Absence of Mercy

by Joe McCoubrey

  Like Das Trio Berne, the disgraced politician had become little more than a jigsaw piece in Stratton’s master plan to bring that same Government to its knees.

  ***

  Container ship captain Charlie Wilson enjoyed a grandstand view of the Felixstowe port from his bridge high on the superstructure’s quarterdeck. He shifted his gaze from the windows to the clipboard held by one of the Revenue and Custom officers who had completed their inspection of the belongings of those crew members disembarking from the vessel for shore leave.

  Security of the containers was handled by a shipping agency via secure computer tracking software which was shared with the Custom authorities. Any tampering with the sealed locks would immediately blip an alarm.

  Wilson’s own distinctive bright red laptop was flashing pages from the software tracing system, with a corner of the screen showing a GPS fix on his ship’s current location within European shipping lanes. He wouldn’t go anywhere without it.

  “Just sign here, Charlie,” the Customs man requested.

  Wilson scrawled his signature across the clipboard sheet before bending to power off his laptop. He folded down the screen, removed the power lead, and stuffed the machine into a shoulder carry bag. “I’ll be taking this with me as well.”

  The Customs man nodded in acknowledgement. “Okay, you’re good to go. See you next trip.”

  Wilson walked from the bridge, crossed a passageway, and disappeared into a lift which took him down four levels to the gangplank walkway. He emerged onto the quayside and climbed aboard a shuttlebus waiting to take the crew to the train station almost a mile away. It would take less than two hours for Wilson to reach his destination.

  Inside his small London apartment he removed the laptop from its bag, hit the power button, and waited for it to go through its start-up routine. When the desktop finally settled, he simultaneously pressed four buttons on the keypad and watched as the console sprang open to reveal its inner workings.

  He leaned in to stare at two battery compartments, each about the size of a standard iPhone, and each with identical manufacture markings denoting the battery’s structure and content.

  Only one, however, was actually a battery.

  Wilson used his thumb and forefinger to lift the left side component from its housing. There were no wires connecting it to any other part of the machine and it came free easily under the slightest of pressures.

  He pushed down on the corner of the keyboard panel to snap it back into place and reached across his desk to grab a brown padded envelope. He inserted the false battery into the envelope, sealed it, and shoved it into his coat pocket.

  Outside on the pavement he hailed a taxi for the cross-city trip to Charing Cross Station where he made his way to a bank of lockers. He fished in his pocket for the key to his designated locker, withdrew the brown envelope, and pushed it into the two-by-two compartment.

  It was a journey he had made with anger and trepidation every month for the past year. He didn’t question what was in the strange battery-shaped packages. The man who had been waiting for him with a silenced pistol inside his apartment had made it clear his life would be forfeit if he tampered with the packages in any way. As an added incentive, he pushed across two recent photographs of Wilson’s grown-up daughter. They were taken with a telephoto lens aimed through the kitchen window of her home.

  Wilson had been estranged from his family for more than fifteen years, but his devotion to daughter Rebecca was stronger than ever. On many occasions he had driven by that same house hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He would do anything rather than let harm befall her.

  Satisfied that Wilson would do what he was told, the intruder produced a bright red laptop which he cable-linked to Wilson’s dilapidated old machine. It took him less than ten minutes to copy-and-clone the contents of Wilson’s hard drive.

  He then showed the old sea captain the coded sequence for unlocking the body of the custom-made machine, pointing out the empty housing for a spare battery. He explained that each time Wilson’s ship docked at one of its regular ports of call in the Bahamas he would be given a battery to be placed inside the laptop.

  After going through the rest of the instructions the man stood up to leave. “One more thing. Always make sure the laptop is powered up when the Customs people are aboard. That way they won’t have reason to suspect the machine is not what it’s supposed to be. You will become familiar to them for carrying your laptop on and off the ship.”

  “What if one of them decides to open the inner casing structure?”

  The man smiled. “Even if they feel inclined to do so, all they will discover will be a double-battery mechanism, a not uncommon sight in certain bulk-manufactured models.”

  When the stranger eventually left, Wilson knew that his uncluttered life had changed forever. He slumped into his favourite old sofa chair and felt real fear for the first time.

  As he wept, he could not know that he had joined a list of five other people who also now owned a bright red laptop.

  He was also unaware that outside on his porch, Carl Stratton was smiling at the ease with which he had added one more puppet to his lethal sideshow.

  Chapter 14

  DEVON KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING to be gained by continuing to pace up and down the hospital corridors. It had been a long night. The General had survived a five-hour emergency operation, after which the surgeon had put his chances at “slightly better than evens.” Despite a few scares caused by the occasional ear-splitting bleep from the bank of monitors surrounding his bed, the old boy was still fighting from somewhere inside an induced coma.

  One of the assassin’s bullets had nicked his heart. A centimetre lower and it would have been curtains. As it was, the delicate repair work was not guaranteed to compensate for the massive shock and trauma to the system. The next forty-eight hours would tell the medical team if their efforts were to be rewarded.

