Chapter 21 – Intel

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December 31, 2011

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They were mad, Calum Reid thought, watching Ruth as she disappeared from sight down the corridor beyond the glass security door. Both Harry and her were stark raving mad. There was no other reason why they should be indulging in such a strange and counterproductive courting ritual. Calum knew that you had to be a bit of a masochist to entertain this job. He knew that Harry and Ruth, having survived longer than anyone else so far, were a bit more masochistic than the usual spook, but really – what were they playing at?

Whatever had happened between them the other night must have been one hell of a blow-out. On the surface, both of them had managed to maintain their professional fronts. Apart from being a bit distracted, they acted no differently unless they were around each other. When they were around each other, Ruth spent her time staring daggers at Harry and Harry spent his cast guilty, longing glances back at Ruth. From this, Calum surmised that, whatever had happened, it had been unilaterally agreed to be his fault and he was bearing the brunt of the consequences. Unless he had managed to knock her up, Calum conceded. That would kind of land on both of them.

He doubted this was the case, however. Quite apart from Harry being, well, completely ancient, and probably not even capable of knocking someone up anymore, Calum doubted that Ruth could being angry over something like a child. She had been completely soft on both Rosie and Wes, during their Christmas day. A baby, then, while probably inconvenient for the pair of them, would be a source of joy for her. So, Calum concluded, Harry hadn't knocked her up. What else could it be then, he asked himself? A proposal, gone wrong? Perhaps he had asked her to move in with him? Perhaps he had asked her to marry him? But he couldn't see Ruth being upset about either of those options either.

Cheating seemed the next logical option, or something from Harry's past. Calum knew that Harry had been married, and that he had been involved in a few work-related affairs he had been given warning for, over the years. In his younger days, he had played the field often enough. But there was nothing in his file for the last ten years or so. No permission to socialise forms dating further than six years. No operations involving women who could fit the profile of a lover. There had been a Russian deal he had been briefly involved in, which could have brought up a dark secret from his past – Calum knew Harry had worked in Cologne for a few years, across from Ilya Gavrik, the Russian diplomat involved in the deal – but it was a bit delayed. The Russians had left the country under a dark cloud more than a week ago. It couldn't be about them.

Whatever had happened between Harry and Ruth, then, remained a mystery. It seemed to be Harry's fault but, unlike Erin and Dimitri, Calum didn't intend on showing a cold shoulder to their boss. Whatever it was, Ruth had told him on no uncertain terms, today that it was private. And, as much as he loved to suppose and theorise, Calum wasn't going to get involved. Things had just started to look up for him, in Section D. After surviving what had seemed like an un-survivable situation, he had a new lease on life. Things which had felt important before no longer bothered him. He took his assignments as they came and resolved to be better, in all areas. Harry was giving him more responsibilities in the field, including his own tactical team to organise and a junior analyst to liaise with. It was like having a team within a team. His team. His people. Calum was enjoying it immensely. He certainly didn't want to ruin everything by pissing Harry off and getting thrown back to A Section.

Turning back to his computer, he opened the screen just in time to see Calum's message box pop upon it.

'New intel,' it said 'come thru asap'.

Resisting the strong urge to type back and tell the younger officer that he had misspelt 'through', Calum clicked the screen shut again and pulled himself to his feet. Giving a short stretch, he rubbed through his newly cropped hair and headed through to the technical suite to find Tariq leaning forwards across his desk, tapping madly. His desk was covered in wrappers and empty coffee cups – not unlike the bones of a kill, lying scattered around a lion's den, Calum thought, approaching with slight distaste. Picking his way around the mess, he pulled up a spare desk chair and sat down beside Tariq.

The young officer glanced over at him.

"Be with you in just a sec."

His skin was paler than usual, eyes marked out by dark bags. He had been working for two days straight – hell-bent on following one paper trail he thought might lead them to Avery Price. So far, he had had no luck and Calum was sure that this was no different. If the new intel had to do with Price, Tariq would have alerted the team with a victory cry rather than a simple message to Calum's computer. This was probably about one of the cross-checks he had sent through for the technical officer to perform then. Leaning back in his chair, he yawned and waited.

Tariq finished tapping after about thirty seconds and sat back too.

"I think I have something," he stated, voice empty with exhaustion, "but I need you to look at it because I think my eyes are incapable of seeing connections anymore." He blinked hard, then screwed up his face. "I'm starting to see numbers when I close them. I'm starting to actually hear my fingers tapping against plastic keys – in my mind. This might be the end."

