The Power of One (25 page)

‘Of course not. God, Tim. That woman. Well, we'll sort out what went on when we get back. The big question now is what on earth Abe has to do with Lyndsey Barnes.'

‘She has to have been in trouble,' Tim said. ‘Why else would Rina have got involved?'

Mac looked sideways at him. In Rina's world, he thought, she was some blend of earth mother and superhero. He was uncomfortably aware that he too had been sucked all too willingly into that way of thinking.

‘You're making the assumption that Abe is one of the good guys,' he said.

‘Well, sure. If he was going to do Lyndsey any harm, he wouldn't have met up with Rina at the Marina and Rina must have given him the benefit of the doubt, or she wouldn't have made sure he could take the boat.'

‘You're assuming she helped him?'

‘Of course she helped him. Why, is another matter, but knowing Rina she had her reasons.'

The agreement was that Fitch should drive straight to Frantham, but Mac had planned a bit of a detour once they were off the motorway. He was worried about the possibility of Hale intercepting their mobile phone calls and it seemed wise to get an alternative. What he didn't want to do was to risk Hale getting to know that he'd purchased a new phone and Mac was wary enough of Hale's seeming connections for him to assume that was possible.

After the attacks on the London Underground, anti-terrorist legislation had tightened up in all sorts of unexpected ways and Mac knew it was now much harder to buy even a pre-paid mobile phone and not have to register it. True, he could have given a false address, but that seemed like an unnecessary complication. Instead, the plan was to get new SIM cards for their existing phones, use the new numbers for the calls they wanted to keep confidential and then revert to the old SIM for those calls they hoped Hale would intercept.

Mac made three stops at small shops he recalled sold SIMs. He bought chocolate and bread, milk and SIM cards, then extra credit from two local supermarkets. Briefly, he recalled, there had been a requirement for any store selling more than a set amount of credit to one customer to report the transaction. Mac realised he had no idea if this had ever been made official or if it had now been rescinded. Better, he thought, simply to spread his purchases around.

‘I never even knew that,' Tim said when Mac explained his reasoning.

‘It wasn't widely broadcast,' Mac said. ‘And I doubt it's still an issue, but … well, you never know.' He laughed suddenly. ‘I never thought I'd be so involved in smoke and mirrors. I feel like I'm playing a role here. Like I've been caught up in some game Paul de Freitas might have designed and I can't say I'm comfortable with it.'

‘We do seem to be imbuing Hale with almost supernatural powers,' Tim agreed, ‘but the fact is, two people have died and, I don't know, I feel like I came pretty close that night. Mac, I don't like to make a fuss, but I still feel shaky about it. I've been in tight spots before, but I honestly thought I might not make it out of that one.'

Mac nodded. ‘I can understand that,' he said. ‘And no, I don't think you're overreacting, if that's what you wanted to ask.'

‘Thanks,' Tim said. ‘And Mac, don't tell Rina how I feel.'

Mac chuckled softly. ‘I don't need to,' he said quietly. ‘Tim, she already knows.'

Mac halted the car in a lay-by a few miles out from Frantham, realising that it was almost time for Sergeant Baker to shut up shop for the day.

‘Just checking in. Anything I should know?'

‘Well,
Tonino's
has done a roaring trade all day,' Frank Baker said, referring to the little cafe on the promenade. ‘I've said no comment, can't comment and plain, I really don't know more times than I can count and your Mrs Martin created some kind of furore at the Old Town marina. Other than that, not a lot. I finally put Andy on the “no comment” duty and he wound up talking cameras with the media lot, but give the boy his due, he kept them off my back. Got more patience than I have.'

‘I heard about Rina,' Mac said. ‘DI Kendal gave me the low-down. Anything else?'

‘Well, yes, but I don't know what to make of it exactly and, Mac, I may have done wrong here but I figured I'd wait to see what you thought before we passed it on up the chain if you see what I mean.'

‘No, I don't think I do.'

