Sometimes the path is clear, other times it is not. Every twist and turn will challenge your sense of direction.
The tactical team was already closing in on the clinic that Daniel Meadows had told them Black Flag’s doctor was working in. Knox waited in the control room for the attack to begin. With the prospect of an immunity deal in place, Meadows had suddenly opened up and given Knox the full scoop on the trafficking and organ-harvesting business that he had been a part of. The scientist had been working for Black Flag for a number of years and, while his research was legitimate, his method of acquiring test subjects was most definitely illegal. They would be holding on to him for a while once this operation was over. They could act on the information he had given them about his own involvement with Black Flag later, the important thing now was to get to PrinceSec employee, Rebecca MacDonald, who had been missing for several days now, before anything happened to her. Knox only hoped they weren’t too late.
Meadows had told him that the doctor specialised in organ removal, and had been known to keep people in the clinic for extended lengths of time while a market was sourced for their organs. He had also insinuated that not all of the patients left alive. It made Knox sick to the stomach to think of it.
He had an additional fear niggling at him now too; Meadows had told him that Rebecca had been brought to the Callahan Scientific on the day before the raid along with the six children. It had been the first time that the scientist had ever seen children at the compound, and he hadn’t been happy about it. The doctor had told him that it was none of his concern and had apparently taken the woman and one of the children away almost immediately. Since Meadows hadn’t been told to prepare a bed for either of them, he hadn’t been expecting them back post-surgery. He had simply assumed that the doctor had other plans for them, and he hadn’t pushed for any more information — there were some things he preferred not to know.
Meadows said that he only ever dealt with the kidney donors, and the post-surgery drugs they were working on were genuinely breaking new ground. Meadows had claimed some justification in the old ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs’ adage. He believed that they were doing good work that would otherwise never be achieved. Knox had countered that it still didn’t justify kidnap, exploitation and murder.
Meadows had also made it clear that, as far as he knew, the clinic was small and staffed by a skeleton crew. With that in mind, Knox had made the decision to scramble a small, armed team and send them in quickly, rather than standing up an entire tactical operation. His priority was to make sure that they got Rebecca and the child out safely and that they could get anyone working there into custody before they could flee the scene. Going in blind, he didn’t want to have to be dealing with any kind of hostage situation.
The phone in the control room buzzed and an operator answered and listened before turning to Knox and covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
‘Chief, it’s the emergency operator; they’re asking for Franklin, they say it’s about Rebecca MacDonald.’
‘Put them on,’ said Knox fearing that the worst had already happened and his team were too late.
The operator nodded as the call was transferred.
‘This is Officer Knox of the NCA, I’m authorised to speak on behalf of Oscar Franklin, what can we do for you, control?’ he asked, sounding brusque and authoritative.
‘We’ve just received a nine nine nine call from a location in Bristol during which a woman identified herself as Rebecca MacDonald and claimed that she has been held captive and has now managed to escape those keeping her locked up. However, she is trapped inside the building she was being held in. We have a unit ready to deploy, but the name has raised a flag to call NCCU before any action be taken. How shall we proceed?’
Knox felt the relief in the pit of his stomach — they weren’t too late. She was going to be okay.
‘Do you have a location, control? We have a team deploying currently to Unit 4, Broadwater Estate. Does that correspond?’
‘Yes. That’s where we traced the call from,’ replied the emergency controller.
‘In that case, send uniformed units as back-up. I have an armed unit en route; they should arrive within the next five minutes. I will give them the all clear to proceed.’
‘Roger that,’ said the controller and the line went dead.
‘Tactical, what is your position?’ Knox asked the mobile unit.
There was a brief pause before the team leader replied, his voice sounded clear and close over the speakers.
‘We’re moving into position around the location now. One main entrance, one fire escape. Switching to visual comms now.’
‘We have a status update. Victim Rebecca MacDonald is confirmed to be inside the unit, she has made a nine nine nine call to report her escape, but she is still trapped in the unit. Proceed with extreme caution and keep your fire down. There are innocents in there.’
‘Roger that, sir,’ said the team leader. Over the speakers Knox could hear him relaying the instructions to his officers. The cameras showed them splitting forces and moving into position around both sets of doors. He watched as they reached the main door and used a battering ram to break their way through. They met no resistance and Knox could hear them making their way into the building, finding no one to oppose them. The cameras showed a clinical environment of stainless steel and polished tiles. It was a contrast from the warehouse compound, but it was no less sinister. Knox could feel himself holding his breath for what they might find behind each door.