"Nonsense," said Calum, wheeling his chair forwards and pulling the mouse towards him, turning Tariq's screen until it faced him squarely. "In the end, there will be four men on horses and much more fire, or whole-world conversion to a single religion and the formation of a new heaven and earth – depending on your religion of choice. There is also the possibility of seventy-two virgins," he added, "but I wouldn't get my hopes up, on that one. Apparently, there is some confusion between the Aramaic and Arabic words for 'virgin' and 'grape'."

Tariq blinked then, clearly giving up trying to follow the monologue, leaning back in his chair instead.

"I don't want to get excited, because every time I thought I've had something over the last five days it has ended up being bugger all, but I think that might just be an account belonging to Avery Price," he explained, pointing at the screen. "I've been digging around in the wire transfer routings, looking through bank account numbers, because I knew Price was able to transfer funds immediately between two accounts within this bank. Their protection laws stop me from being able to get personal details or details from longer than three months ago, but, if this is something, it could give us a lead on the anthrax. It's been almost two weeks," the younger officer trailed on, "I mean, we need to find it. If he gets underground with the stuff then he could wait for years before selling and our guards will be down. I mean, the next thing we hear about this weapon might be-,"

"-when its filling our lungs, giving our immune systems the old shock and awe treatment. Yeah," Calum raised an eyebrow as he panned through the screen, pulling another up beside it and comparing the information on both. "I heard Harry's rather graphic speech on that one too. Why do you think he gets his kicks out of scaring the nuts of us?" he asked, incidentally. "Childhood trauma? Psychopathy?"

Tariq didn't answer.

Calum was about to pursue the matter when his eye was caught by a series of transfers at the bottom of the page. All three from the same internet cafe – and coinciding with three coming out of Avery Price's account. "Woah... think you've got something here, mate."

"Do I?" Tariq looked vaguely surprised. "I hope so. It would be nice to go home and get some sleep."

Calum's mouth stretched slightly, into a smile.

It was as if a lightbulb had lit up in his head. Things began to connect. He could see numbers and dates and coinciding entries in multiple bank accounts. He could see invisible strings connecting it all together – not unlike that horrific mind-map that Bethan Shayne had placed on her bedroom wall, during her search for the mole. (Now that was a sure-fire sign he was losing it). Tariq had been using a program which recognised search patterns to find out if any account holders, within a certain bank, had the sort of activity that would be coming from Avery Price. It seemed he had hit gold.

"I don't think you'll be going home anytime soon mate," he told Tariq, feeling a rush of optimism. "Looks like it's going to be cot beds and standby for us for a while yet." Wheeling over, he grabbed the phone off the side of the table and raised it to his ear, tapping in Harry's extension. It rang once, twice, then he picked it up.

"What?"

"Got something for you, boss. You'd better come through."

Harry hung up. A few moments later, they heard footsteps down the hall and his head poked through the doorframe.

"You know," he stated, testily, "I think I almost preferred it when the lot of you barged into my office without asking. At least then I didn't have to get up from my seat." He fixed Calum in his sights. "What do you want?"

Ignoring the attitude, Calum beckoned him over.

"Come look at this," he pointed at the screen. "Tariq has just found a rock-solid lead."

Harry walked over and both he and Tariq leant forwards at the same time, equal looks of interest on their face as they viewed the material – Harry for the first time and Tariq, perhaps, for the first time with fresh eyes. On the screen on front of them, Calum had shifted around the windows Tariq had been toggling and also brought up a third window, containing a breakdown of the transfer routing pathway. The highlighted portions of the screen near the bottom pointed out the detail he had been so excited by. A transfer routing pathway that ran through the same Saudi bank as-

"Shit, its heading out into the same bank account," Tariq exclaimed, his face changing, opening up and becoming instantly awake in his realisation. "Price's received transfer from the four terrorists who blew you up was routed the same way, through here from that Swiss International. No wonder the trend capture threw up this as a result. It's inverted. Look," he pointed, "payment going out – Thailand, Russia and cleaning by sitting in the Saudi bank for three days. The logon ISP addresses are showing up as different providers but they are at the same physical locations. Look," he pointed again. "It's the same pattern as the payment going in. Same in there, same out, here. And here. This has got to be his. All we have to do is get inside a little further and see where he has accessed it from."

"Six?" Calum asked.

Tariq pulled a slight face.

"We might need them."

Harry looked at the screen for a moment longer, then turned to the pair of them, a slightly resigned look on his face. "I have no idea what either of you two are talking about," he admitted.

Calum turned in his chair to face Harry, as Tariq leapt forwards at the computer, tapping with renewed madness.

