DARKNET CORPORATION (20 page)

These accounts were classified as the ‘dirty’ accounts; the most
vulnerable and inexplicable sources of funds in the money laundering cycle.

The foreign accounts that were known to have received money would be
followed up, but the countries involved were no doubt chosen because their
financial supervision authorities were notoriously difficult and uncooperative
with money laundering investigators. A quick resolution was not anticipated.

Bill recognised the determination of the police that ground their way
through these labyrinths.

He turned to the new phone number section that Jenkins had started and
browsed through what was listed.

The mobile phones of the suspects from Bad Hersfeld were listed with a
few common numbers from their contact lists highlighted. Some proved to be
criminal types in various cities in Germany.

An address jumped out at Bill; payphone: New Spring Gardens Walk. Bill
recognised the address. It was fifty yards from the front entrance of Legoland.
It was a number that had called the ‘landline’. It could not possibly be a
coincidence. Someone from SIS was connected to the drug smugglers.

Bill clicked on the link and saw the metadata of the call; date; time;
call duration and a link to the MP3 file. With trepidation he clicked it and
listened. When the connection was made the caller said, “Call me on my burner,
now”. The call was over in three seconds. The ‘voice’ that Bill had heard on
the previous recording call on the landline did not even acknowledge the call.
The caller was a man. Did he recognise the voice? He spoke in a gruff tone,
presumably to avoid recognition. But whoever the caller was, he expected the
‘voice’ to know who it was and respond to his command.

Bill sat back, stunned, trying to think what the implications of this
revelation were. He was sure now that the assassination attempt on the M20 was
no coincidence; they were sent, with accurate intelligence of where he was and
what vehicle he was driving.

Was Mickey’s death somehow contrived from Legoland? He realised his trek
up the Balkan Route wasn’t discovered by the drug smugglers because no one from
SIS was involved. What other information was this ‘mole’ able to access? His
hesitation to upload the police forensics report into the Dinner-Jacket
directory now seemed prescient.

Bill now had the feeling of being trapped and vulnerable. He was being
kept at Legoland for his own safety, but maybe it was so that he could be kept
under close observation.

Chapter Twenty Three

The mobile buzzed Bill out of his nightmare. Jenkins said, “Call me back
on a landline other than your office phone,” and hung up. Bill got up and went
down a floor to the communications section and picked one of the cubicles. He
sat down and looked around, wondering what he was checking for; there was no
one around.

He dialled Jenkins. “Randall, what’s going on?” Bill started.

“We noticed that your access to the Dinner-Jacket directory was logged in
more than once at the same time yesterday. We thought it could be that you just
forgot to logoff at one workstation before logging into another. So we didn’t
pay too much attention to it, but I checked and there were other logins while
you would have still been on the road following the drugs up the Balkan Route.

We didn’t know if you had logged in at a service area or whatever. Then
when I did the analysis of phone numbers associated with the landline I
realised that one of them was a payphone near SIS headquarters in London. I put
two and two together and came up with a wrong answer; somebody at SIS is
connected with our drug smugglers.” Jenkins paused to let that sink in.

“If there is even a chance that that I’m right, I needed to advise you
right away,” Jenkins seemed almost breathless.

“I think you are spot on, Randall. The phone box is almost just along the
street from the front entrance here and a leak from SIS explains how the
assassins knew where to target me on my way into London….and I did
not
log in to two different workstations here. So you are on the money.”

“OK. I am going to switch off your access rights to Dinner-Jacket via
your SIS login. Keep your eyes and ears open for anyone making any comments
about
it.
I’ll get direct access credentials to you by
alternate means. Can you leave the office in say, half an hour?”

“Sure,” replied Bill.

“OK. At quarter of two your time, that’s about 45 minutes, right?”
Randall didn’t wait for confirmation. “Walk past the payphone we were talking about.
Just keep walking until you find somewhere to stop and sit down. Our person
will come to you.
Normal password.
OK?”

“OK. Thanks Randall. I’m glad you’ve got my back. I think I need it,”
said Bill, glad he had allies he could trust among the allies that were
enemies.

He checked his watch and went back to his desk and locked the police
report in his top drawer. He made sure his desktop computer was logged off and
sat thinking.

When he thought he had the timing right to get to the front door and walk
past the bus stop at 1:45 p.m. Bill got up, grabbed his coat and briefcase,
locking the door behind him. He went down the fire stairs rather than the
lifts, knowing that all of the lifts had cameras.

