DARKNET CORPORATION (19 page)

Chapter Twenty Two

Max Brandt stood in front of the room with a large number of
officers, both
Hesse
state police and federal
officers to brief them for the raid they were about to conduct on the premises
identified by the CIA. No one from the CIA was present but the accuracy of the
information they had provided for the Bad Hersfeld operation was sufficient for
German police to obtain the search warrant that had been issued for the raid.

Given the shootout at the Bad Hersfeld warehouse and what
they had found in it, there was little delay in processing the paperwork and
providing the legal authority, but Max still felt he was out on a limb with the
flimsy evidence that the commercial building they were about to enter was
implicated. All he knew was that a mobile related to the escaped drug smuggler
from Bad Hersfeld was in this building.

It could be entirely innocent or it could be another shootout
like Bad Hersfeld. But if the escaped drug smuggler or any of his associates
were in this building, Max wanted them. They had already lost a BPOL colleague
in the Bad Hersfeld raid, not to mention a murdered hostage and several dead
criminals.

Max wanted this spree closed down quick. He still had an army
of people cleaning up the mess in the spa town 150 kilometres north. He didn’t
want another mess.

He outlined the plan and checked for questions. One of the
BPOL assault team would get eyes on the inside using keyhole a camera with one
other officer providing fire protection. The rest of the BPOL team will be
ready to break down the doors and enter once they knew how many people were
inside, whether or not they were armed and their relative locations. The
Hesse
state police were to surround the premises and Max
pointed out the assigned positions to his men on a hand drawn map on a
whiteboard.

Once the occupants were neutralised the state police were to
commence cataloguing and processing the occupants and searching for anything
which might implicate them in the drug operation; drugs; money; weapons;
weighing scales, documentation,
etc.
They all knew the drill on evidence.

The combined police forces left the briefing room and went in
several vehicles to approach the target commercial premises.

Once everyone was in position Max gave the order for the two
BPOL officers to sneak forward and check the situation inside with the keyhole
camera squeezed in through the gap under a door. The officer operating the
camera spoke quietly on the radio network identifying six people in the
‘chamber’ as he described it; three women and three men. None were seen to be
actually holding firearms. He described their positions and their activity.
They seemed to be operating machines and moving things back and forth.

Satisfied that the threat was small and having assigned
officers to each of the identified individuals inside the BPOL team approached
the door to the room, with a heavy battering ram operated by two officers on
either side with handles. There was a countdown and then the door was
demolished and the BPOL teams cascaded in shouting.

It wasn’t long before the BPOL team leader, Hans
Tugendhat
, came walking casually back to gesture Max and
the rest of the team to enter the building.

Inside were a series of tables each with a note counter
machine on one end and a series of briefcases laid out along the table.
Alongside the note counter there were boxes of envelopes and a much bigger
stack of wads of bank notes. Each table was working from a printed list showing
bank branches, amounts, account numbers identical to the one found in Wood’s
laptop recycle bin.

Two of the men were security protection. Muscled and large
they had been too slow to reach their weapons as the BPOL team entered. The
third man appeared to be the ‘boss’. All three were prone; wrists bound by
cable ties. The three women were all sitting back to back; cable ties around
their wrists with their arms in front of them.

The BPOL team searched the rest of the building and declared
it ‘
klar
’.

Max surveyed the scene. He leafed through the filled
envelopes, sitting upright in the briefcases noting the pre-printed label on
each one showing the same details as on the printout list. He poked one
envelope letting the notes flick out from under his finger, assessing how much
was in each envelope. Then he read the printout and saw that there was a
complete inventory of what had been packed.

He read the totals on the sheet;
€135,000. Then he flicked through the
pile of sheets under the top one. He figured there was at least half a million
Euros in briefcases on this table and there were three other similar tables.
There was no sign of any drugs.

None of the three men were the escapee from the warehouse shootout,
according to the description.

Max looked at the little piles of detritus extracted from the suspects
pockets and flicked open a wallet with the end of a pen. He checked the
driver’s license details and compared it with the three men still lying on the
stomachs, and noticed a credit card. It was unusual; issued by
Banco
Tequendama
of Colombia. He raised an eyebrow in a squint
way.

He started interrogating the men first trying to determine if the
briefcases would be picked up from here or were to be delivered elsewhere.
There was no comment. He decided that on the remote chance that they would be
picked up from this site he would move the prisoners and the evidence to the
police station they had made as their base and leave a team here to arrest
anyone who arrived looking for a briefcase.

It still took almost an hour to photograph everything, close up the
briefcases, count the stacks of money and bag everything up completing the
inventory of evidence before they could finally get the police presence away
from the location.

The small remaining contingent of police made
themselves
comfortable and set up a roster for lookouts and coffee makers.

-|-

The porter picked an envelope off his trolley, walked into Bill’s office
and handed it to Bill. “Here you are ‘guv’.
P’lice
courier delivered it ten minutes since.”

“Thanks Alf. How are you keeping?” Bill replied looking at the aged
porter delivering the mail.

“
Mus’n’t
grumble. You
back from
back’ve
beyond then?” he asked.

“No! I’m still there Alf!” Bill joked back at him.

The catalogue style buff envelope had a blue Metropolitan Police logo on
the front. Bill opened it to find the arrest sheet for George Wood’s drunk and
disorderly arrest in Ilford the previous December; a forensics report on the
materials in the radiator, and a report on the analysis of the Post Office box
Wood was using.

