Gray Redemption (Tom Gray #3) (15 page)

Whether he gave up his employer
or not, he was facing jail, and that didn’t make for an easy decision.

*
* *

Jeff Campbell helped his wife
Anne
prepare
the evening meal while the Levines dealt with
yet another teenage tantrum.  Alana was facing her third night in the tent
and wasn’t about to go quietly.

“I hate it in there,” she
pouted, arms firmly crossed against her chest.  “There isn’t even a
toilet.”

Carl Levine sympathised with
her, having spent countless evenings sleeping rough during his time in the
Army, but she had a roof over her head to keep the rain out and the
inconvenience of having to squat behind a bush just didn’t rank very highly in
his book.

“It won’t be for much longer,”
he told her for the hundredth time, but when pressed for a firm date he
admitted he had no idea.  All he could do was reiterate the offer to make
amends once things were back to normal.

Alana noticed movement outside
the window and suddenly her demeanour changed.

“Okay, but I want a new laptop
when we get back home.”

“Deal,” her father said, glad
that there wasn’t going to be a scene.

“Can I just go for a little
walk?”  Alana asked in her sweetest voice, and Levine nodded, but not
before reminding her of the rules.

“Your name is Alice and we’re
here on holiday from Essex, okay?”

“I know, Dad.”

She was up and out the door
before Levine could say anything else, and his wife took the vacant seat.

“Are you sure about all
this?”  She asked her husband.  “There hasn’t been anything about us
on the news, and no-one seems to be looking for us.  Is there a chance
you’ve misinterpreted the message?”

Carl wondered if it was
possible.  Had he turned their lives upside-down for no reason? 
Alana had missed over two weeks of school and the authorities would soon be
taking an interest — if they weren’t already.  On top of that, his wife
Sandra hadn’t told her employers that she would be taking time off, which meant
she would probably find herself out of work once the situation was
resolved.  Finding another job at her age — given the current economic
climate — would be no easy task.

If he’d got the message wrong,
this whole mess could have been avoided, but in his heart he knew he was doing
the right thing.

“I know it seems strange that
no-one appears to be looking for us, but I’d much rather be safe than sorry.”

Sandra wasn’t about to argue
with her husband.  She might have if Alana wasn’t a consideration, but her
daughter was her whole life, and she wasn’t about to let anything happen to
her.

Levine took her hand in
his.  “We’ll have a family holiday when this is over,” he told her. 
“Somewhere nice and sunny, just the three of us.”

“As long as it isn’t camping,”
Sandra said with a hint of a smile.

While the Levines discussed possible
destinations, Alana struck up a conversation with the girl from the adjacent
caravan.

“You look like you’re enjoying
this as much as me,” she said.

The girl rolled her eyes. 
“I can’t believe they call this a holiday. I’d rather be at school.”

“I wouldn’t go that far!” 
Alana laughed, and got a smile in return.

“I’m Melissa,” the girl said.

“Alice,” she replied,
remembering her father’s instructions.  “So why
aren’t
you in
school?”

“My dad works away most of the year,”
Melissa said, “and he’s only back for like two weeks.  I can’t believe we
have to spend it here, though.”

“Yeah, same
here.
  Dad disappears for months at a time, but I’d rather stay at
home than go camping.  It sucks, big time.” 

Alana looked at the girl’s
handset.  “What phone have you got?”

Melissa handed it over. 
“It’s the new Samsung.”

“I prefer the iPhone,” Alana
said, though the one in her hand was very similar.  “Would it be okay to
text my boyfriend?  My dad forgot to pack the chargers, so all our phones
have run flat.  I haven’t had contact with the real world for days.”

Melissa said it was no problem,
and Alana tapped out a quick message:

Hi Sam.
Hope 2 b back soon.
Luv
U & miss U. No need 2 reply. A.

She hit the Send button, waited
for confirmation, and handed the phone back.  “Thanks.”

“That’s okay.  I get, like,
five hundred free texts a month, so you can use it any time.”

They chatted for a few minutes
about music and Facebook before Sandra called her in for her dinner.

“I gotta go,” Alana said. 
“See you later.”

“See ya.”

Alana trudged back inside, the
thrill of her communication fix wearing off quickly, replaced by the dread of
another night under the stars.

*
* *

“We’ve got our man,” Farsi said
over the phone, “but his equipment is booby-trapped.  He’ll only give us
access if we offer immunity from prosecution and give him a change of
identity.”

“What about Gerald?” 
Veronica Ellis asked.  “Can’t he get access?”

