48 Hours - A City of London Thriller Read online

  “Don’t wear your best suit.” I quoted Bob’s email out loud.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Dee replied. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

 

  Chapter 6

  Ashburnham Mews, Greenwich, London: Wednesday, 9pm.

  Dee stood up and stretched, walking across the room to draw the heavy damask curtains against the darkening summer sky. The two of us had shared a pasta meal and Dee had asked a colleague to bring around an overnight bag for her. She informed me that as a result of the paintballing incident she had no intention of leaving my side before noon on Friday. I found myself thinking for a brief moment that maybe it had been worth it, after all.

  The last three hours had been amongst the most enjoyable of my tenure in Greenwich. The two of us had eaten in companionable silence. Afterwards, Dee had rubbed salve into my bruised back and then we had written a long and laborious statement for the police, covering the day’s events. Dee guessed that, after this evening’s attack, a continuous police presence would be pretty much guaranteed.

  The question of where the gunman had sprung from seemed to have been solved when the Doland family returned home at six to find that their gate was locked with a padlock for which they didn’t have a key. Fortunately the police were still in the area, having been called by a concerned neighbour who had assumed the worst when she saw me lying on the ground, and they removed the padlock with bolt cutters before placing it in an evidence bag. The police would have stayed longer, and would have been more insistent about a statement, had it not been for the telephoned intervention of Inspector Boniface of the City of London Police, explaining that he had the situation under control.

  My guess was that, before the end of the week, the Police would raid the council flats nearby and, whilst they would not find the paint gun, they would find plenty of drugs and illegal weapons to make their trip worthwhile. The elderly residents of The Ashburnhams would then feel safe again.

  “Dee.” The gorgeous young woman turned to face me, trying to anticipate my question. “Why do you think this Bob character risked exposure or even arrest by shooting me with a paintball gun? I mean, it’s not as if the time limit is up yet. I still have forty hours left.”

  Ms Conrad pulled up an upholstered footrest that matched the sofa and sat down, facing me. We were less than a yard apart and my heart was beginning to race. She spoke quietly but with an assured tone that inspired confidence.

  “We can’t know for sure, Josh, but I suspect that our blackmailer enjoys the game rather more than he actually needs the money.” She paused. “Despite all of the controls we have over electronic banking these days, the fact is that if you pay up we will probably never see the money again. So, as long as Bob is clever and doesn’t leave an obvious electronic trail for the police to follow, he might never be identified. To take a risk like he did tonight suggests to me that he enjoys the thrill that comes from terrifying his victims.”

  “Well, he certainly scared me,” I conceded. That was something of an understatement. I could still remember vividly how I had felt when those paint pellets had hit me. I had believed I was dying, and it had shaken me very badly, although I was trying my best not to show it. I could not shake off the worrying realisation that, had the sniper chosen a different weapon, I would now almost certainly be dead. First had been the camera; then came the paintball gun. What might it be next time? I tried to put it to the back of my mind, but it wasn’t easy.

  The next two hours were spent in intimate proximity, in my mind anyway, as we, the guard and the guarded, watched TV. At eleven, Dee stood up and stretched her limbs.

  “We need to sleep. We might have a long day tomorrow.” With that she took a pillow and blanket and laid, fully dressed, on the recliner. “Put the light off on your way to bed.” She smiled at the look of disappointment that undoubtedly crossed my face. I would never make a good poker player, I thought, especially if one of my opponents was a stunningly attractive woman.

  I sat on my bed and shook physically. Perhaps it was delayed shock. Perhaps it was the thought that at best I was about to lose all of my life savings, and at worst I could lose my life. I felt panic rising in my chest. My heart was beating uncontrollably and I began to hyperventilate. Slowly I regained control as I breathed through my nose and sipped chilled water from a bottle by the bed.

  “Why me?” I thought, but no matter how hard I tried I could think of no reason why anyone would choose me for such a scam. I eventually fell asleep with the question rolling around in my befuddled brain.

