by Finn Óg
Durham Constabulary are understood to be investigating whether the 15-year-old may have been duped into sharing information with what he thought was a girl of a similar age. Sources close to the family believe the boy was, in fact, targeted by an organised criminal gang.
“Right, we need to find out if this shit is confined to this phone or if it’s on a computer somewhere else too.”
“This phone isn’t linked to any other device,” Áine said. “It’s possible the whole thing is being controlled from that.” She tapped the black jammer wallet.
“So that means we can—”
“Find out who owns the Facebook account? That could be tricky.”
“No!” Min said impatiently – the first time Áine had experienced that side of him. “We can contact all the other young people and tell them it’s alright, we’ve seized the phone and they’re not at risk any more.”
Áine blinked, shocked at her own oversight. “Of course, of course.” She began to scroll, looking at the number of people who had been targeted. “There’s dozens of them.”
“Aye. We need to move as quick as we can. If they’re sitting frettin’ at home, who knows what they might do to themselves. This is unbelievably sick.”
Áine clicked open a profile and began a message, then paused. “What do I say?”
“I dunno – don’t worry, we’ve got the device this was being run from and it’s safe?”
“Who is we?”
“Eh, well, we could say we’re the police?”
“Then the police will be asked about it and say it wasn’t them.”
“Well,” Min was scrabbling, “why don’t we say we’re, like, internet security folks. We could invent a name or something. But we’ll need to do it sharpish.”
“A name like what?”
“I dunno – Internet Guardians?”
“Cop on.”
“Well, this is your area of expertise. You tell me.”
“Freelance Cybercrime Specialists. At least then it has a ring of truth.”
“Whatever you say. Just get the messages sent.”
Áine hammered hard on the keys, copying and pasting to each and every one on the screen. As she did, she spoke.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Not thinking about the kids first.”
“What?”
“I was thinking we should track the owners – for Sinead. I just didn’t think.”
“Course you didn’t – your sister’s been snatched. Natural. Don’t be daft.”
Áine finished. “We can’t be sure it will have any effect, or that this is everyone. They could be doing it on other platforms.
“Like what?”
Áine was bouncing through the phone’s data. “There’s no Snapchat, no Twitter – never has been. No Instagram.”
“WhatsApp?”
Áine reinstalled the app and waited for it to gather data. The loading clock ticked round and then the application gathered itself and drew down the information. All the contacts and chats were defined by numbers only. They read together, Min considerably more slowly than Áine.
“This isn’t being used for blackmail. This is some sort of …”
“It’s like a booking system.”
The messages were requests for particular physical attributes – men, Áine assumed, demanding women of certain complexion and proportion.
“Let’s see if there’s any consistent place these johns are being sent to.”
They read in silence for twenty minutes, but the responses were succinct.
Yes, we have what you are looking for. Send us the address. Payment upfront with cash taken off premises prior to any engagement.
“What does that mean?” Min muttered.
“It means they send women to men’s addresses, or hotels, by the looks of things.” Áine scrolled.
“No, ‘cash taken off premises’ – that suggests the women are accompanied, or driven. Maybe the driver takes off with the cash or waits outside?”
“Makes sense.”
“So maybe we place an order and speak to whomever is waiting outside.”
“In lockdown? Sure, you’re not even able to visit anyone else’s house.”
“You reckon this stuff has just stopped?”
Áine shook her head in bewilderment. “I have absolutely no idea.”
“We could try it?”
“How? This is the phone that manages it all,” Áine tapped it again, “and it’s here – with us.”
“Then why’s there nae messages coming through looking for sex, or whatever?” Min growled in frustration.
“Good question. They must have stopped it, or diverted it, or readvertised.”
“There’s a few gigabytes of information on that phone. Between us, it would be proper mental if we can’t find a location for where all this is done from.”
“Yeah,” Áine said, “let’s pick it apart.”
19
After two hours Min leaned back and turned to Áine.
“Take a break, go for a walk. Something might come to ye.”
“I never take a break,” she replied without turning to him. “And my sister is missing. You take a break if you want to.”
“Seriously, give your head a chance. You can’t think straight, staring at the same stuff all the time.”
“I’m not some squaddie under your command.”
“I know that.”
“Then you take a break if your tired eyes need a rest.”
Min sighed heavily. “Look, love, I have stuff I want to do and I’d find it easier if you were out of the room.”
Áine turned, at last. “Ah, you want to call your team and see if they’ve found me? You’re worried we’re being ripped by the NSA or your own spooks.”
Min grunted dismissively. “Sure, if I wanted to do that, I’d just walk outside the room and make the call.”
“What, then?”
“You know what I do, don’t ye?”
“Marine intelligence exploitation, whatever that is.”
“Aye – well, some of it’s tech, but I have folks for that. Most of it’s analysis, including images.”