‘Right, well I went into the office earlier today, saw one of your business cards sitting on the desk, like. Didn't think any more about it, then Andy spotted it and he said it looked funny and it did when he pointed it out. Laid out square on to the table edge as if someone put it there deliberate like. Not like something you'd have done. Then Andy noticed something written on it. Ian Manning, but it wasn't your writing. Far too neat. Andy recalled the man on the boat was Ian so we ran the name.'

Baker paused for effect and Mac prompted him. ‘Anything?'

‘Never been arrested, but he has a service record, left the army two years ago. He's in our system because he applied for and got a doorman's licence, so we called the nightclub he was working for. The owner reckons he was only there a few months, but he was good at his job and they were sorry to see him go.'

‘Why did he go?'

‘Offered a better job. More pay, apparently. The nightclub owner thought he remembered Ian saying it was an old colleague of his from his army days, set up some kind of private security firm and he'd offered him a job.'

Hale, Mac thought. It had to be.

‘So, who put the card on my desk?'

‘That, I don't know. But someone got in and left it there. It weren't there last night, Andy and I both agree on that.'

‘Abe Jackson,' Mac said.

‘You reckon?'

‘I'd put money on it.'

I
t had taken more time than he had liked for Richard Grey to finally unravel Paul de Freitas' hidden level but now he knew how to kill the kraken.

And he was fairly sure that he knew what the kraken was.

Still in game mode, his excitement at having mastered it outweighed any implication but as he scanned the list of names that had been revealed in the
Power of One
file and compared these to the intelligence reports on each one, it finally dawned on him that this elaborate level of the game had real world implications.

Dawned on him? No, he had anticipated that all along, but caught up in the challenge of playing the level and comprehending the puzzle Paul de Freitas had set, he had, for a time, lost sight of that fact.

It really was very clever, Richard thought. It was also very disturbing.

This hidden game inside a game, as he had discovered early on, differed from the rest of
Eventide
in that it was played from Lydia's point of view. Lydia had to collect a series of objects and pieces of information from other characters in the game. Together, these gave her the weapon she needed to kill the kraken in the final scene. At each stage of the game she had to fight, to play elaborate games against, or to solve puzzles in competition with, the other characters. All she had to help her was a musical box, the sort you'd give to a little kid with a dancing fairy and a little mirror in the lid. A compartment inside held ‘treasures', but there was no way of knowing what they were until you pulled one out, or how useful it would be in that part of the game until you tried it.

Once out of the box, the treasures were kept in a bag Lydia carried and once she had them, she kept hold of them, even if she made a wrong play with one of them against the wrong character.

The treasures made no sense to Richard. They included a wise owl, and a pair of round-lensed spectacles. A snail with a red shell and a Christmas cracker. Frustrated, Richard decided that the so-called treasures might mean something to Lydia, but to anyone else they were just a nonsense. He'd had to resort to trial and error … a lot of error, before he'd finally solved enough of the clues and gathered enough of the kraken-killing objects to figure out what the game was all about.

Worst of all, there were no back doors, no facility for debugging. You just had to play the game.

Lyndsey, Ray, Lydia herself, Edward, Paul, someone called Ian and two others by the name of Mike and Phil. These were the opponents; the characters with the individual pieces of the puzzle and now Richard had the list of names and the intel about them, it all got very strange.

Mike Thompson had worked for Paul when he ran his own business. Phil Jameson was a mechanic who regularly helped him service his boat. Both had died within days of Paul de Freitas. One three days before, one on the day following.

Accidents, the police reports had said. A car crash and a fall from a ladder while clearing the gutters.

Both had suffered break-ins at home either just before or just after death but nothing obvious had been stolen.

Lyndsey and Ray were Paul's closest associates. Neither had turned up for work and they were definitely not at home.

Lydia and Edward de Freitas, Richard was told, had gone to ground. Ian and Paul were dead and in their cases there was no pretence at making it look accidental.

‘So,' Richard mused. ‘What do we have?'

