London Large: Blood on the Streets (23 page)

‘Nobody... helped... me.
It... wasn’t... that difficult,’ she said.

‘Come come now, you managed
to access some of the most secure files in existence. You really managed to do
that all by yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said Amisha.

‘My my, you are a smart young
lady. Smart and beautiful. We’re going to have such fun, you and I.’

Her tormentor’s loins had
been stirring for some time. He couldn’t help but notice the contours of her
fine figure as the water had soaked through her shirt. But that was for later.
The first order of business for today was to find out who her accomplices were,
and what they knew.

‘Suppose I believe that you
are a very bright young lady and managed to access all those files on your own.
The next question is why, and have you passed what you found on to anyone
else?’

Amisha doubted she could
withstand another round of near drowning but something deep within her refused
to give. She found an ounce of courage, the very last ounce she had.

‘Nobody. I sent them to
nobody.’

‘Oh dear. Then why did you
find it necessary to completely wipe your hard drive. I’ve checked the whole
thing. All traces of your access gone. Very clever, not many people, including
officers of the law, actually know how to do that so effectively.’

The torturer’s phone rang and
he answered the call. She heard some mumbling but couldn’t make out anything
distinct. She looked about her. A small, windowless room. Could be anywhere,
anywhere at all. The balding man with the soothing voice was fiftyish, short,
plump and very sweaty. The fact he was making no effort to conceal his identity
told her all she needed to know about her future prospects - torture, rape,
death. Not exactly the career path she’d signed up for when she joined the Met
as a bright eyed, eager young graduate.

‘Oh it seems I’m going to
have to leave you for a little while. I’ll be back soon to conclude our
conversation.’

Her tormentor left Amisha
alone to consider her plight. But her torments didn’t leave with him. The
lights in the small, windowless room flashed on and off with punishing
regularity - pitch black, bright lights, pitch black, bright lights - whilst
white noise smashed into her brain like two particles obliterating one another
in an atom collider. She was being mentally broken down.

How long had she been here?
Five hours? Five days? How quickly she had lost track of time.

She understood the torture
techniques being applied, but understanding did nothing to soften their impact.
She would break. She knew she would break. The question that reverberated
through her mind was not whether but when; would she break before H found her,
would she give H up before she was killed?

She knew H would be looking,
frantically tearing up the streets of London in a way only he knew how. If
anyone could find her in time it was her partner. As the lights flashed and the
chaotic, formless noise assaulted her senses she tried to cling to that hope.
It was the only hope she had.

Amisha was nothing if
not resourceful. As she lay tightly strapped on the inclined board, the only
piece of furniture in the small room that was her prison, and would most
probably be the place of her death, she knew there was nothing she could do
physically.

But mentally was a different
matter. She made a huge effort to block out the noise and think back, across
the sequence of events that had led her to where she was now. From the deep
dive into the Dark Web to the moment she realised she’d been tumbled; from the
desperate race against time to garner as much information as possible to the
wiping of her hard drive; from the second they’d broken into her flat to the
struggle; from being bundled into the waiting car to the journey and her
imprisonment.

If she got a moment’s
opportunity, a fleeting half chance, she would be prepared. As aware as she
could be of where she was and why and how she’d got here. As desperate as things
looked, Amisha was still holding out for life.

She recalled the moment H had
arrived with news of his hunches. At first she wasn’t sure, although she’d come
to appreciate the fact that H’s hunches were usually spot on. She thought there
may have been one or two people involved, but a child abuse conspiracy at the
heart of the establishment, involving the House of Lords, one of the most
venerable and upstanding institutions in the world? It just wasn’t credible.
Was it?

There was no way, no way a
group of powerful people in the UK could get away with such a thing. Her
parents had always told her what a wonderful, civilized place Britain was. Its
institutions were incorruptible, matured over centuries to limit naked power
and protect its citizens. Things like this happened in third world countries,
in corruption filled post-communist hell holes, in countries run by tin-pot
dictators. But not here, not in the mother of all democratic parliaments, not
in Great Britain.

Amisha had studied Computer
Science at Cambridge and joined the Met to work in their specialist IT security
division. But she had been bored and asked for a transfer so she could work in
the real world of gangsters, where people still spoke to each other.
Reluctantly the Met agreed. As a consequence, over the last year or two,
everyone had forgotten just how advanced and skilful she was in matters of
technology and online security.

And then H had turned up,
urging her to go deep in the darkest recesses of the web.

Time to put those skills
back to use.

She started with the police
IT systems she already had access to. Within half an hour she knew H was really
onto something. She checked and cross-checked multiple references to all those
in the picture H provided, and soon knew who they all were. She was surprised
to find that at some time they had all been questioned by someone in authority
or other but all the interviews were marked ‘Top Secret’ and she didn’t have
access. A pattern was emerging - every time one of them had been in contact
with police the investigation had been closed down. Quickly. She made multiple
attempts to access the top secret files. She knew every attempt was logged and
monitored but was confident it would be days before the cumbersome plods of the
Met had the wherewithal to investigate the failed attempts further.

She resurrected the old user
IDs she used when working for the Met security division, where her main job was
to locate and entrap terrorists, paedophiles and the like, and she quickly
started to make contact with the scum of the earth.

As she typed, her brain
cross-referenced every name, every comment she found that connected to the
information on the police systems. She had written some unique pattern-matching
software while at Cambridge and also had access to the Met’s advanced software
used to encrypt and de-encrypt software keys. She employed them to their
maximum ability and marvelled at the high level of expertise she still had at
her command.

She sat mesmerized, focused,
rigid with attention as she put out fake messages to draw people into her
world, ran responses on her software and went deeper into the web. She accessed
the most sickening images she had ever seen and held her disgust in check.