“If we open the door to the room
it triggers a device which wipes the hard drives.  He said he has a
similar detector on the windows, though we haven’t been able to check that
yet.”

“Then go through the wall,”
Ellis said sternly.  “I haven’t got the power to authorise immunity. 
That’s down to the CPS, and I wouldn’t build his hopes up.” 

Ellis knew that the Crown
Prosecution Service
could
offer Gordon the deal he wanted, but there
were no guarantees.  They had famously done so with Bertie Smalls back in
the 1970s after the armed robber offered to give evidence against over twenty
others in return for his freedom and the chance to keep what was left of his
ill-gotten gains.  The men Smalls helped to prosecute were given a
combined total of over three hundred years in prison, but with Gordon it was
unlikely that the catch would be so big, meaning the Director of Public
Prosecutions would have little incentive to let him walk away a free man.

There was also the fiasco of the
previous year to consider.  Even though Tom Gray had died, his associates
— the very men they were looking for — had been released without charge
following a deal done with the Home Secretary.  That had come back to bite
him on the arse at the subsequent general election, and there was no way the
incumbent minister was going to be handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards any
time soon.

“If we go through the wall, we
still need him to log on to his computer,” Farsi told her.  “He claims to
have encrypted his disks, and if we get the password wrong three times or
remove the disks from their housings, they get wiped.  Gerald confirmed
that this is easy enough to do.”

“You’re the lead officer on the
ground, Hamad.  Do
whatever
you need to do,” Ellis stressed, “but
get him to co-operate.  We need to let Andrew know what he’s up against.”

The phone went dead in Farsi’s
hand and he stuck it back in his pocket.

“No promises,” he told Gordon,
“but we’ll do everything we can.”

Gordon thought long and hard
about his prospects, and eventually nodded in resignation.  He pointed
towards the door.  “I’ll let you in.”

Farsi told Zimmerman to remove
the cuffs and stayed close as Gordon made his way to his office. 

“Wait here,” he said. 
“Once I get inside I have a few things to do.  I can’t disarm it if the
room is full of people getting in my way.”

Farsi nodded to the others to
hang back and Gordon opened the door.  Once inside, he felt for the top of
the frame and then walked to desk, leaned over his chair and drummed out a
command on the keyboard.  Finally, he walked over to the rack and reached
deep into a gap between two servers as if searching for something on the back
wall.  His shoulder was hard against the rack and he grabbed one of the
metal uprights with his free hand.

The procedure had taken seven
seconds.

“I can’t go to prison,” Gordon
repeated, and screwed up his eyes in anticipation of the end.

Farsi saw what was about to
happen but was too slow to react.  He managed just one step into the room
when the capacitor vented its charge, sending over a hundred megawatts through
the prisoner.  The discharge lasted a little over a microsecond and Gordon
was thrown across the room, slamming into the far wall with enough force to
make a body-shaped dent in the plaster.

Farsi ran over and checked his
pulse while
Small
headed to the computers.  The
mains electricity had tripped and he sent someone to find the fuse box. 
In the meantime he unplugged one of the servers and took a screwdriver to the
back.

“He’s dead,” Farsi said.

“So is this,” Small said as he
noticed the scorch marks on the hard drive.  “As I suspected, he was using
SSDs.  I doubt we’ll get anything from them.”

“I want you to try,” Farsi
said.  “Load everything into the van and search for any hard copies. 
Look for a notebook, backup drive, anything that might tell us who’s on the
other end of that site.”

He dug around in Gordon’s
pockets and found just a mobile phone and some loose change.  The phone
refused to turn on, obviously affected by either the impact or electrical
surge.  Farsi handed it to Small and told him to see what he could get off
it, and then made two phone calls.  The first was to call in a clean-up
team, and the second was to break the news to his boss.

*
* *

“We’ve found them!”

The call from Todd Hamilton came
through to Farrar as he was entertaining guests, and he excused himself,
finding a quiet spot in his study.

“Where are they?”  He
asked.

“It looks like a caravan park in
Dorset.  We intercepted a text sent to the Levine kid’s boyfriend and
traced it back.  She wasn’t using her normal phone.”

“Can you pin-point the caravan
they’re in?”  Farrar asked.

“We narrowed it down to a thirty
metre radius, and slap-bang in the middle is one owned by Tom Gray’s
solicitor.”

“I told you to check connections
to all friends and acquaintances,” Farrar said angrily.  “Why am I only
hearing about this now?”

“It’s registered at the camp in
his wife’s maiden name,” Hamilton said.  “We just hadn’t dug that far.”

