by Andy McNab
Rio had been impressed and had been digging into Jack for quite a while. ‘Mate, if she was for real, you’d be punching well above your weight, know what I mean?’
I smiled to myself. If we got out of this in one piece, maybe I should set up Jack and Claudia on a blind date.
Jack still didn’t look as if he was feeling good about himself. He was having a hard job trying to laugh along with the two in the back.
I leant across the central console. ‘Mate, you’ve got to let it go. You texting the Owl? I fucked up, you fucked up, but that’s history. This Gail shit? Soon that’ll be history too.’
Gabe leant forward and gave Jack a shoulder tap over the driver’s seat. ‘You’re one of us. Always have been, always will be. Don’t worry, just like he says, we’re going to get it sorted, no drama.’
Rio was more interested in Yulia than what was going on between Gabe and Jack. He stroked his throat with a forefinger and thumb. ‘Why you got all that over your neck? We’re the ones who are supposed to have tattoos and we ain’t got one between us. I can’t even make out what it is.’
She turned to him. There was no embarrassment, no excuses. ‘Because I could decide to have it. It was my choice. What you people don’t understand is that choice is a privilege. In my country there is no such thing. You have to take what you are given. But this,’ she copied Rio’s action with her thumb and forefinger, ‘this is my choice. When FSB wanted me to work with them, I had no choice. But this I could choose. And it’s a rose, growing out of a swamp.’
Rio wasn’t convinced, not that he could see much of it in the gloom. ‘Really? I think whoever did that tatt used a bit too much dark blue and black. I can’t make it out.’ He raised his voice as if we couldn’t hear him upfront anyway. ‘There you go, Jack. After all this you should become a tattoo artist. All that black and blue – they love it.’
Yulia went back to busying herself with the ‘woman’ Jack had got himself embroiled with. Gabe and Rio kept an eye on what she was up to online. We had to remember she wasn’t one of us.
I turned to face forward again, the hedges each side containing the headlights. I checked the satnav and made sure we were going east with a little touch of north. We wanted to keep off the main A30 that bisected the county. I turned back and watched her as she tapped away. ‘Yulia?’ Her face lifted. ‘How did you get involved in this sort of thing, the troll farms? How did it all happen?’
She dropped her hands and the mobile onto her lap. ‘It wasn’t just the money, not at first. Some of the longest hacking forums are run by FSB. They almost turn the way the Soviet Union was into a romance, and they want Russia to be a superpower again, a country to be reckoned with. And being Russian speaking, and I’ve always thought of Russia as my home, I fell for it. Almost being a patriot – attacking the West.’
‘So you see us and America as the enemy?’
‘Of course. To hack the West is a heroic thing. The West was our former enemy, and you know what? It still is. You use your infrastructure to monopolize the internet for your own use and against us. So if we don’t fight back and take the monopoly away, we lose.
‘That was why I first worked at the troll farms, exposing a whoring politician on Capitol Hill or spreading stories to change policies in the US, Germany, wherever it was needed. You – you believe anything that is out there. But I was one of the stupid people who got the money and got into drugs, alcohol, became antisocial. I burnt out and dropped out.
‘I lived on the street, just fucking myself up even more. No money for drugs, no money for alcohol, doing anything I could to survive.’
Gabe had his sensible, almost compassionate, head on. It sounded really weird coming from him. ‘So where are your parents? Why couldn’t you go home?’
‘They moved to Poland when the Soviet Union collapsed, like a lot of people. I stayed in Belarus. No one arrests you for hacking there. Like I said, it’s a free market – and I got smart. I got cleaned up and decided to get myself onto that market and make money. I didn’t sell anything or scam people, like these.’ She held up the mobile. ‘It takes too long. For me, it was all about raw data. Not compromising anyone, information on a whore and a politician, no. Just data. I collated data for whoever would pay for it.’
I took that with the pinch of salt it deserved, but I wasn’t there to judge. It wasn’t like I was a soldier in the Salvation Army. ‘What are you doing working for FSB again?’
