The Mayor tried to interrupt, but the voice carried on regardless. Singh looked at Palmer.
‘It’s a pre-recorded message, sir. Tape probably.’
The voice continued as Palmer nodded that he understood.
‘Should that money not be in the account within twenty-four hours of you being given its location and number, then at least one thousand people will die – one thousand people at least…’
The voice paused for effect.
‘And now for the demonstration I promised you… I will count to ten. One… two…three…’
Proceedings were briefly interrupted as the Mayor’s mobile rang on his desk. The Mayor waved a hand to his secretary to take the call. She picked it up and whispered: ‘Hello?’
It was the last word she ever spoke. Silently, like a ship slowly sinking beneath the waves, she dropped to the floor, the mobile spilling from her hand and sliding away. The distorted voice counted on as Palmer and Singh reached her. He checked her pulse as Singh started CPR; nothing, no heart beat. Singh moved the secretary’s head face up to start mouth to mouth. They both spotted it at the same time and stopped in their tracks. It wasn’t much, but there it was – a tiny scarlet, glistening trickle of blood running from her ear. The Mayor was at his office door, shouting down the corridor for medics. The voice on the speaker carried on.
‘…eight…nine… ten… I think I have made my point by now, haven’t I? Ten million ready, in four days’ time.’
The phone clicked off, leaving a hum from the speakers. Palmer crossed quickly to the technicians.
‘Get anything?’
One of them shook his head.
‘Nothing, sir; no fix. He’s a clever sod – routed it through ISDN internet lines and proxy servers.’
Palmer looked to Sergeant Singh for a translation, although he knew what she would tell him; but she was still trying to get life back into the secretary. Handing the CPR over to the newly arrived medics, she got up and crossed over to him.
‘Basically sir, he’s got the recording set up somewhere on a timer, and set it to ring this number using an internet modem connection; which means he can program the call to go through lots of different servers before it gets here. Sort of a scenic round-the-houses route, so to speak.’
‘Can we still trace it back to the source?’
‘We can try, but my bet is he’s using proxy servers – the sort of places you go to get an encrypted pseudonym and be untraceable, if you wanted to surf the kiddy porn sites and not be found out. They’re big business now, and mostly sited in Russia and Eastern Europe; unlicensed and unaccountable. If he’s routed the call through three or four of them, forget it. We’ll never trace him.’
The paramedics tried in vain to revive the Mayor’s secretary, and after a while they shook their heads, covered her over with a blanket, and took her away on a stretcher. The pathologist was called. The Mayor sat back at his desk, visibly shaken and silent for once. He reached down to retrieve his mobile. Palmer’s strong hand caught his wrist and stopped him.
‘Sorry Mayor, we’ll need that. We may have better luck tracing that call than we have with the other one.’
‘He meant to kill me, Justin,’ the Mayor said quietly. ‘I’d normally have taken that call. It should be me under the blanket. Jesus!’
‘Well, if we don’t get lucky soon you might need another hundred thousand blankets.’
The Mayor took in the gravity of the situation.
‘I’ll pay the little shit.’
‘And when he comes back for more will you pay him again? And maybe again after that?’ Palmer spoke sense, and the Mayor knew it.
‘Okay, I’ll pay him the first lot and you can follow the money and get him that way. It should be easy enough to trace through bank to bank account transfers.’
‘Easy enough over here sir, yes. But what if the bank he transfers it to is Swiss? Took the victims of the Nazis sixty years to even get an acknowledgement their stolen money was in a Swiss bank, let alone get it back. Lots of safe havens in the world for illicit money if you’ve enough of it, and I think ten million is more than enough.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We hope four days is enough time for us to dig out a lead on the bastard and close in, that’s what we do, sir. And at least we know we’re not looking for a hypodermic needle anymore.’
‘Sir.’
Sergeant Singh caught his attention. He joined her and the technicians who were engrossed looking at a green monitor screen on which a series of zigzags moved up and down the tail, zagging to join the head and repeat the move.
‘Pretty patterns, eh?’
The screen meant nothing to Palmer.
‘It’s called a ‘mouse trap’, sir,’ Gheeta explained. ‘Our killer certainly knows what he’s doing. The call was routed through proxy servers in Eastern Europe and Indonesia, and then routed back on itself. Once the call was terminated it’s like a hall of mirrors – each trace just sends you back to the last one, and you basically go around in circles retracing your steps time and time again. It’s a favourite ploy of some internet web sites so you can’t leave them; only way to bust it is to turn off. Do that and you lose the whole thing.’
‘Is there any way we can get to the original source of the call?’
‘No sir, no way.’
Chapter 7
The high panelled corridor of the Defence Ministry echoed Palmer and Singh’s footsteps as they followed their uniformed escort who strode quickly along it. Palmer had no idea why Assistant Commissioner Bateman had called him urgently up to the fifth floor at the Yard and told him he was to go over to the Defence Ministry immediately for a meeting with Lt Commander Layne. Their escort paused outside a door marked NAVY PRIVATE. His loud knock was answered by a muffled ‘enter’ from within.
