I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Seven

The alarm crashed into her dreams like the cacophonous chorus of a Peking Opera. Sylvie Braque opened her eyes only to shut them again, immediately blinded. Early-morning sunlight poured through her bedroom window, splashing gold all across her tortured duvet, illuminating the layers of dust long settled on almost every surface.

She fumbled for her phone on the bedside table to silence the noise, then lay on her back breathing rapidly. In her dream someone was chasing her in the dark. Someone she couldn’t see. Someone so close she could feel their breath on her neck.

She squinted to her right and lifted the phone to check the time. It was just after 10 a.m. Little more than two hours since she had finally got to bed. But she had very little time. She forced herself to swing her legs over the side of the bed, and brushed the hair and the sleep from her eyes. As she rose to make her way into the hall she caught sight of herself in the mirror and shuddered. A favourite baggy cotton nightgown hung to below her knees. She had several of them. Passion-killers, her ex had called them. Most of the lacy lingerie he had insisted on buying her for birthdays and anniversaries still languishing in the bottom drawer of the dresser. She had never felt comfortable dressing up for sex.

Her hair was a tangle, and the make-up she had so carefully applied to her eyes the previous evening was smudged black around the shadows beneath them. Only a thin, broken line of lipstick remained, clinging stubbornly to her lower lip.

In the hall she passed the open door to the twins’ room. They still shared a bed, and Braque posted a mental note to make it up before she left to collect them. She had been ignoring it for six days now. Toys and drawing books, and crayons and dollies lay about the floor where the girls had left them, taking only their favourite soft toys to their father’s apartment. Sunlight fell in strips between the blinds, tracing distorted lines of yellow across the chaos.

She showered quickly, hoping to wash away the fatigue, stepping out to stand on a towel and briskly rubbing herself dry. Another glance in the mirror. Her face pale and unremarkable, the first signs of crow’s feet around her eyes. No time to do anything with her hair. She grabbed the drier and gave it a quick blow-dry then tied it, still damp, in a plain ponytail behind her head. One more glance. The face that looked back at her was severe and unflattering. No time for make-up.

In the bedroom she hauled on the worn brown leather boots that tucked beneath her jeans and dragged on a fresh pull, flicking her ponytail out from the neck at the back. The phone rang as she was slipping into her faithful old leather bomber. She swore softly and grabbed it from the bed. ‘Oui?’

‘Hope I didn’t wake you.’ The sarcasm was evident in his tone.

‘No, boss. I’m just on my way out to pick up the girls.’

‘Do it later.’

‘I can’t. My ex has had them all week. I have to get them this morning.’

‘I need you to go down to the Quai de l’Horloge. The guys at the police scientifique have recovered important evidence from bits of the bomb.’

Braque sighed. ‘It’s my day off.’

‘If you want days off, and holidays, and a thirty-five-hour week, then get yourself another job, Braque. You want to be a detective, or a mother? Make a choice.’ His impatience reverberated in her ear. ‘I need a report on my desk this afternoon. The Ministry want this publicly ruled out as terrorism asap.’ He didn’t wait for a response.

Braque closed her eyes. ‘Putain!’ she breathed into the phone, knowing he was gone. Much as she would have liked to say it to his face, she needed the job and the money. How else could she keep the children?

She speed-dialled her ex, listening to the long, single rings punctuating the rapid beat of her heart.

His voice came, laden with resignation. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m going to be late, Gilles.’

‘Well, there’s a surprise.’

‘The bomb that went off in the Place de la République last night... you must have heard about it?’

‘And?’

‘I was there.’

Which clearly took him by surprise. A pause. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes. The thing is, I’m on the investigation.’

‘I thought SDAT handled terrorism.’

‘It’s not terrorism. It’s murder. We think.’ She drew in a slow, controlled breath. ‘I’m going to have to pick up the kids tonight.’

His anger was muted, and she guessed that the girls must be within hearing. ‘And if that doesn’t suit me?’

Sylvie had no answer for him. She was entirely at his mercy.

He lowered his voice even further. ‘It’s always at your convenience, isn’t it? Everyone else organizing themselves around you, and your schedule. Do you have any idea how disappointed the girls are going to be?’ She heard the irritation in his breathing. ‘And what if I have to be somewhere else?’

‘Do you?’

Another pause. ‘Some day I will. Then what are you going to do?’

André Duran had been head of the forensics lab ever since Braque could remember. She had thought him old when she first met him nearly fifteen years ago, but he didn’t seem to have aged. Still bald, still grey. His dark, rabbit eyes flickered behind thick-lensed glasses, and he always wore heavy tweed suits beneath his lab coat, whatever the weather.

