Steve Post shook Pete’s hand and reminisced about the last time they had met. Dee noticed the FBI Academy ring on his right hand. Steve turned to Dee. She offered her hand and he walked past it to enclose her in a hug. She returned the hug, all feelings of discomfort forgotten.
“Christine sends her regards, but we should both be at church this morning and so she’s covering for me.”
“Sorry to mess up your weekend, Steve, but this was the only time we had,” Dee apologised.
“Not at all,” Steve smiled, “I would give up more than my weekend to meet up with my Brit friends.”
Steve sat down and refused coffee, settling instead for sparkling water. Dee remembered seeing the Mormon Temple the night before and it stirred a long forgotten memory.
“I forgot, Steve. You joined the Mormon Church about five years ago. You don’t drink tea or coffee, do you?”
“Not any more. Christine and I joined at the same time. I can tell you that giving up smoking, drinking and alcohol were tough, but giving up coffee was almost impossible. We nearly gave up. But now I only yearn for it when I catch the odour of freshly filtered coffee drifting through the office.”
“So much for the hard bitten, hard drinking G Man image,” Geordie joked. “Your lot are even invading my area. Your church is building a strong presence in Newcastle. There must be half a dozen Latter Day Saint chapels there now, all on main roads.”
After a little more banter and Dee’s short monologue about married life with Josh, they moved onto the business of the day.
***
Steve Post had been busy since Dee had called him and asked for his help in researching Gillian Davis, and he had compiled a short report which he handed to her. Dee sat close to Pete and they followed the printed word as Steve explained exactly what he had been able to discover.
“Denton Miles III is a tobacco farming heir. The family goes back almost two hundred years in the same area. The old farm is now mostly highways, developments and smaller farms. Tobacco growing there died out in the thirties when the depression took hold, and the first Denton Miles decided the family should produce food and provide jobs, in preference to simply making money. It was an enlightened attitude that was appreciated by three US administrations who subsequently gave the Miles family regular access to the White House.
Gillian Davis, otherwise known as Gillian Miles on her citizenship papers, is the admitted illegitimate offspring of Denton Miles III. It seems your rumour mill was right on the nail, Pete.
Denton Miles himself returned to the US, and two years later married the socialite and banking heiress Elizabeth Chase-Markham. They have no children. It may be that she is not capable of bearing children. Either that or the decision was to give kids a miss and concentrate on their careers.
For almost eleven years Denton ran the family business whilst hisy
dad ran unsuccessfully for the Senate. He almost made it, too. He was only a few votes away from success, and the backlash from the Clinton years seemed likely to propel him to victory, when he suddenly took ill and died.
The business is now a listed corporation and Denton’s interest in it is managed under a blind trust, freeing him to be involved in politics himself. As you already know, he is now Senator Denton Miles III. What you maybe do not know is that he is a potential Republican Presidential nominee; the only one the party thinks can compete with Sarah Paling and my fellow Mormon, Mitt Romney.
Your girl has some powerful allies in the US. You’ll have to tread carefully. Unless the evidence against her is rock solid you won’t be getting an extradition warrant. You may not get one even if it’s a slam dunk. We don’t send American citizens away to face justice very easily.”
“Surely, if Denton Miles is contemplating running for President he’ll try to distance himself from any scandal,” Dee postulated.
“True, but sticking by the errant daughter you didn’t know you had, a few tears and a promise to get her straightened out stateside, may play well with the Republican vote and Virginia hasn’t had a President for a long time. You might recall a couple from the past; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson”
Dee and Pete both frowned. They found Pete’s analysis hard to accept, but they knew he was in a better position to opine on the matter than most.
***
The meeting ran on for almost three hours, a mixture of business and personal reminiscences taking the time. Eventually Steve asked, “Do you still want that special equipment you asked for? I have it in the car.”
Dee nodded, and Pete said that he felt he had a duty to make Gillian Davis pay for what she had done to the Hokobus, regardless of her contacts in the States. Steve shrugged.
“OK. As I said before, you’re borrowing twenty thousand dollars worth of kit, the optics alone account for almost five thousand dollars, but you can pick out a fruit fly on a tree branch half a mile away, depending on the weather conditions.
So, please remember, you break it, you pay for it. If it doesn’t get returned to the field office there will be an investigation and I’ll be in trouble.”
Dee and Pete promised that they would be careful and that Steve would not be implicated in anything they did with the equipment. After sharing a joke with his two British friends, Steve Post rose and said goodbye, agreeing to meet to debrief them on Friday, but they were destined to meet again a little sooner than that.
Chapter 52
Walt Disney World, Florida, USA, Sunday 9am.
Gil’s iPad, iPod and iPhone were all connected as she used all of their computing power and stored memory to carry out the research she knew was necessary if she wanted to remain safe. Already today she’d had Doc hack into two UK commercial databases and change data for her benefit, a task he had sniffed was below him. Sure enough, twenty minutes later he was reporting that the tasks had been completed and had offered no challenge whatsoever as neither company was using complex encryption software. He was slightly mollified when Gil promised to pay him the full fee anyway.
