Authors: Scott Caladon
“I want your guys to stay out of it, Sandra and, if you can, get the police and Interpol to scale back any active searches they are currently undertaking,” said JJ, having decided that this was a conversation that needed to be face to face. He was in Sandra Hillington's office in Thames House, drinking tea but keen to get on with it.
“I can't do that, JJ. Due process. Robson is Britain's most wanted right now. The Home Secretary is adamant that, if and when apprehended, he needs to be put on trial, here in London.”
“Sandra, you've been very helpful and supportive of me. I appreciate that, I really do, but you need to understand, this is deeply personal now and for reasons that might not be all obvious to you. It's not just that Robson murdered my best friend and kidnapped and beat my son, he also murdered a Treasury accountant, at least three random low level criminals and god knows who else. It's the due process that's fucked up and I'm not having it. If Robson gets his chance to speak in court, jeezus these days it may even be televised, then all that stuff with the FCA will come out. He'll claim Joel Gordon and the former Chancellor were behind the falsification of government budget figures, he'll finger me as the North Korean gold thief, Toby as the rogue trader and that he is just a patsy set up to take the fall. He'll claim he ran and left the country for fear of his life. He's a good actor and convincing. He'll be all spruced up, suited and booted. With a top defence lawyer they'll make a credible case. He may eventually lose and get flung in the fuckin' clink for twenty years. In the meantime, however, he'll have besmirched my murdered friend's name, thrust my son, family and friends into the unwanted limelight and still only be in his sixties when he's out and about, hell-bent on revenge. No fuckin' way is that happening, Sandra, no fuckin' way as long as I live and breathe,” insisted JJ, emotionally rigid with anger.
“JJ, I understand. Well I don't really, nobody but you can feel what you're feeling right now, I get that, but what can I do? I'm head of MI5, I need to follow the rules. My hands are tied JJ. I'm sorry but if my guys find him, he's ours.” Sandra Hillington looked genuinely disappointed that she could not be of more help to JJ. He understood her position but he was committed to his.
“OK, Sandra,” said JJ, a little calmer. “Tell me one thing though. Do you know where he is?”
“Haven't a clue, JJ. The stakeout at the Hull lock-up produced nothing. He either made my team or he hasn't turned up yet. I've had to tell my guys to stand down. The garage is still under surveillance but it's the local police who are doing it now. We've extracted a whole bunch of stuff from Robson's house in St. George's Hill; files, discs, memory sticks, hard-drives. He's a porno loving, drug addicted low-life alright, but we haven't yet discovered anything that may give us a hint as to his whereabouts. We're still looking, we found a hidden safe in his garage and we're dismantling his car nut by bolt.”
“Will you tell me if you find anything?” asked JJ, hopefully.
“Probably not, JJ. Your intentions are clear. I do understand them but I can't condone them.”
“Fine, then we're both on our own,” stated JJ. “Thanks for your honesty Sandra. You've always been upfront with me and it's good to know that at least one of Britain's top intelligence agencies has a leader with scruples.”
JJ stood up and they both shook hands, mutual respect still intact but with mutually exclusive plans of action. As JJ took the lift and headed down to the ground floor of Thames House, to pick up a taxi and go home to consult with Gil, Sandra Hillington picked up her phone and dialled an internal extension.
“That chap that has just left my office, put a tail on him until I tell you otherwise.”
“Yes ma'am,” came the immediate reply.
JJ returned to Markham Square and filled in Gil with the details of his conversation with Sandra Hillington.
“A lot of good that was,” Gil said.
“It's understandable Gil. Nevertheless, we're going to need to find Robson first, otherwise there'll be a shit-fest of bad news.”
“Where do we start?”
JJ had been thinking about all this with great concentration, ever since Cyrus had cajoled him out of his self pity. He didn't really expect to get much help from MI5. Rules, regulations and oversight committees were good things most of the time, but not this time.
“The only places we know Robson has been are London, Amsterdam, Hull and probably Rotterdam. He must have false ID under an assumed name. We know he has money. He's probably changed his appearance again. That was standard practice in MI5 field work if you needed to avoid detection. We'll start there. We need help though, someone with the skillset to hack into transport databases, land, sea and air, security cameras, bank accounts, anything that a fugitive on the run needs access to.”