She had reached a website
with a chat room that she was now certain was used by many of the
co-conspirators in the photo. Maybe she was even talking to one of them.

Think Amisha, think.
However clever these people think they are they are creatures of habit. They
make mistakes.

She found a highly secure
messaging porthole, and the secret database that stored its messages, a
database that would be filled with incriminating emails.

That’s it. Have to access
that database.

For three hours she worked
using every tool at her disposal, and ran an automated script that collated all
the information she had and generated thousands of passwords. She drew on her
knowledge of the conspirators, police software, her own software, her keen
intelligence and her intuition. After several thousand attempts to gain direct
access via the administrator password she almost screamed with joy when the
message flashed on her screen: ACCESS GRANTED.

I’m in.

Amisha gritted her
teeth and forced herself to concentrate, to block out the noise and the
flashing light.

Think back girl, think
back.

She had worked quickly and
methodically, going through the torrent of repugnant data, so vile, so
repulsive. How did the minds of these people work? How had they become so
corrupted, so shameless, so evil? She didn’t think too deeply about the
answers, answers nobody really had. Their numbers were growing, growing all
over the world, like a plague of demons swarming over innocence and beauty.

Some of H’s eye-for-an-eye
values had rubbed off on her.

Castration’s too fucking
good for them.

As she went through each email
she printed them off, one by one, for another hour or so. And then horror
struck her. In the midst of her excitement she’d forgotten to do the obvious,
namely ensure she herself was secured. A piece of Trojan software had accessed
her computer, almost definitely triggered by her access into the secret
database. And it had been operating for some time, reading everything directly
from her disk and sending the information to God knows where.

Oh my God, they’ll know
where I am.

Amisha disconnected her computer
from the internet and set in train a specialist programme, developed by a
friend of hers at Cambridge, that would wipe clean her entire drive. It would
leave no trace whatsoever of what she had accessed.

She was struggling to recount
what she did next when her environment abruptly changed. The noise stopped in
the windowless room. The lights stayed on. The door opened and the small plump
man returned.

‘Hello my dear, have you
missed me?’

She forced her mind back to
the events of her capture, but bits of it were already hazy. She recalled the
sound of her back door being forced open. She remembered the fight with the
three assailants and being dumped into the boot of their car. The journey. What
had it been - thirty minutes?

While in the boot of the car
she noted that radio reception was interrupted. She was in a tunnel, a long
one. Must be heading under the river. Rotherhithe tunnel, maybe Dartford?

And when they’d taken her out
of the boot she’d had a glimpse of a huge bridge. She recognised it - the Queen
Elizabeth II Bridge. It was all coming back to her now: she’d been driven
through the Dartford tunnel, and then first exit off the motorway as the car
slowed down.

She was somewhere in or near
Grays, Essex, on the fringe of the great metropolis. She was sure of it.

The small plump man retrieved
the coarse brown sack and placed it gently over her head.

‘Now, where were we?’

H lay, slumped and
exhausted, in the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep. He hadn’t had a
proper night’s sleep in weeks. He wanted to wake up and get going but was struggling
to keep his eyes open; he drifted back in the direction of sleep.

A multitude of images from
the last few weeks vied for dominance inside his head. He saw the brightly
coloured remains of Tara and Jemima. He could feel the texture of the severed
heads in Bermondsey as if they were in his hands. He could smell the charred
remnants of the dead in Soho.

And now he was back in the
Falklands, launching himself into a ditch and savagely ending the lives of two
young men. He physically shuddered as he felt the force of his rifle butt smash
through their skulls. Young men like him, young men who had died so he could
live. He was suffocating. Hemmed in. His breathing become short. He started
gasping for air.

Mortar shells were exploding
all about him. He looked around. Ronnie lay still and crumpled on the floor as
the men of 2 Para descended on the sniper who had shot him.

‘Please be alive Ronnie, for
fuck’s sake, please be alive,’ he screamed out loud. He was sweating and
shaking as he came out of his nightmare and his senses readjusted to the here
and now.

He was startled by the
pinging of a dumbphone, and found himself back in Ronnie’s place in
Rotherhithe. He wasn’t ready yet to go home to Olivia. He didn’t want her to
see him like this, unravelled and animal-like. He was in pure hunter mode now,
and H in hunter mode was no fun for any woman. The best he’d been able to do
was send her texts assuring her he was in one piece.

The message was from John.
Bingo!: HAVE FOUND PHONE. YOU’LL NEED A NICE FEW QUID OR A SMALL ARMY TO GET IT
BACK THOUGH.

H was in no position, or
mood, to speak to anyone just yet. HOW MUCH?, he texted back.

I’VE GOT THEM DOWN TO 50K.
THEY WON’T GO ANY LOWER, John replied.

WHO ARE ‘THEY’, H asked.

OUR FRIENDS ON THE CARAVAN
SITE, came the reply.

OK. MONEY NO OBJECT. BE AT
HOME.

50K? For a stolen phone?
What the hell is on the fucking thing?

H washed his morning
painkillers down with a mouthful of scotch and called Ronnie, who arrived an
hour later with a brown paper bag containing the cash. He was a bit more like
his old self now, chipper and ready to go. A couple of days rest and a little
tender loving care from Olivia had done the trick; God knows she’d had plenty
of practice.

But there was something else
that had put a spring in Ronnie’s step. He told H about the dead man in his
kitchen. He hadn’t wanted to tell him over the phone; but he knew now that H
was a loose cannon, capable of almost anything. It would have to be face to
face.

H was apoplectic with rage.

‘They came into my house and
threatened Olivia…I’m going to fucking murder…’