by Tom Marcus
The man on the left is dressed in military-type black fatigues and is wearing a black and white shemagh around his neck. With his shaved head, thin, feral face and untidy beard I instantly recognize Stone Fist. He’s waving a large butcher’s knife in front of the man in the chair, while his brother, Iron Sword, is similarly dressed but taller and with a slightly darker and fuller beard, reading from a crumpled sheet of paper held in front of him.
Focusing intently on the screen, I hardly notice the waitress putting two mugs of coffee on the table. ‘You sitting here now, are you, or what?’
‘Yeah,’ I bark, without looking at her.
‘Then what you want me to do with your breakfast then?’ she asks, as if daring me to tell her to bring it over.
‘Jesus, I don’t know, chuck it away, give it to your bloody dog—’
‘Oi, you can’t talk to me like that!’ she squeaks, her eyes going wide. ‘My dad’s in the kitchen. He’ll come and—’
Alex quickly steps in, putting her hand on the girl’s arm and smiling sweetly at her. ‘Take no notice of him. He’s just a bit wound up.’ She grabs my plate from the other table and brings it over.
‘I’ve got to clean it up now before someone else sits there,’ the girl complains. ‘It’s not like I ain’t got enough to do.’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Alex says, smile still in place. When the waitress finally turns on her heels, Alex leans over my shoulder. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘The guy in the chair, it’s Philip Day.’
‘The Foreign Secretary?’
‘Yeah. They want the Prime Minister to put him on trial for war crimes. Something about bombing innocent civilians in Syria. If the PM doesn’t agree, they’re going to do the job themselves.’ I give her a look. ‘And I think we can all guess what the sentence is going to be.’
‘How in hell did they get hold of him? He’s a member of the fucking Cabinet! Jesus.’
I glance over at the counter, where the waitress is glaring at us, along with a short, fat man wearing a grimy apron and a couple of days’ stubble. It’s all beginning to feel a little surreal: a top member of the British government has been kidnapped by a couple of terrorists who are threatening to behead him, and we’re about to be turfed out of this cafe because of bad language. All around us, the rest of the patrons are showing little interest in what’s unfolding on the TV screen, seemingly more interested in their phones or their papers.
‘Any more feeds?’ Alex asks, but the live feed instantly crashes. I’m sure MI5 and GCHQ are all over this, working frantically to close down as many live-streams and servers as they can find.
I hand her back her phone. ‘Well, at least we now know what their endgame is.’
We turn our eyes back to the TV. The Sky News feed is positioned high on top of some houses on the other side of the street. We can make out police snipers scattered around, and armed police covering negotiators with rifles and ballistics shields.
‘How did they get him away from his protection detail?’ I ask in a lowered tone, to ensure we don’t attract any more attention in here. ‘I mean, we’ve seen these guys in action: they’re savvy, all right. Definitely had some training. But no way they’d be capable of pulling off a stunt like that. They’d be taken out before they could get within ten feet of him.’
Alex can’t hide her frustration, ‘Well, they did it somehow.’
‘Not on their own, though. They may be a cut above your average suicidal lowlife, but it takes something special to make the Foreign Secretary disappear in a puff of smoke.’
‘Well, we know they had one helper. The dead guy in the park.’
‘And the question still remains: who killed him?’
‘Leyton-Hughes told us the police found no evidence of foul play.’
‘Which either means he dropped dead of a heart attack—’
‘Or there are more people in this thing that we don’t know about. People with some pretty impressive skills.’
We both chew that thought over for a while. I glance at Alex. She has a fierce look in her eyes, and her knuckles are whitening as she clenches both fists in front of her.
‘We could have stopped it. We could have taken them down. That was the point. That was what Blindeye was created for.’ She jerks her chin towards the TV. ‘So it never gets to this.’
‘Well, it’s happened now. And it doesn’t look like there’s anything we can do about it. It’s all “lights, camera, action”. One great big fucking stage. Time for us to scuttle back into the shadows where we belong.’
