Gray Redemption (Tom Gray #3) (7 page)

“Is he expecting a
delivery?”  Ellis asked.

Small nodded and pointed to a
section of text further down the screen:

Passengers
arriving Durban May 7
^th
3PM.
  Meet them, get the
information and ensure no onward journey.

Ellis read the succinct message
a few times, and a couple of questions popped into her head: who were the
passengers; and who was being sent to meet them?

“Any idea
who’s
behind the website?”  She asked.

Small shook his head. 
“First thing we tried, but whoever it is, they know how to cover their
tracks.  I’ve got one of my guys working on it, but I’m not hopeful.”

“Then we need to know who these
passengers are.  What was the port of origin for the
Huang Zhen
?”

“Port Kelang in Malaysia,” Small
told her.  “It left there last Monday.”

South-east Asia again, Ellis
thought.  First there was Timmy Hughes in Singapore, then Baines and Smart
in Manila.  Now Farrar seemed to be tracking some people who’d recently
departed from Malaysia, and all this in the last couple of weeks.

She called Harvey and asked him
to bring Farsi to her office.  When they arrived, she also told them about
Farrar’s request to stop searching for Baines and Smart.

“And you’re going to do as he
says?”  Farsi asked.

“Of course not,” Ellis
said.  “Those two are the key to finding the others.  What we must do
is try to keep any searches off the record.”

The operatives nodded, and Ellis
gave them a rundown of the information gleaned from Farrar’s computer and laid
out her findings. 

“It could be just a
coincidence,” Harvey said.  “Maybe Farrar has more than one thing on the
go.”

“I agree,” Farsi said. 
“There was that terrorist attack in the southern Philippines last week. 
Maybe he’s working that up.”

The attack on Jolo had slipped
Ellis’s mind.  Although it had been flagged to her department and was
being investigated, there was nothing to suggest a threat to Britain.  The
CIA had jurisdiction and had shared some of their data — it had, after all,
been an American base which had come under attack — and her team of analysts had
created a summary report for her.  It suggested Abdul Mansour had been
responsible for the attack, although there was no concrete evidence, just an
eye witness statement, but they were working hard to confirm his location with
several other agencies around the world. 

Ellis conceded that Farrar might
be working a different case, but it couldn’t hurt to go over the Jolo data one
more time.

“Andrew, get over to the Asia
desk and have them send everything we have relating to the attack on Camp
Bautista.  Once that’s organised, contact our friends across the pond and
ask them for the very latest information.  The stuff we have is at least
three days old.”

Harvey nodded and left to carry
out her orders.

“Hamad,” Ellis said, turning to
the other operative, “get a manifest of the
Huang Zhen
and see if you
can find a connection with anyone we have on our radar.”

Farsi followed Harvey out of the
room, leaving Gerald Small alone with the boss.

“One thing puzzles me,” he said,
his eyes still on the short message Farrar had sent.  “If he has his own
team, why isn’t he communicating with them through normal channels?  Why
go through the trouble of setting up an untraceable website?”

Ellis hadn’t picked up on that
fact, but the more she thought about it, the more intriguing she found
it.  “An outsider,” she said, and began pacing the room, throwing ideas
around in her mind.  Why would he use an outside contractor?  Whoever
it was, they were interested in some people originating from Malaysia, which
placed them in the same area as Timmy Hughes.  And the fact that Hughes
was linked to Levine and Campbell meant that whoever had taken him out could
well
be
looking for them, too.  It could of
course be a coincidence that Hughes was taken out by a professional just a few
days after contacting Levine, but the more she thought about it, the more
unlikely it seemed.

Ellis knew that in order to
confirm her suspicions, she had to discover who Farrar was in contact
with.  “You said that whoever created the website covered their tracks:
does that make finding them impossible, or just very difficult?”

“As I said, I have someone
working on it.  We might get lucky if the host has been careless, but at
this moment in time I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

It wasn’t what Ellis wanted to
hear, but she was determined to either verify the connection or dismiss it as
an avenue of investigation.

“How about gaining access to
Farrar’s files?  Would you be able to do that undetected?”

Small thought about it for a moment,
not wanting to offer hope if there was none.  He knew the network inside
out, but as several agencies had access to the core functionality a lot of it
was compartmentalised.  Gaining access to a sub-net would be no easy task,
but as he’d never even explored the idea before, it didn’t mean it would be
impossible.

“I can try,” he said, the
excitement of the challenge plain to see.

“Go for it,” Ellis smiled.

Chapter
5

Tuesday
May 1st 2012

Ben Palmer’s Emirates flight
touched down at King Shaka International Airport just after five in the
afternoon.  An hour later, he climbed into an airport taxi which ferried
him twenty-two miles to the Alteron hotel, a three-star establishment a couple
of miles from the container port.  A larger, more opulent choice of
accommodation was available to him, but he preferred the low-key lifestyle
while working.  His cover as a British businessman would probably stand up
to close scrutiny in one of the four- or five-star establishments dotted around
the city, but he much preferred to be off the radar.

The hotel had been booked in
advance, and after signing in at reception he took the stairs to the second
floor and found the single room was as pleasant as could be expected for the
price.  He dropped his baggage on the bed and took a quick shower before
opening his laptop and logging in.

The first thing he did was to
visit the proxy server.  As he was using the hotel’s internet connection,
he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t logging every website he visited. 
To be on the safe side, he routed all requests through the proxy, so as far as
any snoopers were concerned he would only appear to have visited one website.

