Second Intention (12 page)

Thirteen

Derek Green’s house was, I suppose, pretty much how I expected it
to be. Very neat and orderly, but a little dated. The furnishings and décor all looked like they would have been at the height of fashion sometime in the mid nineties. Clearly a bachelor, he must have moved in, done the whole thing in one fell swoop, then never given it another thought.

At least,
most
of the house looked out of date. The converted garage which he used as his work room, by contrast, looked like it was on the cutting edge of high technology. The long work benches which flanked the room supported an impressive array of laptops, oscilloscopes, processor units and quite a few items I didn’t recognise. He had surrounded himself with more than just a few gadgets with which to pursue his everyday profession. Information technology was clearly more than just a job to him, it was a passion
.

I knew that I had definitely come to the right man.

It was late on Saturday evening, and he seemed, on receiving my call, perfectly happy to invite me over to talk through what had happened that afternoon. Sue, who had clearly had enough of all the games, had said she wanted to go and stay with Amy for a few days, and I knew it was the right thing to do. I wanted her out of the firing line, at least until I had a better idea of what was going on. I felt sad, watching her as she drove off, but at the same time relieved. We would get this sorted out, then I’d get her back and we’d go off to Copenhagen for the weekend and forget all about it.

Derek listened to the whole story, nodding occasionally, and throwing in the odd frown or smile as I recounted the afternoon’s events. He took the two mobiles from me and examined the
m closely. They were both basic Hiraku 250 models, the sort you can buy cheaply from just about any supermarket these days, and seemed completely unremarkable.

‘And you say these are definitely your mobiles?’ he asked, as he began pulling the case off mine to take a look at the inner workings.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ I confirmed. ‘Look, you see this scratch here on my cover? I got that about a month ago when I dropped it outside the pub. And that one’s definitely Sue’s. Very few people could have got a cover like that.’

I was certain o
f it. On a trip to Hamburg the previous year Sue had got a new cover for her phone, a patterned one which had a little graphic on it showing detailing from a painting by Degas. It was very distinctive, and it was unlikely that anybody in Ely was going to have one the same.

‘Hmmm,’ Derek
murmured, setting mine down on the bench and turning his attention to my wife’s mobile. ‘Just because it’s her cover doesn’t mean it’s her phone.’

‘Sorry?’ I didn’t follow him.

‘Is this pin protected?’

‘Yes. They both are.’

‘Ah … when’s your birthday?’ He switched the phone on, and it immediately asked him for Sue’s PIN number.

‘Er … twenty-
sixth of June. Why?’

He keyed in 2-6-0-6, and rolled his eyes as the display showed he had got it right.

‘You people never learn do you?’ He shook his head. ‘You all make it so easy.’

He was right,
of course. People like Sue and me
do
make it easy for other people, by being so predictable and using things like birthdays for pass codes, but we aren’t innately cynical or suspicious. Maybe we would be in future, but at the time we had no reason to be. I didn’t really welcome what he was saying, or how he was saying it, as though we were naive little children who needed to be kept in line, but knew that I just had to bite my lip and keep quiet about it. I really needed him on my side.

He took a lead from one of the laptops and plugged it into a socket at the bottom of her phone. He tapped at the keyboard for a moment, then looked once more at my mobile. He frowned.

‘Has she lost this mobile recently?’ He began scrolling through the numbers in the listings in my phone. ‘Or at least let it out of her sight for any length of time?’

‘No,’ I shook my head.

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Well …
she left it in the car overnight, then couldn’t find it this morning, but it was locked all the time. Nobody could have touched it.’

‘Oh, really?’ He seemed amused by the suggestion. ‘And what make and model of car are we talking about?

‘Er … Ford Fiesta. 1.1 LX.’

‘Year?’

‘Er … it’s P reg, so that would make it about ’96.’

‘
Really? Pretty old then.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.
It’s ancient, but she loves it. It was her first ever car and she’s really attached to it. Why? Is that significant?’

‘Because if they
knew what they were doing a ten-year-old with a metal ruler could get into a ‘96 Fiesta in about thirty seconds. Just because it was locked doesn’t mean that nobody got in.’

He sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about, and I realised that in his line of work he probably got to learn a lot about how these things were done. He was qui
te right - people like Sue and me were naïve innocents when it came to things like this.

‘So that’s definitely how it was done,’ he said, typing a number in through the keyboard of the laptop. ‘I take it you and your wife are both heavy sleepers?’

‘How what was done?’ What he was saying still wasn’t making any sense to me.

He looked up from the phones and the laptop and fixed me with very direct eye contact.

‘This is not your wife’s phone.’

‘But it is,’ I insisted.

‘Oh, all the hardware’s genuine enough,’ he nodded, ‘but that’s not the bit that matters. Look, the SIM card has been changed. Easy enough to do once you know the model of the phone and have a while to transfer important bits of data across. Then you can have all the fun and games you want with it. Like I say, you must have been fast asleep not to have heard anything.’

It was a lot to take in. He was absolutely right. Sue usually sleeps very heavily, and I had been out cold the night before thanks to all the wine I had drunk, for the first part of the night at least. Our stalker had helped himself to Sue’s phone from out of her car, then tampered with it, right under our noses. It was a chilling thought.

‘Here’s how he did it.’ Derek turned to a whiteboard on the wall beside the bench and began drawing a simple diagram - two thin rectangles with the words “Sue” and “Richard” written underneath them.

