Dreams to Die For (41 page)

“Come on! Come on! I need some answers.” Ritson's impatience at his team's lack of progress had become exasperation, and he was walking around the ATU office exhorting his men to even greater effort. He had arrived at 7:30am to find that his request to GCHQ to decode the message had been refused on the same grounds of ‘Low Priority' as had earned it that dubious status previously – namely GCHQ needed more intercept material or other corroborative intelligence before they would set about deciphering the message. His MI5 liaison man, Kingsley, had provided all the information held by the ATU and Manders had counter-signed the request, but precious hours during the night had been lost. As the day passed bits and pieces of information had come into the ATU office but nothing of any great substance. There was little that would provide Ritson with sufficient cause to trigger a full scale alert or even that could justify making another approach to Manders. The Unifone number had been discontinued by the network provider through lack of usage and they did not have details of any subscriber by the names of Chalthoum, Masri or Hasan. The military were looking into the Hasan family and the parents death, but had said in an email that it would be unlikely that any separate file would be kept as deaths from bomb blasts were so numerous that only some of the names of the victims were known and recorded ‘when circumstances permitted it' – whatever that meant. Hundreds, probably thousands, of civilian casualties had simply not been counted, or identified and therefore not included in any official figures. To the outside world they never existed, let alone died. Only their relatives knew the truth and they had no one they could tell.

The University of Birmingham had been quite helpful. They had traced Yasmin Hasan and confirmed that she left in May 2003 having completed her post graduate course and had a forwarding address of a shop in Haifa Street, Baghdad. The university did however have a photograph of Yasmin Hasan, plus various documents relating to her Visa, and a facsimile of each had been sent to the ATU and were currently being verified. A computer analysis of the photograph was not required to confirm that Fadyar Masri was definitely the same person and Ritson was even more certain that Halima Chalthoum was also Hasan and Masri, despite not having a photograph, nor Crossland's statement, to prove it.

Two officers had spent all day trying to retrieve as much footage as they could from numerous CCTV cameras from Dover and trying to ascertain which direction Masri had travelled. By 5:30pm all they had was that she had driven out of Dover and taken the A2 and then the M2 towards London. It was tiring work, looking at countless tapes for the foreign Peugeot 205 and progress was slow. They were also still interrogating the data from the very latest surveillance cameras deployed on the motorway network leading from London, but so far these had not assisted the ATU enquiries. The new digital cameras, with optical character recognition of vehicle registration plates, represented a considerable advance over the old analogue ones, but as their number increased, so did their downside. The cameras collect data like a vacuum cleaner collects dust. Every day, the huge amount of data is automatically searched for non-taxed, stolen or other vehicles of interest to the police, before it is offloaded and stored onto optical disks. The ATU officers had discovered this permitted the data to be searched extremely easily, but not necessarily quickly, given the massive volumes. Additionally, they were searching motorway by motorway without any certainty of the general direction in which the suspect's vehicle had headed or even which road it was on. If they were required to include non-motorway roads in their search, they would need a lot more time – examining every optical disk in the database would be an enormous undertaking.

The French National Police had been in touch with Ritson again. Pierre Dervisais told him that Fadyar Masri had been very clever in that she had removed the entire hard drive from the computer, but made it look as though it was still in situ. That subterfuge had been discovered relatively quickly. It was, however, embarrassing that his team had not realised the disk was physically absent until they had taken the computer back to their office for detailed testing. This dispirited them, but later they had become prematurely encouraged when the forensic search team returned jubilantly brandishing what was assumed to be the missing and vital piece of hardware. The disk was apparently nearly full with thousands of separate files each individually password protected. The police diligently set about unlocking the encryption of each file or, in many cases, tried to simply by-pass it with sophisticated software of their own in order to view the documents and images. It was a laborious and extremely slow process. Every file was discovered to contain nothing more sinister than copies of publicly available material from the internet. When the French officers realised what Masri had done they were furious. One was so enraged he threw his chair onto the floor; another banged on his desk several times; and several shouts of “merde!” filled the air for nearly an hour.

“There can be only one conclusion, my friend. The suspect made a deliberate and professional attempt to slow us down which I regret to say succeeded.”

It was evident Dervisais was still angry at the waste of time and resources of his team.

“As I told you previously the property agency to which Masri paid the rent is quite legitimate, so we also made investigations to ascertain more information about the actual owners of the flat,” he continued. ”The main leaseholder paid a standing order each month to a Cayman Islands corporation which was no more than a shell subsidiary of a Panamanian Trust. This had been set up using names taken from stolen passports. As soon as any money was received into the Cayman Islands company, it was immediately transferred to a bank in Yemen. There is nothing on any documentation, if you can call scraps of paper that, about our suspect, nor on the ultimate owner's identity. Masri's own bank account showed nothing that wasn't already known. We have made enquiries of the service suppliers at the flat – the electricity supply company along with the other suppliers also received their money via a monthly standing order. I am sorry we could not get more.”

Ritson thanked him, but was disappointed. Dervisais' efforts had yielded quite a lot of periphery information that corroborated the ATU suspicions that some sort of terrorist plot was well underway, but revealed very little about Masri's intentions or provided the hard, factual intelligence Ritson so earnestly needed. The detective chief superintendent could only wait and hope that the information now passed to him by the French was sufficient for his liaison staff to get GCHQ to decipher the message.

