Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2)

by Rosie Claverton

  The man continued to smile affably. “You’re going to catch your death, walking in this.” He crossed over to his pack and pulled out a small cagoule. “Here—this should keep off the worst of it.”

  While Jason’s eyes lit up at the prospect of clothing, he had already preyed on this bloke’s good nature enough. “Nah, mate—ta, though. I appreciate the offer.”

  “It’s only a cheap old thing. Please, take it.”

  Jason gratefully shrugged the navy mac over his suit jacket, doing up the poppers and pulling the hood over his head. He was sure he looked like a right trainspotter, but he already felt warmer for it.

  “Thank you. Really, thanks. Write down your number, will you? I’d like to repay you sometime—take you for a drink when we’re back in civilisation.”

  The man protested a moment, before borrowing his son’s colouring book and crayon to write down the information. Jason read it back and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

  “Cheers, mate. I owe you one.”

  “Good luck getting to the wedding!”

  Jason waved as he set off in the direction he had been pointed, feelings of warmth and guilt at war in his chest. The man had been a stand-up bloke and Jason had repaid him with lies and thieving his mac. He hoped he could call him soon and make amends, tell the truth, maybe take him for that drink.

  He continued until he was clear of the wood before changing direction, intending to skirt the village, only getting close enough to see a road sign. There was no point walking miles only to discover he was headed back to Swansea, or into the wilds of Mid Wales.

  The “village” was little more than a collection of houses with a road running through it and a very small grocery shop. There was, however, a little triangle of grass purporting to be a green with an old-fashioned white road sign.

  Jason crossed the road to peer at it. There was no direction for Cardiff, but one sign pointed towards Pontypridd. That was, at least, the opposite direction to Swansea, if not exactly where he was headed. It wasn’t as if he wanted to take the direct route anyway.

  Satisfied with his reconnaissance, Jason followed the little country road out of the village before stepping off the beaten track and into yet another field. He was halfway down the hedgerow when he heard sirens. He didn’t duck or hide, didn’t show his guilt, but he watched as two squad cars raced along the narrow road towards the site of the prison van incident.

  The clock was ticking.

  Jason continued along the hedge, fighting the urge to run. He was just a rambler out for a walk and, if they didn’t get too close, they’d have no reason to suspect otherwise.

  He walked in a direction vaguely parallel to the road that supposedly led to Pontypridd, keeping it just in sight as he made his way across the marshy fields. He avoided the farm buildings that cropped up out of nowhere, even though the temptation to shelter for an hour in a cosy barn was overwhelming.

  Nothing but fields and streams filled the immediate landscape, though the sun was strengthening as midday approached and the haze around him was beginning to burn off. That lost him some of his cover, but also made him a good deal warmer. Pros and cons.

  As he walked, he started to concoct a plan. While he could ramble across deserted fields in the middle of the day, marching into Cardiff dressed in an anorak and suit trousers in broad daylight was going to draw attention. He would have to find somewhere out of the way to lie low, away from police searchers and nosy locals, until darkness had fallen.

  As the adrenaline and painkillers wore off, his body’s many aches and pains starting reporting in. The wounds in his neck throbbed, the bandages wet through and his breathing laboured under the weight of his cracked ribcage.

  Still, he persevered, one foot in front of the other, his belly rumbling. It had to be beyond lunchtime, the sun having passed overhead and now sinking again. While he’d walked, he’d seen a police van and two further squad cars head in the opposite direction to him. They were beginning the manhunt.

  Jason walked faster.

  * * *

  Jason estimated he’d been walking for almost four hours when he finally ran out of fields and another stretch of woodland appeared. It was easy to get turned around among the trees—or ambushed—but it would also protect him from any eyes in the sky. Jason crossed the treeline but kept close to the edge, continually glancing at the lane that ran alongside.

  He was weary from tramping over the country, his wet feet blistering and thirst parching his throat. He was coughing up thick, foul-tasting mucous, but he didn’t think too hard about that. His first priority was to reach safety—and Amy. Everything else would have to wait.

  Jason followed the lane and the treeline until he came to the river. His geography was terrible and he had no idea what river it might be, but ahead of him he could see houses, hear the buzz of cars. He had hit civilisation. It was too light to wander through a residential area, but the river might have a crossing farther up that would keep him in the country for a little longer.

  The ground beside the river was slippery and Jason struggled to keep his feet and continue to follow the waterway back towards its source. After walking for about a quarter of an hour, the trees suddenly gave way to another set of buildings. Jason peered out to see what it was: Welsh Blood Service.

  Jason skirted the buildings, hoping it was just an isolated laboratory—and found himself in the car park of the Royal Glamorgan Hospital. Beating a hasty retreat back into the trees, he struggled to remember where the hospital was. Llantrisant, wasn’t it? If he was in Llantrisant, Cardiff wasn’t far away—and neither were eyes, cameras, cops. He had to seek shelter until it was dark.