Inside Lt Cmmdr Harry Layne rose from behind his enormous boardroom desk. With hand outstretched, he beamed at Palmer as they entered.
‘Justin you old fox, how are you? How’s the lovely Mrs P., eh? Still wasting her life on you?’
‘Hello Harry, we are both fine thank you. And your lot?’
‘Yes, all okay thanks. Offspring all fled the nest now of course, same as yours. Sit down, sit down.’
Palmer introduced Sergeant Singh, who was never really surprised at Palmer’s contacts. He seemed to be able to produce somebody who knew somebody who could help whenever they floated into new uncharted waters. The Commander smiled at Singh and motioned them both towards large comfy chairs, then retook his seat behind the desk before offering an explanation.
‘Justin, or should I say DCS Palmer and I both started our respective careers about the same time, Sergeant; and at every damn management course I went on there he was, usually disrupting them by asking sensible questions which of course you mustn’t do, ha-ha.’
He giggled like a child at the memory.
‘We had some damn good times, didn’t we Justin? Damn good times. Didn’t do one stick of good for our management skills, but certainly honed our pontoon and drinking skills!’
Palmer gave an embarrassed smile. Day one of his ‘four days’ given by the killer was coming to its end and he wanted to get on, not chat about old times. The Commander must have learned something from one of their courses, as he picked up the serious vibes from Palmer and settled down to serious work. He thrust sheets of paper over the desk to each of them.
‘Sign those, please.’
Palmer took out his pen.
‘Official Secrets Act?’
‘Yes, the information you want is embargoed I’m afraid.’
Singh followed Palmer’s lead and turned to the last page and signed it. It was obviously just a usual formality, although her curiosity would have liked her to read the whole thing; all fourteen pages of it.
The Commander reached over and took the papers back, countersigned them and put them in a drawer under his desk.
‘Right, that’s out of the way; so now you can bring me up
to speed. What have you got so far then on this killer who’s holding the Mayor to ransom?’
Between them Palmer and Singh went through the case, from the beginning to the unfortunate incident in the Mayor’s office. When they had finished the Commander sat back with a long sigh.
‘The man you’re looking for is George North.’
Both Palmer and Singh were a trifle stunned by this. Both thought it prudent to stay silent and await the explanation for such a direct statement.
‘I want to bring in one of our security people to give you information on North and work with you on the case; he knows North inside and out. Any objections, Justin?’
Palmer shrugged.
‘No, we could certainly use some help on this one.’
The commander pressed his desk intercom.
‘Would you come in now please.’
He took two large photos from his desk and passed one each to Singh and Palmer.
‘That is George North.’
The photos showed a uniformed naval officer, late middle-age and serious looking.
A side door to the room opened quietly to admit a young man, also in Naval Officer uniform, who crossed silently to the desk and stood beside Layne. Only when she looked up from the photo towards him did Sergeant Singh’s heart miss a beat. The young officer was her partner, Mark. They looked at each other. Neither the Commander nor Palmer, who was committing George North’s face to his memory, noticed the sign of recognition on her face. Layne did the introductions.
‘This is Mark Randall, he’s handling this case from our end. Mark, this is Detective Sergeant Singh and Detective Chief Superintendent Palmer, Serial Murder Squad, New Scotland Yard.’
They nodded to each other and smiled the perfunctory smile as Randall sat down in a chair alongside them. Palmer guessed he was MI6. The Commander ran over the brief details of the murders for him.
‘Looks like we have the proverbial ‘loose cannon’ out there, eh?’
Randall nodded.
‘What he has in his armoury is far more dangerous than any cannon,’ he added. ‘George North is, or was, one of Portland Down’s top boffins; he was seconded there from AT&T research twelve years ago. At AT&T he was team leader, researching wavelength possibilities on very high ultra frequency radio bands for communications; he was years ahead of anybody else in his field, and he knew it. He came to us and said that the research he had completed had convinced him that he could make a people destructive weapon with NCD, no collateral damage; in other words, he could kill an enemy inside buildings or vehicles without damage to that building or vehicle using a wavelength frequency signal. Now, replace the word vehicle with the word submarine or even aircraft carrier, and you can see the ramifications of what he was claiming. Taking it to the maximum, it would mean de-populating a big city whilst doing no structural damage, leaving the infrastructure and means of government intact.’
‘By ‘de-populating’ you mean killing the population?’
Singh looked him straight in the eyes, having regained her inner composure
‘Yes, I do.’
Palmer was having difficulty with the concept before him
‘This is science fiction, isn’t it? My God.’
‘Science fiction has a habit of becoming fact over time, sir,’ Randall said seriously. ‘North was only on the very first tentative experiments using UHF sound; but his results were promising, and he had an increase in funding and staff. He had found the wave band and pitch that could render the recipient inoperative.’
‘You mean dead?’ Singh said. Their eyes met again. Hers were cold.
‘Yes Sergeant, dead.’
Palmer shifted in his chair.
‘You mean that North had actually tested this bloody thing on humans and killed them?’
‘I don’t have that information, sir.’
‘Yes you do.’
