The Locker (22 page)

forty-four

“I'm sorry, Ruth. We're
taking you off the Hardman case.”

Richard Aston sounded
matter-of
-fact in his apology, but his hands clenched in front of him showed a visible sign of tension. Martyn Claas, sitting alongside him, looked completely calm, even pleased.

The three of them were alone in the Hardman briefing room, with Ruth facing the two senior Cruxys men. The building was still quiet save for the usual skeleton staff manning the operations desks, and only the vague hum of traffic outside signalled the activity of a normal day. She had been summoned up here the moment she had arrived, but hadn't expected this.

She felt a genuine sense of shock on hearing the words, and wondered what had happened. “Why? What's changed?”

“Lack of progress,” Claas muttered, “if you really need an explanation.” He waved away Aston's attempt to cut him off and continued forcefully, “You haven't even scratched the surface of this business, and that's not good enough. You may not be aware, Ms. Gonzales, but every day spent on these cases is a dent in our bottom line. We need a swift conclusion, not a lengthy investigation that goes nowhere. There is not an unlimited budget at your disposal to take a leisurely view of a missing person or their private circumstances. Nor do we have the resources of the authorities. For that reason I am closing this down.”

“It's been just three days and there's
fuck-all
leisure about it,” she protested fiercely, and wanted to slap the smug smile off Claas's face. “What are you going to do—leave Nancy Hardman hanging while her daughter's being held captive God knows where?”

“I'm sure the police will be happy to take over. They are accustomed to dealing with cranks. What is your problem?”

“It's immoral!” She stopped. “What do you mean, the police? You can't.”

“We have to take a pragmatic view. For all we know the girl had been taken by her father—a domestic dispute. It happens all the time. We must hand this matter over to the proper agency to deal with it. It will ensure the best outcome all round.”

“That's precisely what the kidnap note said
not
to do. You have no idea what will happen when the cops show up.” She looked at Aston for support, but he shook his head, his lips set in anger. She guessed he had been outvoted and the signal was telling her not to push back. But she was beyond caring. “Have you any idea of the dimensions of this case? Have you even considered what's behind this kidnap?”

“The whys and wherefores are not my concern,” Claas replied and made to stand up with a glance at Aston. “I think this discussion has gone far enough. I do not intend trading words with an employee in this way.”

“Wait!” Ruth stood up too and walked round to the storyboard. It carried nothing of what she had discussed with Vaslik last night, nor of her suspicions about who might be behind Beth's kidnap. But now maybe it should do, because if this Dutchman had his way, this was the last throw of the coin she had left. Good or bad, it had to count.

She stabbed the board with her finger, standing in a way that blocked Claas's progress to the door. “See this? It's all bullshit. It's detail, but none of it counts because there's something going on here that's a million miles away from Nancy and Beth Hardman. That kid's been taken for reasons we can't even begin to know about—and there are people not far from here who know why.”

“People?” Claas looked at her with an expression of pity. “What on earth—I don't have to listen to this hysteria. Please get out of my way.” He made to push past her but Ruth wasn't moving. She was too angry.

“I haven't finished yet. You really want to treat this like a domestic? See this?” She pointed at the copy of the kidnap note, which had been enlarged for emphasis. “The language: American. It's also intelligently constructed, so not the work of some crank. This woman?” A stab at the photo of Clarisse taken from the CCTV footage at the gym. “She sounded American but we believe she's Israeli and possibly a former member of the Israel Defense Forces. Tiggi Sgornik?” Another stab at the board, where Tiggi was smiling out at the room like a catwalk model. “Also
probably
Israeli, born of Polish immigrants, because the one thing she isn't is a
first-generation
Pole.” Claas made to interrupt, going redder in the face, but she waded on, determined not to allow him to close her down without a fight. “The listening devices in the house? Installed by experts so that we were meant to find some, but not all. The visual surveillance on the house? Also expert. An approach by a team that included Clarisse was clearly a
run-up
to a kidnap attempt on Nancy Hardman, possibly because they saw lifting Beth wasn't producing the result they wanted quickly enough.”

She saw George Paperas' name had been added to the board and grabbed a red marker pen, slashing through the name with a vicious cross. “George was a UN aid expert who was helping me with background information that might have found Michael Hardman. He was followed from a meeting with me by two men, one identified as a CIA agent.”

“I don't see the relevance—”

“You should. Two days later he was dead, murdered by a
hit-and
-run driver that a witness claimed appeared to be waiting for him.” She paused for breath, aware that somebody else had entered the room. But she wasn't willing to stop now. “And this morning, there's continued close surveillance on the Hardman house, only they're not even bothering to hide anymore.” She tossed the pen onto the table, where it clattered across the surface and pinged loudly off a water carafe before landing on the floor.