 

  Chapter 7

  City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London: Thursday, 9am.

  I was sitting in Inspector Boniface’s office watching a young man setting up his laptop and some associated cables and gizmos. Dee Conrad sat beside me. I stole a quick glance at my BlackBerry. There were no new messages but the newly installed countdown application clicked onto twenty seven hours as I watched.

  After a restless night, punctuated by nightmares, I had awoken early before Dee had a chance to rouse me from my fitful sleep. We were in my office by seven fifteen. Dee watched as I cleared my messages and post before we set off for the police station to meet the technician, who was now settling down into the chair on the opposite side of Boniface’s desk.

  “Right, Mr. Hammond,” the young man said. “My name’s Simon, and I’m a forensic computer analyst. I’ve been shown the messages you have received to date, the texts and the email. I am also aware of the paintballing incident last night, which must have been terrifying for you.”

  “Not as terrifying as the real thing,” I countered.

  “No, I guess not.”

  I watched Simon as he set up his equipment. He was in his mid-twenties, I guessed, perhaps six feet tall and dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. He wore metal rimmed glasses and a friendly smile, and the word “geek” could have been invented to describe him. The forensic analyst turned to his laptop which had now booted up. A thin, square black box, connected to the laptop by a USB cable, showed a glowing green diode which had been flashing but was now steady. Simon tapped the keyboard and turned the laptop around so that the screen would face us.

  “If I have an enemy in this game it isn’t the criminals, it’s Hollywood and the TV producers. They give the impression that a computer genius can access anything anywhere and find addresses for the police to raid. Unfortunately, that isn’t generally true. Let me start with the email.” Simon touched a key and the email came into view, exactly as I had remembered it. “Now, keep your eye on the header.” We looked intently at the lines which denoted my email address as being the recipient of Bob’s email. Simon clicked a few more keys and the header lengthened to cover half the page.

  “This is the email address that sent your email..... ‘[email protected]’, which is a South African domain. As you can see, there is a large amount of routing information in the header. This lists the IP address where mail was sent from and the addresses of all intermediaries until it arrived with you at your IP address at Dyson Brecht. The unfortunate thing is that the email was sent from the IP address of Quadrille Hotel Services, who supply public area internet access and room internet access to hotel customers in the City of London. With further investigation it’s possible that we could get Quadrille to narrow the address to the actual hotel, but as anyone in that hotel could access the internet from the lobby, restaurants, gyms and so on, it’s unlikely we can do much about identifying the blackmailer with that information alone.”

  Dee asked for clarification. “So, Simon, what you are saying is that, even if it’s possible that we could get Quadrille to identify the hotel the message was sent from, that doesn’t necessarily mean our man ever stayed there. He could simply have used their internet access to mislead us.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Simon agreed. “Put yourself in his shoes. He would try very hard not to leave a trail to follow. Also, it’s rather unlikely that Quadrill
e would get back to me with that information today, or even tomorrow. The chances are the internet access is subcontracted out to another company somewhere in the UK, and the IT guys who could track this data back might be freelancers, working for the subcontractor from home. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a long shot, and it would not necessarily guarantee us any worthwhile data in any case.”

  I shook my head. “On the BBC last night, the Silent Witness team did what you just described in 20 seconds and traced the message to an individual office in a block of offices.”

  “Artistic license,” Simon replied. “It simply doesn’t work like that in real life. Let’s turn to the texts and the phone records and see if we can find anything useful there.” With a few more keystrokes the screen changed again. “We know the number that sent the texts, they all came from the same phone, but guess what....”

  “It was an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone,” Dee guessed out loud.

  “Spot on,” Simon acknowledged with more than a little admiration in his voice. “It gets worse, though.” The analyst paused as he flicked more buttons. “From the phone number we can tell that the phone is a Nokia 2690 and that it was acquired recently. The records show that it was first activated yesterday and it may only have been on the shelf of the shop where it was bought for a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks. I draw that conclusion because that particular telephone number was only allocated earlier this month. We are waiting for confirmation, but my guess is that it was bought at a supermarket in the London area. Some place where they sell phones by the dozen and the sales assistants will have no idea who bought it. Unless Bob is a bit dim, he’ll have paid cash for it. No credit card which could be traced. But you never know. Sometimes people are careless.”