Alex clenches her fists harder. ‘There must be something we can do. There must be!’
I decide to let her stew. There’s nothing else I can say.
Alex’s breakfast arrives with a surly look from the waitress and we despondently pick at our food in between sips of lukewarm coffee, eyes glued to the TV, even though we know nothing’s likely to happen for a while. The house has been secured. The brothers have made their demands. Now the waiting game begins.
Though it’s pretty certain how this is going to end: with the brothers coming out in body bags. The question is: how many people will they take with them? If their planning has been sophisticated enough to kidnap the Foreign Secretary, they’ll have prepared well for a siege.
They’d know that the location of their IP address would quickly be identified as soon as they started live-streaming their demands. Of course, that’s just what they want. They want to suck in as many police and military personnel as they can.
And all on live TV.
After twenty minutes of nothing happening, intercut with so-called security experts and talking heads back in the studio finding various long-winded ways of saying they don’t know anything, I turn my attention to the other people in the cafe. It’s full now, with a family of five now squeezed into our old table in the corner, and people are beginning to watch the TV, or follow the unfolding drama on their phones. The place hasn’t exactly gone silent, but there’s some tension in the air and some worried faces.
Not everyone’s focused on the TV, however. I watch as two giggling teenage girls use their phones to take videos of each other. Then one of them starts filming the screen of her friend’s phone. Odd thing to do, I think: videoing a video. So you wouldn’t be able to tell which device took the original one, I suppose. I go back to my coffee and half-eaten breakfast. But the girls’ little trick with their phones sticks in my mind. It’s connected to something. I just don’t know what. It’s like knowing you know the answer to a pub quiz question but not being able to actually remember it.
Then suddenly it hits me.
Two devices, filming the exact same content. Fuck me. The brothers – they bought a video camera and a webcam separately. Why would they need two recording devices? It seemed odd at the time, but it didn’t seem important.
I grab my phone and punch in Alan’s number.
‘What are you doing?’ Alex asks, picking up on my urgency.
I make a ‘just hold on’ gesture as Alan picks up. ‘Alan, mate, it’s Logan. Where are you? Yeah, me and Alex have been watching it too. That’s sort of what I want to pick your brains about. We’re at the Central Cafe. It’s on the High Street. You know it? Course you do. See you soon.’
‘What was all that about?’ Alex asks.
‘Better wait till Alan gets here. I’m not sure I can explain it twice.’
‘Explain what?’
‘Nothing. Well, maybe it’s something. I don’t know.’
Alex doesn’t bother pursuing it and goes back to her phone, seeing if she can find any sites still streaming the brothers’ video. I fold my arms and start chewing my lip. Maybe this is what night carp-fishing is like, I think: feeling a little vibration in the rod and not knowing whether it’s some monster forty-pounder on the end of your line or just a little tiddler nibbling at your bait.
Our food has gone cold and the waitress takes it away, along with our coffee. We watch the endless ‘Breaking News’
statements on the TV in silence, waiting for Alan to arrive. Customers have come and gone but the cafe is still heaving, and just as we’re about to outstay our welcome, I see Alan pull up. I nudge Alex. ‘Come on, Alan is here. Let’s go.’
We walk outside and instinctively towards a grassy area that has a bench, borne from years of not wanting to be overheard.
‘So what’s up?’ Alan asks.
I look at them both, and they huddle in slightly as I begin.
‘Alan, hypothetically speaking, could you film something on a video camera then, with a second video camera or webcam, record the display screen of the first camera to make it look like it was recorded from a different location?’
I’ve confused Alan slightly here. Fuck. I need a better way of explaining this. ‘OK, look. Pass me your phone.’ Without question, Alan passes me his phone.
I bring the camera up and do the same with my phone, which I point at Alex.