The phone went quiet for a
while, and Hamilton took the opportunity to deflect some of the blame away from
his team.  “If we’d drilled down to relatives of friends, where does it
end? 
Relatives of relatives of friends?
 
Friends of relatives of friends?
  We’ve had our hands
full just looking at known contacts.”

Farrar knew he had a point, but
wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily.  “I want this finished
tonight.  Get in touch with Matt Baker and work up a plan.”

“Baker’s a liability,” Hamilton
objected.  “My team can handle this.”

“He gets the job done,” Farrar
replied, hoping the insult registered.  “It must look like an accident,
you understand?”

“Got it.”

“Make no mistake, if you don’t
end this in the next six hours, you certainly will ‘get it’!”

Farrar killed the connection and
put the phone back in his trouser pocket.  His watch told him it was just
after eight in the evening, which meant it would be a few hours before the team
were in place.  Despite this, he wanted to end the dinner party early so
that he could get to the office to listen in to the take-down over a secure
connection.

After dishing up the meal he
informed his guests that an emergency had come up at work and he would have to
disappear shortly after dessert.  They made consoling noises, not envious
of the hours he kept. 

Throughout the meal, Farrar
wondered whether or not to tell Palmer about the find.  There was no
longer a need to get the information from Baines and Smart, but it would be
satisfying to have them go through one of Palmer’s interrogations.  Then
again, Palmer was a valuable asset, and the men he would be going up against
had proven themselves rather resourceful.  It would be totally
unprofessional to ask Palmer to take on these two as well as Gray when three
bullets could solve the problem.

Actually, four bullets, he
reminded himself.  There was a fourth passenger on the ship, though he had
no idea who the other might be.  Whoever else was with Gray was obviously
a
fugitive,
otherwise they wouldn’t be tagging
along.
 
That made them desperate and
potentially dangerous. 

Farrar decided that he would
tell Palmer to simply kill the targets.  However, he would wait until his
team confirmed that Levine and Campbell were well and truly dead.  Given
the incompetence shown by his team in the last couple of weeks, he wasn’t going
to go as far as demanding heads on plates, but he did want to know that they
were no longer breathing before signing the task off as complete.

*
* *

Alana Levine muttered to herself
as she angrily stuffed a change of clothes into her rucksack.  Carl knew
the night ahead wasn’t going to be a pleasant one for his wife, and he
apologised in advance, but Sandra ignored him.  She wasn’t too happy with
the new sleeping arrangement, either, but she held her tongue as she finished
making the last of the sandwiches.

Once the food was packed away,
she called her daughter and Anne Campbell, telling them it was time to
leave.  The men had to forgo their goodnight kisses.

The girls left the men to their
own devices and headed out into the night without another word.  Carl
Levine knew he was going to have to work damn hard to make things right, and
was working on a mental list of peace offerings when there was a knock on the
door.  Instinctively he grabbed for the handle of the 9MM automatic pistol
which was strapped to the underside of the table but Campbell waved him off.

“It’s just the kid from the next
caravan.”

Campbell opened the door. 
“Hi,” he smiled.  “What can I do for you?”

“Is Alice here?” the girl asked,
holding up her phone.  “She got a text from her boyfriend.”

Campbell was about to say she
must be mistaken when Levine joined him in the doorway.

“How did he get your number?”
 Levine asked, a little too harshly.

“Alice sent him a text,” Melissa
said, taking a step backwards.  “She said her dad forgot the chargers for
the phones, so I let her use mine.”

Levine did his best to keep his
anger in check.  “When did she send the text?”

“I dunno. 
Couple of hours ago, maybe.”

Campbell moved past
Levine.  “The girls have gone out for the evening,” he said,
smiling.  “If you give me the message I can pass it on to Alice when she
gets back.”

Melissa wasn’t too keen on the
idea.  This was boyfriend-girlfriend stuff — definitely not the kind of
thing you shared with parents.

“I think it’s best if I give it
to Alice,” she said, and got no objections.  Levine wasn’t interested in
the content of the message, just the fact that his daughter had disobeyed his
instructions.

“No problem.  She’ll be
back late, but I’ll let her know and she can pop round in the morning.”

Melissa seemed happy with the
arrangement and headed back to her own caravan, leaving the men to consider the
implications of Alana’s actions.

“What do you reckon?” 
Campbell asked, once he’d closed the caravan door.

“If it
is
the government who
are looking for us, they’ll have traced either one or both of those text
messages, and that means they’ll probably be on their way.”

Campbell agreed.  “Let’s
grab the girls and go.”