Claas looked ready to burst. “What is your point?”

“My point is, this kidnap was conceived and carried out to get the attention of a man we know absolutely nothing about; a man with a secret bank account, who keeps disappearing into countries where he can't be contacted; who manages to support his family with no visible income. I don't know about your home life, Mr. Claas, but that's not a domestic where I come from. And if you leave Nancy Hardman and her daughter hanging like this, word will get out and our reputation will be in ruins within
twenty-four
hours.”

She walked out of the room, brushing past a vaguely familiar figure with
short-cropped
grey hair and steel spectacles. Another new board member, she recalled, although she couldn't remember his name. She carried on down to the basement where she found James Ellworthy crouched over a monitor, humming to himself over a screen full of data. She dropped the smart card from Nancy's photo frame on the desk in front of him. She wasn't sure why she was bothering, but it was better than inactivity or kicking the furniture. And another confrontation with Claas would not end well for either of them.

“Hi,” he said, pushing his spectacles back on the bridge of his nose.

“Can you run this through whatever machinery you have and see if you can rescue a file? It shows up blank. It might be something that got caught up and loaded in error, but I'd like to check it out.”

He smiled and nodded as if thrown a challenge. “Sure thing, uh …”

“Ruth. Ruth Gonzales. Thank you.”

“Sure. Are you OK? You look pissed—and I don't mean drunk.”

“Actually, I wish I was drunk. I'd feel a hell of a lot calmer than I do right now.” She pointed at the smart card. “As quick as you can, please?” She handed him a card with her phone number.

He nodded. “I'll call you.”

She turned and went back up to the ground floor. She had to get out of this place. The atmosphere was suddenly cloying and she wanted to throw something—especially at Claas the Arse.

Aston was waiting for her. He looked faintly amused and said, “Got that out of your system?”

She said nothing at first, not trusting herself to be discreet enough to remain professional. Finally she asked, “Am I fired?”

“No. I confess he tried, but there are areas where I still hold some authority. Bob Zitterman backed me up, but I wouldn't count on that lasting long. They're much too close and Claas has powerful connections. He's also a
big-money
man in the investment community. But your comment about the damage to our reputation was right on the button; it won't be just Cruxys affected—any
fall-out
will include Greenville as well, and they wouldn't like that.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Until the police step in you're still working this case.”

“Thank you. Zitterman's the new American board member?”

“Yes. He arrived yesterday from Washington. He has friends, as they say, along the Beltway and he's taken an active interest in the Hardman case—I suspect prompted by Claas.” His expression remained blank. “I'm not sure why, but they form a formidable front if they want this to go away. Never underestimate the powers of accountants, Ruth.”

“If that's all it is.”

“I don't follow.”

“Well, it's obvious Claas wants this assignment stopped in its tracks. But why? I don't buy his argument about bottom lines; I may be a simple employee but I know we have enough paying clients on the books who never make a claim to make this division profitable.”

He looked worried. “I know. There's been a sudden change of atmosphere in our connections with Greenville, that's all I can tell you. Almost as if somebody threw a switch. I don't know where it stems from, but I'm trying to find out.”

Greenville was the American half of the
Dutch-US
parent company that now owned Cruxys, Ruth remembered. “You mean they'd be happy to see us lose our reputation and go to the wall?” The security and crisis management sector had already been hit by several scandals; walking away from a kidnapping and being seen to be lambasted by the police and press would surely finish Cruxys overnight. What would make Claas and Greenville take that lying down?

“I wouldn't overestimate our financial value to them,” he cautioned her sombrely. “We're probably little more than loose change on their balance sheet. But in PR terms, even a hint of bad news in the current climate means they'd let us go like a snake shedding skin.”

“Thanks for the warning. So what do I do now?”

“I spoke with Sir Philip Coleclough about Hardman after you left yesterday. He made a few phone calls, called in some favours. He got back to me with an answer just before you arrived this morning.”

Ruth waited.

“Michael Hardman is not, and never has been in the employ of Her Majesty's armed forces, the Security Service or Secret Intelligence Service. Sir Philip ran the name and photo you supplied through all the agencies. They've never heard of him. In fact they came up blank.”

Blank. It was an odd word. At the level of checking to which Coleclough was rumoured to have access, there would surely have been
something
—even a parking fine. “Blank as in—?”

“There's nothing. He's a ghost.”

