by Gabriel Kron
I looked sharply at the man and tried to stand up.
“No,” he said putting a hand on my shoulder. “Wait until the coffin's been placed and the main doors close and then meet me out back. If they catch you, they will use extraordinary rendition to extradite you to Guantanamo Bay where you’ll spend the rest of your days dressed in an orange boiler suit.” Without hesitation he turned and walked back out through the curtained doorway behind the altar.
There was some noise from the back of the chapel as Jack’s coffin arrived and was pushed in on a trolley by two pall bearers.
Becs came back over and sat down before the coffin reached the front.
“He’s someone Jack worked with in the Army. Nick Munson—”
“Sorry Becs,” I said cutting her off. “Did you see that guy who was just talking to me?” I whispered urgently as the pallbearers carried the coffin past us.
“I did. What’d he want?”
As the pallbearers walked past us, one of their jackets had become unbuttoned and opened further than it should, revealing a glimpse of a gun. Seeing this crystallised what I had just been told.
“Becs, I haven’t got time to explain, just do what I say and I will explain in a minute, I promise.”
“Dan. What do you mean?” Becs whispered as I looked towards the chapel doors. The so-called pallbearers were leaving and the parish Vicar was closing the doors.
“Now, come on. We’ve got to leave.” I grabbed Becs’ hand and dragged her up, at first she looked surprised and started to resist, but she looked me straight in the eyes and immediately knew something was amiss.
We apologised to the Vicar, who just stood there startled, and made our way to the front of the chapel.
Jack’s old Army buddy Nick Munson was looking around at us along with his carer. I wanted desperately to talk with Nick, ask him about Jack and his experiences with the Lockridge device. Wasn't going to happen now.
I quickly knelt on the floor in front of Nick and his carer.
“Mister Munson, please excuse me and my rudeness, Jack was my friend. One day soon I’d love to talk with you, but today I must run. Please do not believe what they tell you about me. It’s all lies. I did not kill anyone.”
The Vicar was starting to find his voice and beginning to complain.
“Let’s go,” I said to Becs as she leant forward and kissed Jack's coffin.
I stood for a long two seconds that seemed like twenty with my hand on Becs’ shoulder.
As we walked away, I leant over and touched his coffin, “Keep an eye on us Jack, they’re getting closer.”
Behind the curtained doorway was a long corridor that ran to the end of the building. A silhouetted figure of a man stood in the door.
“Come on!” he shouted.
Becs slipped her shoes off and we ran down the red tiled floor and out to the rear of the crematorium.
“Well done. Have you got a car?” the man asked.
“Out on Robson Street,” I answered.
“Good, let’s get to it and get away from here,” he said.
“Hang on a minute pal,” I said. “Just who are you? How did you find me?”
“Okay, okay. Quick summary. I’m Mark Stacey and I thought I was working for the Home Office, MI5 or 6 or something. But now I don’t think so.”
“Okay. How come you know and they know I’d be here?”
“They know because I told ‘em and I know because I’ve been tracking yo—” Mark was cut short as I grabbed him and slammed him against the building.
“Arrgh! You’re one of them! You killed Jack!”
“No!”
“You’re part of it!” I twisted my grip on his jacket causing the collar to choke him.
“N...No...Not any more. Please... Let me go, we need to go.” Mark said holding his hands up, “I’m trying to help you.”
I relaxed my grip. “Why?”
“I really do suggest that we continue this discussion later. You do not want to go where they want to send you.”
I looked at Becs who gestured that we should indeed go.
“Okay, for now. Let’s go,” I said and grabbed Becs’ hand. There wasn’t anyone in sight, so we gently jogged through the cemetery towards the main gates. With them in sight I could clearly see two other paths leading that way and on each of these were men running. Men dressed for sombre respect and grieving, not running. I looked behind us and there were two other men dressed in black following us.
“Mark, can you see them? We need to run now. Becs, ready?” I said.