After managing to overpower the old man who had been keeping watch over her, Rebecca had cautiously made her way to the front desk in the clinic, which was empty. He must have been the only one on duty. She had kept the bloody scalpel clasped firmly in her hand and had locked the door to the unit, sealing herself inside. Then she had gone around the immediate area making sure there was no sign of anyone else.
Only when she was sure that she was alone in the main staff areas and nobody was going to leap out and get her again, did she pick up the phone to call the police. When the operator asked her which service she required, she had said police, and when the police service had asked the nature of her emergency, she had outlined her predicament as calmly as possible.
‘My name is Rebecca MacDonald. I have been kidnapped. I don’t know where I am, but I have been held prisoner. Please contact Oscar Franklin at the NCCU, his agency has been investigating the group who I think took me.’
The operator had encouraged her to stay on the line so that they could trace her location. She had waited nervously for what seemed like an eternity until the operator had told her that they had traced her location and they would be sending someone out to get her.
‘Is there anyone else there with you?’ the operator had asked.
‘There was a man, but he was injured when I tried to escape. I think he may be dead,’ Rebecca had replied honestly. She had questioned, then, whether she was actually alone here. There were other rooms off the corridor and, for all she knew, there could be someone in each of them, tied to the bed as she had been, scared and awake, awaiting some gruesome surgery.
‘There are other rooms,’ she had told the operator. ‘I’m going to look.’
‘I advise you to wait for the police, ma’am,’ the operator replied cautiously.
‘They’re on their way, aren’t they?’ she asked.
‘That’s correct,’ the operator had said.
Rebecca had hung up at that point. She had suddenly thought about young Sofiya and the promise of rescue she had made to the little girl. Was she even here? Had this been a special circumstance, only for Rebecca? Were the children destined for some other hideous fate? Holding the scalpel firmly in her hand, she slowly, carefully, made her way to the first door along the corridor. She pressed her ear against it, realising that doing so just made her heartbeat sound even louder. She could hear nothing from inside.
With a deep, steadying breath, she flung the door open, ready to take down any attacker from within. A quick scan revealed that the room was empty. She moved on to the next one, growing bolder with each empty room she found. At the fourth room, she heard the tell-tale sound of monitors beeping steadily. There was someone in there. She listened carefully at the door. There were no more sounds within, and she was sure that if there had been another member of staff they would have shown their faces by now, having heard the old man’s screams and the doors slamming open.
Cautiously, she pushed the door open and saw the one thing she had been hoping not to see. In the bed, hooked up to the monitors and with her tiny arms strapped the same way Rebecca’s had been, was a young girl. Rebecca realised that she didn’t know if it was Sofiya because she had never actually seen the girl — they had only ever spoken to each other in the dark confines of the container. It made no difference who the child was though, Rebecca had to get her out of there.
She crossed to the bedside and used the scalpel to gently cut the bindings free from the bed. They remained tied around the girl’s wrists like make-shift bandages. The girl was still unconscious. Carefully, Rebecca lifted the thin robe to check for any signs of injury or surgery, but there was nothing there, and apart from the drip, there were no catheters or other invasive tubes. She had probably been drugged to keep her under. Rebecca delicately removed the needle running the drip into the girl’s arm, and then peeled the electronic pads away from her pale skin. She noticed a small scar on the girl’s chest, but it looked old. Folding the child’s arms over her chest she lifted her up off the bed.
She was lighter than Rebecca had thought she would be and she let out a small whimper as Rebecca lifted her off the bed. The old man’s blood had still been on her hands and she felt bad that it was now on the girl. It would wash off. They would be all right. Somewhere outside the unit she heard a huge metallic crash, followed by the sound of shouting voices. She hoped it was the police, but she wasn’t going to risk being a sitting duck if the old man had somehow called reinforcements before he came in to her room. She gathered the girl closer to her body and rushed out of the room. There had been a key in the lock of one of the offices near the front desk — she would secure them in there until she was sure.
Rebecca didn’t even make it back to the front desk before the door to the unit was smashed open and a team of armed officers ran in. She was standing in the middle of the corridor, stained with blood, holding an unconscious child and all she could do was cry. The police had come, it had worked. She was going to be safe.
‘Rebecca MacDonald?’ one of the men at the front of the pack asked.
‘Yes,’ she said through a sob.
‘It’s okay, it’s going to be okay. We’ve got you now.’
Rebecca felt her legs turn to jelly and she let herself sink down to the ground, still cradling the child. She felt the police swarm around her, but she didn’t have to worry anymore. She let the tears roll down her cheeks as they mobilised around her, plucking the young girl from her arms and lifting her up too. She let it happen. She had done her bit.
