by M G Leslie
“The minster?”
“Yes of course – I saw him after his service and approached him in a very quiet and friendly kind of way and asked for his help, opening with the line, ‘Please can you help me as I have a problem?’
He, of course, replied that he was happy to try and help, step this way, etc.… everything you’d expect from a minister – which was all fine, until I showed him the problem. I.e. Photos of him doing things he shouldn’t have done with some poor little kids.
Initially he looked shocked and desperate, then he tried to fake being ashamed and then finally, after I told him what I wanted, he gave up all that rubbish and agreed to provide me the information I needed – in exchange for me not telling the authorities and his church seniors what he was up to of course. I should add that there were a lot of photos and they were really horrible – I mean, truly sick!”
“How did you get the photos in the first place?” Pete interrupted.
“Oh, I followed him – then an infrared camera told me what he was doing. But obviously those pictures aren’t clear enough, so I waited for him to go out and hid some remotely controlled cameras in the room at the back of the church where he was taking these boys and captured the shots that way – all very simple really.
So anyway, we set up regular meetings over the next couple of weeks and it was all looking good. Not surprisingly though, as the shipment time got closer he became more and more stressed, but I did believe he was providing the real details – and indeed, GCHQ and MI5 confirmed, the leads he gave us checked out in terms of the UK end – and the locations in South America checked out as he’d described them, because I spent quite a few nights validating his claims about stockpiles of drugs, warehouses and the like. On a couple of occasions I even followed a truck that was moving the drugs from the processing plant to the warehouse – maybe I’ll tell you more about that another time, because that was actually quite interesting – just briefly, these guys were using, what I assume were old logging trails in the jungle to move their drugs. They’d clearly paid off farmers, Police checkpoints – the works – it was very well organised – I tell you, if British Rail, or whatever they’re called this week, were half as efficient as these guys, the UK would be a lot more successful.”
“Stick to the story,” said Pete, “And stop knocking the UK – it could be a lot worse.”
“Sorry – you’re right – it could.”
“You were getting close to the shipment date?” said Pete, reminding him where he was in his story as they filled their plates with food and sat down to eat.
“Right, yes,” said Price. “The shipment was the next day and it was the final meeting when he crossed a line.
I arrived at the agreed location early, as always, and saw him emerging from a public toilet with a young boy who was crying and had clearly been abused. He didn’t know I’d seen him, so I put that to one side for a moment and watched him send the boy on his way and walk over to the café where we were meeting.
Once he was seated and had ordered a drink, I walked over and sat down opposite him – I was using the drinking ordering part as his signal to me that everything was OK.”
“Very wise,” said Pete, “You can’t be too careful. Although, I have to ask – what would you have done if he hadn’t bought the drink, thereby signalling a problem – do you have a standard response?”
“No, it very much depends on what’s agreed,” said Price. “Sometimes, like in this case, it would have been an abort and meet again at a later time – other times it might be to meet the next week, perhaps the same place or a different place – it all depends.
Although, that said, on one notable occasion, I shot the guy in the head from 50 meters away. I should add that I had video cameras already recording the scene and I wanted to see who came running, or more significantly, quietly walked away. But that was an extreme situation – a conversation for another day perhaps.
So anyway, seated across the table from him, I ordered a drink as well and when they’d both arrived, we started to discuss the details of the shipment – location, timing and people involved. I’d insisted on written evidence and sure enough, he’d turned up with a list of full names, addresses, size and weight of the shipment, storage locations – I mean, everything I asked for – it was all good and tied back to the information I’d received earlier – so I was pretty happy. Actually, cancel that – I was over the moon because what he gave us was nothing less than gold dust – we were going to close them down for good, or at a minimum, a very long time.
So, I photographed it with my phone and uploaded it to London before addressing the pressing issue of his behaviour – which I think I mentioned, he’d previously said was ‘In the past’, ‘A bad mistake’, etc.… all that kind of stuff.
Now, I’m not a policeman as you know, but enough is enough, so I told him that I needed to burn the paperwork to make sure that it couldn’t fall in to the wrong hands and cause problems for him or me. He seemed to be convinced by that and, once we’d finished our drinks, he showed me round the back of the café where a lot of people seemed to have dumped their rubbish – so an ideal place to quietly dispose of the paperwork, and as it turned out, him.
As we stood there, he was obviously expecting me to take a cigarette lighter, or perhaps matches, out of my pocket. So you can imagine his surprise when I took out my Smith and Wesson and started to fit the silencer.
The original plan, as I say, was to wait for the SAS to sort him out along with the rest of the names on the list, but I could tell from previous meetings that he was planning to disappear, if only to avoid me.
Realising what was about to happen, he started to back up, saying, ‘No, no, no, but I helped you, you can’t do this’ - you can imagine, it was all very pathetic and pointless. In fact, in hindsight, his best option would have been to have turned on his heels and ran, because the silencer was resisting my attempts to fit it – so he may have had a 20-30% chance of success if he’d just legged it.
