Gray Redemption (Tom Gray #3) (19 page)

“Morning,” she said as she stuck
her head through the doorway.  “What’s got you in so early?”

“Just finishing up the website,”
the technician told her.  “I managed to get the source code from Gordon’s
cloud storage account and the ISP has graciously agreed to point the IP address
to one of our machines.”

“So when Farrar uses the site,
will he notice any difference?”

“None at all,” Small said, “but
we haven’t been able to crack the encryption algorithm he used to generate the
passwords.  The best I could do was to pretend to authenticate, but in
actual fact it will accept any password the user enters.”

“If you have the source code,
why can’t you figure it out?”

“It relies on a key in the
web.config file,” Small explained.  “It reads the key and uses that as the
hash for the encryption.  Trouble is, this is his backup version, and the
key is blank.”

“Surely this would only be a
problem if they intentionally entered the wrong password, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Small told
her.  “The risk is tiny, but there nonetheless.”

Ellis wasn’t about to
second-guess him on anything technical, and if he said he couldn’t do any more,
that was the end of the matter.  At least they had the site in place, and
following the news she’d received an hour earlier, she only expected it to be
in use for another twenty-four hours at the most.  They already had logs
that tied Farrar to the website, and one of his operatives was currently being
more than co-operative in a safe house south of London.  While compelling
reading, Andy Hill’s testimony wouldn’t be enough to get Farrar into court, let
alone convict him.  According to Hill, there’d been no written
instructions beyond a workup file, which had been deleted once the plan had
been drawn up and approved, so it would be Farrar’s word against theirs. 
Farrar would no doubt paint his team as disgruntled, rogue employees and have
some high-ranking figures offer testimony on his behalf, so the more proof she
could gather, the better.

With that in mind, she thanked
Small and went to her own office to let Andrew Harvey know about the latest
developments.

*
* *

With an hour remaining of the
flight to London Heathrow airport, Abdul Mansour carefully adjusted his
burqa
, unlocked
the toilet door and returned to his seat.  He hadn’t spoken a single word
to his male companion during the entire flight lest anyone discover the charade
that had seen him pass easily through passport control at Lahore’s
Allama
Iqbal
International
airport.  He hadn’t really expected any problems leaving Pakistan, but he
had to trust Al-Asiri when he said the arrival would be uneventful:  That
wasn’t normally the case when walking into the lion’s den.

Thirty minutes later, the plane
began its decent.  Mansour once again felt for the inhaler in his pocket,
and he decided that if they were stopped on their way through the airport, he
would set the device off and leave himself at the mercy of Allah.

When they eventually touched
down, Mansour and his companion, Ali, joined the throng of other passengers
heading towards the immigration desks.  Mansour looked for a desk staffed
by a likely ally, but Ali guided him to a queue manned by a burly male. 
He kept his hands inside the
burqa
and removed the canister from his
pocket, ready to activate it should there be any trouble.

It took ten agonising minutes
for them to reach the head of the line, and Mansour prayed that they would be
let through with just a cursory inspection of their documents.

It wasn’t to be.

“Lift the veil, please,” the
border guard said, flicking through the passports.

Mansour pretended not to
understand the instructions, and they were repeated with hand gestures. 
Again he didn’t move, but Ali lifted the thin material and Mansour found
himself staring into the official’s eyes.

He pressed down on the canister
and began a silent count of ten, but he only got to two before the guard
nodded, handed back the documents and waived them through.  Mansour let
out the breath he’d been holding and glanced back, but the man was already
inspecting the paperwork for the next passenger.

They collected their single
suitcase from the baggage hall and made their way to the exit, where they found
a man holding a placard bearing Ali’s surname.  They followed him to his
vehicle, which was located in the multi-storey car park.  Once they’d
cleared the airport, Mansour finally felt he could relax.

“I wish you’d warned me what to
expect,” he told Ali.