“Not so fast,” Levine
said.  “We still don’t know for sure that anyone’s actually looking for
us.  If we run now, we still won’t know.  I say we leave the girls
where they are, find an OP close by and see if anyone knocks on the door.”

“And if someone does turn
up?”  Campbell asked.

“Then we’ll know we’re not being
paranoid.  I say we grab at least one of them and find out what they
want.”

“Sounds fine if they send a
small team, but what if they bring half the local police with them?”

“I very much doubt it,” Levine
said.  “If the police were going to be involved, we’d have known about it
by now.”

Campbell saw the wisdom in his
friend’s words, but he expressed his concerns for the safety of the
women.  “I’d feel happier if they were out of the area.  How about I
drive them into the nearest town, park up out of sight and then tab back here?”

Levine asked why the women
couldn’t just drive themselves, and Campbell pointed out that they hadn’t had
the defensive and evasive driver training the men had been through in the
regiment.  “If they’re spotted en route, they’ll have no chance.  It
would also be a good idea to change the plates on the car, and there’s a Ford
showroom in town.  I can swap the plates from a similar model and that
should give us enough time to get to where we’re going.”

“Fair point,” Levine
conceded.  “Let’s load our gear before we fetch them.”

They grabbed what few belongings
they had and stuffed them into holdalls, which went into the boot of the
car.  Campbell trotted off and was back within ten minutes, the three
ladies in tow.  Their mood hadn’t changed in the last half hour, and
Levine guessed his friend hadn’t yet explained the situation.

“You have to go,” Levine said,
opening the door to the car so that his wife could get into the front passenger
seat.

“Why?  What’s going on?”

“Ask Alana,” Levine said, and
glared at his daughter.

“What have I done now?” 
Alana asked, full of indignation.

“Sam replied to the text message
you sent him.”

“But I didn’t use my own phone,”
his daughter argued.  “You didn’t say anything about using someone
else’s.”

There was no time to get into a
fight, especially with such a headstrong teenager.  “Just get in,” Levine
said.  “I’ll deal with you later.”

Alana stamped her feet like a
five-year-old as she trudged to the car, arms once again folded tightly across
her chest.  She climbed into the back seat and put her seatbelt on, her
face still a picture of fury as she failed to comprehend the seriousness of her
indiscretion.

“So what was Sam’s
message?”  She pouted, and Levine just stared in disbelief.  Her life
was in danger, yet she was more interested in a how her boyfriend was
doing.  He knew he would have to have a word about priorities when this
was all over.

He turned his attention to his
wife and spoke to her through the open window.  “Jeff’s going to take you
into town.  I want you to stay in the car until we come and get
you.”  He looked over his wife’s shoulder at his daughter.  “That
means all of you.”

“How long will you be?” 
Sandra asked.

“I don’t know. 
Maybe a few hours.
  Just sit tight until we come and
get you.”

“But what if you don’t
come?  How long should we wait?”

“If we’re not there by six in
the morning, just go.  Drive north for a few hours and find a town with an
internet café, but stay off the main roads.   I want you to contact
the newspapers, BBC, Sky, anyone.  Tell them who you are and what’s
happened, and see if you can arrange to meet up to give them the whole story.”

“Why can’t you just come with
us?”  Anne Campbell pleaded with her husband.  “We’re not cut out for
this kind of thing.”

“We have to end it tonight,”
Jeff said.  “If we don’t make a stand, we’ll be on the run forever.”

Anne looked pitiful, but
Campbell wasn’t going to be persuaded otherwise. 

“You want things to go back to
normal, don’t you?”

His wife nodded, and Campbell kissed
her on the forehead.

Levine said his own goodbyes and
Campbell climbed into the driver seat.

“I’ll be tabbing back over the
fields and coming in from the East.  See if you can find a suitable
observation post while I’m gone.”

Levine nodded and watched as the
car drove out of the caravan park and turned left on the country lane, its
lights fading quickly.  His watch told him it was nudging nine-thirty in
the evening, and if anyone was coming to pay them a visit they would be in the
area soon, if not already.  He ducked into the caravan and turned the
lights off.  From the window he could see several of the other mobile
homes were in darkness, so it wouldn’t look too suspicious.

There were several good spots to
set up the OP on the hill off to the north, but rather than just observe his
visitors, he wanted to get up close and personal.  Confirmation that they
were being sought was one thing, but more important was the need to know who
they were up against.  At the moment they were running from shadows, but
once they’d identified their adversary they would at least know the magnitude
of the battle they faced.