Angela looked around at the dozen or so cars parked on that level of the garage.
‘You mean steal one?’
‘Nothing so dramatic. What I had in mind was just hiring one.’
Angela nodded slowly. ‘And then what? Can we just drive to the airport and get on to a flight to London? What about George?’
‘We daren’t risk trying to fly out of Spain now. We know the kind of connections and reach these people have. If I was trying to find us, about the first thing I’d do would be to organize a watch on all our credit card transactions plus red-flag our passports.’
‘Can they do that?’
Bronson nodded.
‘Probably. The only way they could have got an assassin to the café where you met Anum Husani, at the time the meeting took place, would be if they had hacked into his email. You didn’t arrange the rendezvous on the telephone, and there was no other source for that piece of information. Hacking — or even tracking — emails is legally and technically very difficult. It needs either access to something like the Echelon global surveillance system or the assistance of some pretty senior guy in whichever Internet service provider supplied Husani’s email facilities.’
‘And they must have tracked that assassin’s mobile phone as well,’ Angela reminded him, ‘otherwise they couldn’t have known we were in that hotel.’
‘You’re quite right. And if they can do that kind of thing, it’s not too big a stretch to assume that they will also have people working within the banking system who could put a watch on credit card transactions.’
‘But then the moment you hire a car they’ll know about us as well, won’t they?’ Angela protested.
‘Yes … but all the credit card transaction will show is that we’ve hired a car. It will take quite some time for them to get to the car hire company and find out exactly what vehicle we’ve hired, and by the time they do that we’ll be miles away. With a plane, we’d have to wait until we could get on one, and then go through security, where they could have people working for them. We’re much more likely to get away with it in a hire car.’
‘So where are we going to drive to?’
‘London,’ Bronson said. ‘If we keep clear of the autoroutes and pick places to stay where the car can be parked off the road and out of sight we should be safe. And there’s another reason as well. I think we could do something to help George.’
Angela looked at him, puzzled by his sudden change of heart.
‘But how can you do that?’ she asked.
‘We can play them at their own game. But first we have to find a hotel.’
72
The backstreet hotel Bronson had picked was not exactly the Ritz, but it did have one thing that he needed: a free Wi-Fi system.
‘We have something else that might help us,’ Bronson explained: ‘the mobile phone I took off that assassin.’
‘How does having possession of that man’s mobile help?’
‘Even if you try to delete almost all the personal data from a mobile phone, the unit still holds an enormous amount of information. If you’ve got access to the right kind of computer program, you can read SMS messages, inspect the call register, look at images loaded onto the phone, and a whole lot of other stuff.’
‘And you have software like that?’ Angela asked. ‘Programs you can use to hack into a mobile?’
‘No,’ Bronson replied, ‘but luckily, I know a man who does, and he isn’t particularly bothered about the legal implications. I need to call Billy the Kid.’
Angela chuckled when she heard the name.
‘And he lives around here somewhere, does he? Conveniently on hand?’
‘Of course not. He lives in a small, cramped and incredibly grubby basement flat in Tooting.’
Angela regarded him with suspicion.
‘So he’s a hacker, this Billy the Kid person. How exactly do you know him?’
‘I met him through an operation I was involved in. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or at least that’s what he said. We couldn’t make anything stick, and my guess is that he wasn’t involved. Anyway, I interviewed him a couple of times and we kind of hit it off. After we let him go I kept in touch. I found that having somebody I could call on who was a real computer expert, not the half-trained idiots who staff the IT sections of most police stations, was really useful.’
‘And is he just a kid?’
Bronson nodded. ‘He looks about eighteen, long hair, granny glasses and grunge clothing, but he must be in his late twenties, I suppose. And he lives and breathes computers.’
‘OK,’ Angela said, ‘it sounds as if he might be able to help with this, but how the hell are you going to give him access to the phone?’
‘Let me show you.’
73
Once Bronson’s laptop had loaded, he quickly clicked on the Skype icon, found a number labelled ‘BTK’, and clicked ‘Call Phone’. As soon as the system began dialling, he picked up his dual-function mouse-phone — a cheap gadget he’d used before and found much more reliable than the speakers and built-in microphone on his laptop — and held it up to his ear.
The one thing he knew was that Billy would answer his call, because his mobile phone was virtually a component part of his body. He never went anywhere, not even, Bronson suspected, to the shower — assuming he took one — without taking the phone with him. His call was answered in under three seconds.
‘Yup?’
‘Billy, it’s Chris Bronson, and I need a favour.’
There was a chuckle from the other end.
‘Long time no see, man. How’s it hanging? I know you only call me when you need help, so what’s wrong? Your laptop exploded or Windows 7 crashed?’
‘Oddly enough, no,’ Bronson replied. ‘Look, I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I need you to take a look at a mobile phone for me.’
‘No problemo. Drop it round next time you’re passing and I’ll check it out.’
‘It’s not that easy. I’m in Spain at the moment, and the phone belongs to a suspected criminal. The problem is that I’m not working here officially, so I can’t get the phone examined by the Spanish police. Is there any way you can do it remotely?’
There was a short pause while the man at the other end considered the options.
‘Coupla questions, then. What’s the connector on the phone?’
‘A mini USB, the same as mine, and I’ve got the lead with me,’ Bronson said.
‘No problem. It’ll just look like an external hard drive. OK. You still got that remote access program I gave you? TeamViewer?’
‘Yes. Do you want me to run it right now?’
‘In a sec. I’ll talk you through it, step by step, ’cause I know you’re not too bright at this kind of thing.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ Bronson said.
‘OK,’ Billy went on, no hint of humour in his voice, ‘the first thing is, you need to take out the SIM card.’
‘But surely the SIM card holds all the data?’
Billy chuckled again.
‘Wow, you really are out of date, aren’t you? These days, about all the SIM card usually holds is the phone number. Modern mobiles have big internal memories. They have to, because of all the crap people load onto them: emails, photographs, cached web pages, games and all the rest. If there’s anything useful on this phone you want me to take a look at, it’ll be inside it. So, take out the SIM card, put the battery back in for now, and then plug it in to your laptop.’
Bronson did so.
‘When you’ve done that, run the TeamViewer program and I’ll do the same at this end, then we’ll see what we can find out.’