"We were using pattern recognition software on a group of bank accounts sent to us, by GCHQ," Calum explained, trying to keep technical terms out of it as much as was possible. Brilliant spook as he was, Harry could be a bit of a dinosaur sometimes – summed up in his routine reference to what Tariq and Ruth did as 'technical stuff'. "Trying to narrow down which accounts could have received money from the people our mole was working with, using known dates and locations of transactions as well as common routing patterns." He resisted saying 'and other technical stuff'. "A lot of them are ghost accounts, with false names, which the money only ever passes through. Decoys,"

Harry's eyes flicked over to the screen. "Like this one?"

"Yes. Well, we don't know for sure," Calum admitted, "but we do know of one existing bank account Vincent had with this bank. And we know that he used that account to perform instant wire transfers to another – so they had to be in the same umbrella group. This one is the only one so far which fits the bill. And it has the right sort of amounts passing through it. We know he splits money and sends it around the world, cleaning it so to speak, before settling it in his own bank account. Now that we've identified that this might be his account," Calum continued, pointing towards the computer, "we can direct our resources to getting inside their system from the location the account was opened. They should have all the details about when and where it was accessed on their network."

"Price is a felon wanted by the authorities. If we know the bank, can't we just subpoena them and-," Harry stopped himself, mid-way through the suggestion, realising he already knew the answer. "How far out of our jurisdiction are you searching? This isn't a UK bank, is it?"

"Venezuelan," Calum confirmed.

"Bloody fantastic." Harry sighed. "I suppose it would take us a couple of weeks to circumvent their privacy laws."

"About three months and a shedload of paperwork. Trust me," Calum inclined his head. "You're glad Tariq did it this way."

There was a slight pause.

"How legal is this software?"

"Uh..." Calum looked over at it. "It's kind of new. We adapted it from a piece Ruth and I... uh... 'liberated' from the MSS when we took down that London cell, last month."

Another pause. Even Tariq's tapping slowed, for a moment. Then Harry sighed and clearly decided not to pursue the matter. How the MSS monitored their peoples' bank accounts was there concern. What Tariq and Calum did with their software was his but he clearly thought that the benefits outweighed the possible illegalities, right now.

"So do we know who is paying Vincent yet?" he asked Calum. "Or where he is?"

"We have no idea." Calum answered, honestly, "but this account received fifty K today, so he could be on the move. That's around the right amount of cash for a deposit on a sale."

"He could be about to sell the anthrax powder."

"Yeah." Calum felt a twinge in his stomach not dissimilar to the worry which visibly passed across Harry's face. "Me and Tariq should get onto cyber-crime, over at Six, and see if they can give us a hand in cracking into this account. Apparently, they have a computer over there so powerful that the server units have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen."

"It think that is a myth," Harry commented, distractedly.

"Uh... I'm not so sure."

"I've honestly never heard about it, Calum."

"It is a secret service," Calum pointed out.

There was a gap in conversation as Tariq swore and apologised, next to them, then he resumed his tapping.

"Either way," Calum continued, as Harry turned back towards him, "we could do with any help we could get. This is the best lead we have on both the Anthrax threat and Price. The adaptable novel programs Six is running these days might be able to help. If we can get a location on Avery Price, we stand a very good chance of being able to surveil him while hijacking his bank account, direct from his personal network. We could find out who he's been selling information to, maybe going back months. This could be a major intelligence haul," Calum told Harry.

Harry's expression did not break once.

He looked reserved, darkly thoughtful.

"Our primary interest is getting that bioweapon," he stated, after ten seconds or so had passed in silence. "If you have any hint of a location – anything – you bring it straight to the top. Hijacking his account can be prepared for but you will hold off on it until I have okayed a plan. Understood?"

"Yes." Calum nodded.

"Okay." Harry nodded, rubbing one hand over his head. "Good job. Ruth will be back within the next hour. I'll clear her schedule so that she can work on this with you. I'll see if I can convince Six to get some of their cyber-crime people on-board, too. Their department head owes me a favour."

He looked more tired than usual, thought Calum, as he watched him standing in the doorway. Before, even in the worst of times, Harry had always looked like he had reserves hidden beneath the surface, something kept by, just in case he needed to spring into action. Today, however, he just looked drained. Exhausted. Older, even if he didn't look any physically older than usual. He looked, for the first time that Calum could remember, like he didn't entirely want to be here. It was strange to witness, like seeing an old dog no longer looking interested in a bone or a walk. Fading out, his father – a consummate dog man – had called it. That few days just before an old dog went off by himself and found a quiet place to die.

