Chapter 17
The surveillance man, Jay Wilkinson, arrived just over an hour after we got Cronin and Delgado to bed. He was lean and fit and moved swiftly across the front yard of the farm to where we were waiting to greet him. He had reached the front door before I realised he had an artificial foot. He saw my glance, grinned, and lifted the leg of his tan chinos to reveal a metal frame which started just below the knee and ended in a normal walking shoe and sock.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I try not to let it slow me down.’
‘A present from the Taliban,’ Tim explained as he introduced Jay to the assembled group. IED in Helmand.’
Introductions made, Tim went back to the car to fetch a large military holdall and we all went inside.
‘Jay used to be with the SAS’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment until Afghanistan,’ Tim said, indicating the leg.
‘Now I’m a backroom boy,’ Jay added, ‘Research and Development Wing at Hereford. It’s nice to be active again.’
I said we needed a close survey of Spring House, but we could not go in close.
‘I’ve already told Tim I can’t give you sound,’ Jay said, ‘but I’ve managed to liberate our newest toy for a few days. It’ll give you high quality images and can look in all kinds of odd places.’
‘How close do you need to get?’ I asked, thinking but not saying that however fit Jay had kept himself, the missing foot must affect his agility in close manoeuvring.
‘About 500 metres will do fine. Can we manage that?’
‘No problem,’ Tim said, ‘I’ve located the ideal spot.’
‘Good,’ Jay said, ‘then we’d better unpack the kit. Time for you to see the bee.’
No-one asked what the bee was but we were all a bit taken aback to discover that the bee actually was one, or rather a life-size, perfect facsimile of the insect complete with markings, legs and tongue.
‘It’s the world’s smallest flying drone,’ Jay said proudly. ‘The proboscis at the front is a high definition video camera lens. The body contains the camera and equipment to transmit the images live. It’s radio controlled – much like a baby model aeroplane.’
Jay placed the bee carefully on his palm and offered it for inspection.
‘It’s only a prototype,’ he said, ‘but it’s tested very well so far. This will be the first time it’s been used for real.’
Jay took a small brochure-like document out of the holdall. ‘I prepared this for a briefing last week,’ he said, ‘this diagram shows how we can set up the surveillance. This estate, Spring House, is the Alpha, the target. Right?’
‘You can operate it alone?’ Tim asked, ‘if I guide you and cover your back. Two people should be OK. Any more will be tricky.’
‘No problem, and I can transmit the pictures live to base, which we can set up here at the farm house.’ He tapped the diagram. ‘And you can transmit instructions to me as I operate the drone.’
Lottery grinned. ‘That sounds like my kind of op. We get to control it from the kitchen here, with beer and sandwiches on tap.’
‘Exactly,’ Jay said, ‘while we hole up somewhere in the greenery and the bee does the work.’
It took less than five minutes to set up the base, which consisted of nothing more than a laptop on the kitchen table with a headset attached and an extra device to allow communication with the drone operator to be put on loudspeaker.
For the next thirty minutes we discussed the aims of the surveillance. I didn’t need clearance from Tim to be frank with Jay. The Network, as they called it, had only one rule – no-one was to be introduced to it unless they could be trusted absolutely.
I told Jay I believed Spring House was being used – or was going to be used – to store hazardous materials, though I didn’t specify what type. I explained why I thought Spring House was an unlikely venue for Ray Vossler to have chosen. It had none of the luxury he was accustomed to and I was sure he wouldn’t have taken it if the location hadn’t been important. I said I wanted to search for any indications as to why. Was its proximity to the river important? Was there a suitable helicopter landing ground, and so on. And finally, I wanted pictures of everyone in the house. I showed Jay pictures of Vossler, Simpson-Carr and Omar and told him I wanted to see everyone else who was in there – visitors or staff.
Forty-five minutes later, Tim and Jay were in position. The bee wasn’t flying yet but we had established a clear communications link and Tim reported that the vantage point was secure.
When the first pictures appeared on the laptop, the quality was stunning. It was hard to believe that a camera fitted into the space of less than 10 mm could produce such high definition. But though the quality was superb, the results were disappointing. Spring House appeared to be empty, except for a cook and two domestic servants. I told Jay to concentrate first on the river access and that too was a dead end. The pictures showed that Spring House did indeed have good river access but the private boathouse was rundown and the landing stage was virtually a wreck. There were no signs that anyone had been near either any time recently. From there the bee was directed back to the house and accomplished a room by room tour, which produced no surprises either despite being able to enter several rooms through open windows.
Three bedrooms were occupied. Vossler had two rooms, a bedroom and an adjacent study but no papers were visible. Omar’s room was easily identifiable by his crossbow and some bits of fitness equipment but there were no clues of any significance. The tour went on for twenty minutes then I told Jay to switch the surveillance to the outhouses. Finally after another fifteen minutes we had a breakthrough. One of the barns had been worked on. Its doors had been secured with double locks and steel bars and every gap in the woodwork had been sealed up. There were no cracks big enough for even the bee to see through but it was pretty clear that we had found our storage area.
