The Pulsar Files, page 12
part #1 of Matt Flynn Series
‘I think you might be over egging the pudding somewhat. People have more important things to worry about than a few corrupt politicians with their hands in the honey jar. I mean, do you remember the big rumpus a few years back about some jets we sold to Saudi Arabia?’
‘I thought you said you didn’t know much about defence?’
‘I don’t. Despite working for a newspaper that often treats its employees no better than slaves, they do let us read it sometimes.’
‘You’re referring to the Al-Yamamah project?’
She nodded. ‘Sounds about right.’
‘It all started when the Saudis awarded BAE Systems a huge order for Typhoon jets. My dad’s company, my company now, made the circuit boards for the radar.’
‘I apologise for my ignorance, I’m obviously talking to an expert in the field. A stink erupted about the big bribes being paid, slush funds being set up for entertainment in night clubs and restaurants and exotic holidays for some. A few years later, the Serious Fraud Office became involved, but the investigation was shelved and I doubt if anyone will ever be prosecuted.’
‘Not bad.’
‘Not bad for what? A woman or a Scottish person?’
‘You’re not scowling, so I don’t think I’ve offended you. Not bad for a non-defence correspondent.’
‘Thank you, but do you see my point? If it suits politicians, businessmen and the Saudis for a story like this to stay buried, then buried it stays. I don’t think the general public knows too much about it, or if they do, gives a toss about it.’
‘I suppose when you look at it like that, if the balloon accident and the attack on us are Dragon’s response for me nicking a few documents, then it does look a bit over the top.’ He paused for moment, thinking. ‘Maybe I’m missing something; I mean I looked at this stuff around three in the morning and stopped when I spotted the names of a couple of MPs and senior military personnel that I recognised. Maybe there’s more if I looked deeper.’
‘There has to be something more serious going on than you’ve seen so far, or else we’re looking in the wrong place.’
‘Pushing this not insubstantial issue to one side, whatever the reason for the attacks, it doesn’t make much difference to the situation we’re in now, today. If we don’t find someone to help us, I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, or one day you’ll find me lying dead in a skip.’
‘Don’t be so morose, Chris,’ she said. She was tempted to add, ‘Look on the bright side,’ but she couldn’t see any. ‘Do you have any clue who we can turn to?’
‘You mean, apart from the journalist sitting in front of me? No.’
‘What about the policeman running the accident investigation, Superintendent Cousins?’
‘What could he do?’
‘He could give us protection while we try to find out more.’
‘What good would that do? We need to get these documents into the public domain and shame Dragon, it’s the only way I’m ever going to feel safe.’
He popped the last piece of sausage into his mouth and put down his knife and fork. ‘Have you gone off the idea of having this story published in your newspaper?’
‘No, but having given the issue some thought, I don’t think publication is going to be as straightforward as I first assumed. If Dragon realise what we’re about to do, they might take out a court injunction and try to suppress the story. They would in all likelihood succeed, as courts take a dim view of petitions based on documents obtained illegally.’
‘How would they find out?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine and I won’t know for sure until I ring the office, but how did they find out we were meeting at a pub in Oxford? If they know this much about us, they must have twigged that I’m a journalist. They may have already set the legal wheels in motion.’
‘My God that would be awful,’ he said wringing his hands together, a nervous trait paddling just below the surface of his easy-going persona. ‘Can you call your paper and find out?’
‘I will, as soon as we get back to the room, providing my boss will speak to me as I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday. It was him, if you remember, I was talking to when we were attacked. I left him hanging.’
‘Please talk to him soon,’ he said, rising from the chair and rubbing his stomach, ‘the tension is giving me indigestion.’
‘That’s not indigestion, it’s the pain you get when you stuff your face with three sausages, two eggs, beans and a couple of black puddings. Don’t your uncle and aunt feed you?’
Chapter 22
Chris and Louise returned to their room at the Hotel Mercure after breakfast. Louise watching nervously as Chris turned on his laptop. He hadn’t tried to switch it on since yesterday when used as a cudgel to bash one of their assailants on the head, and she didn’t feel confident it would work again.
Miracle of miracles, the laptop started to go through its boot-up routine and didn’t make any strange noises. While waiting for it to complete, she put a call through to her boss, Kingsley Vincent. She couldn’t call him yesterday from the bus or the train, as after smacking her assailant with it, she dropped it and didn’t dare go back to retrieve it. She’d gone out this morning and bought a pay-as-you-go replacement and a charger.
‘Morning Kingsley, how are you?’
‘Don’t come Miss Righteous with me, Walker. Where the hell have you been? You left me in limbo land yesterday and I don’t like people doing it to me.’
‘Get off your bloody high horse for a minute will you and listen.’
‘What! Who do you think–’
‘Listen. When I called you yesterday, I was in Chris Anderson’s car. Remember Chris? The hot-air balloon accident in Oxford?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Get on with it.’
‘We were driving along the road as I was speaking to you, when a van came out of a side street and ran right across our path, nearly taking away the front of the car.’