  My mind had been racing while Simon had been speaking.

  “Simon, you’re probably right to think that the email and texts were sent from the City. That makes sense when you consider that I was photographed in the City yesterday and shot with paintballs in Greenwich last night. I was wondering, can’t we trace where the phone is now? I understand we can track mobile phones by triangulation or cell location or something.”

  Simon looked directly at the two of us facing him. He looked into my eyes as he spoke. “Josh, we’ve pinged that number, by computer, every thirty seconds since five o’clock yesterday, and we haven’t had a hit. That suggests to me that Bob knows exactly what he’s doing. If he’s seen any Hollywood movies he will know that we can track a phone, even when it’s switched off, or on standby to be more accurate. However, if you remove the battery......” he let the thought hang in the air.

  I looked at Dee, my mood plummeting. “This is hopeless,” I said.

  Dee tried to find some positives from the meeting. “If you ping the phone when it’s switched on, can you trace it?”

  “Yes, given enough time,” Simon answered, “but Bob has, so far at least, kept his messages short and not so sweet. Nothing he’s sent so far would have given us enough time to track him.” Simon hesitated before offering more negative news. “To be honest, people think that we can get an address from a phone’s location, and sometimes that’s possible in a rural area, but in a place the size of London the best we can do is narrow it down to a diameter of two or three hundred yards. A radius like that will include thousands of people on the street, in shops, offices and hotels, and hundreds of those will be using phones at any given moment.”

  “So, what are you saying?” I asked, my frustration bringing hoarseness to my usually controlled voice.

  “I’m afraid, Josh, that as an analyst I can’t give you any more information than you could guess for yourself. My guess is that the blackmailer lives or lodges in the City, and is probably within a mile of us right at this minute, but we simply can’t trace him electronically.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dee interrupted. “What about his email address, ‘[email protected]’, or whatever it is? It sounds like he might have set up his own domain. Can’t we track him that way?” Simon leaned over and his hands quickly rattled the keys on the laptop until a new screen appeared.

  “The web domain was set up from an IP address in South Africa, Johannesburg actually, in 2010, during the World Cup. The IP address leads back to the Intercontinental Hotel which, according to the information on lastminuterooms.co.za, has seven hundred and eleven rooms, all of which would have been full at the time.” Simon clicked again on the keyboard and a page entitled ‘whois’ appeared on the screen. “The site was registered and is maintained by “CoolestDomains” in Thailand. They don’t speak much English but they told us that the owner paid for two years’ worth of domain hosting and for ten email addresses up front by credit card. They gave us his address and card number.”

  “We’ve got him then?” I asked hopefully as I sat forward in my chair.

  “I’m afraid not,” Simon sighed, obviously reluctant to pile yet more agony on me, recognising that my life span could potentially be measured in hours.

  “The address they gave us belongs to Thomas Cook Travel Agency in Uxbridge, where an agent sold a prepaid Mastercard to Michael Lambaurgh, an England soccer fan who booked a trip to the World Cup with them.”

  “Surely, they must have a record of where he lives?” Dee interjected.

  “Yes, I’m afraid we’re ahead of you again there. The Metropolitan Police who look after the crowds at Stamford Bridge on match days know Michael Lambaurgh very well. It seems that Michael ran out of money after two weeks in South Africa, and was caught causing trouble by British Police who’d been drafted in to help police the World Cup. To avoid his arrest and prosecution in South Africa, he agreed to be deported. Unfortunately for us, the night before he flew back a man with a heavy Boer dialect, probably fake, offered to buy his card from him when it was refused for payment at a bar. The man offered him three hundred rand, about thirty pounds, for the card. Michael took it happily as there was less than a pound of credit left on it.” Simon picked up a printed email that had arrived earlier that morning.