‘Now, these are your mobiles,’ he said, gesturing towards them with the tip of the pen, ‘and normally you woul
d call or text each other just by going through the internal listing of numbers, yes? You never actually key in the number to get in touch with each other. You just find “Sue” in your phone’s memory and call her.’

‘Yeah. Yes, exactly.’ It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know Sue’s mobile number at all. I just went through the menu in my phone, just as Derek was describing it.

‘Mmmm. That’s nothing unusual. It’s the same with most people. Unfortunately, it makes it very easy for somebody to do what they did.’

He drew a third rectangle high up on the board, between the first two, so that they formed a triangle, then carried on.

‘It happened like this. Last night, after seeing all the lights go off in your house and waiting for a while, our man took Sue’s phone out of her car. He then went off, probably to the all-night Tesco’s out on the industrial estate, and bought an identical model. He then would have taken an hour or so to make his alterations. Sue’s SIM card went into his new phone, and his went into hers. He then would have re-entered all the names into the listing on Sue’s mobile, but with the same number for each one, so that whoever she tried to call or text she would have been contacting the same phone. The one that
he
now had, with
her
old SIM card in.’

I could see what he was getting at now. It all made perfect sense, and seemed laughably easy.

He drew some zigzag lines on the diagram from Sue’s mobile to the one at the top.

‘Later, after he’d made all his alterations, he went back to her car and put the doctored phone back where he’d found it. So today, while you were out shopping, poor Sue would think she was getting in touch with you, or any of her other friends, because she was doing exactly what she had always done, whereas she was really contacting him.’

The thought of it was putting a tight knot in my stomach. ‘And she could only receive messages …’

‘From him. Yes. He was the only person in the world who knew that her mobile had a new number, and what that number was.’ He drew more zigzags on the diagram, this time from my mobile to the one in the middle. ‘Every time you tried to text her,
he
was getting them. As long as neither of you knew what was going on, and believed that the messages were coming from the other, he could get you running around and doing what he liked.’

Bloody hell. That explained why neither of us had got an answer when we tried making a direct telephone call to the other. The person doing this could only send text messages without giving himself away. It was only when Sue broke out of the link, by using a payphone to call Karen at home, that we found each other
again. I didn’t know what to say.

‘By now, of course, the new mobile with Sue’s old SIM card in it will be at the bottom of a rubbish skip somewhere. We know the number, as it’s the one here in Sue’s phone, so he can’t afford to let us track him down that way. He will have had to just sling it.’

‘So we can’t do anything?’ I said, knowing that my anger and frustration were probably quite apparent.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, shaking his head as he unplugged the lead from Sue’s mobile. ‘It seems he’s won this round, at least. Still, the war’s not over yet, and we’re learning more and more about h
im every time he makes a move.’

‘So what do we do?’ I said, not wanting us just to leave it there. ‘Do we just wait for him to attack again?’

He said nothing for a moment, but seemed to be considering our options. After half a minute or so, he gestured towards a swivel chair facing one of the other laptops and motioned for me to sit.

‘It may be that he already has,’ he said, leaning across me and logging the machine on for internet access.

‘You mean …?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he gave me a reassuring grin, ‘at least here we have the weaponry to fight back. Here, call up your e-mails, but don’t click on anything.’

I did as he said, and, after logging on as myself, called up the listing for our inbox. There was nothing especially out of the ordinary that I could see, just three new e-mails. Two were from friends of Sue’s, and the third was from somebody at Medicom.

At least, it was
supposed
to look like someone from Medicom …

‘Look,’ Derek said, pointing at the screen, clearly excited by the development. ‘See this extra full stop here? That’s our boy again. Easy to miss it, isn’t it?’

He then worked with remarkable fluency and speed, moving a small box across to the laptop and connecting it via a lead, then tapping away at the keyboard for a few moments. When he was done, all three of the new e-mails had vanished from the inbox listing. He unplugged the box and moved it over to the third laptop.

This final machine, I noticed, had just a power lead going to it. No other connections to it of any sort. He connected the box to it via the same lead, then began calling up the e-mails on a listing on the screen.

‘I just had this feeling you might be hearing from him pretty soon,’ he explained, as he worked away at the keyboard. ‘After his little victory earlier today it was always possible that he’d want to gloat. It seems I was right.’

‘And this computer …?’ I queried.

‘Standalone machine, with no wireless internet connectivity and lots and lots of protective software. I’ve just transferred all your new messages across to somewhere they can’t do any damage. It’s the computing equivalent of locking any nasty viruses in a lead-lined box. Once they’re in here I can dissect them at my leisure, and not worry about them escaping or self-destructing.’

‘Mmmm. Clever.’ I nodded. This was a bit more like it. I was beginning to feel better, knowing that we were now, perhaps, regaining the init
iative, even if only a little.

‘Yes,’ he looked across at me and grinned, ‘I like to think so.’

‘Well done,’ I said, quietly.

‘Now that we know I can override any masking agents he may have built in, there’s every chance we can find out a bit more about him.’

‘Like who he is, or where he’s from?’ I said, hopefully.

‘Mmmm, no.’ He stroked his beard, thoughtfully. ‘Nothing that precise at this stage, I should think, but possibly a few other telltale bits and pieces which could be just as useful.’

‘Oh,’ I said, hoping my disappointment didn’t show too much.

‘Don’t worry,’ he glanced over at me. ‘I’ve done a lot of this kind of thing, and you’d be surprised at how much I can wring out of the most innocuous of clues. Now we’re the ones in control, at least on the electronic battlefield.’