She was ready and we broke into a sprint for the gates. It was probably only a couple of hundred yards, but I knew I was going to struggle to maintain the pace. I may have been getting fitter, but my injuries were still healing. Becs was quick. She was easily going to get there first. Each stride I took wasn’t particularly comfortable with each jarring step reminding me of each of them. Despite this, Mark was either deliberately bringing up the rear or he wasn’t as quick. As we arrived at the Gothic gates I glanced behind. We were still being followed, but we had a good lead on them. It didn’t seem that they were too concerned.
The reason why they weren’t became apparent as we climbed into Becs' car. A black Audi A5 with the characteristic LED headlights pulled into the road and stormed towards us. Two of the men who had been chasing us ran out and the Audi stopped to pick them up.
“Quick. Go go go, that's them!” Mark shouted as Becs pulled out and accelerated down Robson Street.
The High Street was busy and Becs had to wait before she was able to cut into the traffic. As we waited, the black Audi pulled up behind us.
Suddenly Becs little Fiat felt like a prison. I was about to get out and run, my hand already opening the door, when Becs managed to pull into the flow of the High Street traffic.
“They're not going to try anything around here, it's too busy, but they want you to know they are there,” Mark said from the back seat.
“Why?” I asked.
“Intimidation, harassment, anything to unnerve you into making a mistake. How much fuel have you got?”
“Three quarters of a tank,” Becs said glancing at the dashboard and then the rear view mirror.
“Good, just keep driving, but don’t go anywhere you don’t want them to know about. They don’t know where you’ve been until yesterday,” Mark said.
As he looked out of the rear window, he took out a mobile phone and a pair of ear-phones. When he plugged the earphones in, I realised they weren’t what they appeared to be. At the other end of the lead, instead of having the earpieces, it had a small circle of black plastic with a handle, a bit like a magnifying glass, with no lens and a wire coming from the handle.
“What are you doing? And who are you again?” I asked as Mark started an App on his smart phone.
He looked at me and put a finger to his mouth to shush me and showed me his smart-phone. The display showed what I recognised as a spectrum analyser screen, and there was one large spike displayed. Using the attachment he passed it over various parts of the car including ourselves.
He pointed at Becs’ bag between the front seats.
“Can I?” Mark said pointing at the bag.
“Okay,” Becs said with more than a hint of questioning.
Opening Becs’ bag, Mark took out her mobile phone and scanned it. The display on his phone flashed red. He put the phone on the seat next to him and then carried on scanning the bag, myself, the seats, dashboard and finally he ran the scanner over his own trouser pockets.
Sitting forward he leaned between the front seats, “Okay listen, they had a TrackerBugs on you, I knew about it because I pushed it onto your phone, but needed to check there weren’t any others. It means that up until I started jamming the signal a few seconds ago, they knew where we were.”
Mark later explained that a TrackerBug not only sends back accurate GPS data, but could be what in the old days was called an ‘Infinity Bug’, a physical bug put in a land-lin
e telephone. The invisible piece of software could be pushed onto any phone. All they then needed to do was send you a blank text message which opened the phone’s high gain mike.
“But why are you tracking us and why did you tell them where we were?” I asked.
“It’s time to try and lose them, how good are you?” Mark said and ignored my question.
“How good am I?” Becs said, starting to get annoyed. “I’ve never had a crash, but I must have missed the lesson about escaping in an overloaded Fiat five hundred.”
She turned off onto a side street. I looked behind and saw the black Audi follow.
As we rounded another corner Mark opened the car window and lobbed Becs’ phone into the back of a builder’s truck.
“Hey!” Becs shouted.
“Sorry, no choice. A TrackerBug can’t be deleted or uninstalled. I didn’t expect my phone to be compromised. Keep to the main roads and keep turning. You’re right, we won’t outrun them in this, but we might be able to out manoeuvre them through traffic.”
Becs was now concentrating and pushing her little car faster than I knew she felt safe doing. If a gap appeared in the traffic, Mark would point and tell her to cut into it.
