My guess was that, before the end of the week, the Police would raid the council flats nearby and, whilst they would not find the paint gun, they would find plenty of drugs and illegal weapons to make their trip worthwhile. The elderly residents of The Ashburnhams would then feel safe again.
“Dee.” The gorgeous young woman turned to face me, trying to anticipate my question. “Why do you think this Bob character risked exposure or even arrest by shooting me with a paintball gun? I mean, it’s not as if the time limit is up yet. I still have forty hours left.”
Ms Conrad pulled up an upholstered footrest that matched the sofa and sat down, facing me. We were less than a yard apart and my heart was beginning to race. She spoke quietly but with an assured tone that inspired confidence.
“We can’t know for sure, Josh, but I suspect that our blackmailer enjoys the game rather more than he actually needs the money.” She paused. “Despite all of the controls we have over electronic banking these days, the fact is that if you pay up we will probably never see the money again. So, as long as Bob is clever and doesn’t leave an obvious electronic trail for the police to follow, he might never be identified. To take a risk like he did tonight suggests to me that he enjoys the thrill that comes from terrifying his victims.”
“Well, he certainly scared me,” I conceded. That was something of an understatement. I could still remember vividly how I had felt when those paint pellets had hit me. I had believed I was dying, and it had shaken me very badly, although I was trying my best not to show it. I could not shake off the worrying realisation that, had the sniper chosen a different weapon, I would now almost certainly be dead. First had been the camera; then came the paintball gun. What might it be next time? I tried to put it to the back of my mind, but it wasn’t easy.
The next two hours were spent in intimate proximity, in my mind anyway, as we, the guard and the guarded, watched TV. At eleven, Dee stood up and stretched her limbs.
“We need to sleep. We might have a long day tomorrow.” With that she took a pillow and blanket and laid, fully dressed, on the recliner. “Put the light off on your way to bed.” She smiled at the look of disappointment that undoubtedly crossed my face. I would never make a good poker player, I thought, especially if one of my opponents was a stunningly attractive woman.
I sat on my bed and shook physically. Perhaps it was delayed shock. Perhaps it was the thought that at best I was about to lose all of my life savings, and at worst I could lose my life. I felt panic rising in my chest. My heart was beating uncontrollably and I began to hyperventilate. Slowly I regained control as I breathed through my nose and sipped chilled water from a bottle by the bed.
“Why me?” I thought, but no matter how hard I tried I could think of no reason why anyone would choose me for such a scam. I eventually fell asleep with the question rolling around in my befuddled brain.
Chapter 7
City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London: Thursday, 9am.
I was sitting in Inspector Boniface’s office watching a young man setting up his laptop and some associated cables and gizmos. Dee Conrad sat beside me. I stole a quick glance at my BlackBerry. There were no new messages but the newly installed countdown application clicked onto twenty seven hours as I watched.
After a restless night, punctuated by nightmares, I had awoken early before Dee had a chance to rouse me from my fitful sleep. We were in my office by seven fifteen. Dee watched as I cleared my messages and post before we set off for the police station to meet the technician, who was now settling down into the chair on the opposite side of Boniface’s desk.
“Right, Mr. Hammond,” the young man said. “My name’s Simon, and I’m a forensic computer analyst. I’ve been shown the messages you have received to date, the texts and the email. I am also aware of the paintballing incident last night, which must have been terrifying for you.”
“Not as terrifying as the real thing,” I countered.
“No, I guess not.”
I watched Simon as he set up his equipment. He was in his mid-twenties, I guessed, perhaps six feet tall and dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. He wore metal rimmed glasses and a friendly smile, and the word “geek” could have been invented to describe him. The forensic analyst turned to his laptop which had now booted up. A thin, square black box, connected to the laptop by a USB cable, showed a glowing green diode which had been flashing but was now steady. Simon tapped the keyboard and turned the laptop around so that the screen would face us.
“If I have an enemy in this game it isn’t the criminals, it’s Hollywood and the TV producers. They give the impression that a computer genius can access anything anywhere and find addresses for the police to raid. Unfortunately, that isn’t generally true. Let me start with the email.” Simon touched a key and the email came into view, exactly as I had remembered it. “Now, keep your eye on the header.” We looked intently at the lines which denoted my email address as being the recipient of Bob’s email. Simon clicked a few more keys and the header lengthened to cover half the page.
“This is the email address that sent your email..... ‘paymaster@48hrs.co.za’, which is a South African domain. As you can see, there is a large amount of routing information in the header. This lists the IP address where mail was sent from and the addresses of all intermediaries until it arrived with you at your IP address at Dyson Brecht. The unfortunate thing is that the email was sent from the IP address of Quadrille Hotel Services, who supply public area internet access and room internet access to hotel customers in the City of London. With further investigation it’s possible that we could get Quadrille to narrow the address to the actual hotel, but as anyone in that hotel could access the internet from the lobby, restaurants, gyms and so on, it’s unlikely we can do much about identifying the blackmailer with that information alone.”
Dee asked for clarification. “So, Simon, what you are saying is that, even if it’s possible that we could get Quadrille to identify the hotel the message was sent from, that doesn’t necessarily mean our man ever stayed there. He could simply have used their internet access to mislead us.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Simon agreed. “Put yourself in his shoes. He would try very hard not to leave a trail to follow. Also, it’s rather unlikely that Quadrille would get back to me with that information today, or even tomorrow. The chances are the internet access is subcontracted out to another company somewhere in the UK, and the IT guys who could track this data back might be freelancers, working for the subcontractor from home. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a long shot, and it would not necessarily guarantee us any worthwhile data in any case.”
I shook my head. “On the BBC last night, the Silent Witness team did what you just described in 20 seconds and traced the message to an individual office in a block of offices.”
“Artistic license,” Simon replied. “It simply doesn’t work like that in real life. Let’s turn to the texts and the phone records and see if we can find anything useful there.” With a few more keystrokes the screen changed again. “We know the number that sent the texts, they all came from the same phone, but guess what....”
“It was an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone,” Dee guessed out loud.
“Spot on,” Simon acknowledged with more than a little admiration in his voice. “It gets worse, though.” The analyst paused as he flicked more buttons. “From the phone number we can tell that the phone is a Nokia 2690 and that it was acquired recently. The records show that it was first activated yesterday and it may only have been on the shelf of the shop where it was bought for a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks. I draw that conclusion because that particular telephone number was only allocated earlier this month. We are waiting for confirmation, but my guess is that it was bought at a supermarket in the London area. Some place where they sell phones by the dozen and the sales assistants will have no idea who bought it. Unless Bob is a bit dim, he’ll have paid cash for it. No credit card which could be traced. But you never know. Sometimes people are careless.”