“Victor?”
“The very one, Gil.”
JJ left the ground floor front room and climbed the stairs to the living room. He dug out Victor's number and dialled.
“Hi Victor, it's JJ, got a minute?”
“Sure, JJ, I was just reading some stuff on the latest bank vault locks. I was getting a bit bored, no real action since our last adventure.”
“That may be about to change, my friend. Any chance you could pop round to my house today?”
“No problem. Give me a couple of hours OK?”
“Excellent. See you then.”
JJ was relieved that Victor was available immediately. He knew that MI5 would have a team of forensic computer experts scouring Neil Robson's equipment. What he was hoping for was that manpower constraints due to government cuts would mean that they had not already checked all points of entry and egress to the country with a fine tooth comb. Technologically, Victor was the finest tooth comb JJ had ever encountered. The official law enforcement agencies may have a head start in terms of days, hours and minutes, but Victor could close that gap as certain as a Ferrari closing on a Skoda.
JJ felt that it would be courteous to let Ethel know that Victor was about to be working with him for a while. Ethel had returned to duty at SCO19 but had handed in her resignation. She was scheduled to leave the force in three months from now and planned to try for the baby she had wanted for quite some time. Her shoulder was still a bit stiff but otherwise healed. Courtesy of JJ and Kim Jong-un, she did not need to work another day of her life. Very few officers leave the police force as multi-millionaires and Ethel was eternally grateful to JJ that she was one of the few, maybe the only one come to think of it. Ethel was delighted to hear from JJ and thanked him for letting her know about Victor. Technically, he was still Ethel's No. 1 confidential informer but, nouveau riche as he was, the young man had decided only to do jobs that engaged his fertile brain. JJ promised Ethel that they'd meet up soon for lunch, he may have a favour to ask he said. âAnything' Ethel had replied. They were friends for life.
* * *
Victor arrived and was keen to get started.
“Where's Cyrus, my man?” he asked, still impressed by the boy's code square.
“Cyrus is at the Project LFD offices, Victor,” responded JJ. “He's on school holidays, so he's helping Becky with her work as she's running the show while Gil and I are on this task.”
Despite recent events, JJ felt reasonably comfortable about Cyrus's safety. The building at 1 Grosvenor Place had good ground floor and reception security. You could not just wander up to any floor you wanted without an appointment. JJ had also made certain that the security on the Project LFD floor was solid. He had hired two former Gurkhas and briefed them in detail. One sat on LFD's reception and the other at a desk before going through reinforced glass doors that needed a keypad code to open them. The Gurkhas were both armed. Cyrus was safe and one of the Gurkhas would drive him and Becky back to the house at the end of each work day.
“OK, good, so what do we know about this Neil Robson's movements?” enquired Victor. The young fellow didn't know anything about Toby Naismith's demise. JJ didn't feel like telling him at this moment as every mention of his friend made him feel desperately sad.
“We know some stuff Victor, but it's patchy and there are holes,” said JJ. “We know the day and time that he should have been picked up by MI5 in London but wasn't. We know he flew to Amsterdam on that day, but departed his hotel there that night. We know that a day or so later he rented a lock-up garage in Hull near the port, from a Mr Iqbal Quintus Ahmed. That magnificently named fellow gave this information to the local Hull police. We believe Robson killed three guys in an east London garage. There's a gap of several months after that. We then know that he came back to London and committed murder on 15
th
July. That's what we know for certain. We can also infer, possibly, that his return to London came via Rotterdam and Hull, otherwise there would be very little reason for him to have rented a garage in the Humberside town. In between, we assume that he was abroad but we don't know that for sure. I can give you two pictures of the guy, one a photo when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury and one a police e-fit. I would guess he now looks different again.”
“Well, it's a start,” said Victor opening up his laptop and switching on his tablet. “Any chance I could get a strong Starbucks coffee and a slice of their most excellent pumpkin cake? Then I'll be on this like a demon.”