Palmer wanted the facts; he wanted to know what sort of weapon they were dealing with. Randall remained silent, until the Commander came to his rescue.
‘If it was tested, Justin, it would have been tested in the field; in a war theatre like Iraq, or Syria.’
‘I didn’t think you’d pop down Morrison’s and zap the bacon counter, Harry. So what happened? Why did George North go off the rails?’
‘Well,’ Randall carried on. ‘It’s important to say at this point that North is not running around with a weapon of mass destruction that he can point at a building and kill everybody inside with. He does have the capability of killing by subjecting a person to the frequency, but that frequency has to be delivered to the target at a very close proximity to the receiving diaphragm.’
‘Receiving diaphragm?’ Palmer asked, seeking clarity.
‘The ear,’ Layne explained.
‘So delivery by phone would be just perfect,’ Palmer went on, his brain now racing.
‘Yes sir,’ Randall nodded. ‘And it would seem that that’s what he was showing you in the case of the Mayor’s secretary – an example of his power. The other fatalities so far would have been caused by him calling a number at random.’
A thought occurred to Palmer.
‘How do you know we are investigating these cases? The media don’t know the victims are linked, or how they were killed, and we haven’t released any information on weapon or method. So how come you’ve got all this information?’
Commander Layne took the question and gave the stock evasive answer.
‘That’s above our pay scale, Justin.’
Gheeta knew how they knew. She’d always been open with Mark and had discussed this case with him as she had other cases previously. How could she tell Palmer that she was living with a Naval Secret Service operative, and didn’t even know it? All those evasive answers he had given her whenever she had asked about his work made sense now. She knew he worked at the Navy Desk in the Ministry but assumed it was a normal Civil Service position, not an intelligence agency position. Christ she felt stupid! She kept her head down and avoided eye contact with Mark.
Palmer thought for a moment and turned to her.
‘Sergeant, get Claire to find the last calls received on each of the victims’ mobiles. They would have been from North.’
Things were starting to make sense to Palmer now.
‘So George North did a bunk with his little piece of equipment and decided to make it pay. But why?’
‘The politics changed, sir,’ Randall explained. ‘To develop a delivery system that could deliver the required frequency strength to just a small two-storey building from any distance would need a development budget starting around a hundred million, and that’s a conservative estimate. The problems would be enormous, and the technology completely new; it would be comparable to NASA putting the first man on the moon. The time factor alone would be forty years plus, so the decision was taken to mothball it.’
Palmer nodded. He was beginning to understand this man North.
‘And presumably mothball North as well?’
‘Early retirement, sir. He took it, but he didn’t like it.’
‘I can empathise with that.’
‘Me too,’ the Commander added.
Palmer thought for a moment.
‘Okay, so where are we now? North just took off one day, did he – just like that – and disappeared? Spur of the moment decision?’
Randall smiled.
‘No sir, George North planned this. He planned it well in advance. He left the service and for a year did consultancy work for the big telecom companies; he kept his head down. We monitored him closely for six months, as we do with all senior staff with privileged information that leave or retire. It’s normal procedure, nothing out of the ordinary. Then six months ago he took a holiday in Germany and vanished; until now.’
Sergeant Singh spoke.
‘How did he get the weapon?’
Randall was embarrassed.
‘He either took it with him when he left, or got it out bit by bit over a period of
time before he finally left. It’s only a small box, the size of a cigarette packet.’
‘Well,’ Palmer said, taking a deep breath. ‘We have got a bit of a situation on our hands then haven’t we, eh?’
The Commander rubbed his chin.
‘I suggest Randall works with your team, Justin. He has all the information and files on North and the technology involved. Anything else you want just ask me.’
‘North’s present whereabouts might help.’
‘That we can’t help you with I’m afraid. Not that we don’t want to, we just have no bloody idea.’
Chapter 8
Gheeta was furious.
‘I nearly died on the spot, Mark. I could not believe it was you!’
Singh had arrived back at her apartment, after checking in with Claire and calling it a day. Mark was already there. He sat on the lounge window seat as she took her shoes and uniform off in the bedroom, the anger in her voice resonating around the apartment. He laughed.
‘Fancy both of us working on the same case, eh?’
Gheeta came through from the bedroom in sloppy jumper and jeans.
‘Never mind that. Who the hell are you, Mark Randall? Who am I sharing my life with? I meet you at a security conference, you tell me you work in security for the armed forces, and I naturally think you’re military police.’
‘I am, sort of.’
Randall was trying to make light of his subterfuge, but Gheeta was not having it.
‘Military police don’t work in the advanced weaponry field, Mark. Don’t treat me like a fool, okay? Military police aren’t on first name terms with Defence Ministry Naval Commanders. What are you, Six or Five?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You. Ae you MI6 or MI5? I’d guess Six.’
Mark rose and looked out over the Thames, avoiding Gheeta’s angry look.
‘You’d guess right with Six. Look Gheeta, I’m sorry. You know what it’s like. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’
She took no notice.
‘And where did MI6 find you? You don’t apply for that kind of job, they find you. Where did they find you, Mark? What is your past?’
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 13