We were now four or five cars ahead of the Audi, who was also weaving in and out of the traffic as best it could for its size.
“You’re doing good. There, there, there, turn in there,” Mark said and pointed to the entrance of Hemming Street.
Hemming Street was busy, not only with cars, vans, buses and bikes, but also with lots of pedestrians. We were now five or six cars ahead of the Audi.
As we approached the end of the road, the traffic lights started changing to red.
“Go round, go round. Now!” Mark shouted. Becs did as she was told, pulled around the car in front to jump the lights. A Routemaster double-decker bus was just starting to pull around the corner as the Fiat darted past. I craned around in the seat and scanned the junction, expecting the Audi to storm across on the opposite side, lights blazing and horn blaring. Before I could see past the bus and the other traffic, Becs turned left onto another side street.
“We need to change cars. Dump this one,” Mark said.
“What?!” Becs responded.
“Sorry, but this one is burned. It’ll flash up on licence plate recognition systems everywhere. You’ve got to ditch it. There. NCP.”
Up ahead was a National multi-storey Car Park. We entered, drove to the top floor and parked up. I looked over the edge of the car park to the street below, checking for the black Audi. It could be on its way up already. It was getting dark, a wind was picking up and the sky looked heavy.
Becs locked the car, the indicator lights flashing twice.
“What are you doing?” Mark said. “Leave it unlocked. In fact, leave the keys in the ignition.”
“He’s right. It’s better if it gets stolen,” I said, and then whispered to her, “Remember what Lee did, it worked for him, it’ll work for you.”
“We better go,” Mark said.
I looked around. We were alone and there weren’t any other cars coming or going. There were only about ten cars on the top floor in total and the little Fiat was tucked in the middle of a row of five. Almost hidden.
“Hang on a minute. Before we go anywhere, I want some fucking answers,” I was feeling angry. Angry with the whole situation — with this guy who called himself Mark. He had told those who were against us where we were. So why was he helping us now?
“It’ll be better if we got somewhere safe,” Mark said.
“We’re fine right here for now. There’s no-one else here, and yeah, we will be going 'somewhere safe', just not with you. Unless you can convince us why you now want to help? One reason to not just walk away now, unless you think you can stop me,” I said, mentally readying myself.
“Because I know you are innocent, and I can prove it,” Mark said.
Was this true, could he prove it? How could I trust him?
“But will you, or are you using it to bribe me. Why do you want to help now, why the sudden change?”
“I didn’t agree with the level four sanctions they ordered on your group, so I started to—”
I cut Mark off, “Level four sanctions on the group? What does that mean? The group, do you mean the OTG?”
“Level four is complete deletion of any on-line presence: bank, phone, driving licence, insurance policies, email, text, YouTube, Foursquare, Facebook, Bibo, everything,” Mark explained.
The anger just kept growing and hearing Mark describe what he had done was feeding the fire even more. “And you can do that? I feel like beating the shit out of you! So why did you do it, if you didn’t agree with it? You still haven’t told me why you now want to help me either.”
“Because I thought I was working for the Home Office or military intelligence or something. After the level four sanction I started digging around the chain above me. What I found was very vague at first, but a reference kept appearing. Forty Five Com Twelve…”
From the other end of the car park, the stairwell doors banged open and a solitary figure carrying a briefcase walked towards us. Both Mark and I looked nervously towards him.
“Okay, come on, let’s move. You can talk while we walk.”
As we made our way down to street level via another stair well, Mark explained some more about the 45Com12 references he kept coming across whilst hacking various systems. It was never an official reference, but would appear regularly within legal correspondence, share allocations, title deeds, trustee audits, and even cabinet internal memos.
“I thought I had hit on a new MPs expenses type scandal at first, but then some of the names behind the 45Com12 group started to emerge and included MPs, Lords, US Senators, Chinese dignitaries, German and French Ministers, and there are others. The 45Com12 are a global deal. But then the reference came up on some black op correspondence, very cryptic, but clear about the target. You.”