Once signed in, Palmer went
straight to his own website and composed a short email, which was encrypted and
sent to a friend named Carl Gordon.  Palmer’s knowledge of computers was
limited to the end-user experience, while his profession required a deeper
understanding and ability.  Knowing at an early stage that he wouldn’t be
able to learn enough to work alone, he had recruited a student a few years
earlier.  He’d scoured the web for court schedules, looking for anyone
facing charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.  Gordon had been caught
hacking into the servers of a utility company threatening to cut the power to
his shared accommodation and had been slapped with a hefty fine.  Palmer
had been in court listening to the case and afterwards he met up with Gordon
and agreed to pay the fine in exchange for some well-paid ad hoc work in the
future.  The kid had jumped at the chance and they had worked together
ever since, although Gordon had never discovered Palmer’s real name.  All
subsequent communications had simply been signed ‘B’.

An hour later he received a text
message which simply said: “Hi, Billy.  Fancy a drink later?”

It was Gordon’s signal to say
the work had been completed.  Palmer replied, saying he would try to meet
up but wasn’t making any promises.  What he was actually saying was that
Gordon’s fee would be transferred to the usual account within the hour. 

Palmer logged into his own
website and looked at the information his specialist had managed to find in the
shipping port’s system.  He had requested the manifest for the
Huang
Zhen
as well as the name of the haulage company that was scheduled to collect
the container, and he found everything he needed on the screen. 

After searching for the website
of Wenban Freight Management he made a mental note of the livery, glad to see
that the dark blue cab with lightning strikes on each door would be easy to
recognise.  It wasn’t a large company, and there was no online freight
tracking system, which suggested their paperwork would be hosted internally
rather than on a server Gordon could get access to.  That meant he had the
choice of either visiting the office to see where the container would be
heading next, or simply following the truck to see where it dropped it off.

With six days to go before the
ship arrived, there was more than enough time to check out the setup at Wenban.

He also had plenty of time to
find a place to dispose of his targets.

*
* *

Andrew Harvey was ploughing
through the raw data the CIA had sent over and he had the feeling it was going
to be a long day.  The vast majority of the reports had already been
couriered to Thames House a few days earlier and compiled into the summary
which had been presented to Ellis, but he had to go through each one, just in
case a relevant slice of information had been missed.  It was the report
highlighting the sighting of Abdul Mansour that got his attention.

A statement from the Special
Operations Division commander, Travis Dane, mentioned that one of three western
prisoners had claimed to have seen Mansour in a local Abu Sayyaf camp the day
prior to the attack.  There were no further details as to who the
prisoners were, and the summary had assumed that they had escaped from Abu
Sayyaf. 

Having not heard of any hostages
being taken in recent months, he did a search for known abductions in the
region and found three, two British and one American.  They could be the
prisoners in the statement, he thought, but as he read more the timings seemed
off.  Two of the prisoners had been strapped to the attacking vehicles,
suggesting they couldn’t have fingered Mansour the previous day.  That
left one — Victoria Phillips — but despite a thorough search he found no
mention of her in the CIA documents.

Harvey put in a call to the
British Embassy in Manila, though he wasn’t expecting a whole lot more
co-operation than he’d previously received.  His heart sank further when
the familiar voice came over the phone, but he kept his composure and politely
asked if there was any information available about her disappearance and
release.

“I can confirm that we were
informed of her disappearance at the start of the year,” the attaché admitted.
“I haven’t been informed about her release, though.  She certainly hasn’t
been in touch with us.”

“Are you sure?”  Harvey
asked, astonished.  If he’d been held by terrorists, the first thing he’d
want to do was get to British soil, and that would require a passport.

“Positive,”
came the reply, along with a little indignation.
  “If she contacted
the embassy, I would know about it.”

“If you say so,” Harvey
said.  “What about the other matter, the one I called about last week?”

“I’ve got someone working on
it,” the attaché said, “but things work a little slowly around here.  Once
I have something, I’ll be in touch.”

The phone went dead and Harvey
wished the same on the attaché.   

His next call was to the
American Embassy, where he was put through to his CIA counterpart, Doug Wallis.

“Andy, how are you?”

Harvey didn’t usually take
kindly to people shortening his name, but Wallis was such an affable character,
and when seeking information it was a good idea to let the little things slide.

“Good, thanks, Doug.  How’s
the family?”

Wallis gave him the usual sob
story about how his wife just couldn’t get settled in England, no matter how
much shopping she did.  Harvey knew the story could go on indefinitely so
he cut his friend short.

“I’m just looking for some
information about the attack on Jolo last week.”

“We sent that over yesterday,”
Wallis said.  “Didn’t you get it?”

“Yeah, we got it, but I’d like
to know more about the prisoners.  We can’t seem to locate one of them, a
woman named Victoria Phillips.”

“I don’t recall any of them
being female,” Wallis said, sounding confused. 

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.  There was
certainly no-one named Victoria, anyway.”

Harvey rifled through the papers
on his desk.  “I can’t see any reference to the prisoners anywhere,” he
said.  “Are you sure you sent that information over?”

“No, they won’t be on anything
we passed to you,” Wallis said casually.  “That report was classified
Internal Eyes Only.”

“Any
particular reason?”
  Harvey asked, curious as to why the identities
should have been withheld.

“No idea,” Wallis told
him.  “That’s what we got from Langley, no explanation as to why.”

It wasn’t unusual for agencies
to withhold certain sensitive information from each other, but it seemed
strange that the names of three people rescued from terrorists should be
considered classified, especially if two of them were British.

“Is there any chance you can
tell me the names?”  Harvey asked, knowing what the answer would be. 
He had, however, planted the seed.

“Sorry, pal, no can do.”

“That’s okay, Doug, I
understand.  Hey, fancy a beer later?”

The question was a signal they
both used when they wanted something off the record, and Harvey was relieved
when Doug agreed to meet up later that evening.  He was, however, slightly
frustrated that he would have to wait another few hours to get the information.