“How can he be? He has a bank account in Kensington.”

“It shouldn't be possible, I agree. But that's not all: the passport office has no record of him, either.”

“
What
?”

“All I can say is that Michael Hardman has now become a person of some interest.”

“And the dead European in Herat?”

“An import—a Chechen fighter in his
mid-twenties
. He has a tattoo on his back linking him with a
hard-line
Islamist group with its roots in Grozny. There's been a steady flow of young men from the area into Afghanistan and now Syria, and he appears to be one of the latest casualties.”

“But he had a phone on him with Nancy Hardman's number.”

Aston gave a cool smile. “There were reports of a fourth man, although he's rather conveniently vanished. Think about it: what would you do if you wanted to disappear, believed dead? You have an item identifying you … and a dead body with no face.” He shrugged. “Classic misdirection.”

forty-five

Ruth was halfway back
to the Hardman house when James Ellworthy called.

“The smart card you left me?” he said. “There's definitely a file on there, but the data's corrupted. Could be it got hit by a virus in the original system, but I don't have enough to work with.”

“You didn't get anything at all?”

“I didn't say that.” He chuckled. “I managed to lift off maybe five lines of text, but it didn't make a lot of sense. I need some kind of context. It looks to me like it could be a list, but it's mostly numbers and like, file references. If you could get the original source data, I'd have more of a chance of building a pattern.”

Ruth thanked him for his efforts and disconnected. It was probably nothing—a wild goose chase and a waste of time. But it left her feeling dissatisfied. For reasons she couldn't explain, it was simply another oddity about this whole business. Why would a document file find its way onto a smart card for photos? Whoever had transposed the photos onto the card must have lifted it along with the JPEG files; yet wouldn't they have noticed the difference in icons? Then she recalled that the Hardmans didn't have a computer. That
pre-supposed
that they weren't too
computer-savvy
. And if Nancy had done it at work, where she did accounts, it might explain the list aspect of the data that Ellworthy had come up with.

She pulled up in front of the Hardman house and walked up to the front door. The 4WD from earlier was gone. It was pointless being discreet now; she wasn't supposed to be here, but if Claas got his way, the place would soon be swamped by police. Better to get in and out again before they turned up. They would undoubtedly want to interview her along with Gina and Vaslik, but she wanted to warn Nancy about what was going to happen first.

Vaslik opened the front door. He looked worried and she wondered if he'd heard the news.

“We need to talk,” she said. It felt better to take control of this; no way was she going to play the loser who'd been dumped.

He nodded and jerked a thumb towards the ceiling to indicate that Nancy was upstairs, then turned and led the way to the kitchen, Gina was watching the monitors with the radio playing music.

“I'm officially off the case,” Ruth said shortly. It was no good delaying the news, and they'd soon find out if they hadn't already heard.

“Shit,” Gina swore. “Why?”

Ruth recounted what had been said in the briefing room, including what Aston had told her afterwards about the dead Chechen, and Ellworthy's call about the corrupted file on the smart card. If she was off the case and the cops came in and took over, then it was only right these two should know everything, even if it was a blind lead.

Vaslik said nothing all the time she was talking, and he hadn't lost the worried look.

“I'm surprised you're here,” he said finally. “In your shoes I'd be taking time out, working my way down a bottle or two.”

“I will. But first I need answers to a couple of questions. Whatever Claas might think, there's a little girl still out there.”

“What questions?”

“If Hardman was one of the men in the gun battle, what was he doing with a bunch of Islamist fighters? Or did the four men happen on him earlier and steal his phone and charity documents?”

“If they did,” Vaslik commented, “he's dead and buried in a deep gulley or ravine somewhere.”

“Agreed. But what if Aston's right? What if Hardman was the fourth man and left his phone on the body to blur the trail?”

“What would that accomplish?” Gina queried.

“That's the big question. If Aston hadn't told me what Coleclough had found, I'd have said Michael Hardman was Special Forces, and he's been working undercover all these years. But they've never heard of him and neither have the passport authorities.”

“Oh, boy,” Gina murmured, reaching the obvious conclusions. “So what is he?”

Ruth looked deliberately at Vaslik. “Search me. But if he's not one of ours … maybe he's one of yours. How about it?”

Vaslik pursed his lips. “I can run it by a guy I know … but I don't expect any answers. If he's with one of the really elite black ops units, there's no way his name will come to light; they bury those guys so deep not even their old colleagues can find them.”

