by James Becker
“There’s no need for that.”
“There is in my world. I’ve been shafted too often to start taking chances.”
The principal sounded substantially less than impressed by what he’d just heard, but Marsh didn’t care. Ever since he had begun in the business, he had done everything possible to make sure that he was never implicated in any form of criminal activity, and as a matter of routine he had always recorded all telephone calls that related in any way to his employment.
Then another thought struck him, as he turned and began retracing his steps toward Jessop’s antiquarian bookshop.
“You didn’t ask about Jessop’s other activities today,” he said, “and if you want my guess, whatever arrived this morning in that large cardboard box is now well beyond your reach.”
“What do you mean?”
“After that box was delivered, Mallory and Jessop walked out of the shop carrying a different cardboard box, but still quite a big one, and went to the local bank with it. I followed them inside, and I’m certain that they deposited the box in the bank’s vault. So if you want to get it out of there, you’re going to have to hire a team of experts who specialize in hacking their way into the safety-deposit boxes held inside banks. Alternatively, you’ll have to use that other impressively effective blunt instrument you have access to that would let you get inside.”
“What blunt instrument?” the principal asked.
“I thought you’d know, if anyone did,” Marsh replied. “A search warrant, of course. No need for bulky men in balaclavas wielding thermic lances, plastic explosives, or oxyacetylene cutters in the middle of the night. All you have to do is just turn up one bright and sunny morning, wave the warrant in front of you, and wait for the bank manager to lead you downstairs into the vault, unlocking the doors as he goes. Of course, I have no idea which safety-deposit box you need to look inside, and I have no clue what reason you could give to persuade some legal eagle to issue the warrant in the first place. But those are your problems, not mine.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” the principal said. “While you’re in the apartment, assuming you get the door open, see if you can find the chest and take some pictures of it, especially any metallic decoration on the outside. If there are any words written on the inside or anywhere else on the chest, photograph those as well. The other thing we’re interested in is any kind of ancient parchment, so if you see anything of that sort, get some decent pictures of it. Also, if you see anything written down that looks like a code, or any photocopies or written copies of old texts, take plenty of pictures that show the text clearly. Ideally, don’t remove anything from the apartment, because we don’t want Jessop to know that anyone has been in there. You should try to leave everything exactly the same when you leave as it was when you arrived.”
By that time, Marsh had almost reached Robin’s shop, and he glanced up and down the street to check for passersby before he did anything else.
“Right. I’m outside her place now,” he said, “so I’ll call you in a few minutes, whether or not I get inside.”
6
Via di Sant’Alessio, Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
Vitale was fluent in a number of languages, and when his telephone rang he looked first at the caller identification on the small screen before he answered the call. The double-four prefix was unmistakable, and even before glancing at the rest of the number that was displayed, he knew precisely who was calling and in which language he should speak.
“Good evening, my friend,” Vitale said in perfect English. “Have you any news?”
Not far from the center of Exeter, sitting on a public bench made from cast iron and wood, and dedicated to the eternal memory of some local worthy he doubted that anyone had ever heard of, Gary Marsh’s principal pressed his disposable mobile phone—a burner, in the language of the criminal world, and purchased sometime previously specifically for this operation—closer to his ear before he replied. He was a tertiary, a lay brother of the order, and one of several thousand unacknowledged supporters of the Dominicans around the world. Chosen for their dedication to the cause and at least in part for their own specific knowledge, assets, and—especially—access to government and commercial organizations, they were tasked with smoothing the way for any operations that the order might become involved in, and with providing covert assistance whenever necessary.
“The private inquiry agent we discussed is about to enter the target premises. I have given him specific instructions about the chest, as you requested, and provided him with information about what we are seeking in the most general terms. I have also ordered him to disturb nothing, and to rely on photographs of anything he sees of interest within the building. If at all possible, I’m hoping that he will be able to gain entrance to the property and leave it again without the target having any idea he was ever there. Do you have any other instructions at the moment?”
In his office on the Aventine Hill, Vitale shook his head.
“Not at the moment, my brother. Please contact me again once your operative has completed his assignment.”
7
Dartmouth, Devon
Marsh checked the street again, then walked quickly through the alleyway that led to the rear of the building and the spiral staircase that gave access to Robin Jessop’s small apartment. He didn’t feel comfortable with what he was doing, but he rationalized his actions because until he actually walked inside the building, uninvited, he wasn’t breaking any laws. And he expected to be in and out of the apartment in less than five minutes, no matter what he found or didn’t find.
He hadn’t mentioned to his principal that he’d actually seen Mallory carrying the case out of the shop and down the alley and, presumably, up to Jessop’s apartment, so he was reasonably confident that he would at least find that ancient relic there. The medieval booby trap sounded intriguing, in a kind of lethally dangerous way, but hopefully he would avoid triggering the device when he looked at the old chest. Or at least not be directly in the firing line if he inadvertently actuated whatever it contained.