Miller had come straight to the office from the collection point. He’d felt like a proper spy as he strode down the river towards the dead-drop location. It had all been quite exciting, but he now knew he had to be careful not to risk sticking a random USB stick from a known hacker group into his work computer without isolating it first. He had been rather hoping for paper-based evidence, instead of a drive, but the fact that he had any evidence at all put him one step ahead of Mitchell, and he liked that. Who’s smug now? he thought, imagining the look on Mitchell’s face when he found out that Miller had been the one to crack Strider’s identity. He smiled to himself.
He didn’t know what it was about Mitchell that he didn’t trust, but the guy always seemed up to something. Perhaps it was just because he knew about Mitchell’s past and he didn’t agree with the department hiring former criminals to consult on issues of national security. How could you ever trust that they weren’t just feeding information straight to the enemy? Then again, look at Sheila Davies. Apparently she had been working for the enemy for over a year and none of them had spotted it. It still bothered him that Mitchell had found that information so quickly on her laptop. Had she really been that careless? Or did he know something before he went looking?
Miller had been delighted that the informant from Black Flag had called him rather than Mitchell or anyone else at the NCCU. Perhaps crackers also have a distrust of those who turn to the other side, he thought. He had asked all the usual questions about how the caller had known who he was, and the caller had just laughed and told him that they have many ways of finding out anything they wanted to know. Of course they did. He had tried to talk tough, and to lay some of the ground rules for the interaction between them, but the person had simply told him what was going to happen, and in the end, he had followed the directions given to him.
Miller finished the scan of the USB drive and found no viruses lurking there. As a further precaution, he made sure that his machine was completely disconnected from any network, and that there were no other external drives or devices plugged in that any malware could hop to. He was aware that any one of the files could be acting as some kind of Trojan horse, and he didn’t want the NCCU network to be compromised by anything he did. Besides, if Mitchell was trying to sneak a peek at anything Miller was working on, he wouldn’t be able to.
Miller slipped the USB into the slot on the front of his machine and waited impatiently for the disk icon to appear. This could be a defining moment in his career. If he was able to crack this case, he would surely be in line for a step up the ladder when the department reshuffled, as it would now have to do. When the icon popped up, he double-clicked the mouse and opened it.
The files on the drive were a mix of code snippets, documents and chat logs, and Miller began with the first in the list. He was always methodical, and despite the fact that he would have loved to look at the code first, he wanted to go through everything in the order it was presented here. The first document was a copy of the warning message they had been sent by the journalist. Nothing special there, apart from the fact that this was an actual digital document and so, unlike the screen-grabbed version they had seen before, there was metadata here that he could exploit.
Miller began to feel the thrill of the chase the moment he looked at it. He was looking specifically for what they referred to as PII — personally identifiable information — which included data such as who created the document and when, but more importantly it showed email headers, routing slips and document server details. What Miller saw in the first document made him frown. He quickly toggled open another window and pulled up his own system settings. It must be a glitch, he thought. The document metadata seemed to suggest that the document had been created on his own machine, but that wasn’t possible. There must be a bug in his document inspector which was misreading the information. He tried again with the second document.
‘Dammit!’ Miller said, annoyed. It told him the same thing. Had the disk been corrupted by his system? Without accurate metadata, the documents were useless for identification purposes. There may be other little details to find in the data, but the big, obvious stuff was ruined. He tried again with a number of the other documents but each of them showed the same impossible fact: they all appeared to have been created on this machine. Sometimes, when glitches like this happened, he thought that he genuinely hated computers.
What Miller found strange is that all of the creation dates remained original. If the bug was changing where they were created, why would it not change when? He didn’t understand it. Perhaps it was something to do with his machine. Maybe he could try it in another computer. Miller tried to eject the drive, but a warning popped up to say that the drive was still in use. He double checked that he had closed all of the open files, and tried again. Before he could remove it though, the door to the office opened and Franklin walked in, with two uniformed police officers flanking him.
Miller looked up and smiled.
‘Move away from that machine, Miller,’ Franklin said threateningly. ‘Don’t touch another thing.’
‘What?’ said Miller, genuinely confused. The two uniformed officers arrived at his side before he could react, and the taller of the two unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his belt and took hold of Miller’s left arm. As he snapped the cuffs on, he read Miller his rights.
‘Stephen Miller, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Miguel Ribeiro––’
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Miller shouted over the rights. The officer continued to read them regardless of all the talking going on over the top of him.
