Dan pointed the SUV in the direction of one of the north-eastern suburbs of Laâyoune and weaved the vehicle through the side streets, avoiding main roads wherever he could. The inhabitants of the city were arriving at work, and he was fifteen minutes over his self-imposed deadline.
Within minutes, phones would start ringing in busy offices, questions would be asked, bribes would be taken, and he and Anna would become easy targets if they remained in the area for much longer.
He found a road leading directly north, the residential area becoming more and more sparse before the city finally spat them out of its clutches.
They’d been driving on dust and dirt for the past mile, and once the city had become a speck in his rear view mirrors, Dan finally relaxed his hands on the steering wheel and let the vehicle suspension take the strain of the uneven surface.
Anna picked up on his mood and sighed. ‘I didn’t think we’d ever get away,’ she said.
‘It’s still early,’ said Dan, ‘so with any luck it’ll take them a few hours to pick up our trail. I want to put as much distance between them and us while we still can. It’ll be too dangerous to drive overland at night, so we’ll keep going as long as possible and then try to find somewhere we can hide the vehicle.’
‘I can drive for a bit if you want.’
Dan nodded. Anna’s father had a large ranch in the Arizona desert, and from an early age Anna had learned how to handle the four-wheel drive vehicles the farmhands used to manage the property.
‘Be my guest. Two hours each?’
‘Sure.’
Dan shuffled in his seat, got his long legs comfortable in the foot well, and thanked David’s foresight in hiring a vehicle with an automatic transmission. Driving a manual over the uneven terrain would have been exhausting.
‘How did you end up working in Rotterdam?’ he asked. ‘Last time I saw you, you still had a year to go at university.’
Anna smiled. ‘Yeah, and by the end of it I decided if I was going to be an accountant, I wanted some excitement with it.’ She bounced her fist off the window. ‘I didn’t expect this, though,’ she added as she stared out at the bleak landscape passing them.
Dan could see that it’d take a long time for her to recover from what she’d been through the previous day, and he pressed on, hoping it would help her to talk about it. From personal experience, he knew it would do her no good to bottle up her feelings, and Anna was well aware of the demons he’d battled in the past.
‘So,’ he said. ‘How did you end up in Western Sahara? I mean, I know you got a call from the mine development company’s insurers, but surely you could’ve carried out your investigation from your office.’
‘Only up to a point.’ Anna brought her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, kicked her shoes off, and curled her toes. ‘Like I said when we spoke to David and Mel, the Internet access here in Western Sahara is atrocious. We’re only an hour ahead of them in The Netherlands, but the insurer was becoming more and more frustrated at the length of time it was taking to conduct the investigation – they needed fast results; their client was waiting to be reimbursed, and at the same time its head office in Houston was being investigated by the FBI to make sure nothing untoward happened at that end.’
‘Had it?’
‘No. They were clean. It was definitely a remote attack, but somehow linked to the new mine here.’
‘What happened next?’
‘My boss caved in – agreed with the client to send Benji and me down here to see if we could speed up the investigation by auditing the in-house systems.’ She sniffed. ‘Benji was a computer whizz-kid. They’d employed him even before he’d left university – he worked part-time for them until he graduated. If anyone could find out where that money went, it was him.’
‘What was your role?’
‘To collate the information in such a way that it could be audited and verified,’ she said. ‘It falls to me to decide whether the insurance client reimburses the mine development company, or whether we decide that they were negligible in their actions and therefore responsible for the missing money.’
‘How did it go missing?’
‘Some malware virus had been placed on the system – pretty easy to do with a link in an email to a website that then bounces back an error message.’
‘Yeah, seen that before.’
‘Right. So, once that malware had been installed, all the hackers had to do was intercept all the emails, review them, and wait until one of the suppliers’ accounts departments contacted the mine development company with its bank details for payment. The hackers then intercepted it, changed the bank details to their own, and waited for the money to arrive.’
‘Shit. That easy?’
‘Yeah. Most hackers do a test run first though, to see if it’ll work and if they’ll get away with it. This particular theft happened with the whole of the second milestone payment, so we went back and checked the first one.’
‘And?’
‘It was fifty dollars short when the money arrived in the supplier’s bank account.’
‘And no-one said anything?’
Anna shrugged. ‘Someone somewhere made a business decision. The mining industry’s been struggling for the past six years – suppliers are desperate for work. They’re not going to argue over a missing fifty dollars. It’ll simply get added to the bad debtors figure in the annual accounts.’
Dan blinked. ‘That’s incredible. Why isn’t every hacker in the world doing this?’
Anna smiled. ‘Who’s to say they’re not? Companies rarely report it to the media. Too embarrassing.’
‘So, you arrived here thinking you were simply going to identify the hackers – and then, what? Report them to Interpol or something?’
‘Exactly. We build a criminal case and then pass it onto the authorities, including the FBI and Interpol. The insurance company – our client – then has to hope that a prosecution occurs.’
‘When did you realise you were in trouble? What was it that tipped you off?’
‘We found out that other projects in the region were missing money – like I said, no-one was talking openly about it, but Benji and I made some discreet enquiries and found out that a couple of our competitors were in the country, doing exactly the same thing as us.’
‘And that led you to the conclusion that the funds had been stolen to fund a local uprising.’
Anna nodded. ‘Usually, when money is stolen like this, it’s sent as far away as possible from the scene of the original theft. All these thefts were different – the money was coming back, or being sent to individuals with interests in Western Sahara. The organisation I work for has some ex-military contacts, so I managed to make some phone calls two days ago to see if they had heard anything via their network of colleagues. I got a message yesterday morning that confirmed my suspicions – someone is actively contacting known mercenaries, particularly those from Russia and Eastern Europe, and offering large sums of money to discreetly make their way into Western Sahara.’
Dan cricked his neck before he pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and rubbed at his eyes.
‘Do you want me to drive for a while?’
Dan checked his mirrors. There were no vehicles following them.
‘Yeah, that’d be good.’
He slowed and brought the SUV to a gentle stop, and they switched sides.
Dan stretched before he climbed into the passenger seat.
After a few seconds of each of them adjusting their seats to account for their difference in height, Anna released the handbrake and set off.
‘You haven’t told me what you’ve been up to,’ she said, as she tilted the rear view mirror to better suit her line of sight. ‘Still trying to save the world?’
Dan glanced across and narrowed his eyes at the dimples that had appeared in Anna’s cheeks. ‘I’ll have you know I was doing very important work for the British government,’ he said in mock indignation.
She laughed, and Dan smiled.
‘You said “was,”’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ Dan pulled his sunglasses over his eyes. ‘The last job didn’t go too well.’
Anna’s eyes flickered across to him before she spoke.
‘Well, that’s not exactly encouraging news.’