Old Enemies (15 page)

Back in his prison cellar, Ruari was at his lowest ebb. He had gambled and lost everything – his renewed freedom, his strength, and the last of his hope. His injuries and his bindings now left him in constant pain, he was desperately cold in this place where the warmth of the fire did not reach, he was in total darkness, yet he could hear the scurrying of rats from somewhere close at hand, and there were times when things he could neither see nor identify crawled over him. There was to be no escape, not even in his sleep. He turned one way, only to find Mattias with a hole in his chest that was staring at Ruari like an accusing eye; he turned the other way, and there was Casey. He curled into a ball, trying to hide his eyes from the ghosts, and cried for his mother. And as he tossed and turned, he found himself spiralling down into a world of ever-deeper despair.

Then, through the darkness, came sounds of anger from up above. His jailers were no longer shouting at him but instead were shouting at each other. And he heard their anger grow until they were smashing things to pieces, and he knew they were fighting viciously amongst themselves.

As he listened, Ruari began to feel stronger. He was no longer the only enemy here. And that, he came to think, might give him a chance. It also gave him new hope. He wrapped his blanket around him more tightly, against the cold and the things that crawled, swallowed back his tears and finally drifted off to sleep.

‘Glenny!’ Harry hailed from a distance as he saw his old army chum trotting along the pathway around the Serpentine in Hyde Park. The telecommunications man returned the wave. He was already blowing hard in the freezing morning air that had left the trees and parkland clad in a seasonal hoar frost. ‘Much more than this and you’ll be auditioning for Santa Claus,’ Harry greeted, noting the straining girth on his friend’s tracksuit.

‘OK, so I’ve put on a bit of weight. Occupational hazard,’ Crossing muttered, glancing at Harry’s flat stomach with more than a little envy. Judging by the gentle glow on the Jones brow he suspected Harry had already done a couple of laps. Typical. He already regretted allowing himself to be talked into an early morning run; there were only so many challenges a man could deal with before breakfast.

‘Corporate life getting to you, Glenny?’

‘No, not that. It’s kids. They eat nothing but crap and chips. I can’t keep up. You know what it’s like.’

‘Domestic bliss.’

‘Kids can be seriously damaging to your health.’

‘I’ve heard.’

Twenty years ago the two had been ferocious opponents on the squash court when they had been stationed together in Hereford, their matches always sweaty, aggressive, often epic and usually unpredictable. Neither of them gave quarter, and although Harry hated to admit it, Crossing might even have bested him more often than not. Yet it seemed those days were now a flickering memory for his old friend.

‘Come on, gentle lap to warm us up. While you tell me all about it,’ Harry suggested.

They set off around the lake, scattering grumbling ducks. ‘It’s all in the signalling, you see,’ Crossing began. ‘When a call is made from a mobile, before it’s connected, it has to get permission from the system to make sure the user’s account is valid for what it wants to do. To make sure the bill gets paid. You can imagine we’re pretty hot on that. And all the information’s archived, so there’re location updates and account credentials and signature streams and—’

‘English, please, Glenny.’

‘How brief do you want it?’

‘How far do you want to run?’

Harry’s question was met with a glance that would have sliced the froth off a pint of beer. ‘OK, craphead, here’s what it comes down to. We got the country, the area, even the mast the signal came through. When you switch on your phone it’s continuously looking for the nearest mast. Sometimes it can often see more than one, and then it chooses the hottest signal. And if it’s travelling, it will switch masts to maintain the signal.’

‘You mean—’

‘We can even tell you which direction he was travelling in. Took a little while, mind you, what with all that duff information you fed me.’

‘What duff information?’

Crossing waited several breaths before replying, deliberately punishing his friend while trying to pretend he was enjoying the exercise. ‘You said the phone call came from Switzerland. It didn’t. It was made in Italy.’

They ran on, more painful paces for Crossing while Harry digested what he had been told, grinding out yard after remorseless yard, almost heedless of what was around him, until his friend began to gasp. ‘Look, Harry, it’s good news. We can trace the next phone call in the same way.’

‘Trouble is, they’re not communicating by phone.’

‘Shit. How?’

‘Skype.’

Crossing skidded to a halt on the icy pathway as if he’d thrown an anchor, his eyes no longer glazed but ablaze with agitation. ‘Then, my friend,’ he panted, ‘you are truly fucked.’

Harry stopped and turned to face his friend. Crossing bent over, hands on his knees as he tried to fill his lungs with oxygen, only to discover it came in packets of lung-scraping ice air. A bead of sweat trembled like a dewdrop on the end of his nose. ‘Look, Skype uses what’s called VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol. Ugly acronym – you know how we techies love ’em – but it’s a system that borders on the beautiful. All the info is routed directly between the two end points and it’s encrypted with so much industrial strength cryptography that it’s got balls like an elephant. The boys and girls at GCHQ and A Branch hate it. Can’t stop it, can’t intercept it, not unless you’re freakishly lucky, and even if you are it’s so heavily encrypted you get jumble, nothing that makes any more sense than the contents of my wife’s handbag. It’s peer-to-peer stuff. Only works if it’s meant for you.’

‘You mean the police can’t crack it? Trace it?’

‘What’s to trace? It’s got no moving parts, no machinery, it’s stunningly simple, fabulously flexible, almost impregnable. You can’t bomb it, block it, break it . . .’ He was gasping once again, but this time in enthusiasm, on his own turf now. Slowly he straightened up. ‘Skype,’ he said slowly, the word condensing into a little cloud in front of his face, ‘is a kidnapper’s wet dream, old chum. Too damned clever for our own good, sometimes we are. You’ve got your work cut out on this one, Harry.’