They had driven out together to the warehouse on the north side of the city where the remains of Irina Vetrov’s car, carefully collected beneath the unforgiving glare of arc lights all through the hours of darkness, were laid out on the concrete floor like an exploded jigsaw puzzle. Tables around brick walls were covered with white paper and littered with large and small fragments of the debris. Forensic scientists in white coats were examining and labelling every piece.

In the car, Duran told her they had lifted a fingerprint from the remains of the bomb casing. ‘Normally, heat will obliterate any fingerprints,’ he said. ‘At least, those that we can identify by conventional means.’ He grinned mischievously. ‘That’s what the bomb-makers believe, too. So they are careless. They don’t bother about leaving prints on their handiwork. What they don’t know — yet — is that we have new ways of retrieving them.’

Now, in the cold bright light of the warehouse, he gave her latex gloves and took her to the table where all the pieces of the bomb had been gathered. Braque was amazed that so much of it had remained intact, although none of the pieces of charred and mangled metal, lengths of wire and melted plastic strewn across the white paper would have identified themselves to her untrained eye as bits of a bomb.

‘It’s a professional job,’ Duran said. ‘It doesn’t take too much explosive to make a bit of a mess, especially when you have a tank full of petrol to accelerate it.’ He handed Braque a blackened piece of curved metal. ‘All packed into a steel holder with the upper half cut away to encourage the blast upwards. Simple but effective. Attached with magnets to the underside of the vehicle. Probably took less than thirty seconds to place it. Very often a tilt fuse, or mercury switch, is used. Mercury at one end of a glass or plastic tube, the other wired with the ends of an open circuit to an electrical firing system. The movement of a car as it accelerates would send the mercury down the tube to complete the circuit, and boom! But that’s a very inexact science if you are wanting to choose the exact moment of detonation. If a tilt fuse had been fitted to this one it would have gone off long before Vetrov reached the hotel.’

‘So it was detonated by remote control.’

‘Exactly. Whoever placed the bomb wanted to be sure that both of the intended victims were in the car when it went off.’

‘Which means he was in the square.’

‘Had to have been.’

‘And he used a phone.’

‘That was our original assessment. Confirmed now by the pieces of mobile phone that have been recovered from the site.’ He nodded towards a table further along the wall. ‘Actually, the remains of the sim card itself. Untraceable, I’m afraid.’

‘And the fingerprint?’

Duran lifted a shard of metal which had been polished clean. The tattoo of a very fine fingerprint clearly visible on it. ‘This is just one piece. One print. I’m sure we are going to recover many more.’

‘How?’ Braque was curious.

Duran peeled off a glove and took the tip of one of his fingers between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. ‘The sweat on our fingertips,’ he said, ‘comprises a mix of water, sodium chloride and various other oily substances. It has an almost imperceptible corrosive effect on metal. While the heat of a bomb blast would normally destroy surface fingerprints, it actually increases the corrosive effect of the sweat residue, effectively engraving the print invisibly into the metal.’ He chuckled. ‘All these years we believed that bullets and bomb fragments were fingerprint-free, when they were there, right under our noses, the whole time.’

‘So how do you know when there’s a fingerprint there?’

Duran shrugged. ‘It’s a very simple process, Lieutenant, and amazing it took us so long to discover it. You apply a powerful electrostatic charge to the piece you are examining, and dust it with a fine carbon powder. The carbon particles cling to the areas of metal corroded by the sweat of a finger, et voilà, you have a perfectly readable print.’

Braque picked up and examined the print on the piece of metal. ‘And do we know whose it is?’

Duran pulled a face. ‘Afraid not.’ He paused. ‘But it’s not unknown to us. We, and others in Europe and the Middle East, have pulled this one’s prints off multiple explosive devices over the last couple of years. What do we know about him? Nothing. Except that he’s a pro. Effectively a gun for hire. Terrorists, criminals, anyone who wants a professional, reliable bomb-maker would go to him, or someone like him.’

Braque laid the metal shard back on the table and blinked the grit from stinging eyes. Her interest was piqued, despite her fatigue.

Duran was watching her carefully. ‘Been up all night?’

She nodded.

‘Me too.’

She looked at him very directly. ‘So if you wanted to hire this guy to build a bomb for you, how would you contact him?’

Duran shrugged. ‘On the Dark Web, I suppose. But I’m no expert on that.’ He paused. Then, ‘One other thing.’ He led her across to another table and lifted a blackened object that was still clearly identifiable as a handgun. ‘We also recovered this from the vehicle. An illegal weapon, serial number erased. But it is a Makarov 9×18 millimetre pistol, widely used by Russian police, military and security forces.’ He turned it over to reveal areas which had been cleaned off and tested for prints. ‘We have no idea who owned it, but it has Georgy Vetrov’s fingerprints all over it.’

