “What’s up with me? How many students has he taught who have gone on to run secret bombing campaigns? How many students has he even taught? The guy’s barely twenty five years old himself.”

  “Hey! I was only asking if he was the sort of kid who might do something like this. And once again, the people who knew him recently all find it easy to believe it. It’s only you who doesn’t.”

  “Well he’s not going to know, is he. He’s not going to know that.” West pressed a hand to her brow. She’d hoped that a report of a young man, climbing frozen and exhausted out of the water, would have emerged over the preceding days, but they hadn’t. Nor had watches being kept on his home on Lornea Island, his student address, and his father’s boat, which was big enough to live aboard, turned up anything. His bank account hadn’t been touched in three days, and his cell phone had last pinged from midway across the island, apparently showing Wheatley on his way to catch the ferry. Her own phone rang, interrupting the discussion before it could turn into a row.

  West listened, and then turned to Black. “They’ve got into his computer.”

  They hurried back to the office, and went to see the technical analyst who had been tasked with gaining access to Wheatley’s laptop. He sat with the computer at his desk, plugged in to what was presumably his own system, cables linking the two.

  “I’d say he was extremely paranoid,” the technician said, answering another leading question from Agent Black. The man wore a short-sleeved shirt, even in winter, and had narrow, thin arms that were painfully pale. “He had two passwords to get through, the first is the regular one you put on a set up on this type of system, you know when you set up a Linux system?” he paused, and it was West who answered.

  “No.”

  “Oh, well you have to put in a password, and with this type of system you can’t just access the source file and read what they are, like you could with most people’s set ups. And anyway, like I said he had two passwords,” the man explained. He seemed to be happier talking to West than Black. “But then I realized this wasn’t a standard Linux installation at all. It was something else, a kind of custom crossbreed.”

  “So what does that mean?” West gave an encouraging smile.

  “Well, Linux is a recreation of
UNIX, but this was more of a continuation…”

  “No, I mean did you get in or not?”

  “Oh, right. Well yeah. You see for the first password he used a randomly generated combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Technically that’s impossible to break, but if you can throw enough computer power at it, you can just try every possible combination and get through that way.”

  “So that’s what you did?”

  “No way. It would take like, longer than all the time left in the universe. No you see the weakness of passwords like this is you have to either remember them, which is hard, or store them somewhere, which means there’s a weakness. He had a password vault set up, and luckily it’s one we already cracked. So I was able to try all the passwords from there as his main password. And bingo.”

  “So he’s paranoid, but not too bright?” Black asked.

  The analyst frowned at once. “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, maybe, like if he was an expert on FBI methods and was assuming we’d try and get in, then yeah, pretty dumb. But if he was just an ordinary citizen going about his business, then I’d say his level of protection was extraordinarily high. It just depends.” He shrugged.

  “So what have you actually found?” West was keen to move things on.

  “That’s where it gets interesting. He liked the dark web.”

  West drew in a deep breath, not liking the sound of this. “What was he looking at?”

  “Who knows? That’s the beauty of the dark web, at least, if you have the correct software installed, which permanently erases your search history. And he did.”

  “So you don’t know?”

  “Not really. You see whatever you look at on the regular internet is tracked, because the internet provider and search engine both keep their own records, which you can’t access, but that doesn’t happen on the dark web. You can look at something, delete the records, and poof. It’s gone.” He smiled appreciatively.

  “So we have no idea what he looked at?”

  “We have some idea. He had his software set up to delete the searches automatically, but not right at once. You can change the setting. I guess some people like to be able to go back and find the same page they had open before. Google doesn’t work so well on the dark web, so you kind of need a way to find stuff.”

  “I don’t get this. What are you saying? We know what he looked at? Or we don’t know?” Black asked.

  “What I’m saying is he had a delay on when his history got deleted. He didn’t delete his last week’s searches.” The man turned to his second screen, which had a web browser open, on a number of tabs. He clicked the first, and immediately the screen changed to the car hire firm which had provided the car Wheatley was driving.

  “What’s that?” Black asked.

  “Terms and conditions. He was looking at what he needed to hire the car.”

  West and Black both leaned in closer to look. “What else is there?”

  The technician showed them the other tabs. “He sourced the documents here. A credit card bill and driver’s license in the name of Hans Hass.”

  “Both fake?”

  “Uh huh. They were made by someone with the name Blackhorse.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “No idea. Looks Russian. He doesn’t seem involved though, beyond providing the documents.”

  “You find anything about bomb making?” Black asked. “Specifically how to make a pressure cooker bomb?”

  “No. But like I said, he deleted all his previous searches on the dark web. He could have searched for it.”

  “And the information is there? I mean if he had searched for it. The information was there to find?”

  “Oh yeah.” The analyst’s fingers flew on his keyboard, and seconds later a list appeared on the screen.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s loads of places you can find how to make a bomb online, anything from a simple pipe bomb to a nuclear device, if you can find the material. But this is a kind of portal that lists them all.”

