‘Peggy,’ said Liz, ‘you’ve got to go.’
‘They’ll understand. They know operations come before everything. They can meet another day.’
‘They won’t meet again for another year. They’re all busy people and there’ll be an outsider there as well. The dates for these things are fixed well in advance. If you’re not there this afternoon they’ll think you’re not interested. They’ll also think that you imagine you are indispensable and don’t understand the principles of delegation and teamwork.’
It was the morning of Thomma’s escape from Bartholomew Manor and they were arranging who should go to Suffolk to interview him. In normal circumstances, it would have been Peggy, as it was she who had interviewed Miss Girling and given her the number that Thomma had rung for help. Liz had only met Miss Girling when she had shown Liz around the school. But Peggy was up for promotion and the board was meeting that afternoon. Liz had strongly recommended Peggy and was anxious that she should not miss her chance.
Silence fell. Peggy looked downcast.
‘Come on, Peggy,’ said Liz gently. ‘It’s my reputation on the line as well as yours. If you don’t turn up, they’ll think I got it wrong. I’ve written you up in a big way, you know. I’ll cope with Thomma. Your account of your interview with Miss Girling is very clear, and I’ll read it again before I go. Also, I need to look again at your note about the call from the Berlin Station telling us about Irma and Dieter Nimitz’s deaths. Let me have the file of photographs, and make sure it includes everyone involved, right from the start of all this. I have a feeling there are links here that we haven’t yet made. And why don’t you spend this morning at Grosvenor, briefing Miles Brookhaven on recent developments? Then go to the Promotion Board this afternoon and sock it to them.’
Peggy’s face brightened and she smiled. ‘All right. I’ll go to the beastly board and do my best,’ she said, standing up to go.
‘Of course you will. And you’ll wow them. You’ll see. I just hope I’ll do as well in Suffolk.’
As she emerged from Ipswich station Liz was not surprised to see a police car waiting for her. She was surprised, however, to see the Chief Constable sitting in the back seat.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I was expecting Inspector Singh.’
‘When I heard you were coming I thought I’d come myself,’ Pearson replied with a smile. ‘I hope that isn’t a disappointment.’
‘I’ll get over it,’ Liz said teasingly. ‘And actually I’m delighted to see you, because I think this case is beginning to look more complicated than we initially thought.’ She spent the hour of the drive explaining what had been going on in Germany and trying to make the connections with Suffolk. She found it helped her to go over it, but it clearly left Richard Pearson pretty confused, and neither of them knew quite what to expect from the young man they were on their way to interview.
The desk sergeant was expecting them, and it was obvious that someone had recently cleaned and tidied up the reception area of the small police station in the housing estate on the edge of Southwold. The floors were sparkling and there were flowers in a vase on the reception counter.
‘Good morning, sergeant,’ said Pearson. ‘Where’s the young man then?’
‘I’ll show you along, sir. Good morning, ma’am,’ he said with a nod to Liz. ‘He’s in an interview room down the hall. One of our young family officers is looking after him.’
‘Excellent,’ replied Pearson. ‘Let’s go.’
The sergeant unlocked a door and led them down a corridor to a room that looked like the sitting room of a small house, containing a couple of armchairs, a sofa and a table at which a teenage boy and a young woman PC in uniform were sitting looking at a laptop and laughing. The boy was small and thin and Middle Eastern in appearance. He was dressed in jeans and a grey hoodie that was too big for him, and looked like countless boys seen every day on the streets of London and other English cities. But he had none of their bravado. As he looked up from the screen when Pearson and Liz came into the room, his face grew tense and he looked frightened.
‘This is PC Norton,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘and young Thomma.’
‘Good morning, sir, ma’am,’ said the young woman, jumping to her feet. ‘We were just playing a game on the computer.’
‘Great,’ said Pearson warmly. ‘I expect you were better than Miss Norton at that,’ he said, addressing Thomma.
Thomma seemed too frightened to reply, but PC Norton said with a smile, ‘Yes, sir. He was beating me hands down.’
As the desk sergeant and PC Norton left the room, Liz said, ‘Come and sit down over here, Thomma,’ motioning to the sofa. She sat down next to the boy and Pearson took one of the armchairs opposite them.
Pearson said, ‘First, the most important thing is: did they give you some breakfast and, as it’s nearly lunchtime, are you hungry now?’
The boy smiled hesitantly and replied, ‘No, thank you, sir. I had bread rolls and jam for breakfast and I have just had a sandwich and a coke for lunch.’
‘That’s good,’ said Liz. ‘Now perhaps you could tell us why you ran away from the school.’
The boy thought for a moment. ‘I was scared.’