Anyway, after some jiggling it went on and I decided to shoot him in the head – don’t really know why – possibly because, and this is a bit strange, I couldn’t help having a nagging feeling he was wearing a vest.”
“A church minister?” said Pete, in disbelief.
“I know,” Price continued, “A minister wearing a bulletproof vest does sound a bit strange, but there was something about the shape of his mid-rift. So anyway, there’s him backing up and crying when I fired twice in quick succession. And bugger me – I hit his eyes dead centre. Took them both out! I couldn’t believe it. And the thing is, I only fired twice because he was moving, so I thought I might miss and wanted to be sure. I can only think that I was slightly off with the first shot, which must have made his head start to spin as I fired the second, bringing his other eye in to the line of fire – as I say, I fired the two shots in very quick succession – there would have been only a fraction of a second between them.
But there you go, that’s the story – I did warn you that it was not very interesting really – just another bad guy out of the way.”
“So,” said Pete, “Was he wearing a vest?”
“Dunno – I didn’t bother to look to be honest.”
“What about the photos – you destroyed those I presume?”
“Actually no. Now this you’ll find funny – I went in to the church and inserted one photo in to each of the hymnbooks so that his congregation would find out what he had been up to during the next service. Not that he’d be there to face the music as it were – but nevertheless...”
Pete looked serious, “That’s not funny Price, what about the kids?”
“Oh I blacked their faces out with a marker pen, so they couldn’t be identified – don’t worry. You’re probably right though – but hey, it’s too late now – no point in crying over spilt milk.”
“Did Special Branch get the drugs?”
“Yes, quite a big shipment, and the SAS went in to deal with the li
st of names I’d acquired and the warehouses – the whole lot went up in smoke – even the factory, transport, workshops – everything – we definitely set them back many years because we even burned the fields where they were growing the stuff. So it all ended well – except for the minister who still got off lightly in my view. So what were the rumours about?”
“Oh, that’s nothing – they reckoned you tortured him or something.”
Price laughed, “Oh for goodness sake, of course not. People are full a crap some times.” Then he changed the subject, “The steak here looks fantastic by the way.”
“It should be, we fly it in from Australia. The local steak is a bit tough. Whilst the Japanese allegedly massage the cows that become their Wagyu steaks – in the Philippines it seems like they work the life out of the poor animal before shooting it in the head and serving it on a plate,” Pete replied.
Price shrugged his shoulders; “It’s a poor country with lots of natural disasters, I suppose it’s inevitable – you can’t blame them for that.”
“True,” replied Pete.
An hour or so later, Price left the embassy as quietly as he had entered. He walked around the corner and picked up a taxi back to the shopping district of The Forte, where he changed taxis and headed back to the hotel in order to rest before going to the club again that night.
As the taxi drove him back, Price couldn’t help having a nagging concern. As he’d told Pete, he always liked to make contacts work for him. He didn’t like paying for information and he always preferred to have something that meant the person, who was effectively working for him, owed him in some way – experience told him that this approach led to the information being more accurate. Whereas he knew Mike tended to work a different way. They hadn’t crossed paths in the past and Price didn’t know him personally, but as a senior officer, he had been involved in discussions about Mike’s performance and was one of the people who could approve financial payments for information. This was all strictly controlled, which is why Price remembered Mike, as he had kept asking for more and more money – to the point where Price had finally recommended rejecting the request. In fact he laughed to himself when he thought about his exact words, “We’re in the intelligence business, not money laundering for goodness sake!”
Then suddenly a thought crossed his mind, “Money laundering? A dodgy club would not be a bad way to launder money – all the money coming in is usually cash, so if extra money arrives from who knows where, who’s going to know the difference? Hmmm, maybe a more discreet visit to the club is required – it’s a long shot, but what harm can it do – maybe they keep records – many people are surprisingly naïve in that way and keep records that incriminate themselves.” He knew that from his SIS basic training.
He looked up and caught the driver’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “Sorry, change of plan, please turn the car round, I need to go back to The Fort.”
Somewhat surprised, the driver nodded that he understood and pulled the car over to the right before executing a U-turn and driving back to The Fort. Once at The Fort, Price re-traced his steps to the embassy, re-entering the building as before.
“Hello stranger,” said Pete, smiling as Price walked through the door to the SIS room in the embassy. “Sorry,” replied Price, as he explained his thinking and followed Pete to another secure room in the building with it’s own pin-code-protected door lock.
From the outside, this room didn’t look any different to the communications room or any other office, but once inside, Price could clearly see that this was the equipment room with an assortment communications devices, weapons and other equipment used by the intelligence officers in the course of their duties.
“They’re bound to have a safe of some variety,” said Price, “What’s normal in this part of the world?”