He drew up a list of objects and clues that the characters had finally revealed. Lydia had her music box, of course, with all the ‘treasures' inside. Lyndsey had a newspaper clipping on which a phone number had been written. Ray, something that looked like a missile launcher and Edward, for some reason, a rose bush, though it made more sense, he supposed, when he realised that the rose was named ‘peace'.

The other two had, respectively, a locker key and an old car, make unknown – at least to Richard. It was weird-enough looking that he supposed a car buff might recognise it.

Checking that he had everything printed out, he shuffled his pages together and went in search of his boss, remembering only belatedly that he was away on some course or other.

Richard hesitated, then knocked on the door of the ‘main man', Gil Sykes, who for the purposes of their little unit was ‘big boss number one'.

‘Can I have a word?'

Gil looked surprised, but gestured Richard to come in and sit down. ‘Sure, what's wrong?'

Richard grinned. He couldn't help himself. He knew this was big with a capital B and felt justifiably proud of himself. Gil raised an elegantly plucked eyebrow and tucked an invisible strand of wayward bob back behind her ear.

‘Nothing's wrong. I've solved it. I know how to find the kraken. How to kill it.'

He expected applause; instead she looked at him as if he'd gone mad.

‘Kraken? Isn't that some kind of sea monster?'

‘Well, yeah. But not this one. I mean that's what Paul de Freitas called it but I think it's a ship or maybe a submarine. I know it's stealth technology and I know the thing he was trying to hide was a device for tracking it. Finding it, even though it doesn't have a proper signature. You see …'

‘Richard, what the hell are you talking about?'

For the first time he began to worry. ‘Dave gave me this thing to solve? After Paul de Freitas and his minder were killed. They found two bits of code, see, hidden in the BIOS. I worked through the layers, realised one was a list of names and the other was another level of one of Paul's old games.'

‘De Freitas … right?' A small glimmer of light seemed to dawn. ‘There was something on the bulletin …' Gil closed her eyes for a moment as though accessing the information she had vaguely registered.

She opened her eyes and studied Richard. ‘You'd better show me what you found,' she said, ‘and bring me up to speed. Did Dave say who this was for?'

‘Sure, he said it was a rush job. I've been on it twenty-four-seven. It's for Commander Hale?' The name had meant nothing to him, but he assumed it must to her. From the way her shoulders suddenly stiffened, Richard figured that it did. But he wasn't sure now that was a good thing.

‘Have I done something wrong?'

Gil shook her head. ‘Go back to your station, get everything ready for me. I just need to make a couple of calls. And Richard, don't worry.
You've
done nothing wrong.'

It was another two hours and close on seven o'clock when Abe got the call. They had what they needed to close the net on Hale. Abe was back on the payroll. Officially.

He sank down on one of the uncomfortable kitchen chairs at Hill House and felt relief flood through him right down to his toes. He'd been undercover before, but not like this. Not able to tell even those men he'd served with for so long that really, he'd not left in disgrace; not let the side down and he felt that the rumour-mill had told exactly that story.

Abe Jackson is out of control.

Abe Jackson finally flipped.

To make sure he knew the message was for real, they'd had his commanding officer make the call and Abe had never been so relieved or so glad in all his life to hear that particular voice.

‘What now?' he asked.

‘We close the trap. Abe where the devil are you?'

He told them, still anxious after all this time of trusting no one that he was walking into a noose of his own making. Hesitantly, he voiced his concerns, knowing they'd be understood. He'd sent men into deep cover operations, seen them when they'd returned, unable to accept that even their closest friends were still just that and not some agent sent to trick and deceive. He knew this was a normal anxiety, but analyse it all he liked, he found it hard to shake.

A slight sound made him look up. Lyndsey stood in the doorway, the blanket draped around her shoulders. She looked better. Wide awake and the tense pinched look gone from her face.

‘Who was that?' she asked as he closed his phone.

‘The cavalry, I hope,' he said. ‘And I've told them to bring food.'

She smiled. The first proper smile he'd seen on her face. ‘Good. I'm starved. Is that coffee?'