‘What frightened you?’
‘It was when I heard the other boys talking. About Miss Girling.’
‘What were they saying about Miss Girling?’
‘They said she was dead. She was going to take me to church with her. But she didn’t leave a note, so I thought she had forgotten.’ The boy bit his lip and frowned, then said, almost angrily, ‘I know she is dead, but the other boys said she killed herself. I don’t believe that. Something bad happened to her.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she wanted me to phone her if I didn’t hear from her. Why would she say that if she was going to kill herself?’ He explained how she had first found him when he’d been upset because the other boys laughed at him for being Christian; how she had comforted him, then offered to take him to the local church service.
‘Who would have harmed her, do you think?’ asked Liz.
‘Cicero,’ he said without hesitation. ‘He came looking for me when I left this morning. I think he would have harmed me, too.’
Pearson interjected, ‘You mustn’t worry about that. We’re not going to let anyone come anywhere near you.’
Thomma nodded. He no longer seemed the fragile boy of a few minutes before. Seeing his confidence rise, Liz asked, ‘Can you tell us a bit more about the school at Bartholomew Manor? What were you studying there?’
‘Computers, miss.’
‘Yes. But was it just computing in general?’
‘Oh no, we’ve all had the basic training before. This is specialised.’
‘Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you originally come from and how did you get here?’
‘And,’ added Pearson, ‘how do you come to speak such excellent English?’
So Thomma told a story which he had probably recounted many times before – how he had been born and brought up in Aleppo in Syria. His father had been an English professor at the university and had taught his children to speak English. They were Christians. When the fighting started, his father had decided they must leave but he couldn’t find a country that would take them. So the family, his parents and his two sisters and Thomma, travelled to the coast. His father paid people smugglers to ferry them to Italy. They paid a lot of money, said Thomma, to get a better boat than the unsafe inflatables. But when the boat came it was old and rickety and had no life rafts. When they were in sight of the Italian coast a storm blew up and the boat capsized. In the chaos that followed he lost sight of the rest of his family. He swam for as long as he could and was eventually washed up on the shore all alone.
He had managed to evade the government officials who would have put him in a refugee camp and joined a group who were walking across Europe. It took him about two months to reach Germany, where they were very kind and found him temporary foster parents. He had to take some tests to decide which school he should go to, and he got very high marks. So he was put in a school outside Hamburg that specialised in maths and computing. During his third year he had been chosen to join a group of boys going to England for specialised training.
‘What is the school in Hamburg called?’ asked Liz.
‘The Freitang.’
‘And the name of the head teacher?’
‘Frau Nimitz.’
Liz took a folder of photographs out of her briefcase and selected one. ‘Is this the Head?’
Thomma nodded. ‘Yes. That’s Frau Nimitz.’
‘Tell us about your journey here, Thomma,’ asked Richard Pearson. ‘Did you come by plane?’
‘Oh no. It was like when we came from Syria only this time the boat was better. I don’t know why we came that way. All the boys were asking why we had to travel at night and land on a beach in the dark.’
‘What did the people in charge say?’
‘They said it was cheaper and there was not much money for educating immigrant children. That did not make us feel good.’ He went on to describe the regime at the school, which sounded more like a prison camp than an educational establishment.
‘Tell us about the lessons. What were you being taught?’
‘We were not really taught, sir. Mr Sarnat – he’s the Head – believes you learn by doing. That’s what he likes to say.’
‘I see. Tell me what you were doing then.’
‘We were divided into groups, four of us in each one. I was assigned to Computer Defences.’
‘What did that mean exactly?’ asked Liz.
‘We were developing programs that companies could use to protect themselves against hackers.’
‘Did you try and use the software against attackers?’
‘There aren’t any attackers at present.’
‘Then how did you know the software would work?’
Thomma looked surprised. ‘We didn’t,’ he said innocently. ‘Instead, we tried to get into other sites. That way we could see where their weaknesses were, and find ways to make those sites stronger.’
It was a touchingly naïve assessment of what was going on. To Liz, it was perfectly clear that Thomma and his fellow students were being taught how to hack, not how to prevent it. She said, ‘Did you practise on real companies then?’
‘Not real ones,’ said Thomma. ‘That’s next week.’
‘Oh,’ said Liz casually. ‘What are they?’
‘We are going to test something called jaysee browncow.’
‘What is that?’ asked Liz, puzzled.
‘It’s a meat company and it runs refrigerated lorries. They have a computer program that tells the lorries where to go. If someone hacked the program they could send the lorries somewhere else and steal the meat.’
‘J.C. Brown and Co,’ murmured Pearson. ‘Big meat suppliers.’