“Oh, very traditional,” said Pete, “Very much the old-fashioned type here with the dial on the front and usually only a few numbers to find. You’ll want this,” he said as he picked up a black box around the size of a small shoebox. “I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the latest model – just place the hole over the dial, hold it in place and push the button on the front.
It automatically adjusts to grip the wheel and the back is magnetic, so unless you’re really unlucky, it should stick to the front of the door. It’s pretty simple really – it counts the clicks to determine the contact points, parks and calculates the number of wheels, determines the likely combinations as a result and tries them one after the other. The whole process shouldn’t take more than two or three minutes. Do you want our friends to cover your back?”
“Yes, that might be nice please – these people have already disposed of one, possibly two, of our people and I have no desire to be their third,” said Price – after which they sat down and worked out the details, the timing and the communication methods they would use – including messages they would use to acknowledge each other, warn each other of problems and even tell each other to abort and run.
Several cups of coffee later, their plans were finalised. Two SAS men would cover Price’s back from the alleyway behind the Club One building whilst two others went in the front door and sat at the bar pretending to be ordinary customers. They would try to avoid chatting to any girls – although, as Price said, “Fat chance of that.” But, in any case, they would be there to watch and provide information on who was going up and down the stairs via a series of clicks on a small device they would have in their pockets. These were linked to minute earpieces that enabled them to hear responses from Price, Pete or the other SAS men, who could send and receive messages the same way.
Anyone monitoring communications wouldn’t notice the clicks as anything more than static – at least, that was the theory. However, in a real emergency, the earpieces also enabled voice communication – although, given that this would not be encrypted, that had to be reserved for emergencies.
Price would enter the building through an upstairs window once the two men at the bar had confirmed that there wasn’t much movement up there. The time chosen was 4am – before the club closed at 5am when the staff would be upstairs counting their takings for the night, but later enough that the majority of the guests would have gone home – with any luck.
With everything agreed, Price headed back to the hotel as before, and it was just after 6pm when he walked through the door in to his room.
He let it swing shut behind him before proceeding in to the main part of the room. Then, he methodically checked the en suite, lounge and wardrobes in case an intruder was hiding, before returning to the door and pushing the security latch in place, making it almost impossible for someone to enter without making a lot of noise.
Having assured himself that he was alone, Price kicked off his shoes and went to the safe. He was pleased to note that his satellite phone and camera hadn’t been moved since he put them there earlier in the day. Retrieving the camera, he switched it on, entered the settings menu and selected a hidden sub-menu – then he proceeded to walk casually around the room.
Anyone watching him would have believed that he was looking at some photos on the LCD display. However, in truth, it was a poor camera – the primary purpose of the device was to scan for transmitting devices in the room. I.e. Bugs.
Having satisfied himself that the room was clean, Price ordered some food from the room service menu, put his mobile phone on charge and switched on the television to catch up on the latest new of the day. A short while later his food arrived and he sat down to eat before taking a refreshing shower, setting his alarm for 2:30am and getting some rest before the night’s activities.
CHAPTER 3 – Eavesdropping
As events started to unfold in the Philippines, 700 miles North West a tall dark-haired Caucasian man stood in a large room 20 meters below Stanley Bay, just off the south coast of Hong Kong Island.
He was looking at a wall of dozens of LCD computer screens that displayed a constantly changing stream of numbers and a map
of the world. In front of the screens, two more people were sitting next to each other, working at their computers as the Caucasian man watched.
To his left, the wall was mostly glass, through which it was easy to see rows and rows of computers and computer network equipment disappearing in to the distance – the other two walls were just undecorated grey concrete – giving away the functional rather than aesthetic nature of the building.
Aside from the background hum of the air conditioning, all you could hear was the faint clicking sounds of the men’s fingernails typing on their computer keyboards. Then the Caucasian man spoke, “Can you break-in and decrypt their data?”
“Yes Sir,” said the man on the left.
“It’s easy Sir,” said the man on the right, looking up and over his shoulder. “Most of the data isn’t even encrypted. It’s just a case of determining the format of the data, piecing the bits back together and then we can see everything.”
The data they were referring to was being extracted from submarine communications cables.
For many years now, the world has been communicating internationally by using numerous underwater cables that link all the continents together. These enable us to make international phone calls, surf Internet websites in far flung places and, for the financial services industry, trade on stock markets around the world and transfer money from just about anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.
In Asia, there are around a dozen of these cables linking South East Asia to the USA. Most of these pass either directly or indirectly through Hong Kong, with the highest speed links landing in Stanley Bay on the south of the island, and Junk Bay in the southeast New Territories. Looking to the southwest of Hong Kong, similar submarine cables provide connectivity between many of the individual Asian countries before travelling across the Bay of Bengal to India, around the Arabian Sea and through the Suez Canal, under the Mediterranean Sea to Western Europe and across The Channel to the UK.