As he walked past the bus stop, he checked his watch. Right on time, but
he didn’t see anyone that looked like a spook. He kept on walking. After about
120 metres he crossed the road and went under the brick arched tunnel that gave
access under the train lines above, to Glasshouse Walk.

There was a grassy area with trees on his right. He walked on down the
narrow, dingy, one-way street until he came to an equally
dingy,
children’s play area that had picnic tables and park benches. He turned in and
took a seat that faced the entrances on both sides placing his hand on the
comforting grip of his Glock.

People walked past and Bill assessed each of them; a paunchy man in a
green jersey; a young guy in jeans and red tee shirt; a woman in a blue skirt
and jacket.

The woman turned in and came directly over to Bill. Bill gripped the
Glock and watched her hands. She saw him reach his hand into his side and took
her hands out of her pockets to show they were empty. She walked over and sat
down. She was tall and athletic looking with a clear complexion and blue eyes,
mousy hair. She wasn’t especially good looking. Overall she was the kind of
unremarkable looking individual that made a good spook.

Bill immediately said, “Dinner?”

“Jacket,”
came
the reply. “I’m River,” she said.
Her accent sounded vaguely Californian, or at least not as obvious as many
other American regional accents.

“I had to hang around at the bus stop and check you were not being
tailed. I’ve got credentials for you to log into the operation database.” She
handed over a scrap of paper with the URL on it, which he recognised, and the
name ‘
billhodge
’, which Bill took to be the login
name.

“What about the password?” Bill asked.

“We never put both things on one piece of paper and we try not to write
down passwords at all if we can help it. She spelled it out; it’s
‘A-0-+-e-a-r-0-A’. Does that mean something to you?” she asked, her face
screwed up a little.

Bill smiled.
“Yeah.
It does. Thanks.” He put the
briefcase on his knees and pulled out a plastic bag he had with the transponder
and control unit and the keystroke USB device that he’d been given by Jenkins.
“This is CIA property given to me by Randall Jenkins in Kabul.”

River took the bag and explained that she was running the money
laundering investigation aspects of the case and had provided the analysis of
the Kosovo and Montenegro
smurf
lists that had
impressed Bill. She confirmed that some of the banks on the lists were behind
too many network protection measures for them to get useful information but she
said that what she had already discovered would be enough to track where the
money went.

River was already in contact with Detective Chief Superintendent Cullen
and ‘her people’ had arranged for him to be impressed by the need to cooperate.
Bill asked how she had ‘impressed’ Cullen and she explained how she had
arranged for the British Home Secretary to apply pressure down through the
ranks of the Metropolitan Police on her behalf. Bill was equally impressed with
River’s ability to wield political clout. “Obviously a shaker and mover”, he
thought.

River explained that the Colombian credit cards found in Wood’s stash and
on the German captives, which Bill was unaware of up until that time, were
payoffs from the ‘clean’ money end of the money laundering ‘shredder’ they were
using. She was obviously also connected to the German police activities, or at
least, was getting information from them.

Bill realised that River was fully indoctrinated into this operation and
seemed to know just about everything, and more, than Bill knew about the
operation.

River explained that if they could connect transactions from the ‘dirty’
accounts to the ‘clean’ accounts that funded the credit cards, they would have
an evidence trail that would enable the police to break up the whole system.

Bill gave her a synopsis of the police report he had just read, and she
acknowledged that she had received a copy directly from Gower just before she
left to meet Bill, but had not had time to read it yet.

They discussed the ‘mole’ in SIS that was connected to the syndicate.
River said that they had no way to identify who it was so far but would review
their intelligence on SIS personnel and look for any indications that might
help.

Bill had realised that his next step would have to be to approach SIS counter-intelligence
with the suspicions that he had. River was relaxed about them being told about
the information collecting methods that the CIA had used to tap the phone near
Legoland. She said it would be no surprise to SIS counter-intelligence that they
had done so and that the evidence they were following fully justified tapping
the payphone. She implied that British authorities, who were unnamed, would
have been involved in setting up the tap, from a technical viewpoint.

River handed Bill a business card that listed her as a ‘Representative’
for Calder’s & Son Private Bank, with an office in Bayswater, with her
email and mobile phone contacts. She assured him she already had his details.