Marc Bouquand’s workspace simmered in permanent darkness, illuminated only by the screens lined up along his desk. He ushered Braque in from a brightly lit corridor and it took some seconds for her eyes to adapt to the change. The wall above the desk was lined with shelves groaning with electronic equipment that winked green and red lights in the dark, and spewed cables in snaking sheaths the thickness of her forearm to junction boxes fixed to the wall below his worktop.

Bouquand was on attachment to the Police Judiciaire from ANSSI, the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information, the French network and information security agency. He wore jeans torn at the knees, a T-shirt with the logo A little radiation brightens my day, and looked about twelve years old. But he was, Braque noticed, older than he seemed, the beginnings of grey creeping in at the temples around his shock of self-consciously permed and probably dyed auburn air.

‘The Dark Web is not really dark at all, Lieutenant,’ he was saying. ‘It’s not even that secret.’ He pulled out a seat on castors for her, and slumped into his own state-of-the-art computer chair, swivelling to face her, and swinging one leg up over the other as he leaned back. ‘It’s just a collection of websites that are publicly visible, but hide the IP addresses of the servers that run them.’

‘Which means what?’ Braque was only barely competent when it came to actually using computers, and so this kind of thing was well beyond her.

‘That anyone can visit a Dark Web site, but would find it impossible to figure out where it was hosted, or by whom.’

He swivelled towards his desk to pull a keyboard towards him, and his fingers rattled quickly across the keys. A screenshot of a website called Silk Road filled one of his screens.

‘This, for example, is a dead site. It used to be one of the biggest Darknet markets for trading in illegal drugs, until the guy who founded it, Ross William Ulbricht, also known as Dread Pirate Roberts, got himself arrested and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It had a kind of weird morality, though, banning stuff like child pornography, assassinations, weapons, that sort of thing. So other sites, like Black Market Reloaded, sprang up to fill the gap.’ His fingers did more spidering across the keys to bring up a black page titled Killer Network in red, above a photograph of a man’s face with a gun held against his cheek. Services offered included killing a target in the USA or Canada for 10,000USD, or one in Europe for 12,000USD. The young man grinned. ‘Of course, who knows if it is genuine or not?’

Braque was shocked. ‘How can you just access sites like these?’

Bouquand shrugged as if it were a stupid question. ‘You could, too, Lieutenant. With the right browser. Most Dark Web sites use the anonymity software Tor. You can download it from your computer at home. Anyone can. Then you have free access to virtually any site on the Dark Web. Tor encrypts web traffic in layers and bounces it through randomly picked computers around the world. Each of those removes a single layer of encryption before passing the data on to its next jumping-off point on the network. In theory that stops anyone being able to match the origin of the traffic with its destination, even the people who control the computers in the encrypted chain. So you can conduct any kind of business you like in complete anonymity.’

Braque dragged her eyes away from the screen to focus on Bouquand. ‘You said in theory.’

He laughed. ‘Well, of course, theory and practice are two different things. The FBI have cracked quite a few of those Tor hidden services, which is why Monsieur Ulbricht is now languishing in jail. And much of what we’ve been doing recently at ANSSI is hacking into sites being used by terrorists to buy and sell weapons and trade information. But it’s not that easy.’

‘And suppose I wanted to hire a hitman, or someone to build me a bomb, how easy would that be?’

‘Well, there are people out there advertising their services. You could make contact easily enough, but they would be almost impossible to track down if you wanted to find them. In person, that is.’

‘And how would I pay?’

Bouquand turned back to his computer and pulled up a website called BitBear. ‘You’d go to a site like this and buy Bitcoins.’

Braque had heard of bitcoins, but had no idea what they were.

‘It’s a kind of virtual currency,’ Bouquand explained. ‘Again, anyone can buy them, and you can pay for services, from anyone who accepts them, in absolute secure anonymity. You really don’t need to be a computer guru to buy and sell services anonymously on the Dark Web.’

Braque thought about it for a moment, then asked, ‘What about the email we sent you?’

‘What about it?’

‘Are you able to say who sent it?’

Bouquand shook his head. ‘No. The address is a simple generic g-mail address. It could belong to anyone. The question to ask is where it was sent from.’

‘Well, where was it sent from?’

He turned back to his keyboard, and brought up a document filled with tiny text, on yet another screen. Most of it seemed to Braque entirely incomprehensible. ‘This is the raw source code of that email,’ he said. ‘But the IP address listed is not the address the email came from. The real address has been disguised, concealed by the sender. The email itself will have been rerouted many times over. A little like a Dark Web site. Bouncing around from server to server.’

Braque was disappointed. ‘Untraceable then?’

Bouquand pulled a coy little smile. ‘Well, not necessarily. No guarantees, but given a bit of time I might just be able to pin down a real location for you.’