At the top of the stairs he paused again and adjusted his watch. Then he glanced down at the street below, checking for any potential witnesses, but it was empty of pedestrians, and he couldn’t see anyone sitting in a parked car nearby, the way he himself had observed an unidentified man breaking into the building less than two weeks earlier. Quite apart from anything else, Robin Jessop clearly attracted a lot of attention from the criminal elements—in which category, at least at that moment, he included himself—which was puzzling, bearing in mind her profession.
For an instant, he wondered if the whole bookselling business was just some kind of a front, and that she was actually a spy or secret agent, or followed some entirely different profession. But then he rejected the notion. The idea of a spy in the sleepy town of Dartmouth really didn’t make sense, and not even the looming presence of the Royal Navy officer training college, the concrete battleship that was HMS Britannia, suggested otherwise.
Marsh knocked on the door in a somewhat perfunctory fashion, knowing beyond doubt that both Jessop and Mallory were still feeding their faces in the nearby restaurant, and when he got no reply he took a lockpick gun from his pocket, inserted the end into the Yale lock that secured the door, applied gentle turning force, and squeezed the trigger rapidly several times. The lockpick gun turned, and the door opened silently inward, Marsh immediately stepping inside. Before he did anything else, he pulled a packet from his jacket pocket, extracted a pair of latex medical gloves from it, and pulled them on, replacing the empty packet in his pocket before moving on.
It wasn’t a big apartment, as was quite obvious from the size of the building, and it took him less than thirty seconds to look into every room. But it was immediately apparent that the only room he needed to bother with was the study, which had presumably originally been a small second bedroom.
&
nbsp; The moment he stepped inside that room, he saw a clearly very old wooden chest on the floor in a kind of alcove almost opposite the door, which just confirmed what he had seen earlier: Mallory had obviously carried the chest from the bookshop up to the apartment. He walked over to it, lifted the chest out of the alcove, and placed it on the floor. Then he stood behind it, reached over the top of the ancient relic, seized the front of the lid, and opened the chest. Almost disappointingly, nothing happened, but when Marsh looked inside the lid, the mechanism that composed the booby trap was clearly visible, and it only took him a few moments to locate the metal pins that somebody—presumably Mallory—had inserted through holes in the lid to safely lock the device.
The chest was empty, but when he looked inside it he saw that there was a false bottom, because the piece of wood that formed the base was standing on its side instead of having been pushed flat. He made a quick estimate of the space that would be available if the base was in place, and guessed at around three-quarters of an inch. That would have been enough to hold a few documents, but nothing more substantial than that. Marsh took half a dozen pictures of the inside and the outside of the chest with the camera on his smartphone before closing the lid and replacing the relic where he’d found it.
Then he turned his attention to the rest of the small study. He walked across to the opposite wall and looked at the safe, and even tried turning the T-shaped handle on the door, but it was locked. Safecracking was a skill he certainly didn’t possess, so he just took a couple of pictures of the safe, including the name on the front, and a close-up photograph of the keyhole, then turned away. There were a few papers lying on the desk, one of which he photographed because he thought the information on it might be useful to him personally, rather than to his principal, later. He quickly checked the others but found nothing of obvious interest.
But beside the desk was a leather computer bag, which he picked up and opened. He ignored the laptop, power adapters, and other cabling that occupied one side of it, and instead inspected the three narrow slots on the opposite side that were intended to hold documents. As they were in fact doing. There were perhaps a couple dozen sheets of paper tucked away inside these.
Marsh pulled the wad of papers out of one slot, fanned them slightly so that a part of each one was visible, then placed them on the floor and took three photographs. That would ensure that when he replaced them in the computer bag they would be in exactly the same order as when he took them out. Then he looked at them more carefully, realized that they were all handwritten but that many were duplicates, presumably photocopies, and quickly took close-up pictures of each one that seemed unique. Some sheets were covered in apparently random patterns of letters, and he took a series of photographs of those as well.
He quickly collected all the papers, making sure they were in the same order as they had been before, and slid them back inside the leather computer case, which he replaced exactly where he had found it, but turned round the other way. Despite his briefing, he had decided that leaving a couple of fairly obvious clues in the apartment might give Mallory and Jessop a warning that they were again under surveillance.
Then the watch on his left wrist emitted a muted beeping tone, which he immediately silenced by pressing a button with his thumb. He had set the alarm on the watch for exactly seven minutes, which was all the time he was prepared to allow himself to spend inside the property, and that time was now up.
