Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (12 page)

Jason’s GPS signal skirted the edges of Bangor and then vanished once more.

Amy scowled at the map, as if she could will the two-dimensional landscape to give up her assistant with the force of her ire, before returning to her perusal of spy-grade satellite tracking systems. The market leaders were a little out of her price range, but she could possibly MacGyver a more reliable device out of a satnav’s innards.

Her electronics knowledge was self-taught, like most of her education, but it shouldn’t be too difficult if she refreshed her knowledge via her favourite greyhat forums. Her lieutenants were always happy to gather knowledge for her in exchange for the odd code review or workaround for their pet projects.

However, her mind slid away from this new area of interest, her concentration barely lasting five minutes, even on the most fascinating of subjects. Her limbs were lead, the old aches stealing across her joints from too long at her desk, and even coffee failed to hold back the fatigue.

But she couldn’t sleep now – she had to watch out for Jason. He was relying on her, and she couldn’t let him down. She needed to keep working, keep pushing at this case. She might only be one or two puzzle pieces away from a breakthrough.

She had tried to address Bryn’s cryptic text about Paul Roberts, but what was there to investigate? The man was an internet ghost. Without access to his tech, she had little to no chance of finding out more about him. If Bryn had listened to her in the first place, his laptop would be secure in her custody and not being held hostage by the NCA.

She checked the results on the North Wales names – Benjamin Stock seemed to share Jason’s aversion to social media, with only the barest Facebook account on display, but she learned he lived with his girlfriend and daughter. He also worked for a reputable haulage company in the main, with his dodgier trips only a side project.

The advantage of happening upon a casual social media user was that they usually weren’t very security conscious. Within minutes, she had Benjamin’s date of birth from his profile and his address from his frequent location data. That was more than enough to look for a bank account via a simple credit rating search.

He only had the one bank account, with an attached credit card and a second card that he used exclusively for online porn shopping. Perhaps he had some clue about privacy precautions after all. The account received his regular company pay cheques every month and then more irregular payments, but for double the amount. These were attached to a vague company moniker – LogiPair – and Amy immediately switched her focus.

LogiPair had a bright corporate website, which used phrases like ‘logistics solutions’ and ‘close links with key stakeholders’. Their motto was ‘change in exchange’, which made little sense to her. It had the air of a hastily constructed front, a page merely to satisfy the casual Google searcher but not actually for the business. Amy suspected that the men behind LogiPair did most of their business transactions on the streets and on the deep web.

LogiPair’s bank transfers came through as a supposedly secure international account, which meant it took about ten minutes longer to break in than usual. The transfers were mostly to the same few names, which led her to Jonah Fish’s real first name – Kevin. She noted it for later, along with the other recurrent names on the list, before she stopped short.

The account also made regular payments to a hospital.

A little Googling revealed a private hospital in the South Wales Valleys, catering for anything from private GP services to major operations, including a cancer investigation and treatment wing. Was one of the gang members receiving treatment there? Or did some of their trafficked girls go there at the insistence of their masters, to rid them of the unintended consequences of the work?

Medical records were difficult to hack into and harder still in the middle of the night. The best hacks exploited the weakest link in the chain – i.e. the human-computer interface. She only needed one surgeon with a weak password and she would be in.

But for now she only had the transaction data. She looked at the recurrent names on the list – with money deposited directly into their accounts, finding out their personal details was child’s play. Opening a bank account under a false name was difficult even for an experienced forger, and Amy’s heart had been in her mouth when she’d opened her first. Of course, once you have one bank account, the rest follow easily enough. Banks don’t like to think their fellows can be duped.

She mapped out the home addresses of the main payees from LogiPair. They were concentrated in small patches around port towns in Wales and Ireland – Cardiff, Swansea, Port Talbot, Holyhead, Dublin, Cork, Rosslare. A quick cross-reference to the database of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency revealed which of the men had HGV licences, lorry drivers capable of large hauls. The rest were more likely to be small van couriers – the kind who might stash a painting on board.

All three accounts resident in Cardiff were HGV drivers. Amy accessed their phone numbers from their bank accounts – Benjamin Stock was in Bangor, of course; another was in Germany and the third was crossing the Dutch-Belgian border.