“Sure,” said Gil, volunteering this one time to be the kid's snack slave. Gil returned after about ten minutes and came bearing coffee and cake for everyone.
Victor had already begun his digital tap dance checking ferry schedules, flight manifests, scouring through CCTV footage at the targeted terminals and airports. He paused for a few minutes to sip his coffee and devour his pumpkin cake, then he was back to his investigation. This went on for at least two hours. JJ and Gil had little to contribute to this phase of the mission. They assumed that they'd need to go abroad at some point so they were checking their weapons and other essential gear. Victor wasn't disturbed by this, he had seen JJ's eclectic selection of armoury before. It was getting near dinnertime, Cyrus and Becky would be home soon.
“Hmmm⦔ said Victor, loud enough to be heard and alert JJ and Gil.
“Hmm what, Victor?” asked the Scot.
“Would you say that this Neil Robson fellow is imaginative, JJ?”
“He's a conniving, murderous, fuckwit is what he is, Victor, I don't know whether or not you need imagination for that! Why do you ask?”
“Well, in my research on intelligent criminals on the run, they often plan their escape route down to the last detail. They know how they're getting out, where they're going, how they're going to pay for it. They cover their tracks well and, barring bad luck, it often works provided they've not done one very slack thing,” said Victor.
“And that would be?” asked Gil.
“The alias for their fake ID,” Victor replied. “It's really odd but when fugitives pick their own fake name, as opposed to being in a witness protection programme where it's picked for them, they tend to do one of two things. Either they select an outrageously stupid name, let's say like Legolas Greenleaf from
Lord of the Rings
, or they select a name that's different from their real name, but not so different as they're likely to forget it. For example, Lord Lucan famously went on the run in the 1970s suspected of murder. His real name was John Bingham. Though he has never been discovered, dead or alive, the DCS in charge of the investigation found a scrap piece of paper with the name Bing Johnson on it. That led to some tracking to South Africa, and indeed there were reported sightings of the fugitive Earl on that continent, but the trail ended there.”
“And this is relevant how?” asked Gil, keen to hear any form of conclusion.
“Robert Nilsson,” announced Victor. “That name is not so different from Neil Robson in the scheme of things. A Robert Nilsson travelling under a Danish passport took a flight from Rotterdam's The Hague Airport on the day after the killing of the three guys at Bert's Garage. The flight was to San Jose in Costa Rica. Since then, he has returned to the UK three times, all via the Rotterdam to Hull ferry.”
JJ and Gil were listening intently, Victor may have happened upon something critical.
“Anything else, Victor, not that what you've discovered so far isn't brilliant?” asked JJ.
“Yes,” replied Victor, feeling a rising sense of glowing satisfaction. “You said Neil Robson committed murder on 15
th
July. The next day, Robert Nilsson took a flight from Heathrow to San Jose, and there's more. On a wild punt I hypothesised that if he was intent on murder in Chelsea and, as you told me he's loaded, I guessed he might stay somewhere posh and local the night before. I hacked into the computer systems of all the four and five star hotels within a two mile radius of Sloane Square. Guess what, a Robert Nilsson stayed in a junior suite, for one night only on 14
th
July, at the Wyndham Grand in Chelsea Harbour.”
JJ and Gil looked at each other. It seemed too much to be a coincidence; Victor may have hit the jackpot.
“Well done Victor,” said JJ, placing a hand on the young wizard's shoulder.
“Thanks. I'm now going to check for bank accounts, credit cards, anything that could legitimise this guy, but my instinct is that he's your man.”
JJ's instinct was the same. Robert Nilsson, Neil Robson, the fool would not forget his new name with that kind of simple alias. The timing of the ferry trips, the flights all added up to a credible timeline of the murderer's villainous trail of theft, death and flight. Costa Rica, nice place, pleasant weather. Robson would like that thought JJ. He seemed to recall that when Cyrus was unloading about his ordeal Robson had yelled at him that he wanted to be in the Caribbean. Costa Rica was not in the Caribbean, per se, but it fitted the bill and most important of all it did not have an extradition treaty with the UK.