‘Look, I’m filming Alex yeah? On my phone.’ Alan nods in agreement at my basic demonstration. I pass his phone back to him. ‘Mate, take a video recording of my phone screen now.’ I give him a few seconds as he adjusts and tightens in to record the display of my phone, still trained on Alex. ‘OK. Play it back.’ Alan stops recording and hits play, and all three of us crowd round to watch his short video.
‘With a bit of time and a proper set up, it would look like Alan’s phone has taken that footage directly of me, not recorded it from your phone, right?’ Alex asks.
‘Exactly!’ I’m hoping Alan is going to see my point and say it’s possible.
‘Of course, but I’m not sure exactly what you mean by a different location. Unless you mean something like Face-Time or Skype?’ he says.
Bingo.
‘Alex is the Foreign Secretary, yeah? I’m filming. Which means I’m here in the exact same place?’ Nods from Alan as I continue with my theory. ‘You film the screen of my video camera, perfectly still. So all you’re recording is the video on my screen.’
Taking a moment to look at both Alex and Alan, I try and wrap my idea up. ‘What if you use the video you are taking and live-stream it online. Then we would all assume you are with the Foreign Secretary, not me. Right?’
I can see Alan and Alex working this through in their heads. ‘You’re still wondering why the brothers bought a video camera and a webcam.’ Alan delves deeper into this idea. ‘So what you’re suggesting is that the brothers are filming the Foreign Secretary in one location with the video recorder, but the live feed goes directly to a TV screen in a completely different location, where the webcam is set up to film the screen. So when you look at the IP address, it looks as if the Foreign Secretary is being held at the address where the webcam is, where all the police are now outside?’
Alex takes her phone and waves it animatedly. ‘The livestreams I’ve seen on social media aren’t great quality, so maybe that’s how they’re disguising the fact it’s filming off a screen – to obscure the pixilation and line refreshes you get when you try and film video footage off a TV screen.’
The three of us fall silent for a moment, working out the implications.
‘OK, so this is just a theory, right,’ I begin tentatively, ‘but let’s say we have no idea where the brothers are actually holding the Foreign Secretary. And the police are surrounding a house which is completely empty . . .’
‘Except for a couple of hundred pounds of high explosive rigged with sophisticated booby traps,’ Alex completes my thought.
I nod. ‘And the brothers can basically control when the security forces go in, by making it look like they’re about to execute the Foreign Secretary. They press the button, and the world’s media will show the SAS getting blown to smithereens live around the globe.’
‘And when they stop shitting themselves with laughter, they cut Philip Day’s throat,’ Alex adds.
‘You know what,’ Alan says, touching my sleeve. ‘I think maybe we should tell someone about this.’
18
In Alan’s tech bay, waiting for Jeremy Leyton-Hughes to arrive, we huddle around a TV showing Sky News reporters. ‘You join us live from Middleton Road in north London. In dramatic scenes, police and Special Forces personnel have surrounded a house where the Foreign Secretary is being held hostage.’
We all discuss the idea that Stone Fist and Iron Sword could actually be deliberately hiding their real location. Alan still has his ear pretty close to the ground with operations at MI5. Missing the brothers leaving the address on Agar Grove was a massive mistake by the police CTUs – it happens to every surveillance team, but losing control of the brothers this time has likely caused this massive fuck-up.
Claire wants to pick Alan’s brains.
‘Alan, how easy would it be for the brothers to fake their location?’
‘It’s not easy, but done properly it could fool everyone, because they aren’t looking for it. I can’t remember ever dealing with a situation like this from a domestic target. The police are surrounding the house in Middleton Road because the phones from Agar Grove were tracked there, the video footage seems to be coming from that area and the next-door neighbours have reported the sound of voices that match the audio. That’s it.’
Claire adds to the theory. ‘So, all Iron Sword and Stone Fist would have to do is dump their phones at Middleton Road before moving somewhere else without being seen. They knew we’d track their phones . . .’