‘I’m so good, they asked me. So therefore I had to. When we worked on a troll farm, techniques were needed to crack a site and various exploits, software programs, so a tool had to be developed. But when I came back into the game it became crystal clear to me that all data is open. You just need to be able to see it. That’s why FSB came back to hire me. Because I can see Nigella. I can see a way of getting in. And that’s why the Owl should employ me, not just question me.’
I had a feeling it might be more than just a questioning she would face if she didn’t give up what she knew. ‘And this Bogachev? That’s where you learnt the scams?’
She nodded. ‘That is how FSB got to me, for the troll farms. The gangs, they are like recruiting agents.’
Maybe she thought it wouldn’t look good to the Owl on her CV.
Rio was impressed. ‘Good pitch, mate! Nick, he should give her a job. What do you reckon?’
Jack announced: ‘We’re twenty away from Taunton.’
I played about with the satnav, closing the scale to see more of the country, then checked the fuel gauge.
Jack was ahead of me. ‘We still have enough for Bristol.’
I turned back to Yulia. ‘Can you google for a park-and-ride south-west of Bristol?’
She looked confused. ‘Parkin who?’
Rio took the phone off her. ‘No drama, Yuli. I’ll do it.’
61
We were on the south-west edge of Bristol, following signs for Long Ashton park-and-ride, as I turned off the radio after listening to the four a.m. local BBC news. There had been plenty about Brexit and a couple of items about extremist attacks. Two sixteen-year-old German Islamists had been arrested in relation to a bombing in Essen earlier in the year, and two French soldiers protecting a railway station had been attacked by an Islamist with an axe. Brexit and terrorism were now the staples of the news, and there were no reports of any incidents around the forestry block, nothing about any major roads being closed. However, there was a mention of sixty-two-year-old Gloria Hadley, staying at Sennen with her husband and their grandchildren. She had disappeared early yesterday morning from Seaview Holiday Park where they were enjoying a week’s break. She was last seen dressed in blue pyjamas and a white dressing-gown. Police and the Coastguard were due to resume their search for her later that morning. I turned down the volume.
‘Okay …’
Everybody except Jack was half dozing, but they stirred.
‘This is a new bound. We’re not going into the park-and-ride – we dump the Beamer off-site and everything stays, apart from the Vectors. We just use the public transport to get into the city. We’ll leave the weapons in a hide to come back to after we’ve found out who’s scamming Jack.’
The murmurs of agreement were sleepy. Jack had had the heater on full-blast because the warmth in the footwell helped his stump when he was sitting for so long.
‘Yulia, a laptop or tablet, what do you need?’
She rubbed a face that looked as greasy and tired as the lads’ and, no doubt, mine. ‘It doesn’t matter, but it has to be a Mac.’ She pointed to the mobile charging on top of the centre console. ‘So it’s compatible. Personal hotspot.’
I hit Safari and checked if Bristol had a CeX. ‘Jack, you got a pen and paper in here anywhere?’
Of course he did. There was an A5 drawing pad and a collection of numbered pencils in the glove compartment. I wrote down the address and we started to see signs for the park-and-ride.
‘Jack, time for the small roads. Find somewhere to hide this and we�
��ll walk back to the park-and-ride.’ I checked the opening times on Safari. ‘It’s good from six.’
We turned left, out of the ambient glow of the city ahead of us, and almost straight away I saw signs for a golf club. ‘That’s the one. A Beamer estate, with a dog guard, all you need is a Barbour on the back seat and you’ve cracked it.
‘Okay, everyone, switch on. We’re going to be moving soon. Jack will dump us on the road just short of the golf club in case of CCTV.’
As everyone sorted themselves out, I pulled the mobile charger from the power jack and shoved it and the phone into my jacket. I checked Safe on my Vector and passed it to Rio to bag up, then got back to Jack. ‘Mate, we’ll find a place just off the road and wait for you. Go in, park up as normal, keep your head down, then come out and walk back the way we’ve just come. We’ll grab you. Okay?’
He nodded and slowed the Beamer so I could check the area to the left.