“So?”
“So leave me at it for a while and let me see if these old eyes can spot anything. And I’m in my mid forties, by the way. You canny be all that much younger.”
“You think you’ll see something I can’t? And you’ve years on me, just saying.”
Min’s exasperation reached the surface. “Look, Áine, I’m going to go through the dirty photos and videos. See if there is anything identifiable that could locate where all this is being done. There are particular things we can look for, and it would be a hell of a lot easier to pick through them if you weren’t sitting beside me.”
Áine thought for a moment. That meant all kinds of things. She had never imagined this bulky little man could be bashful, embarrassed, uneasy. It also suggested something more subtle that she couldn’t put her finger on. And then, she reasoned, it suggested he was trying to … “I don’t need your protection, thanks all the same.”
Min shook his head in resignation and, in full command mode, said, “Just get out of the fucking room for half an hour.”
Áine was taken aback by how firm, yet softly spoken, the order was. She found herself rising and, admonished, headed for the door. Oddly, she quite liked it.
Áine wasn’t accustomed to taking a walk, and she had no intention of leaving the apartment – the pain in her head reminding her of the potential consequences. She found herself uneasy at being more than a few hundred yards from the burly Scotsman on the other side of her control room door.
Idle and at a loss, she found her tablet and considered taking a look at what he was doing in there – the mirroring system allowed her to continue working when not in the room. She often padded through the apartment staring into it – while setting the coffee machine running or, not that she would ever admit it, sitting on the jacks.
And then an unusual pang of guilt overcame her, as if intrusion into Min’s activities was somehow indecent. Instead, she opened up the other unfinished task, tapping a window that allowed her to look at the CCTV of her own building. They’d neglected it when the madam’s phone had revived itself.
Áine found the date and time and shivered slightly as images appeared in sixteen separate boxes on the screen. She braced a little against the countertop as she watched two people – a man in a baseball hat, the only thing visible from above, and a woman with a very scruffy haircut – loiter outside the building, turning on occasion to glance through the glass frontage. After about five minutes the man appeared to nod and they entered the lobby. She tracked her eye across to the next camera, seeing the concierge desk unattended. Áine immediately began to wonder how they had triggered the elevator, which required a resident’s card or code, but the man leaned over the counter and stretched out his arm.
Now, how did they know to do that? she wondered, having seen it done a dozen times before by the concierge when a resident had forgotten their pass or the lift was being cleaned or serviced. The button triggered the release of the stairwell door and the couple pushed through it in a hurry, shortly after which the concierge returned from the lobby toilet.
Áine tracked the couple’s progress with a fleeting glimpse offered by the sole camera pointed down the stairwell, but they became lost after a few minutes – which was confusing.
Where have you gone?
She scrolled back and forth, panning across to the other camera images, confused.
Then, after ten minutes, they were back, twisting around the stairs. She followed their slow climb all the way to her own door, which was shielded for privacy reasons by the acute angle of the hallway camera. The rest she remembered better than she cared to.
The whole attack took less than ten minutes. Nine minutes twenty-two seconds, to be exact, to beat the shit out of her and ransack the apartment. Not very thoroughly, she thought.
Then they were back in the hallway, hurrying this time, making their way down the stairs. Áine noted that they could have used the lift to go down – there was no code required to descend, to allow visitors out or for fast escape in the event of fire. Áine thought it interesting that this pair had known about the stairwell door release button, but not the lift protocol.
They rushed to the ground-floor door, peering through the small window into the lobby. There they waited for a further minute before triggering the door and walking out – straight past the concierge who didn’t pay much attention, and onto the street. From there they walked – oddly, the man a few paces ahead of the woman, until the cameras had nothing else to show. They had walked upriver, away from the docks, but there was no car to be seen, no waiting vehicle to collect them. No onward journey trackable through the apartment block’s CCTV.
Áine threw down the tablet in frustration, its heavy plastic case shielding the screen from damage.
And then a thought occurred: why had they spent so much time off the stairwell? She retrieved the pad and dragged the cursor back. She peered closer into the screen, zooming a little before realising that she had been wrong: they hadn’t gone up the stairs initially – they had gone down, to the car park.
She straightened up – painfully – and thought for a moment. Why would they do that?
The car park had cameras too, of course, so she opened the dark frame and watched. The image was black and white – colour and light would only be triggered by movement, but there was none.
So, without thinking, she moved to the door, into the hallway and summoned the lift. Inside she selected -1, watching the iPad screen falter, the signal breaking as she descended. Two steps outside and she was at the car park door, flickering her eyes between the newly established screen image and the door, ready to test when the light would come on. But when she pushed the door, she found the light in the echoey parking floor was already on. She moved inside to see where the camera was positioned and was startled by a sound behind her.
There stood a man at her own open bin, with a letter in his hand.