‘You expect me to believe that? You’ve had a couple of days to concoct a good story and this is the best you can come up with?’
‘You’re having me on. You must have heard the squealing of brakes and people shouting.’
‘No. I gave you ten seconds to come back on the line before I hung up.’
‘You can be so obtuse! Look the incident up on the feed. Abingdon Road, Oxford, yesterday. Go on take a look, I’ll wait.’
She heard him tap-tapping on his computer keyboard.
‘My God!’ he said a few seconds later. ‘This is you? I’m so sorry, Louise, I didn’t realise. Were you hurt? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. We’re both fine. Chris managed to stop before we hit the van.’
‘Have you been to hospital to be checked out? You both could have whiplash.’
‘We’re both uninjured, thankfully. We’ve got a few cuts and bruises, and this morning Chris has a sore neck, but nothing serious.’
‘What happened?’
She outlined the story, details of the two men who attacked them a taster of the documents they’d been looking at in the pub. For the next few minutes, she listened to Kingsley’s response.
When at last she said goodbye, she threw her new phone on the bed in frustration. ‘Damn, damn damn!’ she shouted.
‘What happened?’ Chris asked.
‘Oh nothing. The biggest story to hit my newspaper in over ten years and my chance to hit the big time as a journalist, and they’ve both been chucked out of the window like an old fag butt.’
‘How come?’
‘Dragon are on to us. They threatened my paper. If we publish, they’ll sue.’
‘It’s just an empty threat, surely?’
‘Nope, my boss was persuaded after receiving a call from one of the top litigation firms in London. They gave him a summary of the complaint and demanded the immediate return of the documents.’
‘Well, they would wouldn’t they, but they’re not having them.’
‘Are you looking at them now?’
‘Yep. I scrolled down to where I finished up the other night, but found nothing heavier than the stuff I told you about earlier.’
She thought for a moment trying to clear her head of the bitter disappointment. ‘Why don’t you look at emails sent by the Head of Security? He sounds a nasty sort. If there’s any dirty dealing going on, I bet he’s involved. What’s his name?’
‘Daniel Leppo. Good idea, give me a couple of minutes.’
While Chris tapped away on his computer, Louise texted a friend in the office, Estelle. She told her she was fine but didn’t say where she was and didn’t say when she intended to return; in truth, because she didn’t know. She also sent another text to her flat mate, Caitlin. She was used to Louise being away for one or two days at a time on assignment, but if this went on for a few more days, she would start to worry.
‘Listen to this Louise. It’s an email Leppo sent to someone who, on Leppo’s instructions, escorted an employee off company premises for failing a drug test. ‘Thanks for saving me the trouble. I told him at his exit interview, if he ever comes within ten yards of this building I’ll tear his balls out with my teeth.’ He sounds like a right charmer.’
‘Less of the frivolity and get on with some real work.’
‘Yes, miss.’
A few minutes later, he said, ‘I keep seeing the word, ‘Renoir.’ Do you think it might be a code word?’
‘I dunno. Have you seen it before? It might be another name for Pulsar.’
‘They often give new products a working name before they reveal its true marketing title, so you could be right.’
‘I think he’s a French artist from the 1800s. Maybe they’re thinking about buying a painting to brighten up the wall beside all those boring, grey pictures of planes and helicopters.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘No, I’m only joking. I think it must be a code word; try searching with it.’
A few minutes later, she threw the hotel’s in-house magazine on the floor. Working in the city, she didn’t often take time out to see the sights, but she couldn’t do it now without looking over her shoulder, worried the bad guys might be lurking in the shadows.
‘You’re a bit quiet,’ she said, ‘I hope you’re not looking at something you shouldn’t.’
‘No, I’m doing what you suggested. I’m using ‘Renoir’ to open a load of files I ignored last time as I couldn’t be bothered trying to hack the password. I now think it’s the code word they use for all their dirty dealings.’
‘Progress of sorts. Let me take a look.’
She shuffled on the bed beside him.
‘This one’s a bit opaque and talks about the need to silence Latif Artha. If you remember, his name cropped up when we looked at some emails addressed to him in the pub. He’s the weapons specialist at QuinTec who’s a vocal opponent of the UK buying Pulsar.’
She nodded.
‘When I looked him up in Google, it turns out he was killed about two weeks ago when his car veered off the M40 and crashed into a disused quarry.’
‘How convenient for Dragon.’
‘Take a look for yourself,’ he said turning the laptop towards her.
She read the email once, twice and now understood what he meant by ‘opaque’ as it looked innocent enough on the surface, but when adding the QuinTec guy’s death into the mix, the email read like an order to kill him. Her head started to spin and for a moment it felt like she had fallen into something she didn’t have the capacity to deal with. She took a deep breath and tried to regroup. She’d been a journalist long enough to know making assumptions without the evidence to back them up was the work of an amateur.
‘How do I get back to other ‘Renoir’ messages? See if something else will make this email any clearer.’
