Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (29 page)

The middle aged Jared
Stevens and Thom Passerell constituted a covert unit who were
essentially the eyes and ears of Whitehall in the Revolutionary
Republic. Both held down real jobs in Havana, and both were part
timers. Nonetheless, they were well trained and had been considered
to be highly skilled operatives at one time. But, completely
against regulations, and the QA policy drafted at Thames House in
2002 that demanded refresher training every two years, neither man
had been back to the UK for skills training for over five years. As
a result they had become lazy, and their skills were perhaps less
well honed than they might have been.

Stevens would take up
the surveillance later in the day, but for now he had to return to
his office at Cubapetrolio, sometimes known as Cupet, where he
needed to finalise a proposal for a new semi submersible oil
platform for presentation to the Cupet board the next
morning.

***

The elderly bus
disgorged the tourists at the Nacional and the concierge staff
swarmed over the luggage, hoping that the owners of the individual
suitcases would present them with a generous tip when they
delivered them to their rooms. Gil waited her turn in line and duly
checked in, after touching up her make up using a small compact.
She had spotted Thom Passarell as soon as she had walked into the
hotel lobby. She obviously did not know his name, but she knew his
type.

As Gillian stepped up
to check in, Passarell moved over to the counter a few feet away
and perused some leaflets offering boat trips and bus tours of the
locale.

“
Ah, Senora Davis, it
is so good to welcome you to Habana,” the small grinning
receptionist gushed as he looked at Gillian’s passport. “You are in
room 431 which is on the fourth floor. I am sure you will like the
room.” Then, after preening his thin, immaculately neat moustache,
he pointed to the bank of elevators.

“
The lifts are to
your left. Is there anything else I can you with?”

Gillian spoke loudly
enough for Thom Passerell to hear.

“
Yes. I’
m booked in for
a pampering session this afternoon, I believe?”

The man tapped a few
keys on his computer, while his eyes quickly scanned the
information on the screen. He smiled at her, and spoke.

“
Yes Senora, that is
at 4pm for two hours. I also note that you are booked on the city
tour tomorrow. That tour is due to leave at eight in the morning.
Do you wish an alarm call?”

“
Yes please. Tell me,
what time does the tour return in the evening?”

The receptionist
picked up an itinerary and read off the details.

“
After visiting
National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, you have a boat
tour followed by lunch. The afternoon is spent touring the region
by bus, culminating in a delicious dinner at the famous Club
Paradiso, where you will be watching and dancing salsa until 11pm,
when the bus leaves for your hotel.” He paused whilst he thought.
“You should be back at the hotel around midnight
tomorrow.”

“
Thank you,
” Gillian
replied gracefully. “I have a full week of events planned. I want
to make the most of my week in Havana.” The receptionist bowed and
Gillian walked across the lobby to be reacquainted with her
luggage, which was in the safe hands of a smartly uniformed young
man whose name badge read ‘Jesus’.

***

Across the Atlantic a
phone rang in Thames House. Maureen Lassiter answered it without
giving her name.

“
This is Moriarty.
Our
little bird has settled. This afternoon I will visit her room and
by this evening we will have audio in the bedroom and bathroom.
There will also be limited motion sensor video from the alarm
clock. I’ll send you the IP address of the server so that you can
watch and listen in real time on the website.”

“
Good. When do you
plan to extract her?” Maureen asked.

“
We will have a
subcontracted team waiting in her room when she returns tomorrow
night. They will lift her and she will be on the company transport
back to London by the early hours of the morning.”

“
That is acceptable.
Call me when she has boarded.” At that Maureen replaced the
receiver, then lifted it again to dial Barry Mitchinson.

***

Mrs.
Docherty went to a good deal of
trouble naming her baby boy. After much considered thought she and
her husband eventually alighted on a name that was stylish and cool
without sounding odd. She called him Vaughan. When her baby boy
started school, the much considered name was abandoned and he was
thereafter called ‘Doc’. Now approaching twenty nine years of age,
he was a geeky computer genius who eschewed people and the outside
world for the world of multi core chipsets, motherboards, flat
screen monitors and superfast graphic sets. Doc could build, or
disassemble, anything electronic.

Without formal
qualifications, he rebuilt computers that people had discarded and
sold them second hand. He had a ready market, because his
reconditioned gaming machines were faster than any production
model. Unfortunately, like many isolated young men running virtual
worlds from his bedroom, he descended into the murky world of
computer hacking. After successful efforts to shut down some of the
USA’s top law enforcement websites, he tried to close down the SOCA
website. Unfortunately for Doc and his friends, the UK’s Serious
Organised Crime Agency had an ex hacker geek of their own, ‘The
Repeller’.  Sitting in an almost empty office on a Sunday
night and playing war games, ‘The Repeller’ saw an unexpected spike
in data requests which were multiplying geometrically by the
minute, and quickly realised that his baby was under attack. ‘The
Repeller’ quickly took the website offline and repelled the attack
by sending back a barrage of data from an array of computers that
Doc and his friends simply could not match. The quickly escalating
data requests were now swamping their originator’s machines and
closing them down, whilst stripping their hard drives. Before Doc
managed to shut down his system, ‘The Repeller’ had a full copy of
his system registry, along with a list of his IP addresses and his
contacts list.

Less than an hour
later, whilst Doc was trying to revive his useless computers, the
front door came in and his mum screamed as men streamed in to her
neatly maintained bungalow. Doc was in trouble.

Since then Doc had
been on the side of the angels, or at least of the authorities, and
it was here that he found the resources that allowed him to show
his capability. Ten years later he had seven ‘apps’ on the top
hundred Apple iPhone Apps list, and it was widely believed that
Apple had incorporated one of his rejected ‘apps’ into the
architecture of the new iPhone 4.