‘How could you do it, Miller?’ Franklin asked, bubbling with rage.
‘You’ve got it wrong! I haven’t done anything!’ Miller pleaded, but it fell on deaf ears.
‘Your own people gave you up,’ said Franklin. ‘All this time you’ve been sitting here, like a Judas, in bed with the enemy. I feel like killing you right now.’
‘No, it’s not me!’ said Miller. He was feeling desperate now, and he struggled to free himself from the officer’s firm grip.
‘Mitchell, get in here!’ shouted Franklin, and Miller was horrified to see Mitchell slink into the room from just outside the door. ‘Seize that machine. I want to know what he was just doing.’
Miller saw the look in Mitchell’s eye as he passed, and he knew then that the little cracker had something to do with this. But what? How?
‘You,’ Miller spat venomously as he was led out. He wanted to rip Mitchell’s face off. Mitchell stared at him with a blank expression. ‘It’s him! Can’t you see? He’s doing this!’ shouted Miller, but he was dragged through the door and nobody was listening to him. The last thing he saw was Mitchell sitting down in front of his machine and he knew exactly how bad it would look when they opened those files.
Franklin watched Miller being dragged away by the two uniformed officers, raving at Mitchell as he was pulled past him. He was livid that the kid had thought he could get away with killing a lead witness in their biggest case and then just come into work as though nothing had happened. The sheer arrogance of it made his blood boil.
With the CCTV evidence from the hospital already suggesting that Miller had managed to sneak in and kill Miguel Ribeiro, and then the forensic evidence Willis had found placing Miller at both the power station and the scene of Roche’s beating, Franklin had been forced to build a case against his agent. Miller and Squires had left Southampton early enough that he could have feasibly made it to the power plant in time to get to Roche. His girlfriend had been away for the week, so she couldn’t even confirm that he had gone straight home after his journey. Franklin still couldn’t believe that Miller could do it, but the facts didn’t lie and he had enough to send Miller down for a long time. When Mitchell had called in with further evidence of his own, Miller’s fate was sealed.
Mitchell said that he had also been suspicious that Miller was so keen to look at the evidence. He was paranoid after the loss of the Teddybear’s Picnic evidence, and he was determined to get a good look at it before anyone else. This time his paranoia had paid off. He had told Franklin that he had found just a couple of lines in the code from the plane’s GPS worm that had felt familiar to him, and when he probed a little deeper, he saw that it was a style that Miller used often. He had come into the office early, hoping to confront Miller before throwing any accusations around, and when he got here, he found that Miller had also arrived early, isolated his machine from the network and had been working alone in one of the private offices ever since. Mitchell had said he was afraid that Miller was deleting evidence.
Franklin had been on his way back to the NCCU when Mitchell had called. He had already initiated the warrant for Miller’s arrest and so he had called the unit back from Miller’s home address and redirected them to the NCCU. When they had arrived at the office, Miller was still working alone. Franklin hoped that Mitchell was right, and they had just caught Miller red-handed. The last thing Mitchell had said to Franklin on the phone was: “I think that Miller is this Strider person, sir. I think I can prove it, too.”
He had told Franklin he had some proof linking Miller to Prince’s death and Davies’ accident.
‘Well?’ Franklin asked him now. He turned his back on the door and looked at the computer Mitchell was sitting at.
‘I just don’t get why he would do all this here,’ said Mitchell, with convincing incredulity. ‘Did he not think anyone would notice?’
Franklin could still hear Miller protesting his innocence as he was led away. He put his hand on Mitchell’s shoulder.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s on the drive?’
‘It’s almost like a case file,’ said Mitchell, feigning an edge of awed surprise. ‘It seems to be a kind of road map to Prince’s murder.’
‘Does any of it actually prove that it belonged to Miller?’ Franklin was in little doubt that Miller was a rogue force, but he needed to know that they had actual proof. Miller was clearly going to deny all involvement and Franklin wanted to make sure that he had every piece of evidence possible to nail this conviction to the wall.
‘When you combine it with everything else we know, I think so, yes,’ said Mitchell. ‘These files were created here. On this machine.’
‘Work it up for me Mitchell, as quickly as possible. Make sure we have every angle covered, okay? If there is any chance that we’re wrong about Miller, I need to know it.’
Franklin had yet to go through any of the files that Mitchell was claiming had tipped him off to Strider’s identity, but the kid had been right about a lot of things recently. Franklin was sure enough of Willis’s evidence anyway to have made the arrest. By the time they sat down to question Miller, he wanted everything in place.