  Devon needed to get back to his team. He had provided Doyle with updates during the night, knowing that everyone at headquarters was staring at the phones and refusing to grab some sleep. It was time to leave the General to his personal life-struggle and get back in the fight.

  It was time to get on the front foot and end this war on his organisation. Once and for all.

  He nodded at Alfie Cheadle - who had remained at his side throughout the night - and barged his way out through the hospital entrance, oblivious to the irate stares of a few people who were forced to stand aside to let him through the large swinging doors.

  Cheadle took the wheel of the Range Rover and eased into the Marylebone traffic. At the first set of traffic lights he moved to the outside lane and looked across at Devon. “Now would be a good time for you to grab a change of clothes before we head back to the office.”

  Devon was about to argue but thought better of it. His home was less than five minutes away. “Good idea. Might even treat myself to a quick shower.”

  Both men jumped from the car when it stopped alongside the kerb outside Devon’s house. Cheadle pulled his Glock from the holster and held it down by his side as he scanned the road.

  Devon bounded up the steps, fished his bunch of keys from a coat pocket, and inserted one into the door’s faded brass holder. As a matter of habit he made a quarter turn anticlockwise, before returning to the twelve o’clock position. He was about to turn the key in the opposite direction when he noticed that a small green light was not pulsing as it should be in a dust-covered glass shield high up in the door frame.

  Despite the outward appearances, the decrepit-looking Yale lock was in fact a state-of-the-art security mechanism that reacted to a pre-coded sequence. The absence of a green light told Devon that someone had tampered with the lock since he last left the house.

  He removed the key and walked back towards the car. “Get in and drive around the corner to the underground garage. I’ve had an unwanted visitor. Let’s see if he’s still there or if he’s left something for me.”

 
Three minutes later they were standing outside a private door connecting his house to the car park. This time a green light blinked when Devon repeated the opening sequence. “We’re clear.”

  He pushed the door fully open to reveal a small porch leading to the kitchen at the rear of the premises. He motioned for Cheadle to go right and moved forward to the left, holding his Sig in a two-handed sweep. There was an eerie silence, broken only by the squeal of his rubber-soled boots as he edged up the parquet floor.

  He paused in the hallway to glance through an open door leading to the front living room. Satisfied the room was empty he turned his attention to the front door.

  He spotted the moulded block of C-4 almost instantly, letting his eyes trace the wiring down from the coat rail and across the floor to disappear under the porch mat.

  He whistled for Cheadle to join him, but warned him to stay back while he knelt to gingerly lift the mat. “Just as I thought, a pressure-pad ignition. Simple, but highly effective.”

  Devon pulled the wires from the disc pad and then rose to yank the other ends from the C-4.

  Cheadle winced. “Jeez, Mike, you don’t believe in subtlety, do you?”

  “It’s okay, Alfie. Once the pressure pad was disarmed the rest was pretty useless. When you’ve been around these things as long as I have, you get to know when to jump in and when to run.”

  “Mike, this is all getting pretty fucked up in a hurry. What do we do now?”

  “Don’t know about you, but I think I’ll take that shower now.”

  ***

  The office was frantic with activity by the time Devon and Cheadle dumped their change-of-clothes holdalls on the floor inside the conference room.

  As usual, Doyle brought calm to the proceedings. “Listen up, people. We need to bring Mike up to speed with what we’ve got so far.” He waited until the general buzz quietened down before continuing. “We tracked last night’s gunman down to a hotel near St. Pancras train station. Good job for us that he was still carrying his room key. I sent a team there in the wee small hours and discovered the room was booked by one Alexei Baronova, who checked in three nights ago. We accessed his room safe and found three passports, all in different names.”

  Doyle leaned forward and picked up the passports from the conference table. “We ran the photos from these through the usual software systems and almost immediately got a hit with an Interpol mugshot. Seems he’s wanted in about a dozen countries.”

  Devon crossed the room to take the passports from Doyle’s hand. “This is great work team.”

  “Wait, there’s more, a lot more. We retrieved a laptop from under the bed and got it back here fast to the techie boys. They’re boasting it took them less than a minute to get past the password protection…”

  “Actually, it was about forty seconds.” The interruption came from Tim Halloran, head of the LonWash computer surveillance team.

  Doyle exaggerated a bow of courtesy towards Halloran. “Okay, it’s your show. Tell us what you found.”

  Halloran lifted two pieces of paper and waved one in Devon’s direction. “This is a print-out of an email that matches exactly the one you discovered in Austria. Quite obviously it’s a group message, but just as before it’s heavily encrypted with no chance of breaking down either where it came from or where it went, apart from the two recipients we already know about.”

  “So what’s the other piece of paper about?” Devon asked.

  “This,” said Halloran triumphantly, “is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. It’s a second email which arrived less than an hour ago while we were still searching through the laptop’s deleted message trail. I think it’s best if I showed it on the big screen.”

  He hit a few buttons on an iPad linked to a projector. An image flashed immediately on a white screen fixed to the wall at the head of the room.