Bill looked at the name on the card; River Banks. He looked up at her.
“It’s a joke right?” he said incredulous.

“I wish! My folks must have been stoned at the time. They probably
thought it was ‘cool’ or something. Their generation was full of flower power
crap. By the time I was old enough to realise it was a play on words, it was
just my name. I’m over it. At least you won’t forget me, right?”

Bill laughed out loud.
“No way!
It’s absolutely
sweet.
Sweet as!”
It was a common reaction but Bill
was clearly not teasing River over her name and she enjoyed it as if it was an
ice-breaker. They laughed together.

“Keep me up to date, Bill…and keep your head down,” she said, leaving in
the opposite direction from which she came.

Bill watched her go and automatically looked around for anyone taking an
interest. He took a few deep breaths and started back for the office. He felt
much better now that he could share what was going on and knew that at least
the CIA was watching out for him, even if his own organisation was one of his,
several threats.

-|-

The light on Bill’s office phone was flashing indicating that he had
messages.

He dialled up the code for messages and listened to Gower explain that
they had checked all the identities they had collected so far and found that
two of the credit cards listed by Max Brandt; one from a captive in Bad
Hersfeld and one form another in Frankfurt matched the names of two British
people that were co-located in the same residential care facility in Bradford
for intellectually disabled adults.

They had investigated the ‘supported living’ facility to discover that up
to six individuals were living ‘in the community’, supervised by live-in staff.
Gower believed that a present or past staff member had sold information on the
residents and intercepted mail to the address to verify mailed details to
create false identities.

They were obtaining the names and addresses of residents at other
facilities managed by the organisation to establish whether this was the source
of the identity trade used to support the false passports, bank accounts, and credit
cards they were collecting.

Gower explained they had worked out that once an identity had been
established it was easy enough to arrange for the address to be changed and
thereafter there was little chance of the original individual whose identity had
been stolen from ever being involved or traced to the new false identity.

“And you
are
going to check all the false identities you find
against ‘The Drive’ in Ilford, right?” Bill said out loud to himself.

The next voicemail was from Max Brandt. He said that he had passed on all
the information they had collected from the raid in Frankfurt but that they had
found a laptop and wanted to know if he wanted an image of the hard disk.

Bill called him right away. He sounded tired. Bill could understand that.
Bill had given them the biggest drug bust they had probably ever had and he was
in no doubt it had generated a lot of overtime for Max and his team.

“
Guden
tag Herr Brandt.” That was as far as
Bill’s German would take him. He thanked him for his call about the laptop and
questioned him about house keys he had collected from the suspects. Brandt
agreed he had collected several and put the phone down to go get them at Bill’s
insistence. Bill explained what Brandt should look for and he soon identified
the type of key that Bill described.

“Oh
meine
Güte
!”
Bill smiled as he heard Brandt react to finding the hidden
USB as Bill explained how to open it.

Bill requested that Brandt extract and email the data on the USB and an
image of the laptop hard drive directly to John
Buttrose
at GCHQ, giving him the email address. Bill had the contact details of
Buttrose
scribbled on a pad in front of him. He gave Brandt
the telephone number to talk directly with John in case he had any issues with
the files being too large for his email or anything else.

Bill thanked him and confirmed that the information Brandt had provided
from the Frankfurt raid had been particularly useful and that he would keep in
touch as the case unfolded.

“Phew, it’s all happening,” thought Bill. Then like a bolt out of the
blue, all the talk of identities made him think of the dental appointment Wood
had made in one of the very first emails they had intercepted. He swivelled
around and logged into the Dinner-Jacket database using his new, directly authenticated
credentials.

Once past this login step it all looked very familiar. He pounced on the
email file that was now
a long way down
the index. He
had to scroll and scroll to find it and clicked on it, reading with mind fully
engaged. The reply only gave the date and time, not the name of the dentist.

Bill jumped on his browser and searched for dentists in Ilford; assuming
that the report of Wood in Ilford was correct; seven came up. He printed the
page off and collected it from the printer in the services area. He decided he
would avoid using his office phone and found an empty desk to make the calls.

He started at the top and circled the phone number of the dentist and
picked up the phone and dialled it. He went down the list with no luck then on
the fourth dentist the call was answered by a chirpy receptionist saying,
“Gentle Dental. How can we help you?”