If the painting was being moved by LogiPair, it was probably being collected by one of the other vans. Amy checked the non-HGV drivers’ accounts for recent payments. A pair of accounts from Swansea had been paid on Thursday, but checking up on their mobile signals had them placed in France. The only other pair to be paid recently were Kevin Fish and Kyle Atherton, both living near the North Wales coast. The money had been deposited on Friday, exactly double what the Swansea boys had been paid.

Was the work considered twice as dangerous? Or were they being paid for two journeys, both with precious cargo on board? Amy checked the mobile signals for the two phones – Kevin Fish was snug in his bed in Bangor, but Kyle Atherton’s signal was nowhere to be found. With a sinking feeling, Amy looked up the recent location data. Kyle had left Bangor at exactly the same time as Jason.

Her assistant was accompanying a gang shipment across the middle of Wales. With a man who had got into this business God knows how. This was exactly the kind of shit that she needed to be kept apprised of.

If shipment one was being delivered tonight, did that mean that the second leg of the journey would start tomorrow? Was the painting on the move?

It was a lot of guesswork, which she hated. She had data but she didn’t have answers. LogiPair might have nothing to do with the painting at all – only rumours linked the art heist to North Wales in the first place.

She had to concentrate on the immediate threat. She debated calling Bryn but didn’t have anything concrete for him yet. She had to rely on Frieda to keep the police updated as to her plans. Her only course of action was to find out as much about Kyle Atherton as she could.

If Jason was in danger, she needed to know exactly how much. And when that niggling anxiety in her chest should turn into full 999 panic.

The chronological recital of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest hits was almost enough to reassure him. Yet Jason had better instincts than that, honed by years of rounding a corner and reading a street’s atmosphere like it was written in flashing neon signs.

The silence was telling. Kyle said nothing, but he glanced over at Jason every so often, studying him. Working out his story. Judging it against the sparse information he knew.

Maybe Jonah Fish had no family. Nye said he had a mother, but what did that prove? Maybe Kyle was Jonah’s best friend, or his real-life cousin. Maybe he’d seen straight through that bullshit.

Or perhaps Jason was working himself up for no good reason and Kyle could smell the fear, the anxiety oozing out of his pores. Jason concentrated on the music, the rhythms, keeping an eye out for place names he knew and wishing his Welsh geography was up to scratch.

Kyle drove like a man possessed, in keeping with his strict deadline and the vast emptiness of the roads. Unlike Frieda’s bike, however, the Land Rover was more than a match for any vehicle that came along – except, perhaps, an HGV. Jason had the feeling that Kyle would let nothing stop him delivering this package. Not even Jason.

Now he was along for the ride, Jason needed to figure out a plan. If the changeover happened the same way in Bridgend, he would never get to see what was in the hamper. How would he find out? Could he sneak a look if Kyle stopped for a piss? Unlikely.

And what guarantees were there that these men were also moving art? Admittedly, Wales wasn’t exactly a hotbed of organised crime but half a dozen gangs could have a hand in transit across the desolate middle of the country.

As the miles slipped by, the darkness pressing in on him from all sides, Jason realised why Frieda had been so pissed off at him. He was taking a huge risk on what might be nothing at all. They could be shipping rare caviar in that hamper for all he knew. Maybe one of the bosses had a taste for it, got his boys to transport it by special delivery.

Jason didn’t want to die for caviar.

After about two hours, the unforgiving mountain roads started to level out, the terrain smoother beneath the wheels of the 4x4 as they left Snowdonia National Park behind.

‘We’ll stop in Aber,’ Kyle said, breaking the silence like a sledgehammer shatters a frozen lake.

Jason guessed he meant Aberystwyth, an isolated town in the middle of the west coast. As a city boy, he was naturally suspicious of any place that was most accessible by boat. In its heyday, it had been a profitable tourist trap, but its past glory had faded. It boasted a university miles from anything except Aberystwyth, where English students came to be stranded and learn something about the pregnancy bump of the UK.

The pit stop would probably mean a quick toilet trip and maybe a snack at a petrol station or twenty-four-hour supermarket. The back roads of Wales weren’t renowned for their service stations or wayside taverns. Could he use the stop to his advantage? Would they bond over soggy sandwiches? He doubted it.

Would Kyle leave the hamper unattended long enough for Jason to discover its secrets? He didn’t know the code and maybe Kyle didn’t either. He didn’t need to open it, after all. In fact, maybe Kyle didn’t even know what was inside – or had decided he didn’t want to know. Like Benjamin and the girls in the back of his lorry.