  Devon could hardly believe what he was reading.

  Message Title: Final Warning

  From: Me

  To: Alexei Baronova

  Copy: Max Steiner, Charles Nightingale, Dragan Boskovic, Martin Greene, Jeff Millar.

  All but one of you has so far failed to carry out the missions that were contracted to you. You were made aware that failure to do so would result in the ultimate sanction. Any contract remaining unfulfilled at midnight on August 6 will leave me with no choice but to invoke the terms of our agreement. There is no hiding place. You will know by now that my reach is without boundaries.

  EXECUTE OR BE EXECUTED!

  Devon read the message several times before taking a seat. “Is this what I think it is?”

  Doyle jumped in. “There can be little doubt that we now have our list of assassins. Whoever has been sending these messages appears to have made a crucial error in his encryption techniques. It’s like the old saying about giving people enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.”

  Halloran coughed slightly to get attention. “Actually, this is not the kind of mistake an expert techno-geek would make. I don’t doubt the authenticity of the email. It follows the previous techniques, although at a guess I would say it originated from a different source server and displays the characteristics of a different hand on the keystrokes.”

  “Explain,” Devon said brusquely.

  “Apart from the obvious mistake of forgetting to hide the names of all the recipients, the message is also showing IP address fragments which might lead us back to the source, if we get lucky. This kind of sloppy work was certainly not apparent in the first email we recovered. It’s just not the sort of thing a trained operative would overlook.”

  Devon lifted the copies of both sheets of paper, not quite sure what he was looking for. “So, have we a hoax second email, or are we just looking a gift horse in the mouth?”

  “Like I said,” Halloran continued, “there are too many similarities between the two to dismiss the conclusion that the names on the list are who they appear to be. I would like to do a lot more work on trying to track the other proxy server fragments that we’ve detected. That should tell us a lot more about what’s going on here.”

  Devon thought about this for a few seconds. “Could it be simply a case that two different people in whatever organisation has targeted us were responsible for each sending out a message, but the second person was not as technically gifted as the first?”

  Halloran shook his head. “Don’t think so. The second message still displays a high level of expertise. The knowledge of hacking into random servers and laying a ghost trail around the world is not something anyone can just pick up. If it wasn’t for the obvious mistakes I would have a healthy respect for both senders.”

  Devon rose and walked away from the table. “Okay, we’re going round in circles here. Let’s go with what we have.” He turned to Doyle. “Alan, put everything we’ve got on tracking down all available information on the four names who are still living. By sometime this evening I want us ready to go on the offensive. We’re going to need four different teams, so I suggest you hurry up about bringing in those extra pairs of hands you’ve been promising us.”

  He continued his walk to the door, before stopping to look at Halloran. “I hope I don’t need to tell you that we need your team to bring us back answers on those computer fragments that seem to hold an important key. We need those answers yesterday.”

  “Consider it done,” Halloran said as he brushed hurriedly past Devon.

  The noise in the room grew as Devon stepped out into the corridor. He was aware of a rustle behind him and turned to face Doyle.

  “Aren’t you staying to help out, Mike.”

  “Nah, I’ve got a few things to do. I’ll join you later.”

  Cloistered in his office, Devon leaned back in his chair and rubbed the fingers of both hands against his temple. Despite his earlier flippancy about taking a shower after discovering the bomb at his home, his morale was at the lowest point he could remember.

  What if Emma had returned to the house unannounced? He couldn�
�t shake the image of her cradling his son and opening the front door to step into the killing zone that had been created inside his porch. How could he live with something like that?

  The simple answer was that he couldn’t. Not for the first time his job had put his family in harm’s way. This time, however, he knew he needed to do something about it. At forty-one he was not the young gung-ho trailblazer he once was. This was a game for younger men. For younger, single men, he corrected himself.

  He had done his bit. It was time to move aside. It was time to be the husband and father he had promised himself he would be. He was a moderately wealthy man, thanks to a sizeable inheritance from his parents, and could chose to live whatever way he wanted.

  Sure, he would miss the action and the adrenaline. He had known nothing else since he was a teenager drafted into MI6, now known as the Secret Intelligence Service, and sent on his first undercover mission to America. He had chased terrorists all around the world before signing up to General Sandford’s new off-the-books agency. The surroundings might have changed, but the job hadn’t.

  He had lost count of the men he had had to kill in a twenty-two year career spent protecting his country from all manner of global threats. Twenty-two years! That’s more than anyone had a right to expect.

  And then he considered the fate of the General. Would a younger Devon have reacted differently and kept the old man out of harm’s way? He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that one.

  As he continued to think through his circumstances he became more convinced about what he would do when this current crisis ended.

  A knock on the door dragged him from his reverie. He looked up as Doyle stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “What’s up, Mike?”

  “Just thinking a few things through.”

  Doyle crossed the room, lifted a chair and straddled across it in front of Devon’s desk. “Don’t try to kid a kidder. We’ve been around too many blocks together for me not to realise something other than these agency attacks is bothering you. I saw that look in your eyes when you left the briefing.”