Liz pressed on. ‘You said you were divided into groups. What were the other ones working on?’
‘Social media mainly.’
‘Like Facebook?’
‘Yes. One group, I know, was working on updating the profiles of social network users. On Facebook, and Snapchat and Instagram, and Twitter – and many others too.’
‘Really? Did they have permission from the users to do this?’ It sounded very odd.
A smile was struggling to break out on Thomma’s face. Finally he giggled.
‘What’s funny, Thomma?’
‘You asked if the users would mind. But you see, none of these users are real!’
‘Really? How do you know that?’
Thomma explained that when one of the other boys made a mistake with dates, their teacher Mr Gottingen said it didn’t matter; no one was going to complain because no one owned these profiles. Thomma also heard Mr Gottingen talk to Mr Sarnat about their work – he said the ‘Legends’ group was doing very well. Gradually, Thomma said, the other boys had realised they were working on the profiles of people who didn’t exist.
Liz was beginning to understand. Legends were the fake histories or cover stories assigned to Illegals – the spurious ‘facts’ of a CV that transformed a Russian agent into a thirty-four-year-old Norwegian businessman called Erik Nilson, educated in Oslo, married with two children, multilingual with a passion for painting. All the detail needed to bamboozle everyone from immigration authorities to his new neighbours in a Surrey suburb that he was who he said he was, and not the Russian Illegal he actually was. And Thomma’s fellow students were supplying the details for these phony personae.
‘That was one social media group,’ said Thomma. ‘There was another one too. They spent their time looking for real people on social media sites. I’m not sure why.’
‘Who were they looking for?’
‘They didn’t have actual names. They looked for interests and languages. American or English people who spoke Russian or Chinese. People who had travelled there. And people who had worked there.’
‘How did they find them?’
‘LinkedIn,’ said Thomma. ‘That was the best site for finding them.’
Of course it was, thought Liz. It provided a useful first step to finding which young employee in a Western embassy didn’t have a Facebook profile or belong to LinkedIn. That would be equally revealing –a telltale sign that they might be engaged in clandestine work.
From what Thomma had to say, it seemed clear that these teams at Bartholomew Manor were at work on much more than how to protect against hacking. Sixteen pupils working full time could get an awful lot done. But then why had they not been more effectively disguised? If even Miss Girling had had her doubts, surely other people would soon ask questions? It seemed very strange.
Liz looked at Thomma. The boy was clearly tired. It might be better to continue talking to him tomorrow. But there was one further question she wanted to ask.
‘Thomma,’ she said kindly, ‘you’ve told us a lot and been very helpful. We may want to speak to you again, but in the meantime, we’ll sort out somewhere for you to stay tonight. Don’t worry – it will be completely safe. There will be a policeman to protect you.’ The boy looked reassured. ‘But before we stop, just tell me something. Are all the other boys on the IT course from the same school in Hamburg?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the teachers – are they from Hamburg too?’
Thomma shook his head. ‘No.’ Then he hesitated. ‘Well, there is one. He’s a sort of assistant teacher. I knew him in Hamburg – he’s called Aziz. He’s a few years older than me. He went on a course in America and he stayed on there to teach. He must have been very good. I was quite friendly with him at school because he came from Syria too. I was surprised to see him here at Bartholomew Manor.’
‘Have you chatted to him at all? Did he tell you why he was here?’
‘No. He pretended not to know me, probably because I am a student and now he is a teaching assistant. And I was scared to approach him because he’s working for Mr Sarnat.’
Liz flicked through her folder of photographs again and picked one out. It had been sent over weeks ago by the FBI, when they had first investigated the death of the man in Burlington, Vermont. It was a young man, slightly older than Thomma but not unlike him in appearance.
Thomma nodded. ‘Yes. That’s him. Aziz.’
Liz realised the network was now fully connected. Moscow with Blankensee, Blankensee with Suffolk, Suffolk with Vermont and Vermont back to Moscow. They were the nodes of a circular network, but it seemed that only one node, Suffolk, was live.
Thomma looked drained now, and Liz turned to Pearson. ‘Shall we wrap it up for today?’
Pearson nodded. ‘We’re most grateful to you, young man. You did the right thing getting out of that school when you did. The ones running it are not good people. We’re going to look after you now and keep you safe, and after a few days we’ll be talking to you about what you would like to do next. I’ll send in Miss Norton to look after you now while we sort out a nice place for you to stay. I think it must be time for something else to eat. What would you like? There’s a Lebanese in town if you want something that reminds you of home.’
Thomma shook his head. ‘I’d like a burger,’ he announced with an enormous smile that said he was already becoming westernised. ‘With chips, please.’