The very last thing he did was to glance around the office at floor level, checking the handful of electrical outlets. Older buildings in Britain are almost invariably ill-equipped with power sockets, because when they were constructed people genuinely didn’t need more than perhaps two or three in every room except the kitchen. But the demands of modern technology, which required power supplies for computers, printers, and photocopiers, and charging stations or docks for mobile phones and tablets, meant that almost everybody used either extension leads or mains adapters, or both, because they had to.
Tucked away more or less out of sight was exactly what he was looking for: a single power socket in the wall, into which a white mains adapter was plugged. From it, two electrical leads snaked away, one obviously supplying power to a printer. It took Marsh less than six seconds to remove the adapter from the socket and replace it with one he had been carrying in his pocket, and to attach the two power leads to it.
Moments later, he was standing at the door of the apartment and looking through the fish-eye peephole to make sure there was nobody outside the door. Then he opened the door, pulled it closed behind him, making sure that the Yale lock clicked into place, and walked down the spiral staircase.
He retraced his earlier steps, his path taking him in front of the restaurant where he had seen Jessop and Mallory sitting down to their dinner. He glanced to his right and saw that they were still in exactly the same place, talking animatedly together and with almost empty main-course plates in front of them. Marsh guessed that he could probably have spent another five or ten minutes in the apartment before there was any chance of them arriving, but that would have cut it far too fine for his own peace of mind. And, he hoped, he had probably got whatever it was that his principal was looking for.
He found another convenient spot to sit while he made a phone call. Or, to be exact, to send one text message and then make a phone call.
Marsh took a small spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket and flicked through it until he found the page that he needed. On it was a mobile phone number—though the SIM card it was linked with was not and had never been fitted in a mobile—and a coded instruction.
In fact, the mains power adapter that he had installed in the target apartment was rather more than it seemed. It would function exactly like any other adapter, but tucked away inside it, safe from prying eyes, was a microphone attached to an extremely nonstandard piece of circuitry. The device was actually a mains-powered bug that was designed to monitor any sounds within about thirty feet of its location.
In his professional capacity, Gary Marsh employed surveillance devices of many different types, but he always preferred to use equipment that operated from the mains supply in the target premises, because that meant he only needed to access the property once. Battery-powered devices fitted with adhesive pads or magnets were easy enough to attach under a desk or some other convenient place, and were usually small enough to be missed unless a thorough search was undertaken, but they normally had a battery life measured in days, or at best a couple weeks, and changing or charging the battery obviously required continued and frequent access to the device, something that was only very rarely possible. Marsh did use them when only short-term surveillance was needed, but he didn’t really like them.
Of course, the microphone inside the adapter was only a part of the story. The bug also contained a SIM card, and that was the clever bit. The built-in circuitry had both incoming and outgoing call functionality, which meant he could dial the number of the embedded SIM card from any phone in the world, and that would allow him to listen to whatever the microphone was picking up at that moment. In a target environment such as an office, where there would be activity between set hours, that was a useful option, but it really wouldn’t work in Robin Jessop’s apartment. She and Mallory might be out all day doing other stuff, and then work in the office late in the evening. Knowing that was one reason why he had installed that particular bug, which included a further refinement.
Marsh opened the messaging app on his mobile and entered the number of the SIM card as the recipient. Then he typed the coded instruction that had been supplied by the manufacturer as the text of the message, and sent it. That programmed the bug to call Marsh’s mobile phone as soon as the microphone detected any sounds in its vicinity, which meant that he could listen in to whatever was happening in Robin Jessop’s office, just as if he were sitting invisibly in a corner of the room.
That message sent, Marsh dialed the mobile
number of the man he was working for.
“I’m out,” he said when his call was answered. “There was an old wooden chest in the apartment, and there was some kind of complicated steel mechanism hidden in the lid. It looked like a couple of sword blades attached to powerful springs, but somebody had fashioned a pair of steel pins and slid them through holes in the decoration on the outside of the lid to stop it working. Like a couple of safety catches, I suppose.”
“Good work. That will please my—er—associates.”
Marsh didn’t miss the slight hesitation in the sentence, and not for the first time he wondered exactly whom he was dealing with, because it clearly wasn’t just one senior police officer involved in a kind of covert surveillance operation. There had to be a number of other people giving him his instructions.
“Did you find anything else?”
“There’s a biggish safe in the study. It looks as if it’s bolted to the wall, and I don’t have the skill to even try and get it open, but I’ve taken shots of it so if you do decide to get someone else to pay a visit, at least he’ll know what he’s facing. There were a few papers on the desk, but nothing of any obvious interest. But I did find a computer bag and there were papers inside it that seemed to be the kind of things you were looking for. I didn’t take them, but I did photograph them, and if you let me have a confirmed e-mail address, I’ll send them to you.”
“That’s good,” his principal said. “Use the same e-mail address as before. Do you still have the details?”