The rest of the outhouses showed nothing of interest and Jay told us that if we wanted to wait to see if anyone came back to the house, we had better give the bee a rest to save battery life.
Kate, Chunk and I replayed all the images that had been transmitted to see if we had missed anything and it was Kate who spotted a possible lead. As the bee was travelling from the boat house along the edge of the estate, it passed over a wooden sign board lying in the grass.
‘Isn’t that a realtor’s board,’ she said, ‘can you enlarge it enough to read?’
We freeze-framed the image and enlarged it.
The name wasn’t very clear but a band across the bottom read ‘Sale Agreed.’
‘So they didn’t rent it,’ Chunk said. ‘That could matter. He would never have bought a dump like Spring House just because it was cheap. We absolutely have to find out why.’
‘Pity you can’t hack into the estate agent’s e-mails, like you did with the BBC,’ Kate said. She looked up and saw that I was smiling.
‘You can’t, can you?’’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘I can certainly have a go.’
It took ten minutes to establish the name of the Estate Agent. Most of the letters were visible on the image. Tillie was called in and she said straightway the company was Watson and Barnes. A quick check on their website gave us a list of partners and the sales force, with their e-mail addresses.
One of the bits of intelligence software I had hoarded from my previous life was an official version of a hacker’s ‘worm’ programme. It consisted of an e-mail message, offering a subscription to a new magazine. The text could be adapted to the recipient. I typed in a few details for an imaginary new glossy real estate monthly, that ‘no agency could afford to be without.’ The e-mail promised that the magazine would revolutionise house and business sales in the UK and would have an inter-active UK-wide web-site, through which companies could trade. I added some clipart of an elegant woman and a house and sent the e-mail, flagged urgent, to [email protected]. All that mattered was that Wilton should open the message. Even if he tra
shed it straightaway, the-mail contained a worm which would quickly identify his in-house log-in name and password and send them back within minutes of his opening the message.
In fact it took less than five. Wilton must have been sitting at his desk, probably without much to do and he opened my message immediately. In another five minutes I had his password and login and remote access configuration.
‘Does it matter that he’s logged in?’ Kate asked.
‘No.’
‘What if he logs out?’
‘Once I’m in, It’ll make no difference.’
‘What a wonderful world we live in,’ Chunk said.
‘I’d no idea it was this easy,’ Kate said, ‘do the intelligence services use these methods all the time?’
‘When they have to,’ I said, ‘and so do the police. In the real world, there are almost no restrictions on the information you can gather if you want to. The limits are set on what use you can make of it in court. If I were collecting evidence against Wilton and it came out I’d illegally hacked into his computer account, my case could be thrown out.’
‘Well that’s something,’ Kate said, ‘anyway, we’re not trying to incriminate Wilton. Let’s see what we can find out’
I logged in and did a search on Spring House in Wilton’s Outlook account. There was one e-mail, a ‘message to all sales staff’ listing new properties going on the market.
‘It doesn’t look as though he handled the sale,’ I said, ‘still that would be asking too much. Let’s see what the shared drive turns up.’
Using Windows Explorer, I looked at the drives accessible to Barnes. One of them was called [f]Ashford site. Ashford was where the head office was located and that drive looked promising. I did a search on Spring House again and this time, fourteen Word documents and an Excel spreadsheet came up. It took barely half an hour to reconstruct the sale of the estate to Vossler Inc. of Washington, D.C. and the files produced more information than we could have dreamed of.
Two things became immediately clear. Firstly, Vossler had been renting the previous house and the lease hadn’t expired. For some reason – not explained in the emails – he wanted to get out quickly and specifically wanted to rent Spring House. Emails had gone back and forth but the owner had refused to rent. He was in the throes of a divorce and only a sale would do. At this point, the senior partner, Malcolm Barnes, had stepped in. He obviously assumed Vossler had fallen on hard times and wanted a cheaper property than where he was currently living and made various suggestions. Vossler fired back a fierce snotagram saying he wanted Spring House and was prepared to buy if necessary – but he wanted to be certain that he had Green Lane access.
‘What’s Green Lane access?’ Kate asked, looking over my shoulder.
I had some idea, but wasn’t really sure. Luckily one of the files spelled out the problem precisely. Green Lanes were apparently ancient drover roads that had been used for transporting livestock, mainly sheep, across England in mediaeval times. It seemed no-one could own them, but certain properties through which they passed had the right to link up with them. A Green Lane passed right by Spring House but there was no right of access. Vossler offered to pay for access and was told that wasn’t possible. It was explained that it was highly unlikely anyone would object to the access, but without legal title, the problem could affect his future resale of the house. The senior partner again offered alternative and, in his view, preferable properties. Vossler replied with an even fiercer snotagram. He wanted Spring House and he wanted it with Green Lane access.
In the end, the lawyers arranged the purchase of an insurance policy, which would become part of the deeds of the house. This stated that Vossler would receive compensation if he opened up access from Spring House into the Green Lane and this was later contested by parties as yet undetermined. The deal was done and the house was sold.
Kate was exultant. ‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘we now know why they wanted Spring House. The next step is to find out where the Green Lane leads to.’