“He has been working for us for
quite some time now,” his companion told him.  “The man has a severe
gambling problem, which we feed with a few thousand pounds every month.”

“Is money enough to ensure his
obedience?”  Mansour wondered aloud.

“It usually is.  This one
was about to lose his house because of his addiction, but we paid off the
mortgage arrears and he gets a gambling allowance in cash every month.  He
is happy with the current arrangement, but he also knows that if he tries to cross
us, his precious home will go up in flames while he and his family sleep.”

“Sometimes the carrot works,
sometimes the stick,” Mansour said, “but a combination of both is better.”

Ali nodded.  “I have been
here eleven times, and you are the eleventh wife he has allowed me to bring
through immigration control.  It has proven to be a valuable route into
the country.”

Mansour agreed, though he did
wonder why he hadn’t been told of it on his last visit to England.  Hadn’t
they trusted him?  His masters had provided him with a forged passport and
let him make his own way there, rather than disclose this more secure method of
entry.  Perhaps the operation had been so hurriedly put together that
there simply hadn’t been time to ensure their man would be working when he touched
down.

That was a year ago, he reminded
himself, and his exploits since had surely demonstrated his loyalty beyond any
doubt.

His loyalty to
the cause, at least.

In his pocket he had the flash
card from the mobile he’d been carrying on his recent visit to Azhar Al-Asiri’s
home, and embedded on that drive were the GPS co-ordinates of the
building.  Once they reached the London safe house, he would send someone
out to a local toy shop to buy the equipment he needed for the next part of his
plan.

*
* *

Andrew Harvey removed the
magazine from the 9mm Beretta, checked the chamber was empty and stripped it
down, as his firearms training dictated.  The barrel looked clean and the
moving parts slid nicely into place.  The well-oiled gun had obviously
been properly maintained.

“Thanks, Dennis.  Should I
ask where you got this?”

“Best not to,” Owen smiled.

They were sitting in Harvey’s
hotel room waiting for a phone call so that they could make a move.  The plan
was to check out the area around the port exit to see if they could spot anyone
waiting for the Wenban haulage trucks to make an appearance. 
Unfortunately, they still had no idea just how many they were up against. 

That information, according to
Veronica Ellis, had died with Carl Gordon. 

The good news was that they had
managed to rebuild the website Farrar had been communicating through, though
the latest message they’d intercepted an hour earlier hadn’t made today’s task
easy. 

Ellis had given Harvey a brief
rundown on the events of the previous evening, and it seemed Farrar had
believed the news he’d been fed by Andy Hill.   On the understanding
that Campbell and Levine were out of the way, Farrar had left a curt note on
the website:

“Information no longer
required.  Terminate their journey.”

For Harvey, this changed the
entire game.  Up until a few hours ago he was looking for someone who
wanted the people in the container alive, which meant being subtle and choosing
the moment carefully. Now, however, the strike could occur at any time, and
Harvey and Owen would be the only ones concerned about the passengers’ safety.

He would have felt a lot better
if he had a full team behind him, but when he suggested the idea to Ellis, she
ruled it out.  There simply wasn’t time to get anyone else in place, and
using the local cops was out of the question. 

“What happens if you and the
police catch some guy in the act,” Ellis had said, “and the locals want to take
him in?  That’s only natural, as it’s their country.  We might lose
access to him and our case against Farrar falls apart.”

Her reasoning was sound, but it
didn’t make his job any easier.  What did was the recent discovery made by
Gerald Small.  His eventual success at hacking the Port Authority servers
meant they knew that the larger consignment was to be delivered to a small firm
to the south of the city.  The mom and pop company operated normal
business hours, which meant that unless the truck could reach them before five
in the afternoon, it would have to park up overnight, and the logical place to
do so was the Wenban facility.  Small had been searching for further
details, such as the offloading time, when the server security systems
recognised the intrusion and kicked him out.  That information would have
been handy, but at least they knew a lot more now than they did a few hours
earlier.

