Rules of Vengeance

28

Officially it was called the Telephone Information Unit of the London Metropolitan Police, but everyone on the force knew it as the Aquarium. The Aquarium was located on the third underground floor beneath a government building in Whitehall. The building, a dignified assembly of red brick and mortar, might have been designed and constructed in the seventeenth century by a pupil of Inigo Jones, but the Aquarium was strictly twenty-first century. Instead of brick there was stainless steel, and instead of mortar, fiber optic cable. Thousands of miles of it ran through the walls and under the floors and into the warren of cubicles and bullpens and soundproofed conference rooms that covered an area the size of a football pitch. It was the Telephone Information Unit’s job to eavesdrop on the telephone conversations and e-mail traffic of some five thousand people deemed “persons of interest” by Her Majesty’s government.

Kate Ford hurried along the elevated walkway that ran the length of the Aquarium. A pane of soundproof glass separated her from the work area. Every 20 meters there was an exit and stairs that descended from the catwalk to the floor. It was past eleven at night, but the floor bristled with activity. In the digital world, there was no day or night.

She stopped at the third doorway, passed her identification card through the reader, waited for the green pinlight, and applied her left thumb to the biometric scanner. Ironically, security increased once you’d been granted admission to the building. She descended the stairs. The warren was so complex that the walkways that crisscrossed the giant floor had all been given names. She passed pennants denoting Belgravia and Covent Garden, stopping at Pimlico.

Tony Shaffer slouched at his desk, keyboard on his lap as he tapped instructions into his computer. “Oh, hey there,” he said, coming to attention. “Just finishing a little something.”

“Hurry it up,” said Kate, finding an empty chair and rolling it to Shaffer’s cubicle.

Shaffer was young and unshaven, with a head of unruly black hair. “I’ve started working on the info you gave me,” he said.

“Any luck?”

“’Fraid not.”

Kate frowned. Upon leaving the Dorchester, she’d phoned Shaffer to request that he start tracking down the IP address and location of the woman who’d sent Russell the video message yesterday morning. “Name and address check out?”

“No problem there,” said Shaffer, with an air of apology that made her nervous. “Robert Russell was duly registered with British Telecom and Vodafone. I have the number of every phone and cable line running into his apartment at One Park. Theoretically, it’s just a question of tracing the traffic that came through Russell’s pipe.”

“Then why the long face?”

“Russell’s info is blocked. Can’t get to it.”

“How’s that? I was at Five this morning. They’ve had a clamp on Russell’s numbers for weeks. They’d even made a copy of the transmission.”

“Five’s the problem. They have a filter on the node running into that part of the city. Essentially, they’re capturing every bit of communications traffic in Mayfair, whether they have a warrant for it or not. Russell’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Did you request copies of the traffic to his flat?”

Shaffer nodded. “I did, but they refuse to share it. Fed me a line about national security taking precedence over a local investigation.”

“A homicide investigation, thank you.”

“I told ’em. Didn’t cut me any slack.”

Kate leaned forward, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The woman’s the key. She’s the human connection. It was her source that gave Russell ‘Victoria Bear.’ She’s the one who can tell us who’s behind the bombing.”

“You’ll need to file a request with the Security Service, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“I thought this was the age of improved cooperation.”

“That is improved cooperation. Believe me. Before, Five wouldn’t even take my call.” Shaffer scratched his head. “Don’t you have any other way of finding your Joe? You said it was a video message. Did you do an ambient sound analysis? Sometimes they can find the craziest things. Radios playing in another room, church bells ringing miles away, all kinds of stuff that can help you pinpoint the location of the sender. Then you can reverse-engineer the whole thing. Narrow it down to a few square miles, identify the local cable node, and see who in that area was sending messages to Russell.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Days, maybe a week-provided, that is, that they get to you. Queue’s about sixty days as it is.”

“Thanks for the tip, Tony.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help.”

“No worries.” Kate patted him on the shoulder and made her way to the stairs. Ambient sound analysis, she thought to herself. There had to be an easier way. She shook her head. Church bells, of all things.

Just then she remembered something about the video message, a detail she’d noted but had dismissed as more grasping at straws. She stopped in her tracks. It was probably nothing, but…

She ran up the remaining stairs and threw open the door before getting hold of herself. No running allowed, she reminded herself. Never let them see you bothered.

Setting her chin against the world, she strode down the walkway and out of the building. She needed to review a copy of the video transmission. She was going back to Thames House, Graves be damned!