Matt manoeuvred his way around the armchair and deposited the mug on the place mat next to the laptop.
“Thanks,” said Will.
“How are we doing?”
“Getting closer,” said Will. “You wouldn’t believe how many boats in this country are called Melody Rose.”
“What if it’s not there?”
“If it’s a fishing vessel then it has to be on here, by law. What about this one?”
Matt leant forward to peer at the screen, trying to match the photograph to the picture in his mind.
“Looks familiar,” he said.
“A coastal fishing boat,” said Will. “They’re often hired to angling enthusiasts these days, bygone days of a disappearing life etc. Can you remember the registration number?”
“No, just the name,” said Matt.
His recognition of the craft prompted Will to initiate a series of deft hand movements, the screen skipping its way through a host of differing coloured images before coming to a sudden halt. The vessel was identified as being registered to the port of Felixstowe.
Will further manipulated the mouse and came up with a diary like entry showing a single, unnamed, booking for an entire three month block.
“All we need, a dead end,” said Matt.
“Not necessarily.”
His friend delved deeper into the company records, once he’d bypassed electronic security, and came up with details of a credit card transaction.
“That’s interesting,” said Will.
“What is?”
“The purchaser is one Maria Costa.”
“And she is?”
“Tillman married a Spanish woman called Maria with a surname beginning with C.”
Had to be no more than coincidence, he reasoned. What were the odds of Tillman’s widow hiring a fishing vessel for a team of special operation renegades?
“How could we find out?”
Will identified the name of the card issuer, shut down all open screens, and then re-opened the connection. He attached a small fitting to the laptop and typed in the relevant name. The image of a brick wall appeared on screen.
“What are you up to?”
“Fishing,” said Will.
A series of what could only be described as dents appeared at random on a number of the individual bricks, as if someone were throwing hard missiles or rocks against the wall.
“What’s happening?”
“The programme is finding a route to breach the firewall and their other security measures.”
“Of a bank?” said Matt.
“How else do you think the authorities investigate the financial records of individuals?”
“This is an international bank. I understood their security systems were supposed to be impregnable.”
“Think again.”
Matt watched in awed silence as the constant pinging against the imaginary bricks continued. He had to ask.
“Why is it showing as a brick wall being knocked down?”
“Passes the time, the boredom,” said Will. “Sometimes it can take a long while to hack into a system. An old mate of mine, Toby Rowe, came up with this idea. He’s a Pink Floyd fan.”
Matt turned his attention back to the screen. One of the bricks had disappeared, soon followed by another.
“There you go …”
“Yeah, I get it. Another brick in the wall,” said Matt.
One by one the red bricks started to shatter, disintegrate and gradually disappear from the screen, leaving bigger and bigger holes in their wake.
“So this is what cyber terrorism looks like?” said Matt.
“Yep, pretty dull isn’t it? What were you expecting it to look like?”
“I don’t know. Flashing lights maybe, certainly something a bit more elaborate than a simple game of ping pong against a red brick wall.”
His unintended humour caused Will to laugh.
“Don’t let it fool you. This is the new weapon, in many ways more powerful than the bomb. With just a few targeted clicks of a mouse you can destroy the comfortable lives of millions, possibly billions, of people. The masses would never be able to sleep at night if they knew the truth.”
“You’d still have to be a computer genius to make it look so easy,” said Matt.
“True. Fortunately, we had Toby. He’s an absolute maestro at programming. That’s why they recruited him, along with the others.”
“They?” asked Matt.
“The Government,” said Will. “If they didn’t employ the likes of Toby and others like him you can put your house on it that someone else will. And Government doesn’t want those sorts of skills working for the wrong kind of people.”
“How would they even know what Toby could do?”
Will looked up and smiled.
“You don’t need me to answer that.”
Matt thought back to the very first time he had reviewed the Milieu files and uncovered the extraordinary depth of information held on individuals, garnered from all manner of data such as financial records, health, genealogy, e-mail transcripts, etc.
“I thought it was only the Milieu crowd who went to those lengths of intelligence.”
“Where do you think they got most of it from?”
This was somewhat of an eye-opener, and a potentially frightening scenario.
“Big brother really does exist then?”
“Has done for years and years,” said Will. “The only people free from observation are those off the radar, and those are the people regarded by Governments as the enemy. If the public services know nothing about you then you must be up to no good.”
Matt decided to change tack.
“What made you sign up to the intelligence services?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Will.
“I didn’t think the question was that funny?”
“Nobody applies to be in intelligence. You get selected, approached. We all were; Toby, Johnno, Lily, Helen, me and Rosa. Once they find out you’ve got a particular skill they’re all over you like a rash.”
“Particular skill?” asked Matt.
“Toby Rowe is a hacker extraordinaire, can get into almost anything you put in front of him. Johnno’s bag is weapons, large or small he can tell you precisely how each of them work, what they do, and name every part. Lily is logistics maestro. Whatever equipment was needed for a job she’d find a way of providing it. Helen was the scientist; physics, biology, chemistry and everything in between including a photographic memory.”
“What about Rosa?”
“Tracker and contact queen. It doesn’t matter where you hide Rosa will find you. And if you need an introduction to a target Rosa is your girl, though I guess it helps if you can flip both ways.”