Vaslik stood in a patch of shadow under the front porch overhang, staring along the road and checking everything while barely moving a muscle. After Ruth's news, he needed some fresh air. She was being treated like dirt and he didn't like it. But short of putting himself back on a plane to the US in protest, there was nothing he could do about it other than continue until the police stepped in and took over. At that point his assignment would be over, too.

The road looked pretty normal; a few cars, a couple of pedestrians, an old lady wrapped in a raincoat pottering in her front garden. No more signs of cars with steamy windows or houses with the blinds pulled 24/7, but then, he hadn't expected them to hang around.

It was probably a waste of time worrying about it. If the watchers were still in the area, they'd have already chosen another location and settled in, their neighbours
none-the
-wiser. In fact, if they had the means they could have paid off a neighbour to get lost for a few days, leaving their house as an OP with no fears of anybody stumbling on them. It was a tactic used by Homeland Security agents when a suspect turned up in some quiet neighbourhood and had to be checked out through careful surveillance.
Su casa es mi casa
, Jimmy Marriot, a fellow DHS agent used to say when persuading a householder to go on a few days' vacation so he could take over the place as a base. Your house is my house. Most were only too pleased to comply, especially knowing they could talk about it in the neighborhood afterwards and gain kudos for helping out in the fight against terrorism.

His survey flowed across Nancy's car parked on the driveway where she had left it after rushing in from the gym. It probably needed a run sometime soon to keep things ticking over. Cars were like dogs; they needed exercise and a chance to blow off some dust. This one was a Nissan and looked about ten years old, with a couple of rust spots over the fenders and a small
star-shaped
crack in one corner of the windshield. Plenty of life left in it yet, though. Not that he knew much about cars; live in New York and you got used to public transport.

A flicker of light caught his eye on the driver's side, just inside the glass. He stepped across and peered at it. Shiny, like gold, and rectangular. He leaned closer and knew instantly what it was: it was a smart card, like they use in digital cameras, and stuck on the windshield side of the sun visor.

He remembered what Ruth had told them a few minutes ago about the corrupted file from the photo frame, and wondered. Could there be two of them? He turned and went back inside, and came out moments later with the car keys.

He opened the car and slid behind the wheel, then pulled the flap out and up against the car roof. The smart card blinked back at him, the gold colour slightly dulled in the reduced light. He took out his visa card and fed it behind the card until the adhesive used to hold it in place gave way.

The card looked innocuous in the palm of his hand; a tiny piece of chip technology most people never saw, never realised was even there. They clicked away with their cameras and only downloaded what they needed direct to their PC or Mac without realising that given the correct piece of kit, you could store stuff other than photos on the memory card inside.

He sat watching the street for a few moments, his chest thumping as he thought about what he might be holding. If what Ruth had suggested was right, this might hold the key to the corrupted file she'd handed Ellworthy.

But what if it held more than that? What if it gave a clue to the whereabouts of Michael Hardman? Of Beth?

He took out his cell phone and stared at the smart card. It might be nothing, of course, in which case he was barking at the moon. This should go to the techs in Langley; they would have the machinery and software to open the card up like soft butter and prise out its secrets. Corrupted file or not, it was what they were good at. If they said it was a dud, then so bit it. But he had to find out and duty was leaning on him to go the correct route.

He touched the button that would connect him with Drybeck in Washington. Hand him this and the
rear-admiral
would forget all about his rebellious refusal earlier. It wasn't that Vaslik wanted his old job back, but he could do without the kind of trouble a heavy hitter like Drybeck could bring down on him. Common sense said it was better to play safe and stay on the side of the angels.

But.

There was always a but. What if he said go fuck the angels? They'd had their turn, and he had a more powerful instinct driving him.

He pocketed the cell phone and walked back inside.

He handed the card to Ruth and told her where he'd found it. “Hidden in plain sight. It could be a copy of the other one, could be nothing. Weird place to stick it, though, if it means nothing. Kind of place someone with a secret to hide would leave it.”

Ruth took it and smiled gratefully. “Thanks, Andy. I'll get Ellworthy to open it.”

Vaslik lifted an eyebrow. “Andy? Just as I was getting used to Slik, too.”

Ruth's phone rang, cutting off her reply. It was Ellworthy. He sounded breathless, as if he was on the move.

“I just got a call from our Siege 2 operator. I'm on my way to your location right now.”

“Why—what's up?”

“Are any of you guys using your cell phones?”

Ruth looked at Gina and Vaslik, both with hands in plain sight. “No. Why?”

“We got
low-level
signals less than two minutes ago from inside the house. Somebody there is sending and receiving text messages.”

“When?”

“Right now.”