‘That’s a job for Tim,’ I said, ‘let’s take a break and have something to eat.’
We sat for a while at the kitchen table then Tim called urgently to say that two 4WDs were arriving at Spring House. Almost immediately the pictures began streaming in. Vossler, Omar and Massoud were in the first vehicle. The second contained Simpson-Carr and a completely new group of faces. There were four men, all in their thirties or early forties. Three had Slavic features but I wasn’t sure whether thinking they looked Russian was a jump of the imagination because they were in the company of Simpson-Carr.
It seemed logical. Simpson-Carr’s contacts were predominantly Russian and Cronin had already mentioned unconfirmed reports that Vossler might be getting the diffuser needed to weaponise the Bubonic plague germs from a Russian source. One of the unidentified men was chubby and round and seemed to stay much closer to Vossler and didn’t look to be in the Simpson-Carr group. Without sound we could only guess, but the bee was able to track the group into the house and we acquired in the next half hour perfect images of all of them. Eventually, Tim and I agreed that we were not going to get anything better. The bee had done its work brilliantly – the next task was to find out who the new faces were.
Chapter 18
That night, before we managed the debrief we’d all waited hours to begin, we ended up bird-watching to try to keep Vince Delgado sane.
We had settled Jay in one of the farm cottages then waited for Cronin and Delgado to surface. The one useful task we could have carried out was to try to identify the men we had photographed inside Spring House, but I convinced everyone to put that on hold. The obvious way was to use BBC resources again but it was likely either Cronin or Delgado would recognise them and I didn’t want to waste Kate’s contacts unnecessarily.
We tried waking Delgado at about nine o’clock but without success so we let him sleep on and didn’t bother waking Bob either. I asked the district nurse for her estimate of when they would wake naturally and she shrugged and said ‘sometime in the night probably.’
So we chatted and played cards then Kate and I went back to the Internet to keep abreast of developments and they were not good. The torrent of posts about Kate and me on UpstairsBackstairs had subsided but Cronin was the new target. Under the heading ‘Two traitors for the price of one’ a story obviously fed in by the Vossler team announced that Traitor Number One (me) had turned in desperation to Traitor Number Two. It didn’t mention our trip to Norfolk directly but concentrated on bringing up all the old allegations against Bob. Significantly, there was no mention of the fight at Farvale. I discussed it with Chunk and we decided Vossler wanted to locate us himself without a press hoard descending on the area.
‘Or he may just have been too embarrassed,’ Chunk added with a small smile.
‘Embarrassed ? Why?’
‘It was all pretty mediaeval – crossbows and slingshots – not exactly a legendary firefight.’
We decided to get some rest and Kate and I made love companionably and without either giving even a hint that commitment might become an issue. Then just before three a.m. Christine knocked on our door and told me Delgado was awake and he wanted to record the dawn chorus. My first instinct was to laugh but he was so strung out that I decided to humour him.
Kate simply gathered more of the duvet around her and asked to be woken when something important was happening. When I asked Chunk if he wanted to join us, he said only, ‘Are you taking the piss?’ and went back to sleep. Tim was woken and arrived quickly, but without Rachel.
George Overton, who was clearly used to Tim’s friends doing mad things, agreed to organise the expedition and led Delgado, Tim and me to Ravens Wood at the south end of the farm.
‘The skylark or the corn bunting will be first, probably with a male robin next, then blackbirds and song thrushes coming in soon afterwards,’ Delgado said as we crouched down in a hollow. It didn’t seem at all odd to him that he should be talking about local
birds to a group of men who had grown up with them all their lives. He told them solemnly that the intensity of the dawn light would be good and the chorus would begin very soon as there was no street lighting to fool the birds into singing early.
George Overton, who had probably spent more dawns in the woods than Delgado had spent days in an office, listened patiently and we watched as he fiddled with his cell-phone to record the birdsong.
There was a kind of brittle friendliness and false normality about Delgado that no-one could mistake. He was a man in the grip of total, absolute fear and was very close to falling apart. His waking and sleeping moments were obviously consumed with fearful images of an avenging Omar, which were now compounded by having been stabbed by a completely different assailant. We stayed in the wood for over an hour and eventually I managed to coax Delgado around to the idea that we needed to talk over the situation. The painkillers were obviously working on the wound but I didn’t read Delgado as a man with a high pain threshold and I was afraid he would take another huge dose once the effect started to wear off and become completely incoherent.
Back at the farm, Kate was already up and dressed and Tillie was making another impressive breakfast. Kate said she had woken Chunk and he would be down shortly. Delgado had cheered up considerably since the bird-watching and Tillie also helped by explaining gently how safe the farm was, especially with all these SAS people around.
When we were all assembled and had started on the food, Cronin began by thanking Tillie and apologising for bringing such chaos to the farm. He went over the Tergari situation, but obviously underplaying it.
‘When it happened, Vince was concerned so I went to London. I felt the best option was to bring him to you.’
He spoke the words quietly and calmly but the code was easy to read. One glance at Vince’s present state left no doubt how bad his panic had been.
‘Is there any more Intel from your brother?’ Chunk said almost casually.
The Saxon Network Page 17