Sitting on her king sized hotel bed, Gil ticked the final item off her list. It was a story, a fiction but one that she would swear was fact, knowing that if she didn’t she could find herself back in the UK waiting for a court hearing or, more likely, the inevitable attempt on her life. The story had been carefully woven around known facts. She had created a convincing story that took incriminating evidence and turned it around so that it portrayed her as an unwitting victim of powerful people and institutions.
The fact that MI5 would know immediately that her story was fabricated did not concern Gil; they would not share that knowledge with the police. She knew that MI5 would not be able to prove their assertions, and in any case they would not want the true version of the story aired in public. Given the choice between being humiliated but seeing Gillian serve life in prison, and saving themselves from humiliation but letting her go free, she fully expected them to choose the latter.
Gil had a patsy who could take the fall for her, and, much as she regretted using him, she had little choice if she wanted to stay free.
The edited story was saved on her hard drive and on a mini USB drive under the title “affidavit”.
Gil took her rather bulky sunglasses and extracted from one of the arms a micro SD card. The glasses, commercially available from companies dealing in spyware and which were even available on Amazon, recorded HD video and high quality stills at the touch of a button on the side arm of the glasses.
Sliding the micro SD card into her specially adapted iPhone VOX, she used the screen to preview the video and the still photos she had taken. She isolated about twenty minutes of video and around thirty still pictures which she then downloaded onto her iPad VOX. The pictures and video transferred over rapidly and the preview screen flashed up. Opening each still picture with Photoshop Elements, she cropped them to isolate two figures, two figures who appeared far more times than they had a right to appear in a sample of this size.
The man was in his
mid twenties, with short dark hair and prominent eyebrows. He had dark eyes and a strong nose. His mouth was large and his lips full. He was clean shaven, but a shadow of beard growth was still visible. The woman was probably in her twenties too, but she looked much younger. She was probably chosen on that basis. She was pretty and petite but she was much too handy with that camera when Gil was in the picture.
Gil examined the pictures as they were loading onto an FTP site that Doc had nominated. From their remote computers Gil and Doc could both load data onto the server and download it. Doc’s task, computer genius that he was, would be to see if he could hack into any photo recognition databases and get a hit. Gil would dearly like to know who they were. Doc, on the other hand, saw the task as nothing more than a chance to beat the US law enforcement firewalls and give them yet another headache by leaving a destructive little ‘worm’ behind.
The Chameleon had survived far too long, in a competitive and deadly business, to fail to notice a mock bride and groom appearing at every turn in her peripheral vision. They would not be MI5, neither would they be likely to be CIA; even the FBI seemed unlikely. In any event, how would any of those agencies know where she was?
Gil had a sudden thought. It was obvious, really, and so she booted up a newspaper picture archive. The archive belonged to the Washington Picture Library. A password or a fee was due from anyone wanting to search the archive. Gil attached a dongle to her iPad via the USB port and rebooted the site. The dongle, provided by Doc, did its work, and soon the picture site security software was cooing over the dongle, revealing all of her secrets. Good old Doc, he knew what he was doing. The dongle, having taken what it wanted from its suitor, dumped the link and listed the last twenty passwords used to enter the site. Gil picked one at random and inserted the password into the box. The search engine appeared instantly.
Gil typed in the name Denton Miles and received a page full of pictures of her father. There were fifteen thumbnails to a page and there were at least twenty pages of them. After fifteen minutes of searching Gil found what she was looking for. On a photograph entitled ‘campaign team celebrates’ stood her father, looking statesmanlike and rather handsome, but there in the background was the blond girl without her Minnie Mouse Ear veil. Further, and to the left, pouring champagne for an elderly grey haired contributor, stood the fake groom.
Her father was keeping an eye on her. Good for him, she thought. By the time the Doc came back to her with the names Jessica Halvorssen and Bryan O’Keefe Gillian was no longer interested.
Chapter 53
The Miles Estate, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA, Monday 11am.
The security team were uncomfortable with the situation but they followed orders. They were to allow access to the house to one Gillian Miles, a former British assassin, and the senator was not only in residence but he was to greet her personally. The fact that she was his estranged daughter did nothing to alleviate their concerns. Luckily, sensing their nervousness, the pretty and smiling young woman volunteered herself for a pat down. She was not carrying a weapon.
Elizabeth Chase Miles opened the door on the front porch of the old plantation house before Gil had a chance to knock. The beautiful and glamorous senator’s wife oozed good breeding. She was reported as being in her mid fifties but she looked a decade younger. Her smile was warm and generous. Gil wasn’t sure how to greet the woman who had married her husband without knowing he had already fathered a child. She had no need to worry because, as she was puzzling over the correct etiquette, Liz Chase Miles threw good manners to the wind and stepped in to hug Gil as if she was a long lost friend. When the older woman withdrew from the hug, which was as tight as it was long lasting, she held Gil at arm’s length and scanned her face.
“Gillian, you have no idea how long I have waited for this day. We have always wanted children of our own but the fact that even one of us could produce a beautiful young woman like you makes me quite emotional. Come in and meet your father.”