“Okay, so the people you work for are high up in government. Still doesn’t explain why you want to help me now.”
“No you’re right, but I didn’t sign up for my hacking skills to be used to help assassinate innocent members of the public or to suppress technology that quite frankly, should be made public. I take it that what you found was real, otherwise why would they want to stop you?” Mark said as we crossed the road, checking all the time for anyone showing us any interest, people following us, or anything that just looked out of place. Nothing was obvious.
“Okay, okay, I’ll assume that you are who you say you are and that you want to help me or us. But how? They’ve just seen you, so you’re not on the inside any more. How can you help?” I asked as Becs hailed a black taxi. “Quick because you ain’t coming with us.”
“Other than my controller, no-one knows what I look like and like I said before, I can prove you’re innocent. I can help you bring down their empire. My skill set is quite unique,” Mark said and held out a business card.
I took his card and read it quickly before pocketing it.
“Ha, I used to work just up the road from you,” I said.
“Yes I know, Kleinwort Benson. Kevin’s done well since you disappeared,” Mark said as I climbed in the back of the black London Taxi.
“Mark. We need to talk some more.” I said as the Taxi pulled away.
SIS HQ - Vauxhall Cross, London. Day 49.
The operations room for Operation Bellring was relatively quiet after a flurry of activity the day before when American security agents were closing in on Bateman. Admittedly the British SIS were spectators as the American CIA, operating on UK soil under Extraordinary Rendition protocol, managed to track Bateman and were in position to lift him with minimal impact.
Seconds before the lift was about to be executed, Bateman was on the run. Again. Those at SIS watched the video feed from the pursuit car. The intention was to perform a hard stop in a less populated area, but the London traffic combined with the nimbleness of the lit
tle Fiat won over the much larger Audi. Wolf watched from the back of the room as the operation unfolded. He could feel Rourke’s frustration as they saw the Fiat weave its way through the London traffic, getting further and further away from the pursuit car until it was no longer in sight.
Once again, Bateman had escaped. It was an all too familiar situation for General Rourke who stormed out of the Ops room back into his office.
As the door sealed itself shut, one of the AV technicians laughed, commenting, “That’d make a great commercial for Fiat.” No one else laughed.
Agent Cornell was about to leave the op room, when Wolf caught his attention.
“I need to touch base with my office and the labs, so I’m going back to my hotel,” Wolf said as he walked with Cornell.
“Okay. There's an update briefing at four. Rourke’s going to want to kick someone’s arse, so if you can bring anything new,” Agent Cornell said before he entered General Rourke’s office.
Wolf checked his watch and figured he had plenty of time to check in with his office and call home. He had promised his wife he would keep the trip as short as possible and that his only task was to deliver the evidence they had on the Bateman case.
Using the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection, Wolf logged on and collected his emails. There were the usual casual chatty ones from friends and colleagues, and two from the Forensic Science Lab. These were what he was waiting for.
The first was the finger print evidence from the gun that Maria Becker had handed in, claiming it was the gun that Mueller had used to try to setup and kill Bateman. A claim that had appeared ludicrous at first. The forensics report was clear and concise with no judgements. Four sets of prints were found on the gun, all of which were identifiable. They belonged to Mueller, Bateman, Dominik and Maria Becker. This wasn’t remarkable in itself. What did register with Wolf was the fingerprint layering order.
Some of the fingerprints were partially on top of each other, allowing the order the gun was handled to be deduced. Maria Becker’s prints were easy to separate out and they existed only on either side of the slide where she had picked the gun up like a dirty pair of socks. The other prints were partials, but it clearly showed that Dominik had handled the gun after Mueller and Bateman. More importantly, it appeared that Mueller had handled the gun first, his prints being the lowest layer. This wasn’t conclusive, as all finger print evidence is circumstantial, but in light of the strong accusations against Mueller, supposedly one of the BKA’s best detectives, it added weight to Maria Becker’s assertions and Director Werner’s fears.