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Chapter Five: Onions
As far as safe houses go, it went. As far as its location went, Lucas only knew he was there. Somewhere between London and Scotland, but was definitely in the armpit of nowhere. He lit a candle, rather than run the risk of switching on the lights, and left it burning on the kitchen table. Meanwhile, Ros was boiling water over a camp stove, foregoing the kettle that silently rusted on the disused hob of the cooker that time forgot. It took forever and a day, but she persisted until they were equipped with two passable cups of coffee.
"There's no milk," she said, sounding almost apologetic.
Lucas couldn't care less about the milk. Or the coffee in general, for that matter. He'd been staring at it blankly ever since she put it in front of him. But the burning liquid provided a valuable source of warmth for his hands.
"So, what now?" he asked.
He'd had several hours to go over it, but it still didn't make any sense. However, one thing that repeatedly intruded on his thoughts was Harry's near complete silence. Neither call, text nor email had the Section Head sent him since his fleeing London that afternoon. To Lucas, it felt ominous.
"I'll stay with you for a few hours, but then you're on your own," answered Ros. Her manner was customarily brisk and honest. "None of the Whitehall lot must know we helped you escape. Surely you understand that?"
"I can't say I understand that. I can't say I understand any of this. I mean, the very minute I allow myself to think this business in Dakar is dead buried, like Night of the Living Dead it's suddenly back from beyond to bite me on the arse again, Ros." Lucas broke off his building diatribe and pushed away from the table. Losing his temper would help precisely no one, least of all one of the few willing to help him. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean-"
"It's fine," Ros assured him. "I'd be bloody livid if I were in your place. Just hole up somewhere discreet for a while and Harry will find a way to sort this out."
She showed a level of confidence he lacked since Russia happened. Eight years of waiting for Harry to "sort this out" while he was locked up in a cage with his bollocks clamped on permanent livewires. His stomach clenched as his current predicament breathed new life into dying memories.
"Where the hell will I go?" he asked, running a hand through his hair. "I can't just keep on running. And what about Harry? He must be feeling pretty disincentivised about all this right now. How many times has he had to do this for me?"
It was like a stray dog. Lucas fed it once, now the flea-bitten beast of Dakar just kept on coming back for more. Now it was eating him out of house and home and attempting to hump the neighbour's cat – metaphorically speaking, at least. But Ros still looked unconcerned as she sipped at her black coffee.
"Harry is doing all he can," she assured him. "But shouting the odds and slamming your fists on the table can only get you so far. He needs to cool off and gather his wits. Ruth was up to something as well. There was something in that file the Home Sec handed her, some chat log or other. God knows what it was, but it came from some dark recess of the internet known only by drug dealers, Paedophiles and Ruth Evershed."
Lucas raised a brow. "I always knew there was something funny about her. And that wouldn't be the Deep Web you're referring to, by any chance?"
"That's the one."
"She has no chance of decrypting anything found on the Deep Web, Ros. You know that, even if you've never used it. That's the whole point of it. It's just layer after layer of encryption, another layer added with every page you open," he said, pessimistically.
"There are other ways, Lucas. The thing is, the team probably have their heads together right now. You need to stay calm, keep it together and don't bloody unravel this time. Play by the rules and don't give the Home Secretary even half a chance to hunt you down-"
"If this is anything to go by, he's already doing that," Lucas interjected, gesturing to the bleak kitchen. "Otherwise, what is all this?"
"God, Lucas, will you listen?! Harry is holding them off. Just lay low, like we advised, and you know we won't betray you," she retorted. "The team is working to clear your name and I should be too."
She reached into the gloom at the side of her chair, where she had left her bag. Lucas' heart sank as she readied herself to leave, although he knew it was right. But as she pulled the bag over her shoulder, she stopped and caught his attention again.
"You need to be gone from here by morning, they'll have it under surveillance. Do you have anywhere else?"
"Only my Dad's house, up in Cumbria. It's on the market, but they won't know about it," he replied. "I don't think they know about it, anyway. How much of John Bateman's life do they know about?"
He made himself sound like he was two different people at once.
"If you do go there, don't get too comfortable," she cautioned. "I'll call you again when it's safe to do so."
Before leaving, she held his gaze for a long moment and kissed him. But after that, there was no delaying the moment of departure any longer. Without a further word, she left via the backdoor which Lucas promptly bolted after her. Then he was alone again, in semi-darkness with nothing to do but dwell on what was happening. SNAFU, he thought to himself. Situation normal, all fucked up.