The two women stepped into a hallway that spoke more of New England austerity than grandeur. Gil was surprised by its homeliness. The staircase was painted white, as was much of the clapboard on the walls. A dado rail ran around the plastered blue-painted walls, above the clapboard. With the portraits and other artwork, one could have imagined being in Cape Cod, or at least on the set of Murder She Wrote.
Hearing voices in the hallway, Senator Miles Denton III came out of his study to join the two women.
“Gillian, I couldn’t believe it when you wrote to tell me I had a daughter. Since that day - what is it, three years ago? - I determined that I would do everything I could to persuade you to visit with us. And here you are.”
The staid Senator from Virginia hugged the daughter he had never met and looked as though he may never let go. The three of them retired to a comfortable and airy sitting room, where the married couple sat holding hands as they talked.
“Senator, Elizabeth, I have dreamed about this meeting but never did I see it like this. At best I had hoped for a frosty politeness from you, Elizabeth, and perhaps a restrained wariness from you, Senator.” Gil wanted to let them know that their welcome was unexpected and much appreciated.
“”Gillian, we are all grown-ups here. Miles probably got up to all sorts of things before we met and, quite frankly, I daren’t ask what they were. But he speaks about your mother with such tenderness that I can’t help but feel that their relationship wasn’t anything but right. After all, look what it brought us.”
Miles Denton squeezed his wife’s hand as she spoke, then added, “Look, I’ve kept a window open until three this afternoon, when I really must conference call with my fellow senator for Virginia, by the name of Rich. He is a democrat, but a nice democrat.”
He smiled, and Gil’s heart skipped. “That’s my dad,” she thought.
Over the next four hours they had lunch, talked about Gillian’s mother and her upbringing in Hampshire, and walked in the garden, albeit briefly as it was still cold outside.
Elizabeth was keen to hear about Uncle Nick, who seemed to have been a surrogate father, whilst the Senator showed a good deal of interest in her career. He was aware of Celebrato Greeting Cards and her role in transforming the company, but he was most keenly interested in her role with MI5, much of which was covered by the official secrets act.
For the last hour Elizabeth left father and daughter alone to bond, and they talked in details about Gillian’s skills and training. Gil even confided in him about her period in private enterprise with Doug McKeown, concluding with the death of the Hokobus and her escape from the UK after an attempt on her life. She related the story in a way that placed her in the best possible light, but even this revised version of recent history clearly disturbed her father.
“I wanted you to know the whole unvarnished truth,” she explained, looking him in the eye. “If you don’t want to continue with any form of relationship with me, I’ll understand. It will still have been an honour to meet you.”
There was a long period of silence, and Gil wondered whether she had overplayed her hand.
“Gillian, we – governments, that is – call on people to do things we would not do ourselves. We ask our soldiers to make sacrifices we would not make to keep our society safe. From time to time we may inadvertently hurt the good guys, but all of the time we hurt the people we send to do our dirty work.
For decades we have trained people in the deadly arts, we have supported truly wicked regimes and we have lived to regret it. I fear that the government who trained you and the society that wanted you to clean up their mess without wanting to hear about it, are equally responsible for the death of a couple like the Hokobus. We don’t know any other way.”
He paused, stood up and crossed the floor to sit beside Gil. “Whilst I am not without influence, I’m not sure how much I can protect you from the rigours of international law. I can guarantee you that you will be safe and treated fairly. I hope that you understand that.”
/> Gillian nodded, and the two hugged again.
***
Over a quarter of a mile away, in the wooded hills surrounding the estate, Pete and Dee blew into their hands and tried to keep warm. The equipment was set up, and had been for hours, targeted on the front door of the house that currently accommodated Gillian Davis, The Chameleon.
They had watched a lithe young woman with short dark hair enter the house earlier, but had been unsure of their target until she turned around briefly as the door closed behind her. There had been no time to get a shot off. Now, however, if she exited through the front door she would be in their sights.
Pete looked through the spotting scope; Dee was already lined up on the front door.
“I hope she comes out soon. We’re losing the light.”
“We have night vision and infra red, I won’t miss anything,” Dee confirmed for the third time. Both of them were tired and irritable, and cold, so very cold.
***
“Holland and Mattingley will show you to the lodge in the rear. You can stay there as long as you like. Elizabeth wants you to join us for dinner, and then the two of you can spend the next few days together, getting to know each other while I go off to Washington and round up some help for you.”
The Senator hugged her as he opened the front door for her. “Don’t you worry, I’m sure I can fix things. That’s what dads are for, after all.”
Gillian walked out onto the stoop and into the winter sunshine. She thought she saw the flash of a lens or mirror in the distance, but decided that she was probably mistaken. Relieved and contented by her reception, she stepped down towards the two bodyguards who would accompany her to the lodge.
***
“Door is opening,” Pete said as he looked through the spotting scope. “You’ll need around three degrees of traverse and two degrees of elevation to keep her in your sights for around ten seconds.”
The tripod was firmly affixed, giving Dee the best possible chance for a steady shot. As Dee picked up the movement at the door and focussed the cross hairs, Pete whispered, “It’s her. It’s up to you now.”
Chameleon - A City of London Thriller Page 25