He took the laptop back, did something quickly, his fingers flashing over the keyboard, and handed it back.
‘So, to view any message I just double-click on it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘If I want to go back, I just click on the little arrow there?’ she said pointing.
‘Yep, you got it.’
‘This is like being inside Dragon’s own system with the logo and all that.’ She felt a wave of panic. ‘We’re not, are we?’
‘Nope.’
‘Thank God. I don’t understand much about computers but I do know they can trace anyone looking at their system.’
‘They can trace ordinary folk, but we hackers have ways of hiding ourselves from the watchers. What you’ve got there is an offline dump from their system, so they can’t see us looking at it. There’s tons of stuff in these files.’
‘Right,’ Louise said, ‘I’m going to take my time looking through all this. You might want to find something to read.’
‘I’ll just lie here and work off my hearty breakfast.’
‘It would take a serious workout session in the gym to make any impact on what you put away.’
Over the next hour she found emails promising monetary payments, the use of a private resort in Antigua, gifts of cars and boats, the supply of drugs and call girls; the extent of their corruption was staggering. It looked to be a systemised attempt to put potential buyers securely into their pockets. When this didn’t prove enticing enough, they blackmailed certain greedy or stubborn individuals with salacious videos and photographs of them sniffing coke or lying between a call girl’s legs. She took careful note of the last few as they had moved their actions from pig-trough avarice to downright illegality. Louise had the bit between her teeth now and eagerly searched for more.
One email dated only two weeks before stopped her in her tracks. She nudged Chris beside her, but got no response. He didn’t sound asleep but dozing. She nudged him again and, in slow motion, he pushed himself up on his elbows, his face sleepy and woozy. ‘What is it?’
‘This guy Leppo, yeah?’
‘The security guy at Dragon?’
‘So, you are awake.’
‘Of course.’
‘Listen to this. He’s instructed someone to kill you.’
Chapter 23
Matt Flynn didn’t ‘do’ offices. During his time in the Met as a murder squad detective, he only returned to base under sufferance. He didn’t like the stuffy atmosphere, took no interest in office gossip or politics and hated long meetings. On days like today while waiting for something to happen or for their information guru, Sikandar Khosa, to work his magic, he worked from home.
In front of him, scattered over the table in the lounge-diner, lay financial and intelligence reports relating to Stephen and Kevin Anderson’s company, a profile of Chris compiled from social media, a report from his tutor at Durham University, bank statements and other information about Kevin. He felt confident Kevin didn’t have anything to do with the shooting down of the balloon or Chris’s recent disappearance, but he looked at the financials of the company nevertheless.
He didn’t consider himself a skilled financial analyst but any fool could see the turnover of the firm had been increasing steadily over the last five years, as had its profitability. The balance sheet showed a similar strong picture, with low debt and company ownership of key assets such as the building housing the business and all the machinery inside.
Kevin earned a meaty salary and in his personal life didn’t have any loans, paid his credit card bill in full every month and Matt couldn’t see any other suspicious payments moving in or out of his current account, other than those spotted by Rosie. When examined closely, they found enough payments to bookmakers, casinos and hospitality at racetracks to suggest he wasn’t a drug addict or a stock market speculator, but a serious gambler.
Such a habit could have serious consequences for many of the company’s workers, but Kevin’s salary and annual bonus covered it. It was possible he could have taken out bank accounts and credit cards in other names, but Matt could only make assumptions about the information in front of him. As far as he was concerned, Kevin Anderson was no longer on his radar.
Next, he picked up the assessment written by Chris’s tutor at Durham. In a class of bright computer geeks, Chris made the top three. At the age of twelve he was writing computer games, and by fifteen, had published his own iPhone app. His tutor believed, although Chris had never admitted his involvement, that he was a member of INEXIS, a notorious hacking group involved in disrupting the activities of organisations and companies their members didn’t agree with.
In common with many such groups, their members lived all over the world, using aliases in communication and sharing hacking and other software across the dark web. By deploying onion servers and bouncing their internet traffic across dozens of servers and countries, they could disguise the location of their computers. Even skilled operators at GCHQ didn’t know much about them, and their activities were almost impossible to infiltrate.
Matt couldn’t help but be impressed. Chris moved up in his estimation from a simple computer geek with a silver spoon in his mouth, to a highly skilled individual, capable of using the tools he possessed to further the aims he believed in, no matter how misplaced or misguided they might be.
Matt walked into the kitchen, switched on the coffee machine and stood over it while it crunched and hissed and worked its magic.
‘I’ll take one if you’re making,’ Emma said.
‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
She walked into the kitchen, smiling, the most relaxed Matt had seen her in weeks. She came over and gave him a hug and a kiss and didn’t pull away a few moments later as she usually did.
‘Cut it out, Davis. You might be on gardening leave or whatever they call it at the cop shop, but I’m not.’
‘Spoilsport,’ she said pulling away.
He went back to the coffee machine.
‘Do you want to see what I bought?’ she asked.