One hour passed, then two. Nothing. No more information was forthcoming. Two hours of vital time, two hours nearer whatever Fadyar Masri was plotting for it to reach fruition. Frustrated and bad-tempered, Ritson went home having posted notice of a full review meeting of everyone in his team for 4pm the following day. He had decided his enlarged team could not sustain their efforts for much longer unless some real and more tangible results were forthcoming, and the only hope of that lay in the yet to be deciphered message. There were also other matters that required his team's attention that had nothing to do with this investigation. Those might be just as important, just as critical to the UK's well-being and safety as Ritson believed the Masri case to be, and he could not ignore those pressures for much longer. He set himself a deadline of Thursday afternoon. Unless he had more hard evidence by then, the Masri file would have to remain in abeyance pending further developments.

* * *

Senior firearms officer Greaves had travelled the Kinloch Hourn road three times from end to end during the day. He had observed Donaldson's car and thought it totally unsuitable for a holiday in the highlands, but he was used to seeing tourists make real fools of themselves. Many did not even possess a pair of boots nor a waterproof jacket and returned home to tell their relatives that they got thoroughly soaked several times, as if it was someone else's fault. Where did they think all the water in the lochs came from? In his view there were only two kinds of vehicles for the Highlands – large estates and 4x4's, like the vehicle he saw parked at the cottage by Kinloch Hourn. Despite its local registration number, he had not recognised the Land Rover and gave it little consideration when he first passed by in early morning. Greaves paid it more attention in the afternoon when he spotted the three boats out fishing. He watched their occupants, his trained eyes observing small details casual onlookers would miss. It was immediately obvious to him that only one person knew how to cast a line properly. The rest were very poor and could only be beginners.
If Truscott was the practised angler, then who were the others,
he asked himself. The security agents for certain would be in the craft nearer to Truscott, but the very sloppy casting and poor technique in the handling of the third boat strongly suggested tourists, yet the only vehicle he had seen from where its crew might have come from was the locally registered one, now parked at the cottage. Local people would know how to fish and how to handle a boat, though it was just possible the Land Rover did belong to someone fairly new in the area, possibly having moved to the Highlands to escape the rat race.

Out of curiosity he typed in the registration number for it to be checked and watched the small screen in the centre of the fascia console of his own vehicle. It revealed that the Land Rover Defender was registered to the garage at Fort William and Greaves interest waned slightly. He knew that David, the proprietor, often hired out vehicles even those he might eventually sell, which would explain everything.

“More tourists”, Greaves mumbled to himself.

Meticulously, he noted the result of his vehicle enquiry in his log book. Several hours later, when the first dark clouds raced across the tops of the mountains heralding the onset of dusk, Greaves was on his way home and passed by Eagles Rest Hotel and was surprised to see David's Land Rover parked there, since he had assumed it was being used by the tourists who had hired the tiny cottage at Kinloch Hourn. Greaves drove past the hotel and stopped, wanting to clarify his thoughts. Something niggled in his brain. He knew the tourists' blue boat must have been hired from Kinloch Hourn as those hired out by Eagles Rest hotel were all painted light grey and had two bright red stripes along each side.
Why would tourists obtain a boat from Kinloch Hourn and use the outboard to travel miles up the loch before starting to fish when the hotel boats were nearer and superior? Were the strangers staying at the Hotel or the cottage?
He decided he would investigate the cottage and its occupants tomorrow, assuming the Land Rover was not parked outside. After a boring day travelling up and down between Corach and Kinloch Hourn, Greaves was looking forward to an evening meal with his wife and speculating about the antics of crazy tourists were not going to disturb that.

Margaret MacLean had prepared a superb roast beef dinner and the conversation around the table turned to what the holidaymakers would like to do the following day. Gordon and Dean had already agreed their chosen activity, but neither said anything until Cindy had made her suggestions. As none of these seemed to elicit any favourable reaction, albeit not direct opposition, from either Assiter or Truscott, she realised that the two men had probably already discussed the subject.

“Well, you two. Seeing as my suggestions do not appear to have your support, what would you really like to be doing?”

Gordon looked a little sheepish as he turned to his American guest.

“The weather for the next few days seems set fair, cloudy with a few sunny intervals but no major rain. Looks ideal for a spot of stalking and walking the hills, might even get a stag. If not tomorrow, then Friday. How does that grab you, Dean?” Gordon asked slowly.

Before Assiter could reply, Cindy screwed up her napkin and flung it across the table at Gordon, laughing. “You bastards!” she exclaimed smiling, “You two have cooked this up on the boat today. Don't lie. I'm right, aren't I?”

Cindy's joyful face radiated merriment and everyone at the table laughed along with her. It was Assiter who spoke first, “Well, ya see Cindy. Gordon and I may have spoken a little, but nothing was firmly agreed. We definitely wanted to hear what you and Paulette had to say first. Promise.”

After a few further lighthearted exchanges it was settled that for the next two days Gordon and Dean would be on the hill, stalking. Cindy and Paulette would travel to Inverness for some shopping on the Thursday, and probably go for a walk around the dam and fish the loch themselves on Friday.

The four plotters were seated in the small lounge of the cottage, reviewing the day. Fadyar was still jubilant at discovering that there were at most only six security agents; two American and four British. She had also observed the marked patrol vehicle on the road, conspicuously and deliberately travelling up and down. The communication equipment worked really well and their tests confirmed that it was capable of receiving the transmissions from the British police radios. The CIA agents' transmission frequency was unknown, but Fadyar presumed this was due to the fact that as they were literally in the same boat there had been absolutely no need for them to be used. She was satisfied that if and when they were operated, her own equipment would be able to eavesdrop. She would have been overjoyed had she known that an elementary, but crucially vital, aspect of Assiter's protection had been overlooked. The American equipment brought into Britain courtesy of the diplomatic bag (in reality a crate accompanying Assiter on his cross Atlantic flight) did function, but used illegal UK frequencies which unsurprisingly the British radios were not manufactured to detect. As such the Americans were capable only of radio communication with each other and not with the British, something they would only discover later when the two forces desperately needed to talk with each other.