  He thought longingly of the barns he had passed on his trek through the fields, but the last thing he needed was a breaking and entering charge on top of everything else.

  In the end, he retreated back into the woods, looking for somewhere to lie low. More than anything, he wanted to sit down and rest, but the ground was boggy and uneven. The chill would soak right into his bones, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to get back up again.

  He found a close copse of trees a few yards from the river and leaned up against the broad trunk of one that afforded him a good view of the approach while partially concealing him between the branches. The rain was coming down harder now, trickling down the trees and seeping through the canopy above. At least visibility remained poor—he would blend in with the advancing shadows.

  Suddenly, the wood was filled with the sound of a barking dog.

  Jason jerked upright, body thrown into full-blown panic. Was it a dog walker? Or was it—

  “I’m sure those kids were just messing with us.”

  “This is right in the middle of the hot zone. And if it’s just some creep hanging about, it don’t do no harm to move him on, does it?”

  Cops.

  With all the stealth of an armoured tank, Jason tried to scramble up the nearest tree. His ribs screamed in agony and the lowest branches were just out of his reach. Frantically, he looked at the other trees around him before finding one with a branch he could grasp.

  The dog was going mental.

  “What’s got into him?”

  “Maybe he’s got the scent. The training manuals all say fresh sheets are the best.”

  “Fresh prison sheets though, mate...”

  “Oh, give over.”

  Jason heaved himself up on the branch. It bent, but did not break. Once he’d got hold of it, it was a short scramble into the dense foliage above. A few leaves and twigs fluttered to the ground, but the rain was dropping a steady stream of litter. It should theoretically mess with the dog too, though Jason couldn’t remember where he’d seen that. Probably some American cops reality show. He was never watching those again.

  The voices were getting closer and Jason caught a glimps
e of them through the leaves. The dog was straining at his lead, a large German shepherd with his teeth bared and drool coating his jaws. Fuck, he didn’t want that snarling mouth around his leg.

  “What do we do? Y’know, if we find him?” The cop sounded nervous, green.

  “It’s just a simple takedown,” his colleague said confidently. “He isn’t armed and you can’t just rob a farmer of his shotgun around here.”

  “But what he did to those escort boys... They’re sending out the ARVs next.”

  “We’ve got Benny, haven’t we?”

  The German shepherd growled at his name and pulled his handler towards the spot beneath Jason’s tree. Shit, the cops were sending armed units out after him. There were worse things than having your leg gnawed off by a police dog, and he didn’t want his mam crying over a closed casket that concealed the fact that his face had been blown off.

  Jason held his breath, quiet as a church mouse, waiting. But the dog barked up at the tree, pawing at the ground beneath it.

  “He’d definitely got hold of something. Best go have a look.”

  Without warning, Jason felt the urge to sneeze. He tried staring up at the sky, pinching his nose, swallowing his saliva—but the itchy anticipation wouldn’t leave him. Why now? He had been so close—

  Jason sneezed.

  Above him, a flock of birds departed the tree, screeching and calling to each other.

  The dog handler laughed. “Oh, Benny, you daft thing. You’d think he’d never seen a bird before.”

  The two cops laughed to each other, the quiet, chilled laughter of two men who would rather be inside with a cup of tea.

  The handler dragged Benny away from the tree, continuing their search and leaving Jason to count his blessings once again.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Hacked Off

  While she was waiting for Sebastian to return with his warrant, Amy made herself useful.

  For a prison transport company that prided itself on its technological advancement, LOCDunne’s systems were absurdly easy to infiltrate. Once she’d installed the tracking software, the rest was lemon squeezy. The news photographs had neglected to blur the van’s registration plate and she input the vehicle’s particulars to peruse the last uploaded data.

  But wait—that made no sense. The tracking data had the van arriving safely at the courthouse at 09:15, exactly on schedule. Someone had gotten between the van and the primary interface, feeding back false data to the central tracking system—and giving who-knows-what intel to the van.

  Perhaps that was the explanation for how a simple trip down the M4 ended them up on a country lane headed for Pontypridd. Had the satellite navigation system sent them on a detour? If that was the case, then this whole operation had been meticulously planned and executed by someone with an above-average degree of hacking skill.

  Amy quickly withdrew her connection. She knew her digital footprint was minute, but they would be looking for evidence of tampering. Her tampering.

  Were the cops already privy to that information? Was that why Bryn was so convinced she’d had a hand in Jason’s escape?

  The problem was that she had only one half of the manipulated data. The van’s “black box” had been ripped out, purportedly by Jason. Amy, however, had seen him fail to distinguish a terabyte from a USB stick. The odds of him recognising and appropriately detaching the correct elements were long enough for her to bet the house on it.

  Amy connected to her Polish server and ran a tentative connection through a twisted route of proxy servers to LOCDunne’s system. Slowly, she filtered away the relevant data along her slow, arduous link, a few bits at a time, like a trickle of water leaking from a fast-flowing pipe.