He was still trying to be in mega-helpful mode. ‘What about the satnav, Nick? Should I smash it, take it out, so if they find the car they don’t know where we’ve been?’
‘Not a problem. They would have hit us by now if they’d been tracking us, and if they find the car, so what? It doesn’t matter where we’ve been, it’s where we’re going that we need to keep to ourselves.’
We drove slowly alongside a continuous treeline and the entrance to the club was approaching. I checked behind me, between the two front seats, for headlights and to make sure the rest of them were ready. ‘Just here, mate. No brake lights, just in case. And for us lot, remember, just the first click of the doors. Jack can sort that out when he parks up.’
The Beamer stopped on the handbrake and the three in the rear climbed out. I leant across to Jack. ‘Once you get on the road, count the paces to where we link up, okay?’
He gave me a thumbs-up. He knew there wasn’t time for any questions.
While the Beamer rolled on to the club entrance, I took the weapons bag and gathered us a metre or so into the hedgerow to be clear of any headlights. I kept my voice low. ‘We’ll hide it around here – Rio, you take the stag for Jack, and I’ll get on with this.’ It wasn’t as if we were going tens of metres away, but somebody had to be thinking about security while the job was done.
It was perfect ground for what we needed, a mess of brambles, bushes and fallen trees, and I was maybe five metres in when the ground dipped sharply to help us even more. I switched on the mobile screen for the next bit. You could hide something at night, and come back in daylight to find it sticking out like a maypole, with a busy walking track right next to it.
In the faint glow I shoved the bag under a rotten fallen tree that had seen quite a few years of history by the size of it, then covered it as best I could with brambles and brush.
I went back to the others and gathered them in close. ‘It’s five metres directly behind here, in the big dip, under a massive trunk. Jack’s going to count from the junction and give us a number. From the number count, chuck a right.’
Rio muttered, ‘Got it,’ and Gabe gave me a double-tap on the arm. Yulia didn’t say anything. It was nothing to do with her and she knew when to shut up.
We stood in the treeline as a vehicle rumbled past, right to left, and it was several seconds before the dead quiet of the early morning resumed. I hoped Jack would get a move on. I wanted to be in habitation before first light so it wouldn’t be suspicious that we were on foot.
It wasn’t long before I heard him padding along the road and Rio brought him into the pack.
‘The foot count is eighty-six.’
‘Eighty-six – everybody got that?’
Obviously everyone’s foot pattern was going to be different, but Jack’s and Gabe’s would probably be roughly the same because of their prosthetics. It would more or less work and that was all that mattered.
Now I wanted to crack on and find out one way or another if we could locate these scammers and sort out Jack, because we still had to sort the Owl before we landed up like Gloria Hadley.
‘Okay, listen in. The plan. We need to split up when we get to the city. I’ll go on my own – I need to recce a meeting place for the Owl. I want to bring him into our killing ground rather than the other way round. As soon as we sort out Jack’s rip-off merchants, we can get on with our other business.
‘Rio and Yulia,’ I dug in my pocket and pushed the drawing paper into Rio’s hand, ‘CeX. Buy a laptop, whatever she needs for the job. The reason I want you two together is because you’re going to blend in. You, a black man with dreadlocks in Bristol – they come in useful at last. And, Yulia, you’re working at Pret, or you’re an academic. Big student town, you’ve cracked it. But remember, take your time with your purchase because it’s a big one. Make them check it out, ask questions, like you’ve been saving up for it for months.
‘Gabe and Jack, soon as you’re in town, start looking for a van. Gabe, you’re the only one without a marked face. You might have a fucked-up accent but that doesn’t matter. It’s the face that counts. Take Jack along for a posh voice if it’s really needed. It’s got to be cash, and it’s got to be private. White-van man, no windows. We might be living in it for a while. Did you get more cash out while you were running about looking for me?’
He was insulted, whether about the accent or not thinking of cash, I wasn’t sure. ‘Of course we fucking did.’