Harry didn’t wait to change out of his jogging kit, he simply ran on from Hyde Park to Notting Hill. He found a security man blocking his way at the Breslins’ front door. The man was typical of his type, an hour every day in the gym and two in the pub, with muscles and stomach to match that stretched the seams of his cheap suit and whose every opinion was fed to him through a pink plastic earpiece.

‘Are they expecting you?’ the security man asked gruffly, blowing on his fingertips for warmth.

‘I very much doubt it,’ Harry replied.

The man began to mutter into a microphone at his lapel, and a little while later the front door opened. It was a woman, the housekeeper, Harry guessed, who showed him up the stairs and immediately disappeared. He found Terri kneeling beside the Christmas tree, which was no longer leaning but firmly anchored and upright in its base. She was decorating the tree with tinsel and threading a string of lights through its branches. A pile of wrapped presents waited nearby. She looked up defiantly, but her eyes were raw and her fingers trembling. She seemed older than the woman he had met the night before. Something had happened.

Her fingers led a trail of silvered paper around the tree. ‘I’m getting it ready,’ she said forlornly, ‘for when Ruari comes home. What do you think?’

‘He’ll love it.’

‘Thank you, Harry.’ She offered a forced smile, then nodded in the direction of a far door. ‘They’re in the dining room,’ she said, as though they were entirely separate to her, then went back to her task, filling her time, leaving as little space as possible for her fears.

Harry’s immediate impression was that the negotiating team had already fallen apart. The men were scattered disjointedly around the room – J.J. sat alone at the table, distractedly drumming his fingers, Archer and Hiley, the risk assessor, had their heads together, muttering, while Sean Breslin sat in the corner in the manner of a chess player, waiting for the next move. At the end of the table was a computer surrounded by trailing wires that fed into other pieces of kit that Harry assumed were for monitoring and recording. The curtains were drawn, covering the windows that overlooked the street, and the atmosphere was thick enough to chew.

‘Hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Harry began, addressing J.J. ‘I know you don’t want me here, but I’ve stumbled across something I think might help.’

From the corner, the older Breslin’s eyes burned with mistrust, as if to say that the only way Harry could help was if a hole opened beneath him and he dropped to the Devil, but the son appeared less hostile. ‘If you’re able to help, then you are welcome,’ he sighed. His voice was thick with exhaustion.

‘It’s the call from Ruari’s phone.’

‘You know about that?’ J.J asked, less kindly.

‘I told him,’ Terri said. She was behind Harry, standing by the door.

‘I’d like to know what else you’ve heard,’ J.J. said, his eyes honed with suspicion, his gaze fixed unblinkingly on his wife.

‘The call – it didn’t come from Switzerland. It came out of Italy.’

The other men stirred. Patiently, Harry began to repeat what Crossing had explained to him. J.J. listened attentively, Hiley nodded thoughtfully, Archer chewed his cheek, Sean Breslin continued to stare like a hawk. It was left to Terri to show emotion. Harry was explaining about the switching between masts when she moved closer and grabbed his sleeve. ‘Where was it, Harry?’ she demanded suddenly, urgent. ‘Show me, please show me.’

She continued to hold him, as if she was afraid he might leave without telling everything he knew. It was a gesture too intimate for comfort, and Harry turned back to her husband. ‘Would you mind if I used the computer?’

J.J. nodded at the screen, and in a moment Harry was fiddling with the mouse while the rest slowly gathered round, like moths drawn to the flame, even the older Breslin. Harry brought up a satellite image from Google Earth and soon they were staring down upon the Southern Alps from a height that was diminishing all the time. ‘Where were the bodies of the girl and the instructor found?’ he asked.

Hiley pointed to the screen, locations that were in the vicinity of Zermatt.

‘OK, so the call was made from here. Near a place called Ceppo Morelli,’ Harry announced. The screen zoomed in until it showed a cluster of rooftops hidden in the foothills.

‘But that’s barely inside Italy at all,’ protested Archer.

‘The location updates tell us they were flying east.’

‘Yes, but for how long?’ Archer muttered, ever the unbeliever and professional pain.

‘They were coming out of the Alps. No need to fly in anything other than a pretty direct route. My guess is they continued travelling east.’

‘Guesswork’s all very good but—’ Archer began yet again until Terri cut him off. She was leaning over Harry’s shoulder, her eyes fixed to the screen, breathing in his ear, rattling his memories. Her finger began tracing the route from Villars through the places where the bodies had been found and across to Ceppo Morelli, as if she could almost touch her son. ‘Thank you, Harry,’ she whispered, ‘thank you so much.’

‘But how do you know all this, Mr Jones?’ J.J. said, breaking up the huddle. ‘Surely this information is all confidential.’

Harry smiled ruefully. ‘I have friends in low places. A bit like a newspaper.’

‘Need to check it, of course,’ Archer continued doggedly.

‘And why the bloody hell didn’t we know this already?’ J.J. demanded, growing exasperated with Archer’s remorseless scepticism. He was Ruari’s father, for God’s sake, he needed hope as much as he needed to draw breath.

But Archer wasn’t to be thrown off course so easily. ‘As you say, J.J., the records are confidential, and Mr Jones here has probably broken the law. We have to go through official channels, and in Switzerland that takes time.’

‘We don’t have time!’ J.J. burst out, banging his fist on the table.