  “According to the credit card company, the card was topped up with five thousand rand cash at a Thomas Cook Foreign Exchange point in Johannesburg the next day. An hour ago Michael Lambaurgh described the man who bought the card as white European, about six feet tall with receding dark hair. He couldn’t remember much else about that night, as he was falling over drunk, to use his own words.”

  “So,” Dee said, looking at me and then Simon. “We’re nowhere.” Simon frowned again but held his palms up submissively. “I’m afraid that about sums it up. Unless Bob starts to make some serious mistakes, we won’t find him before Friday at noon.”

 

  Chapter 8

  Dyson Brecht Offices, Ropemaker Street, London:

  Thursday, 12 noon.

  I was unhappy about my BlackBerry being cloned by Simon, but eventually accepted that it was necessary. Simon informed me that he would be able to monitor all incoming and outgoing calls and messages in real time, which would hopefully assist in locating Bob. Despite all of this, neither Simon nor Dee were confident that Bob would be found before the deadline expired. I decided I would just have to be careful how I used the phone until Simon terminated the shadowing of my calls and texts.

  The countdown on my BlackBerry had reached twenty four hours. It had been only twenty four hours since I had spilled the beans to Toby, my boss, but it already seemed like an eternity. I was now sitting in a conference room with Dee. We sat in silence, each alone with our thoughts.

  The door to the conference room opened and Toby walked in with another man. I immediately recognised the second man as Roddy McDougall, the Dyson Brecht contact at Chartered Equitable Building Society. Roddy sat and acknowledged me with a nod. Toby broke the silence.

  “Miss Conrad. It’s very nice to see you again. This is Roddy McDougall. He is helping us raise the money for the ransom demand, in a manner of speaking.”

  Roddy, a chubby redhead who looke
d out of place in a suit, spoke directly to me in a Scots accent. “I don’t know what to say, Josh. This is a crazy situation. I suppose all I can realistically do is make your life a wee bit simpler by raising the loan agreement as quickly as possible. To that end I have these papers prepared. Take your time to read them, if you want, but they’re all as we discussed yesterday.” Roddy pushed a sheaf of papers across the table towards me. Toby spoke.

  “Josh, I’ve asked Terry in Legal to agree the terms of your loan agreement on your behalf so that we can spend time on finding a solution that doesn’t ruin you financially.” He paused whilst he looked at a sheet of paper lying flat on the table in front of him.

  “Your flat will be valued at around three hundred and twenty thousand pounds, which is actually quite generous given the current housing slump. You will borrow two hundred thousand, repayable over twenty five years at a rate tracked to one percent over base. It’s the best we could do.” Toby looked at Roddy for confirmation, and Roddy nodded and smiled. I appreciated that this was an excellent deal in the circumstances.

  “Subject to the valuer’s condition survey confirming the initial valuation, the cash can be paid to you on Tuesday next week. Until then you are mine, buddy boy. I own you.” Toby smiled, and the others in the room joined him as the mood lightened. “With my two hundred grand partner’s loan account money and your fifty grand advance against bonus and benefits, you will have the necessary quarter of a million quid in your account later today. Just be sure to leave your passport on the way out.” Dee looked surprised, but he grinned.

  “Just kidding! Now, how do we deal with Bob, whoever he is?” Toby looked around the room for ideas. Dee had already explained that the Police offered little hope of finding Bob, even after the money had been paid. When the room remained silent, Toby continued.

  “OK. I guess it’s down to me. I’ve had a few thoughts. Let me brainstorm them for a few minutes.” Toby stood up and walked to a large flip chart on an easel. He picked up a blue marker pen and began to write. I have watched this brilliant man develop new strategies on the hoof with just a pen, a whiteboard and his agile mind hundreds of times. I hoped that Toby’s ingenuity would help us find the elusive solution to my problem.