“You mean men and … women?”
“Yes. I always thought the fairer sex was her preference to be honest.”
“Are we talking about the same person?”
“There’s only one Rosa Cain. You sound surprised.”
“I understood she had someone, a European guy running a multinational company.”
“Ah, you’re talking about the Tyrolean op, in Austria.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All very hush, hush,” said Will. “It didn’t include the lads or Helen. Our friends from across the pond were involved.”
“Good to know the special relationship goes deeper than with the politicians.”
“Not them, the Canadians. It was so special Tillman never told us a thing about it. We had to rely on Lily to fill in some of the detail once it was all over.”
“All sounds very intriguing.”
“The multinational guy you’re talking about was one of two designated targets. Rosa was allocated him while Tillman took the other, a woman. According to Lily the boss and Rosa had a bust up over the op, so bad it nearly blew their covers and ruined the op.”
Images of an altercation formed in Matt’s head. He’d never seen Rosa truly an
gry.
“That would have been quite something, Rosa and Tillman at each other’s throats.”
“Yeah, fireworks I reckon,” agreed Will. “Strange thing was, everything changed afterwards. The atmosphere in the team was never the same and both were off their game for some time. Eventually, Tillman decided to split us up and we received orders to transfer to different units. Rosa quit on the spot, just turned and walked out, and the rest of us followed soon after.”
“That’s when you went to work for Catherine?”
“No, I drifted for a while. Didn’t know what to do with myself and lost touch with the others. Tillman recommended me to Catherine. You know the rest.”
“Did you … have to …?”
“On occasion,” said Will.
“And Jenna …?”
“No,” his friend said instantly. “That was never supposed to happen. It just did.”
“I thought you people had all the emotion kicked out of you, that you were trained to be heartless.”
Will shrugged his shoulders.
“We were operatives not assassins.”
“Is Jenna the reason you quit?” asked Matt.
He noticed the look of surprise on his friend’s face.
“Catherine told you?”
Matt nodded.
“Yes,” admitted Will, eventually. “Jenna came at me out of the blue, all unexpected like.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d quit?”
His companion hesitated, and shrugged again.
“I reasoned if you knew you might not want me around. I like where my life is at the moment.”
He found the admission disarming. Matt had liked Will from the start, a little odd given the man had been appointed to keep an eye on him.
“So what’s your particular skill?”
“When I was young a friend and I needed some quick cash so we did a burglary. We stumbled upon a horde of cash, ideal at the time. It was only later we discovered it belonged to some very unpleasant people and they came looking for us. They managed to corner my friend and shattered his arms with a baseball bat before I got there.”
“It sounds like there was more than one.”
“Five of them,” said Will. “I wasn’t about to let them do the same with me, so …”
“You took them down?”
“No option. As it happened someone heard the commotion and called the police. They arrived as I’d finished and took me into custody.”
“A born warrior,” said Matt. “It’s easy to see why they wanted to recruit you.”
The two friends drifted into silence as they watched the bricks continue to be eroded from the screen.
“I’m surprised Catherine and her people let you keep hold of this program.”
“They didn’t. This is Toby’s own make. He gave me it a few years back and as you can see it still works. It never hurts to have access to extra-curriculum resource.”
The sound of thunder, as though a derelict building were in the midst of being demolished, took their eyes to the screen.
“We’re in,” said Will.
In moments he had secured the requisite information, and then used it to enter another Government agency website.
“Yeah, it’s Tillman’s wife,” said Will. “It looks like she upped and left the UK after you made her a widow and is now living in a place called Olhos d’Agua in Portugal.”
Matt examined the oval shaped face on the screen, long black tresses with matching eyebrows and a Mediterranean complexion. This didn’t make sense.
“If you were told to recover something by whatever means necessary how would you interpret the instruction.”
“Don’t worry about the collateral.”
“Kill everyone?”
“Effectively,” said Will. “It ties up any loose ends.”
Matt’s concern was registered through his frown.
“What’s Catherine got you into?” asked Will.
Matt toyed with the idea of coming clean, deciding instead to keep his own counsel for the time being. Bad enough he was going up against Will’s old team, worse if this included his friend at a later stage.
“Do you mind sticking around, Will? I might need your help at some later point.”
“I guess this means you’ll be paying Tillman’s widow a visit next.”
“Yes, but how the hell do I get her to confide in me?”
“Easy enough,” said Will. “Seduce her.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“The woman’s been a widow for long enough so should be relatively easy.”
“First of all, I’m the man who killed her husband. How sick would that be? And secondly, according to that file on screen, she has given birth to four children. I am not jumping into the sack with a roly-poly, frump of a woman.”
His friend grinned at the latter remark and Matt could see the dubiousness of this last protestation.
“You know what I mean,” he said awkwardly.
“I know you need rapid access to information and she’s not going to give it up to you simply by asking.”
“There’s got to be a way,” he mumbled.
After a few moments deliberation another question came to his mind.
“If you’re not reporting back to Catherine on me anymore then who is?” asked Matt.
“Rest assured,” said Will. “Whoever it is, they’ll be close, to both of us.”
Chapter Twelve
Olhos d’Agua