Nathan held his breath until he heard the deadlock click on the front door. Only then did he relax and gently nudge his way inside the dark house. Although only empty for a few days, it still carried an air of abandonment. As cold as the crypt, his breath clouded in the frigid air. Slipping a thin torch from his back pocket, he flicked the switch and directed the narrow beam of light over the floor.
A plate was left by an armchair, a book was left open on a small table. A stack of remote controls were scattered over the dining table, where flowers slowly wilted in a vase of green-tinged water. Photographs lined the mantelpiece and a crumpled TV guide had been tossed into a disused hearth. It was as though Sharaf Suleiman had just stepped out of the door.
"Are you in yet?" Tariq's voice sounded in his ear.
"I'm in," he confirmed, keeping his voice low as if someone might overhear. "Nothing of interest yet. I'll try upstairs."
The neighbours would know the occupant was dead by now. If anyone saw Nathan he knew he would be taken for a burglar. So he crept through the house and up the stairs with the silent stealth of a cat, careful to touch nothing and with his back pressed to the walls. Only the torchlight broke the darkness, lighting up painted white doors all of which were closed. Checking his gloves were in place, he tried the handles on every one he passed.
A bathroom and toilet came first, right at the top of the landing. Closing them silently, he carried on until he reached the master bedroom. He quickly found the mobile phone and a tablet. Now feeling like a burglar, he slipped them into the rucksack over his shoulder and carried on searching for anything interesting. Turning out the drawers, he aimed the torch at the contents: combs, coins, batteries and socks. Spare keys and toiletries. The normal detritus of life that accumulated unnoticed as the years rolled by.
"I've only got a phone and a tablet of some sort, so far," he said, still keeping quiet.
"Just keep looking," Tariq's disembodied voice urged. "Pen drives; mp3s, laptops. Anything at all, just bring it all in and I'll crack it wide open."
There was a whole box of flash drives in the top drawer. With no time to sort them all out, he tipped the lot – box and all – into his bag.
"Check under the bed," said Tariq.
He did so, but there was nothing there except long forgotten shoes and an electric fan. Letting himself into an office space, he collected a laptop and removed the hard disk from a desktop PC. There was a contact book he extracted just in case, but doubted it contained anything important. Once done, he got to his feet and picked up the torch again.
"There's nothing else, Tariq. Nothing that I can see."
Before he even finished the sentence, a notice board caught his eye. He crossed the office space to take a closer look, directing the beam of the torch at the notes still pinned there. Some were written in Arabic, which he disregarded. But, wedged into the bottom right corner of the board, was John Carlton's business card. On the reverse side, a phone number was scrawled in blue biro.
"Actually, Tariq, check out this number for me: 0751 191300."
With that, he slid the card into the pocket and ducked out of the room, hauling a ton of technology with him. He left via the back, careful to lock up after himself, and jumped the fence at the bottom of the garden. He landed softly on his feet in the alleyway out back and looked up at the dead street lamps.
"Okay Tariq, you can fix the lights now."
It only took a second before the lamps flickered back into life, but Nathan was gone already.
Ruth found the scrap of paper scrunched up in her coat pocket. Flattening it out on the lounge computer desk, she read over the chat log again. There was little there by way of straightforward clues, but the web address was still clearly visible. She opened Tor and drummed her fingers against the table as the connection was wired up and routed through some anonymous server on the far side of the planet.
Once in, she bypassed the search engine and typed in the address written on the paper. Rather than a standard web address, it was a sequence of numbers and letters which she input one at a time. By the time she finished, Harry was back from the Grid, where he had been shouting at William Towers over the phone. If shouting alone solved the world's problems, Harry would have achieved world peace and global unity by now.
"In here!" she called out, attention still focused on the screen. "Your dinner's in the oven."
Even when he entered the room she didn't look round. She was waiting for the mystery website to open.
"Towers is a prick," he declared. "A complete prick."
"I know, dear," she replied, absent minded. "Come and have a look at this."
Harry lowered himself down at her side, squinting at the screen. Hitman For Hire, read the header at the top of the page. "Ruth, I know I just called the man a prick, but don't you're taking things a little far?"
"No, silly," she replied, aiming a playful smack at his leg. "It was that onion address I found inside Lucas' file."
"Onion address?" he questioned, brow creasing in confusion. "You really have lost me."
