Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (36 page)

The guard on
the front desk was smiling and convivial, he was a large African
American who would not be out of place as a linebacker. He led them
to the conference room where the only other member of staff on duty
was setting up the room for their meeting.

“
Hi. My
name’s Olly. I’ll be taking care of you today. I’m an investigative
assistant and I handle the IT based analysis in the Quantico
office.”

Dee introduced
herself and Pete. A few years had passed since they had been in
this office and Olly had not been around then. In fact, he looked
as though he may have been in High School at the time.

***

Dee and Pete
had helped themselves to the coffee, and selected one of the Krispy
Kreme doughnuts which were sitting invitingly on plates, having
been laid on specifically for the meeting. They were just finishing
up and attempting to dust off the sugar powder that coated the
table and their dark clothing when their guest arrived. Olly showed
him in, and left when it was apparent that no introductions were
necessary.

Steve Post
shook Pete’s hand and reminisced about the last time they had met.
Dee noticed the FBI Academy ring on his right hand. Steve turned to
Dee. She offered her hand and he walked past it to enclose her in a
hug. She returned the hug, all feelings of discomfort
forgotten.

“
Christine
sends her regards, but we should both be at church this morning and
so she’s covering for me.”

“
Sorry to
mess up your weekend, Steve, but this was the only time we had,”
Dee apologised.

“
Not at all,”
Steve smiled, “I would give up more than my weekend to meet up with
my Brit friends.”

Steve sat down
and refused coffee, settling instead for sparkling water. Dee
remembered seeing the Mormon Temple the night before and it stirred
a long forgotten memory.

“
I forgot,
Steve. You joined the Mormon Church about five years ago. You don’t
drink tea or coffee, do you?”

“
Not any
more. Christine and I joined at the same time. I can tell you that
giving up smoking, drinking and alcohol were tough, but giving up
coffee was almost impossible. We nearly gave up. But now I only
yearn for it when I catch the odour of freshly filtered coffee
drifting through the office.”

“
So much for
the hard bitten, hard drinking G Man image,” Geordie joked. “Your
lot are even invading my area. Your church is building a strong
presence in Newcastle. There must be half a dozen Latter Day Saint
chapels there now, all on main roads.”

After a little
more banter and Dee’s short monologue about married life with Josh,
they moved onto the business of the day.

***

Steve Post had
been busy since Dee had called him and asked for his help in
researching Gillian Davis, and he had compiled a short report which
he handed to her. Dee sat close to Pete and they followed the
printed word as Steve explained exactly what he had been able to
discover.

“
Denton Miles
III is a tobacco farming heir. The family goes back almost two
hundred years in the same area. The old farm is now mostly
highways, developments and smaller farms. Tobacco growing there
died out in the thirties when the depression took hold, and the
first Denton Miles decided the family should produce food and
provide jobs, in preference to simply making money. It was an
enlightened attitude that was appreciated by three US
administrations who subsequently gave the Miles family regular
access to the White House.

Gillian Davis,
otherwise known as Gillian Miles on her citizenship papers, is the
admitted illegitimate offspring of Denton Miles III. It seems your
rumour mill was right on the nail, Pete.

Denton Miles
himself returned to the US, and two years later married the
socialite and banking heiress Elizabeth Chase-Markham. They have no
children. It may be that she is not capable of bearing children.
Either that or the decision was to give kids a miss and concentrate
on their careers.

For almost
eleven years Denton ran the family business whilst hid dad ran
unsuccessfully for the Senate. He almost made it, too. He was only
a few votes away from success, and the backlash from the Clinton
years seemed likely to propel him to victory, when he suddenly took
ill and died.

The business
is now a listed corporation and Denton’s interest in it is managed
under a blind trust, freeing him to be involved in politics
himself. As you already know, he is now Senator Denton Miles III.
What you maybe do not know is that he is a potential Republican
Presidential nominee; the only one the party thinks can compete
with Sarah Paling and my fellow Mormon, Mitt Romney.

Your girl has
some powerful allies in the US. You’ll have to tread carefully.
Unless the evidence against her is rock solid you won’t be getting
an extradition warrant. You may not get one even if it’s a slam
dunk. We don’t send American citizens away to face justice very
easily.”

“
Surely, if
Denton Miles is contemplating running for President he’ll try to
distance himself from any scandal,” Dee postulated.

“
True, but
sticking by the errant daughter you didn’t know you had, a few
tears and a promise to get her straightened out stateside, may play
well with the Republican vote and Virginia hasn’t had a President
for a long time. You might recall a couple from the past; George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson”

Dee and Pete
both frowned. They found Pete’s analysis hard to accept, but they
knew he was in a better position to opine on the matter than
most.

***

The meeting
ran on for almost three hours, a mixture of business and personal
reminiscences taking the time. Eventually Steve asked, “Do you
still want that special equipment you asked for? I have it in the
car.”

Dee nodded,
and Pete said that he felt he had a duty to make Gillian Davis pay
for what she had done to the Hokobus, regardless of her contacts in
the States. Steve shrugged.

“
OK. As I
said before, you’re borrowing twenty thousand dollars worth of kit,
the optics alone account for almost five thousand dollars, but you
can pick out a fruit fly on a tree branch half a mile away,
depending on the weather conditions.

So, please
remember, you break it, you pay for it. If it doesn’t get returned
to the field office there will be an investigation and I’ll be in
trouble.”

Dee and Pete
promised that they would be careful and that Steve would not be
implicated in anything they did with the equipment. After sharing a
joke with his two British friends, Steve Post rose and said
goodbye, agreeing to meet to debrief them on Friday, but they were
destined to meet again a little sooner than that.