  The man scanned the screen, the words reflecting back off the coating on his glasses.

  “Here.” He clicked a link, and the page refreshed with the colorful images and instructions for what looked like a recipe, only the pressure cooker being used was being filled with fertilizer and wires.

  “I thought they called it the dark web,” Black muttered. “Looks like a page on making soup.”

  “Did he look at this?” West clarified. “Is there any evidence to suggest he looked at this?”

  “There’s no evidence he didn’t. But wait, I have more.”

  He clicked off the page, and went instead to one of the last tabs on what had been Billy Wheatley’s screen. It showed a Google map, but the contents blurred out.

  “OK, first up. This is the Fonchem site in the north of Lornea Island. This he was looking at.”

  “Why’s it blurry?”

  “Ask Google, or actually ask Fonchem. Military and some commercial sites are obscured. You can apply to Google and make your case. A lot of chemical and pharmaceutical sites do it, to make it harder to see what they’re actually up to, but check this, it’s clever.” He clicked to the next, final tab. It showed a blueprint.

  “Every state and county keeps a record office of all buildings, and you can download it. They’re just a lot harder to find. But he found it.”

  “So what is that, what we’re looking at?”

  “It’s the blueprint of the building that was bombed.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  They worked together on the report, West paying particular care to make sure there were no claims which weren’t strongly supported by the evidence. It was broken down into sections.

  There was considerable evidence to suggest that Billy Wheatley was responsible for the attack on the Fonchem facility. Rental car records, and data from his computer, showed he faked an ID in order to rent a car, which he then booked onto the Lornea Island ferry on the day prior to the attack. He was then seen leaving the island, on the day after the attack. In total sixteen of his fingerprints were identified on the remaining fragments of the bomb casing, strongly indicating he was at least present when the device was made, if not responsible for its manufacture. The single trail of footprints reportedly seen by the murdered security guard, and their small size, was consistent with the size of Wheatley’s own feet. And Wheatley had an ongoing campaign against Fonchem, something he didn’t even try to hide, which may, in his mind, have provided a motive for the attack.

  The autopsy on the security guard had by now confirmed that he was killed by the detonation when the device exploded. It had caused so much destruction that it was impossible to ascertain exactly what had happened. It was possible Wheatley had timed the device to explode when the guard was there, or it might have been an unfortunate accident – none of the other bomb sites had involved any injuries or deaths.

  Interviews carried out with all those who had known Wheatley during his brief time at college had all told a similar story. He was quiet and polite, and clearly highly intelligent, but also reserved, and appearing to be more interested in his own private projects than taking part in the typical freshman activities. The details of his private projects had not been shared. He had an ‘air’ about him, a sense that he was different. Arrogant was a word that came up a lot. He appeared highly capable of carrying out the work tasked to him, yet unmotivated by it. His attendance to classes had started well, but slipped in the weeks before the attack.

  The computer equipment recovered from Wheatley’s student apartment revealed an interesting absence of information, which in itself was damning. He had installed and employed an array of software and devices designed to prevent leaving any sort of electronic trail. His cellphone, which was not recovered, was discovered to have been loaded with software that projected a false position, to anyone who tried to track it. Though this program was legal, other software and apps installed were not. In total he seemed to have gone to co
nsiderable lengths to leave false trails, and to hide his true online activities, and physical locations. This was considered the likely reason it had been difficult so far to place him at the locations of the other bombings the agents were investigating. But with sufficient resources and time, it was thought likely that these defenses would fail, and information would come to light which demonstrated he was directly involved in the other attacks.

  Finally, there had been no sightings of Billy Wheatley since he was captured on CCTV driving the rental car onto the Lornea Island ferry over two weeks previously, a ferry which he did not drive off. There had been no activity on any of his electronic devices, nor anything from his multiple online accounts and aliases. Watches placed on his student address, his family home on Lornea Island, and on the few actual friends he was known to have, in particular one Amber Atherton, had not seen any contact from Wheatley, nor any evidence to suggest anything other than he had perished that night. And while Wheatley’s body had not been found, this was perfectly consistent with the likelihood that he had either fallen, or more likely jumped from the Lornea Island ferry on February 2nd.

  It was therefore the conclusion of the investigating agents, that the perpetrator of the string of domestic terror attacks on the Fonchem Chemical facilities was one William ‘Billy’ Wheatley, and that he had died, most probably by suicide, on the evening following the final attack.

  When the report was finished, Black read it through, looking satisfied.

  West however, did not.

  32

  Three Months Earlier

  I’m still here. I can’t believe it. It’s the morning now, and I’m still here. At Lily’s house. The Lily Palace. But not just that, I’m actually in her bedroom. With her. Well actually she’s asleep, but she’s right next to me. This is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. And I’ve had quite a few amazing things happen to me.