The cell structure would suit the men at the top, no one below them knowing anyone else’s business. Just do your job, keep your head down, and if you get busted by a cop, you don’t know nothing important. Which would work particularly well if you were smuggling antiques that were worth more than these men would see in their lifetimes.

Though what would you do with a Ming vase in your living room? It wasn’t as if the local pawnbroker would give you a fair price for it. A local gang boy might as well use it to house his mam’s flowers for all the money it would bring him.

Aberystwyth loomed out of the night before Jason had really decided what to do. The opening harmonica chords of ‘The Promised Land’ filtered out of the speakers as they crossed into a town that typified the sort of dead-end place that Springsteen had in mind. The back alleys of Cardiff weren’t exactly a fertile breeding ground for success stories but they had more going for them than poor, tired Aberystwyth.

The petrol station was bright, radiant, where the surrounding houses were grey – but it was also closed. Kyle turned in anyway, parking up away from the pumps and the deserted shop.

‘I’m gonna take a leak.’

As Kyle went round the back of the garage for some privacy, Jason had five seconds to make a decision. He reached over for the boot release and rounded the 4x4 in a minute, lifting the boot and looking inside. The cooler stared back at him.

Glancing up to check Kyle hadn’t returned, Jason reached for the cooler with a tremor in his fingers. It was cold to the touch, cooler than the blankets cushioning it. Had it been filled with ice?
If it’s fucking caviar…

Jason’s fingers brushed something stuck to the side, and he shifted a folded jumper to see it better. It was a faded sticker, half peeled away, but Jason couldn’t make it out in the light. He took his phone out of his pocket to shine a light on it – a wing, and the head of a snake.

What did it mean? Recognition tugged at the corner of Jason’s mind. He had seen that symbol before, part of a larger whole, but where? Was it Masonic? Or was it the coat of arms of some arts institute? For all he knew, it could be the symbol of a well-known butcher or something he’d seen down the supermarket.

‘You can’t get in.’

Jason froze.

Kyle grinned back at him, a flick knife held in his hand with the air of a man who had used it many times.

‘And you won’t be needing that ride.’

The GPS came online in Aberystwyth.

The beeping startled her from the Wikipedia hole she’d fallen into, starting with ‘proctologist’ and ending somewhere in early twentieth-century literature. Amy stared at the blinking dot on the screen as it skirted the edges of the town, AEON automatically zooming and re-centring the map as she watched.

The dot stopped. Amy waited for it to move again, but it remained static for five long minutes.

And then it vanished.

A box flashed up on the screen: SIGNAL LOST – RECONNECT?

Amy slammed down the enter key, sitting forward in her chair. She felt uneasy, anxiety seeping into her mind as she fought to stop her body from panicking.

Another message: CONNECTION ERROR.

Jason’s phone was offline. Amy tried to reason with herself – the battery was dead, the phone was faulty, he had walked into a lead-lined hole in the ground. But Jason was a trouble magnet and, despite her nervous nature, Amy had a finely tuned sense of when he was in deep shit.

She scanned the last known location – a petrol station attached to a supermarket, both closed hours earlier. Aberystwyth was not a late-night party town, especially not on a September Sunday. Why had they stopped there?

It was in the middle of a retail park, which wasn’t prime CCTV territory. However, she found a cluster of local traffic cameras close by. Taking a few minutes to exploit a weakness in Aberystwyth Council’s firewall, she tapped into the live feed and tilted the angle of the camera on the adjacent roundabout.

Just in time to see a dark Land Rover emerge from the road leading to the supermarket. She tried to catch the number plate, jumping to a second camera for a better angle. She couldn’t see through the windscreen, no way to tell who was driving or the status of any passenger.

The vehicle was moving fast and Amy was on foreign soil, the camera locations unfamiliar and scattered. She managed to find the next camera just as the 4x4 disappeared out of shot and by the time she found the next, he had sped away into the night.

Amy hurriedly changed the location of her online phone router to Aberystwyth and called 999.

‘999 – what’s your emergency?’

‘I saw…’ Amy trailed off. How could she get their attention? What would bring the police running?

‘Hello? Miss, can you hear me?’

‘I heard a fight at the petrol station, in the retail park. Lots of shouting. And this 4x4 drove off really fast. I think someone might be hurt.’