He flicked over the title page of the arrest sheet and read. Although it
gave the location of the offence as the ‘King’s Head’ pub on
Cranbrook
Road the statement of offence seemed standard.
What Bill didn’t expect was that it gave the name of another pub patron as
having been the original complainant. “Why hasn’t anyone mentioned that there
was another person involved in this fracas we could follow up with?” Bill
thought, genuinely surprised. “Hadn’t Gower at least read this report and
spotted this?”

Bill turned the page and read a handwritten note signed by Detective
Inspector Gower to the effect that he had found the person involved in the
fracas with Wood and interviewed them. While the person said he did not know
Wood well, he had suggested that Wood lived on ‘The Drive’ in Ilford.
Unfortunately, Gower explained, there was nobody on that street named ‘Wood’ or
either of the aliases in the forged passports, listed at any address in phone
books, electoral lists or any of the normal immediate sources of information.

Gower explained that he had therefore set it train investigations and enlisted
the Ilford Police station to check registered property owners, tenant registers
and local Redbridge council records for any signs of Wood with any of the known
aliases.

Bill’s confidence was restored in the Met. He turned to the ‘forensics’
report. Wood’s fingerprints were confirmed on the Sig Sauer. Bill nodded. It
wasn’t a surprise that Wood did not think it necessary to wipe fingerprints off
a gun he had secreted. The ballistics report had not matched the gun with any
unsolved crimes.

The passports were good forgeries and the underlying identities were
genuine enough to get him past most customs checks. The cash amounted to
£50,000 and €75,000.

They had made a request to the Colombian police for information on the
credit cards but expected it would take a long time before any information came
back, if ever.

There was a list of files on the USB stick. The forensics report stated
that they included software, a secured area they could not access and data
tables with ‘.
dat
’ file type which could be a
database for an application, but there was no suggestion about what that
application might be. The key blade was described as a standard key type that
could be used in a wide variety of lock types.

Bill called Cullen and asked him to urgently courier the USB stick to
John
Buttrose
at GCHQ in Cheltenham, who had the
expertise to fully analyse it. He cursed himself for being so passive about the
USB stick. He’d known it was a breakthrough and now realised it was a waste of
time going through police procedure for evidence cataloguing. He should have
insisted on the data on the USB stick going directly to GCHQ. Well, he’d sorted
it now.

He consciously set aside his irritation and turned to the report on the
post office box. The box had dozens of items, with a variety of addressees
other than Wood. There were bank statements; documents from the stock exchange;
and company’s house and other formal looking things. It became clear that the
post office box was being used by a wide range of fake identities that needed
to be maintained for company directorships and bank accountholders used in the
criminal activities. He made a note into his phone to have the identities
followed up.

The post office box was registered to a named individual who turned out
to be a false identity. “Phew, the number of identities is staggering.
All those bank accounts, companies, and passports.
It just
keeps mounting,” thought Bill. It dawned on Bill why they needed a department
just to administer the compliance and paperwork on all the front companies and
identities.

Then there was a grainy picture inserted into the report from more than a
month previously of a closed circuit security camera image. It was Wood, head
bowed, but quite recognisable. He stared at the image for a moment then closed
the file.

Realising that all of this intelligence was useful he started to scan all
the pages to put them up into the
Bicep
subdirectory and thinking about
marking up the all the identities, phone numbers, locations and other unique
elements that were not already in the database. He stopped himself. He wasn’t
even sure why he hesitated but he trusted his intuition and there was something
twitching at the back of his neck.

Now that the database was in his mind Bill twisted around and logged into
the Dinner-Jacket directory and browsed through the latest input. There was an
update on the Kosovo and Montenegro accounts from Jenkins.

The report revealed that the printed ‘
smurf
lists’ were sequenced geographically, suggesting that the ‘
smurf
‘
making the deposits would need to be driving, given the distances between the
branches. But more interestingly, the route was optimised; programmed to
minimise distances, but also to minimise the number of turns against the
traffic flow.

The lists showed that separation was kept between
smurfs
;
no two
smurfs
would visit the same branch on the same
day; no
smurf
would visit the same branch more than
once; and no deposit would be made to the same account on the same day.

“Wow!” Bill thought, “Careful attention to detail. Do they make
mistakes?” It wasn’t immediately obvious to him what the rationale for the
sophisticated routing and separation was, but he was impressed. All of the
lists that had been seized revealed the same characteristics. The assessment
was that only five ‘
smurfs
’ would deposit 2.4million
euros into ninety bank accounts over a period of five days.

There were accounts at seven different banks and clearly the CIA was only
able to ‘crack’ some of them given that the intelligence provided was for only
three of the banks. For those that were exploited the report said that most of
the money was transferred out using online foreign exchange transfers to banks
in countries all over the world, especially South America. Although there were
a large number of accounts, each account typically only transferred money to a
few new accounts, concentrating the money flow.

The analysis was that transferring to a small number of foreign accounts
minimised the interest that might be raised in the sending account. Each of the
transfers was just below the reportable limits and each account had a foreign
exchange transaction not more than once a month. All of this was designed to
keep the activity invisible to normal money laundering surveillance but was
capable of transferring a million euros a month out of the 90 accounts
identified.