20
Áine froze. Her senses were as heightened as they were confused, like the aftermath of watching a scary movie. For the first time in her life, she was without words and utterly terrified, unable to separate what she’d seen on her screen and what was before her now. Her instincts told her another beating was imminent, yet her body seemed completely helpless to turn or move to prevent it.
The man in front of her was in his fifties, fit looking, with the aura of a burglar caught in the act.
“How are ye?” He feigned nonchalance, confusing Áine further. “Can never remember what day’s collection.”
On an ordinary day Áine would rip him apart with her tongue – Can’t remember which bin is yours either, but the sentence wouldn’t form. Áine just stared at him.
The man looked at her looking at him and his unease morphed into curiosity as she failed to respond or turn away. He dithered about what to do, plainly keen to take the letter away while wanting to appear as if he was throwing it in the bin. “You ok there?”
Áine looked at the letter in his hand, then flickered her eyes back to his face. The man did the same before looking straight at her.
“Sinead?” he ventured, unsure of himself.
The door suddenly swung open behind her and Áine ran.
Lockdown rules banning household mixing went out the window as three people entered Áine’s apartment, staring at one another warily.
“I think you’re going to have to explain yourself,” Min grunted at the binman, bundling him into a chair.
“Yeah,” Áine finally found her voice, calmed by the fact Min had come looking for her and oddly reassured by the protection he had thrown around her.
The man looked strangely unperturbed, despite having been gripped, twisted and manhandled in and out of the lift by the mini marine. He’d protested, but not wildly, saying only that he hadn’t been stealing.
“Look, brother, I think you’re the one going to have to explain himself. I am a man completely at liberty, and you have taken me against my free will and with no small measure of illegal force, to a contained environment. So, comrade, I think you need to tell me what that’s all about.”
“Oh, do ye?” Min said flippantly.
“I am saying absolutely nothing until you tell me who you are and where you come from,” the man said. Áine recognised his accent as pure inner-city northside, Dublin.
“Does he live in this block?” Min said over his shoulder.
“No,” Áine replied, “don’t think so. Never seen him before.”
“Alright, sunshine. I’ll tell you where I came from – right here. I realised my …” Min looked round at Áine, who was standing behind his chair, “friend was missing, so I went looking for her and find her running away from you.”
Áine realised that Min must have searched the CCTV system. “What were you doing at my bin?” she said.
“Are you Sinead?” the man asked again.
“Why are you looking for Sinead?” Áine shouted. “We don’t have the fucking phone!”
“What?” the man said, evidently baffled.
Min shifted a little. “Look, you were in her apartment block, in her bin.”
“If it’s her bin, she must be Sinead.” He looked again at Áine.
“Do you live in this building?” Min pressed on.
“Wow,” the man said, as if the idea were preposterous. “Give me a break, here. This place is for fat cats and the non-tax-paying scum of this fine city.”
Min looked behind him at Áine. “What the hell is he talking about? What were you doing in the car—”
“What happened your face?” the man asked.
Áine peered out through the bruising, as confused as anyone. She ignored the intruder and spoke to Min, “I looked at the camera recordings and saw the two who attacked me had gone into the car park, but the camer
a down there hadn’t triggered. Then I thought maybe they knew about the letters, so I went down to see where the camera was.”
“The letters?” Min asked.
Áine shut up, staring suspiciously at the man again. “Shouldn’t we, like, tie him up?”
Min shook his head dismissively. There was no need.
“I’m just a delivery boy,” the man chirped in, as if he were the most innocent man in Dublin. “I have me orders and I follow them.”
“From whom?” Áine asked.
“I really can’t say.”
“You’ll find yourself saying one way or another,” Min said steadily, but with unnerving menace. “You’ll tell us who you’re working for and we’ll go and get her, that’s a fact.”
“Get who?”
“Sinead,” Áine shouted.
“I thought you were Sinead?” The man was back to bafflement.
“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” Min spat. “Tell me who the hell you are or I’m gonnae snap your fucking wrist.” He got up.
“Wow, brother!” The man held up his hands before whipping them behind him lest the threat should be carried through. “There is no need for further violence. Looks like this young one has seen enough of that for the lot of us.”
Min paused. There was something florid and beguiling about the man’s overconfident patter that suggested an unconnectedness to the attackers.
“Talk, you little prick.”
“Pot and kettle,” the man muttered, for which he was treated to a large paw around the throat and a pinning against the Liffey-facing window.
“Alright, alright, fuck it, anyway!” the man said, his toes still dancing on the rug for Min’s stretch could hoist him no higher. “I was engaged by a former comrade to perform delivery of certain letters to and from this apartment complex,” he gushed.
“Stop talking like an estate agent and just tell us what’s going on.”
“If you’re not Sinead,” the man croaked over Min’s head, “who are you?”