Doc was the UK
Security Services go-to guy for anything Apple, be it iPad, iPod or
iPhone. Such was his expertise that within days of the release of a
new iPad, Doc would be selling his own souped up version at many
times the price. Disassembled, improved and reassembled, the iPad
VOX looked and behaved like an ordinary iPad, but it also did so
much more.

Gillian owned an
iP
ad Vox, iPod Vox and
iPhoneVox. They had been extraordinarily useful to her as the
Chameleon, and now they were going to be pressed into service to
help her escape the clutches of MI5.

Gil Davis had returned
to room 431 after her sojourn in the spa and by the pool, and was
now sitting on the bed with her iPad VOX. Laying it to one side for
a moment, she donned her headphones and walked around the room,
holding her iPod Vox and shaking her head in time with some unheard
music. She casually danced her way through the en-suite room,
tunelessly singing Abba’s Dancing Queen as she went. The iPod was
not playing music at all, although there were some three thousand
tunes on its hard drive. Rather, the iPod was listening and sending
out a series of beeps that would have been perceptible only to
dolphins or whales.

After a minute or two
Gil unplugged the headphones and laid the iPod on the bed close to
the iPad. They synchronised immediately, and the iPad screen came
to life, showing a series of white dashes, lighting and dimming as
they raced around the perimeter of an unseen circle. In a few
seconds a floor plan appeared, showing two bright green dots along
with a single red dot.

One green dot was in
the bathroom, in the vicinity of the wash hand basin. The other was
in the vicinity of a large oil painting on the wall. The red dot
was beside the bed. Gil clicked an icon labelled 3D View and a
skeletal 3D picture of her room appeared on the screen.

The new screen showed
the red dot, a video source, on the bedside table, probably hidden
in the clock. The first green dot, an audio only source, was right
behind the painting, and the second green dot was indeed on the
wall behind the pedestal wash hand basin.

Content that she now
knew that she was being spied upon, she decided that listening was
acceptable but watching, well, that was just plain rude. Gil
sniffed a couple of times and left the bed to pick up a cube shaped
box of tissues. Returning to her iPad and the bed, she sat down and
blew her nose loudly before placing the tissue box, without
looking, on the bedside table. The box had landed, as she planned,
right in front of the camera clock, obscuring its view entirely.
She tried not to smile as she imagined her watcher swearing and
blaspheming at his or her appalling bad luck.

A little while
later
Gil retired to the
bathroom for a few minutes, singing as she went, to offer a few
crumbs of comfort to the surveillance team who were no doubt
listening in. As soon as she had prepared herself for bed she
returned to the bedroom, lay down and fluffed the pillow. Twenty
minutes later, Jared Stevens was sitting at a monitor in a nearby
room, listening to gentle snoring and keeping his eye on the
picture from the hallway security camera that pointed straight at
the door of room 431.

Chapter
40

The Frank
Sinatra Suite, The Savoy, London.

Thursday,
2am.

Katie Norman was
wearing fluffy pink pyjamas with red hearts of all sizes displayed
in a random but repeating pattern. The pyjamas were still too big
for her petite frame
, even
though they were the smallest adult size. Her make-up was gone and
her hair was brushed out. Her young skin radiated good health and
her moisturiser gave her a slight glow. She looked about twelve
years old again as she reclined on the sofa, holding a Las Vegas
themed cushion across her stomach as she cradled a large mug of hot
chocolate.

Dee had
secured the room and was ready for bed also. She wasn’t generally a
night bird, preferring to get to sleep before eleven at night, as a
general rule, so that she could arise early. Dee dropped her weary
frame into an oversized armchair facing the young Katie. Wearing
short pyjamas under a Savoy branded robe, she curled her legs up
under her. The robe opened around her knees, revealing the
beginnings of a dark purple bruise where the cage fighter’s
forehead had connected with Dee’s leg.

Katie noticed
the bruise and mentioned it. Dee touched it tenderly. It was
already beginning to hurt, but she had rubbed in witch hazel to
reduce the discomfort and to speed up the healing process. Later
she would take some Boiron Arnica Montana capsules to minimise the
overnight swelling and bruising. In the close protection business
it was always wise to be aware of homeopathic remedies for minor
injuries, or you would spend your life consuming painkillers and
destroying your stomach lining.

“
Is that the
leg you were shot in?” Katie asked in as tactful a way as she could
manage late in the day.

Dee slid the
robe over to show a scar on her thigh.

“
This is
where I was shot last year,” she said, stretching the skin to show
the full effect of the injury, which had healed exceptionally
well.

“
The second
bullet wound is now virtually invisible, because the gun was
pointed upwards when it fired and it passed through my under arm.”
Dee unconsciously touched the spot with her left hand as Katie
spoke.

“
In the movie
I made with that ex-wrestler last year, I was a rich heiress being
guarded by an ex marine, and he was shot in the leg early on in the
film, but he managed to strap it up and struggle through the rest
of the day, and the next day he barely had a limp. I guess that was
artistic license.”

Dee smiled.
“Yes. Although the man that shot me in the leg deliberately tried
to avoid the bone and the arteries, it was still a week before I
could stand up without fainting and a month before I could limp
about. At least when you’re shot in the arm you can stay
mobile.”

Katie stood up
and set her mug down on the table before moving over to Dee’s chair
and squeezing in beside her. The young woman curled her left arm
around Dee’s waist and rested her head on the older woman’s
shoulder.

“
Thank you,”
Katie murmured in a tiny voice. “It’s not that I wouldn’t have
survived a kiss from that slimy toad, but it would have been
humiliating and I would have had nightmares about it for weeks. In
this business everyone thinks they own a part of you. The fans love
Clara and they think that she and I are their best friends. It’s
scary how possessive they can be sometimes.”