Chapter
5
2

Walt Disney
World, Florida, USA, Sunday 9am.

Gil’s iPad,
iPod and iPhone were all connected as she used all of their
computing power and stored memory to carry out the research she
knew was necessary if she wanted to remain safe. Already today
she’d had Doc hack into two UK commercial databases and change data
for her benefit, a task he had sniffed was below him. Sure enough,
twenty minutes later he was reporting that the tasks had been
completed and had offered no challenge whatsoever as neither
company was using complex encryption software. He was slightly
mollified when Gil promised to pay him the full fee
anyway.

Sitting on her
king sized hotel bed, Gil ticked the final item off her list. It
was a story, a fiction but one that she would swear was fact,
knowing that if she didn’t she could find herself back in the UK
waiting for a court hearing or, more likely, the inevitable attempt
on her life. The story had been carefully woven around known facts.
She had created a convincing story that took incriminating evidence
and turned it around so that it portrayed her as an unwitting
victim of powerful people and institutions.

The fact that
MI5 would know immediately that her story was fabricated did not
concern Gil; they would not share that knowledge with the police.
She knew that MI5 would not be able to prove their assertions, and
in any case they would not want the true version of the story aired
in public. Given the choice between being humiliated but seeing
Gillian serve life in prison, and saving themselves from
humiliation but letting her go free, she fully expected them to
choose the latter.

Gil had a
patsy who could take the fall for her, and, much as she regretted
using him, she had little choice if she wanted to stay
free.

The edited
story was saved on her hard drive and on a mini USB drive under the
title “affidavit”.

Gil took her
rather bulky sunglasses and extracted from one of the arms a micro
SD card. The glasses, commercially available from companies dealing
in spyware and which were even available on Amazon, recorded HD
video and high quality stills at the touch of a button on the side
arm of the glasses.

Sliding the
micro SD card into her specially adapted iPhone VOX, she used the
screen to preview the video and the still photos she had taken. She
isolated about twenty minutes of video and around thirty still
pictures which she then downloaded onto her iPad VOX. The pictures
and video transferred over rapidly and the preview screen flashed
up. Opening each still picture with Photoshop Elements, she cropped
them to isolate two figures, two figures who appeared far more
times than they had a right to appear in a sample of this
size.

The man was in
his mid twenties, with short dark hair and prominent eyebrows. He
had dark eyes and a strong nose. His mouth was large and his lips
full. He was clean shaven, but a shadow of beard growth was still
visible. The woman was probably in her twenties too, but she looked
much younger. She was probably chosen on that basis. She was pretty
and petite but she was much too handy with that camera when Gil was
in the picture.

Gil examined
the pictures as they were loading onto an FTP site that Doc had
nominated. From their remote computers Gil and Doc could both load
data onto the server and download it. Doc’s task, computer genius
that he was, would be to see if he could hack into any photo
recognition databases and get a hit. Gil would dearly like to know
who they were. Doc, on the other hand, saw the task as nothing more
than a chance to beat the US law enforcement firewalls and give
them yet another headache by leaving a destructive little ‘worm’
behind.

The Chameleon
had survived far too long, in a competitive and deadly business, to
fail to notice a mock bride and groom appearing at every turn in
her peripheral vision. They would not be MI5, neither would they be
likely to be CIA; even the FBI seemed unlikely. In any event, how
would any of those agencies know where she was?

Gil had a
sudden thought. It was obvious, really, and so she booted up a
newspaper picture archive. The archive belonged to the Washington
Picture Library. A password or a fee was due from anyone wanting to
search the archive. Gil attached a dongle to her iPad via the USB
port and rebooted the site. The dongle, provided by Doc, did its
work, and soon the picture site security software was cooing over
the dongle, revealing all of her secrets. Good old Doc, he knew
what he was doing. The dongle, having taken what it wanted from its
suitor, dumped the link and listed the last twenty passwords used
to enter the site. Gil picked one at random and inserted the
password into the box. The search engine appeared
instantly.

Gil typed in
the name Denton Miles and received a page full of pictures of her
father. There were fifteen thumbnails to a page and there were at
least twenty pages of them. After fifteen minutes of searching Gil
found what she was looking for. On a photograph entitled ‘campaign
team celebrates’ stood her father, looking statesmanlike and rather
handsome, but there in the background was the blond girl without
her Minnie Mouse Ear veil. Further, and to the left, pouring
champagne for an elderly grey haired contributor, stood the fake
groom.

Her father was
keeping an eye on her. Good for him, she thought. By the time the
Doc came back to her with the names Jessica Halvorssen and Bryan
O’Keefe Gillian was no longer interested.

Chapter
5
3

The Miles
Estate, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA, Monday 11am.

The security
team were uncomfortable with the situation but they followed
orders. They were to allow access to the house to one Gillian
Miles, a former British assassin, and the senator was not only in
residence but he was to greet her personally. The fact that she was
his estranged daughter did nothing to alleviate their concerns.
Luckily, sensing their nervousness, the pretty and smiling young
woman volunteered herself for a pat down. She was not carrying a
weapon.

Elizabeth
Chase Miles opened the door on the front porch of the old
plantation house before Gil had a chance to knock. The beautiful
and glamorous senator’s wife oozed good breeding. She was reported
as being in her mid fifties but she looked a decade younger. Her
smile was warm and generous. Gil wasn’t sure how to greet the woman
who had married her husband without knowing he had already fathered
a child. She had no need to worry because, as she was puzzling over
the correct etiquette, Liz Chase Miles threw good manners to the
wind and stepped in to hug Gil as if she was a long lost friend.
When the older woman withdrew from the hug, which was as tight as
it was long lasting, she held Gil at arm’s length and scanned her
face.