‘Good. How much have we got?’ I dug around my neck and brought out my wallet to pass over my cash to Gabe. ‘So you got fifteen hundred, and I got out two grand. We spent a bit on fuel, tents, food, general shit, so Rio gets five hundred for Yulia’s stuff. We all keep a hundred for ourselves and the rest is on the van. Does that make sense?’
Gabe nodded as he collected and divvied out the cash as best he could in the dark. ‘I’ve got it.’
Rio had a thought that he couldn’t wait to share with Gabe. ‘Fuck me. That’s over two grand you keep. That’s more than the Jeep was worth. We’ve already paid up, mate – that’s our money you got there and you’re buying new wheels so that means we’ve pitched in for your new wagon. We’re evens.’
Gabe scoffed. ‘You wish.’
There was still more I needed Gabe to know.
‘Also, mate, we need sleeping bags and mats. Just cheap old shit for the back of the van if we have to keep moving.’
Rio grabbed my arm. ‘What if all these lads are abroad, Nick?’
‘That’s why I’m recceing for the Owl meet, just in case. If they’re not here, the scammers become just another day for us – but at least we’ll know where they are. Mate, you still got that knife with you? You’ve got to hand it over.’
‘Why?’
‘Like I said, you’re coming in handy at last – black guy in Bristol with dreadlocks. All good. But with lips like split sausages, you’re up for being stopped and searched. If they find that thing, you’re fucked.’
He shrugged. ‘Fair one.’ He produced the KA-BAR in its sheath and I shoved it down my jeans exactly as he had, on the side, taking-a-knife-to-school style.
A car zoomed left to right, heading for the city, doing at least eighty along the empty road. No sooner had it appeared than it disappeared.
‘Okay, any questions?’
There weren’t any as Gabe handed me my share of the cash.
‘Now the boring stuff. We leave here together for the first K and a bit, until we hit habitation. As soon as we’re in streetlights we split up into our groups. Do your own thing, sort yourselves out, then head for the park-and-ride. It opens at six. You can normally buy tickets from the driver but pay with small notes if you can.
‘Get a ride into town, have something to eat, start checking out vans, do whatever you need to do, but keep a low profile. The first RV will be at twelve thirty at the King Street Brew House. It’s right at the end of King Street in the town centre, by the river. It’s easy to find – it’s full of pubs. Everyone goes there on the piss. The Brew House is one of those micro-brewer
y places, lots of space. It’ll be packed at lunchtime so we’ll blend in. Any questions?’
There were none.
‘Okay, now the ERV. If things get fucked up, the ERV is the Hippodrome. Every fucker knows where it is. It’s the local music centre, large open spaces outside, bus stops, lots of footfall, places to sit and shops to lurk around. ERV time for the next two days is at seventeen hundred for two hours.’ I said it again so there was no doubt. ‘Seventeen hundred for two hours. If you have no luck, you’re on your own. If anyone does get separated or there’s a drama, you get yourself out of it and you link up at the ERV. No one’s going to leave the city until the end of the ERV.’
Rio leant into Yulia’s ear as I continued. ‘He means emergency rendezvous. You know, meeting place.’
‘Buy return tickets or it’s going to look weird, but don’t come back here. It might be the weapons or the Beamer that have compromised us, and whoever it is will be sitting here, waiting. Any questions?’
Gabe was still fumbling with the cash. ‘How the fuck do you know Bristol so well? You lived here? Will you get recognized?’
‘Hereford, mate. It’s about an hour away and we used the city for urban surveillance training. Long hair, trainers, shooting around in fast cars. Got to know it really well.’
I wasn’t expecting any more questions. There were few details to pick up on because it didn’t need to be a detailed plan.
But Yulia had one. ‘What about your cell? I need it to get online.’
‘We’ll do all that when we’re together at the Brew House, twelve thirty.’ I made sure my tone didn’t invite a reply. ‘One last thing. Rio, you’d better come with me and I’ll show you the hide. If all goes to plan, and we van up, we’ll come back for the weapons and it’ll be one of us who’ll collect. Those two will spend all day stumbling about and their legs are going to fall off as they fuck about in the dark. Gabe, can you explain to Jack what I said before he got here?’