  The data capture would take about an hour, far slower than if she used her own beautiful, fine-tuned server, but there was far less likelihood that the effort could be traced back to her. She would use what protections she could.

  This new information changed the whole picture. They’d thought they were dealing with street gangs dealing drugs, fighting among themselves and bringing in outside agents only to obtain more product. But now it seemed that they had a hacker on the payroll and they had shown their hand.

  If the organisation had hired the hacker to point fingers at Amy, they had to be a recent acquisition, reactive to Jason’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment. If that was the case, the hacker had one week to develop a system that would emulate perfectly the sending and receiving software of a high-end encryption programme.

  Sure, Amy had accessed the records in minutes, but reading information that was already logged and producing de novo data that would fool the system were worlds apart. She’d be hard-pressed to construct a perfect replica within a month, let alone seven days.

  She formulated three theories: the hacker was an insider at the escort company; the hacker was on a level higher even than Amy had achieved; or this had been planned for another purpose.

  Amy made a list of the IT contractor’s staff, setting up a database to log what she could uncover of their education, skills and recreational accomplishments. She set AEON to search LinkedIn, graduate records, blogging sites and SEO rankings for the information she needed. There wasn’t an IT professional alive who didn’t ensure her web presence was optimised.

  Well, except for Amy, obviously. But then she specialised in staying in the shadows.

  Next, she logged into the blackhat community of which she was co-founder and made a second list. This was more subjective, her impression of the individuals with sufficient skill and lack of scruples to take on work like this. She also sent out feelers to her lieutenants, friends she had trained and trusted with everything short of her root password, asking them to report on rumours they had of a job like this and who might’ve taken it.

  “Is he here?”

  Amy leapt to her feet, snatching up her empty coffee cup to defend herself.

  Lizzie looked at her incredulously. “Really?”

  Amy set the mug down hard on the desk but didn’t sit. “I knew I should’ve locked you out.”

  “Have you locked out your assistant?” The way she spat the word made it sound more like bastard or murderer. It wasn’t like Lizzie to mince words—she must think Amy was in a delicate state.

  “I thought I’d made it clear that is none of your business.”

  “How can you still believe this guy?” Lizzie threw up her hands, her voice shrill and passionate. “He’s murdered three people. What’s to stop him coming for you next?”

  “What happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

  “You think there was a gang of blokes waiting on a random Valleys road to bust this innocent man out of his prison van and kill his guards? Before letting him just wander off on his merry way? Grow up!”

  Amy snapped. “I’m not a child anymore! While you were fucking around in Australia, I grew up—alone. I had no choice.”

  “Do not put this on me.”

  “I haven’t seen you in six years! And then you just walk in here and think you can tell me how to live my life.”

  “When it comes to you living with a murderer, I bloody well can!”

  Arguing with Lizzie made her chest feel odd and tight. Amy couldn’t afford to have a panic attack now, not when Lizzie already thought she was close to the edge.

  “I want you to leave.”

  Lizzie changed tack, pain in her eyes and her voice soft. “I want you to swear to me that you will lock him out. And you will call the police if he comes here.”

  Amy considered lying to her sister. But they were already breaking apart and she couldn’t drive a further wedge between them. “I can’t.”

  She could see that Lizzie was fighting not to lose her temper again. “If you are so convinced he’s innocent, why not let justice take its course? Hand him back to th
e police.”

  Amy laughed, a bitter, mocking sound. “In prison, he was beaten and someone tried to hang him. Now they’ve framed him for murder—again. That’s what justice has done for him.”

  “Ames, this guy has already done time. He’s not some delicate flower that needs your protection.”

  “He needs me to keep him away from these people who are trying to kill him!”

  “No, you need him,” Lizzie said, and Amy could hear the pity in her words. “You want to save him so you don’t have to be alone.”

  The words went straight to her heart and Amy felt the world close down. “That’s not—”

  “Do you fancy him?”

  The shock jerked her out from under her anxiety and Amy looked at Lizzie as if she were a Klingon speaking Romulan. “What?”

  “You have a crush, don’t you? You’ve imagined a romance in your head. Wake up. The guy’s been playing you.”

  Hysteria replaced shock and Amy gave way to her laughter.

  Lizzie looked at her as if she’d finally fallen over the edge of sanity. “Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

  Swiping at the tears of mirth seeping from her eyes, Amy looked at her sister with a huge grin on her face. “You don’t know him. And you don’t know me either, not anymore.”

  “Amy—”

  “You can’t persuade me he is anything but the good, loyal man I know. Stay or go, it makes no difference. But I’m not making the tea.” Amy retook her seat in front of AEON and checked her searches—nothing yet. She could see Lizzie awkwardly hovering in the reflection of AEON’s blank third monitor.

  “You’re not kicking me out?”

  “If you stop haranguing me about Jason.”

  Lizzie gave off a little snort. “You’ve no clean cups, have you?”

  “My assistant’s been gone for an entire week. What do you think?”

  Without further argument, Lizzie gathered the collection of used cups from the desk. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”