Alan nods in complete agreement. ‘Exactly. So everything indicates the brothers being where they say they are, at Middleton Road.’ He points at the little TV. ‘I’ve had a look at the feeds and done some digging on their various sources. All very sophisticated – if I had more time I’d be able to give a concrete answer – but my initial guess is that the brothers are transmitting out of an address we don’t know about via Tor, and the webcam is filming that feed at Middleton Road. From there, extremists all over the world are then putting it all up on their social media and news feeds. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the brothers are sending the secure feed directly into Middleton Road with the volume turned right up, knowing that Special Forces are going to be listening in. When they hear the audio, they’ll be certain the Foreign Secretary is actually there.’
I want this to be true, but it’s just a theory. A good one, but nothing we can concretely back up. Leyton-Hughes arrives and beckons us upstairs to the briefing room, just as the news ticker scrolling across the bottom says Sources say Foreign Secretary taken hostage, local residents forced to evacuate . . .
We all move quickly upstairs, eager to get more information on the situation. Ryan closes the door as we wait for Jeremy to start this briefing. Our boss looks calm and a little nonchalant, almost arrogant. ‘So you’ve seen the news regarding Stone Fist and Iron Sword. It’s confirmed it’s definitely them and they have the Foreign Secretary as a hostage. The house on Middleton Road is a rental property which has apparently been empty for a number of months now. The landlord is cooperating fully but isn’t believed to be involved in any way. Now, as with everything we discuss in Blindeye, this doesn’t go anywhere—’
Claire interrupts Jeremy, ‘How the hell did they manage to snatch a government minister?’
Jeremy shrugs his shoulders. ‘We have no information on that at this stage. Let’s just assume the PM isn’t very happy with the DG, or CTU. She’s handed over everything to the police negotiators and Special Forces teams, who are looking at ways to breach the building.’
‘On that, boss, I have a theory I’d like to share with you.’ I hope Jeremy will listen to Alan’s reasoning closely enough to allow us to rule our theory out at least. The tech positions himself and us to make his demonstration. ‘Something’s been troubling me ever since I saw the dodgy quality of the feed the brothers are putting out of this mock trial.’
Leyton-Hughes nods, frustrated, while checking his watch. Alan lays it out in simple terms for him.
‘I think the brothers are spoofing their location. The guys
had them buying a video camera and a webcam. Everyone, including the police and intelligence agencies, think they are holding the Foreign Secretary at Middleton Road. I think they are routing the stream directly into Middleton Road from a completely different address to make it look like they are there. When, in fact, they could be miles away. There’s potential for this to go massively wrong.’ Alan is determined to hammer this point home. ‘If the sniffer dogs are right about those two massive bags having explosive residue in them, the news crews will broadcast the Special Forces teams breaking into the wrong address and being blown up. All on live, twenty-four-hour news. All from British soil.’
Fucking hell, he really does paint a picture, but Leyton-Hughes doesn’t seem overly taken by it.
‘Firstly, A4 found a van that was rented and paid for by a card registered to the Agar Grove address parked up not far from Middleton Road, outside a police station. Bomb disposal deactivated a viable device with around ten kilos of explosives.’ Confused looks fill the team, including Alan. Only ten kilos . . . out of two massive bags?
Jeremy continues, ‘The IP address of the brothers’ exact transmission location would have been picked up by Thames House, Alan. My source within operations at A Branch had two phones showing up at Agar Grove, which were then tracked to Middleton Road. GCHQ analysed the initial video broadcast and gave confirmation that a video feed is being uploaded to an extremist news site from Middleton Road. Special Forces teams have got audio inside that building after evacuating the neighbours’ addresses too. Everything is pointing to the Foreign Secretary being held at Middleton Road.’ He’s nowhere near convinced, but for the first time I can sense Jeremy being more open to Alan’s ideas than he is to any of the rest of us.
‘You’ve got to understand the position I’m in. We are in. We’re a deniable unit. We are meant to clear up the mess, not create it.’ This feels like a plea rather than a rational explanation. ‘If you give me something concrete I can maybe do something. Maybe. But unless you have any actionable intelligence I can’t do anything.’