Owen’s mobile chirped and he hit
the Accept button.  After the briefest of conversations he nodded to
Harvey, grabbed his jacket and headed towards the door.

Harvey tucked the pistol into
his waistband and covered it with the Hawaiian print shirt.  Owen was
similarly dressed in order to create the impression that they were just
tourists out enjoying a drive.

In the hotel reception, Owen was
greeted by two young blondes from the Durban office who he’d arranged to come
along on the surveillance, adding to the pretence.  After brief
introductions, the girls led them to the car, an Audi A5 convertible. 
Harvey climbed in the back with Clara while Elaine took the front passenger
seat. 

On the short drive to the port,
Harvey gave Clara a smart phone and was glad to discover she was familiar with
the model. 

“It’s set to record video,” he
said.  “Just hold it up to your ear and make sure you aren’t covering the
camera lens.”

As they drove, Clara pretended
to make a short phone call,
then
handed the phone back
to Harvey who looked at the recording.

“All I’m getting is the wheels
of the vehicles,” he told her.  “If you can hold it vertical we should get
some good images.”

Clara tried once more, this time
with better results.  Harvey wiped the test video and handed the phone
back, then pulled his own from his pocket.  After a dummy run, he declared
them good to go.

Earlier in the day, Owen and
Harvey had studied aerial shots of the port before spending a couple of hours
monitoring movement from the main exit, Bayhead Road.  They knew that the
trucks would turn left onto South Coast Road and head south until they had a
chance to join the M4 highway heading north towards their depot.

Following the likely route, both
Harvey and Clara set their phones recording, placed them to their ears and
pretended to be deep in conversation as they cruised along at a sedate
pace.  They passed shops and service stations built in the fifties and
looking like they hadn’t had a lick of paint since.  Their job wasn’t made
easy by the sheer number of vehicles on the road, and though Harvey had a clear
view of the occupants of the vehicles parked along his side of the street,
Clara’s phone was mostly capturing oncoming traffic.

It took almost fifteen minutes
to travel the two miles to the M4 on-ramp, where Owen made a U-turn and
retraced their route.  Once they’d reached their starting point at the
junction of Bayhead Road, Harvey uploaded the videos to a cloud storage site
and emailed Hamad Farsi, asking him to scan through the images and see if any
of the faces captured were known to the service.  It was a long shot, but
if they could identify their suspect before the truck arrived, it took the targets
out of the equation.

“Let’s go meet up with Kyle,”
Owen said.

He drove down Bayhead Road and
pulled up at a service station where he’d parked his BMW that morning. 
Kyle Ackerman was waiting by a Suzuki Jeep and he came over as they parked
up.  Owen handled the introductions and thanked Kyle for helping out.

“No problem,” Kyle said. 
“Two thousand Rand for following a truck is the easiest money I’ve ever made.”

Harvey wasn’t sure that having
someone with no field experience on the operation was a good idea, but Kyle was
the only person Owen could call on at short notice.   When Owen had
suggested the idea, Harvey had asked for someone who could handle themselves in
a tight situation, and Kyle had been Owen’s only option.  His four years
spent in the Royal Marines would have to make up for his lack of field craft,
and hopefully his only task would be to tail a slow-moving vehicle for a few
miles.

Owen thanked the girls for their
help and promised to treat them when the mission was over, and Clara slipped
Harvey a business card and a smile before climbing into the driver’s seat and
gunning the engine.

“You’re a sly one,” Owen grinned
as Harvey studied the phone number he’d been handed.  “She’s not usually
that forward.”

 “Hey, I’m as surprised as
you!”

“Trust me,
that’s
one call you wanna make.”

Harvey was flattered by the
invitation, but his first concern was ensuring Kyle knew what was expected of
him.

“Dennis said I just had to stay
behind the truck and wait for a phone call from you guys,” Ackerman smiled. 
“Not really rocket science.”