‘Where are you, Miss? Are you safe?’

‘I was driving past,’ Amy said. ‘I’m not there now.’

‘Can you tell me anything else?’

‘It was a dark colour. With BG at the front. Heading out of town.’

‘That’s good. Can I take your name?’

Amy hung up and resumed her search for cameras leading out of town, while setting AEON to connect to the local branch of the digital police radio system. She didn’t have a Bryn or Owain on the ground to give her personal updates, so an improvised police scanner would have to do.

A clear female voice came to life. ‘—station ETA five minutes. Can you respond to escape vehicle, Lampeter? Over.’

‘This is Lampeter. We can have a bike out in twenty minutes. Reg, over?’

‘ANPR data coming through now.’

Twenty minutes was a long time. The 4x4 could be long gone by then, if the automated number plate recognition had even picked it up. However, the petrol forecourt would soon be checked, inspected. For blood and bullets.

‘Aber Town to dispatch. State 6.’

‘Reading you, Aber Town.’

‘I’ve got a clean knife and a smashed phone here. Knife’s illegal. No blood. Over.’

The lack of blood was a good sign but she knew Jason didn’t carry a knife anymore. So his mystery companion must’ve brought the weapon to the party. And the destruction of the phone explained her lost GPS signal.

‘Check immediate location and secure for forensics, over.’

Amy waited, the silent radio and empty map taunting her.

When he couldn’t sleep, Bryn liked the solitude of the detectives’ office at night. Except tonight he wasn’t alone.

Owain was sitting at his desk, a closed laptop beside him in a clear evidence bag. A series of cables connected the device to a computer on Owain’s desk, a brand new PC that Bryn swore hadn’t been there when he’d last visited the office.

At his approach, Owain started, almost flying out of his seat like a boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. ‘Bryn.’

‘Late night for you?’ He wanted the boy to be at his ease before he started asking him what the hell was going on, but Owain knew all his tricks.

‘NCA wanted me to start work on Paul’s computer straightaway.’

Bryn frowned. ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’

‘I’ve always had an interest. And not all that much to do for the past few months.’ He gestured at the new computer with a faint smile. ‘It does most of the job by itself, to be honest.’

‘Found anything?’

Owain nodded. ‘Lots of art, of course, and his own photographs from all around Wales. Though they’re not of anything in particular – a random bench or an empty bird’s nest. Nothing to write home about.’

‘What else?’

‘This is really interesting. When the computer was last booted, the password was entered incorrectly three times. And then the lid was shut without turning it off, sending it into hibernation.’

Bryn nodded like he understood why that was significant, waiting for Owain to put him out of his misery.

‘The boot log says it started up Saturday lunchtime.’

‘After Paul had been dead for two days?’ Bryn felt an odd shiver, as if the man’s ghost was looking over his shoulder.

‘Yeah. SOCOs dusted for prints but they’re smudges on smudges. Not even a workable partial.’

‘Who would be after Paul Roberts’ computer?’

Suddenly, Matt’s theory that Paul was the inside man didn’t seem so ridiculous.

‘They didn’t get in, so we don’t know what they were after. But there’s nothing here that’s incriminating.’

‘That we can see. Can you take this to Amy tomorrow?’

Owain hesitated. ‘I thought Matt said—’

‘Owain, I don’t doubt you have some idea what you’re doing, but Amy is the expert.’

‘Her evidence is also inadmissible in court.’

Bryn gritted his teeth. ‘Do you work for me or not?’

‘I work for the department,’ Owain said, squaring his shoulders. ‘And I can do this! You have to believe in me!’

Bryn reached for Owain’s shoulder but he shifted it away. Bryn withdrew his hand and Owain went back to typing, steadfastly ignoring him.

‘I do believe in you,’ Bryn said. ‘But Amy—’

‘Amy isn’t police, Bryn,’ Owain said bluntly. ‘Do you want more sky falling on our heads?’

The phone screeched to life, causing them both to jump. Who the hell was calling at gone three in the morning?

‘Hello?’ Bryn said.

There was a burst of static, a terrible line. ‘—you hear—?’

‘Who is this?’

The line went dead, the connection lost.

Bryn rang through to the switchboard. ‘Who did you put through?’

‘Said it was urgent, sir. J-something. Didn’t hear the rest. Bloody awful line.’

What the hell had happened to Jason now?