Old dog Harry still had some life left in him, though, Calum thought, with a strange twinge in the pit of his stomach. He had come back after the Albany fiasco, hadn't he? He had come back after numerous other scandals, over the years. He loved this job. He epitomised this job. He had given no indication that he might be about to fade out on them all and sneak away into the shadowy world that ex-spooks seemed to live; out to live that strange half-life, absent family and everything they had given up for the job, absent the job which had been their life.

"I'm going to put my tactical group on standby for tonight," Calum commented, to drag the conversation out, hoping for a chance to hear some conviction in Harry's voice, something that would reassure him that nothing was changing and everything was as it should be. Solid. In control. With Harry at the helm. "I had a Health Protection Agency man brief them all on the proper safety gear etcetera, last week. We're all ready to go, should our lead pan out."

Harry nodded.

"Good."

"Anything else you need from us?" Calum prodded.

Harry shook his head. "I've got a meeting to get to, upstairs, in ten minutes. You've got the Grid."

Calum felt a tiny swelling of pride.

He nodded, looking as authoritative as he could manage. "Okay. All under control."

"Good."

Harry turned on his heel, leaving Tariq and Calum alone in the technical suite.

Tariq tapped quietly for a moment then commented softly, through the blue-lit air, "Mate, you could not have been further up his ass there if you had tried."

Calum threw him an indignant glance.

"Like hell."

"Anything else you need from us, sir?" Tariq imitated, gleefully.

"I was just trying to be supportive," Calum retorted defensively, giving the younger officer a frown. "There is something up with him. And Ruth."

"Really..?" Sarcasm.

"Yes, actually." Calum raised his chin. "Come on, Tariq, even by Ruth and Harry's standards, you have to admit this is bad."

Tariq shrugged slightly, looking back at his computer screen.

"I don't know. I've seen her pretty pissed at him, before. And vice versa."

Calum tapped his finger against his arm thoughtfully. Perhaps the younger man was right. He had known them for two years longer, after all. Perhaps this wasn't that unusual a normal occurrence. "Well fine then," he relented, turning back around in his chair and pulling up the second screen, logging himself on and pairing the two systems in order to share Tariq's workload. "But when both of them burn out and blow up and take this entire operation down with them, don't come crawling back through the wreckage of our careers and complain to me." It wasn't entirely career-motivated, his concern, but that was the man he played here and he was loathe to let go of his mask. "I tried to warn you."

Tariq tapped away.

"I was just saying..." he murmured, after a while, "just because Ruth is no longer taking one for the team doesn't mean you have to slip into her place."

Unsure whether Tariq was meaning metaphorically or physically, Calum settled for just glaring at the younger man and muttering "piss off."

The computer screens streamed information past them.

"You know, this is the problem with you field spooks," Tariq continued, as Calum began to type on his own keyboard. "Harry's in love with Ruth, Dimitri fancies Erin, Erin thinks your her baby brother, you idolise Harry; you're all emotionally involved with each other."

Unlike yourself, oh master of cool, Calum thought, but chose not to say anything out loud.

Tariq's talk was just talk. He was young, only twenty five this year. He would learn, over the next dozen or so years – just like Calum had – that being emotionally uninvolved did not a spook make. He would learn that, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Emotions were necessary for what they did. Emotions, after all, were what made them human. And you had to hold onto your humanity in this job. Your humanity was what kept you going, through all the darkness. Emotion could be dangerous, of course, but not when it was kept in check. Self-control and sacrifice. That was what this job was about. Self control, sacrifice and balance, Calum thought, tapping into a long list of ISP addresses and selecting the top one. And a love of strong liquor – (a thought that made Calum flinch, remembering to how he suffered on Boxing day from having gone toe-to-toe with Harry with the whiskey measures, on Christmas afternoon).

Starting up a series of cross-searches, Calum leant forwards in his chair. He would find something before Ruth got back this afternoon, he resolved. Give the analyst something to get her teeth into. If they could find some technical clue, Calum knew, Ruth could worry it and chase it until she had turned it into a lead. And then they could follow that lead and they might find another. And that one might lead them to Avery Price and Avery Price might lead them to their anthrax. All was possible, he thought, dragging and dropping keywords and file extensions. They would find this mole. It was just a matter of time. And then there would be no threat. And Ruth and Harry would make up whatever argument they had had. And all would be well and orderly in Calum's world.

His cross-search hit a dead-end after four minutes.

The second one hit a dead end after forty seconds.

Only seven hundred and thirty more to go, thought Calum, stretching his fingers and leaning closer to the screen.

They would find something. Eventually.

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