Ruth looked from Harry back to the screen, wondering whether there was a way to hack the site. No doubt it wasn't a real hit man, but a contract killer had been brought in from somewhere. Even if only for the hit on Sharaf Suleiman. This site was part of the set-up on Lucas, she was sure of it. But for now, she had to dispel the cloud of confusion that was slowly consuming her husband.
"You know what the deep web is, right?" she asked.
"Heard of it," he replied. "Popular in countries where there's a national firewall, isn't it?"
"Among other things," she answered.
Demonstrating the point, she took a pencil from a stand beside the computer and turned over an old envelope. On the back, she drew an ice berg, its huge bulk beneath the wavy sea level and turned it towards him.
"The surface web, indexed by Google, is this bit here," she said, drawing an arrow pointing to the tip of the iceberg poking above the sea line. "The deep web that neither Google, nor any other mainstream browser registers, is this going on below the surface."
She drew a second arrow towards the bulk of the iceberg beneath the surface.
"Because it's not indexed by Google, it can only be accessed by a special browser that foregoes Google. Which is the Onion Router – or Tor to its regular users. The Onion Router not only allows access to hidden websites, it adds a new layer of encryption to every connection on every page that's viewed – hence the name, it's layers of an onion. So onion websites, like this one, can only be accessed by people who know exactly where they are."
It was the same encryption that made these sites, and the people who used them, impossible to track. It was what made the Deep Web so attractive to the criminal underworld. Ruth looked back at the screen, studying the details of her "hit man".
"What is this?" asked Harry, pointing to a symbol next to a number. A letter "B" with two vertical lines through it.
"coins," she answered. "A virtual, peer-to-peer, currency system. It's a fast, secure transfer that can't be hacked or traced. So, our friend the hit man here is charging 75,000 coins for hits in Great Britain and 25,000 coins for hits in the rest of the world."
Harry's brow was so furrowed it resembled a map of the underground. He was pointing at the screen of the computer, almost accusingly, dumbfounded. Not to mention the unpleasant shade of red creeping into his face.
"So … this chap here," he said, jabbing his finger at the screen again. "He's an actual, genuine contract killer who's advertising his services on the web-"
"No, Harry. It's a load of bollocks; all these hit men are fraudsters conning people out of coins." She tried not to sound utterly exasperated, but sometimes explaining technology to Harry was like teaching a chimp to play chess. It was only a matter of time before shit began to fly. "Someone's set this page up and is claiming that the 'hit man' behind it is our Lucas."
"How do you even know that?"
Ruth shrugged. "I don't. It's a hunch. Because it all fits too neatly. But think about it, there's this slip of paper left in Lucas' fake file and it leads straight to this fake website for some fake assassin. There's this chat log that's supposed to have come from said fake site and it points straight to Lucas."
"Yes, but we still have no way of proving this," he replied.
He was right about that, at least. She sighed heavily, shutting the Tor browser down and locking the PC. When she turned back, Harry had left for the kitchen and what remained of the meal she had prepared. Wearily, she followed him out there and came to a rest in the kitchen door.
"So, did you speak with Towers again?"
"He's adamant that Lucas is the one responsible for the Baghdad bomb," replied Harry, sniffing at the burned remains of his dinner. It looked as if the dog's day was about to get better, at least. "And he cannot be reasoned with. What's worse is that he's started dragged up Ros' past, too. The Yalta affair."
"What?" Ruth had been in Cyprus at the time, but she had heard all about it. "Harry, this is getting ridiculous. At this rate he'll be picking off Section D one by one. What the bloody hell will he make of our own respective histories should he ever even get a sniff of the truth?"
"That's why we need to act fast," he said, reaching for the wine. "Look, I'm getting an early night. Tomorrow will be another day in glorious paradise and we need to be prepared."
Ruth stood aside, letting him pass. She noticed then how utterly defeated he looked. That all too familiar, hangdog look of self-recrimination was back in his eyes. Drawing a deep breath, she prepared to follow him, mentally preparing herself to catch the inevitable fall out.
Lucas was out of the door in the hour before dawn. A mist was building over the surrounding fields, rolling down from the distant hills. The grass beneath his shoes damp with dewfalls. Still cold, he huddled inside his jacket and pulled his hood down low. A dirt track led between farmer's fields, stretching off into the distance. It was at least five miles to the nearest town. A journey he needed to make before morning was done.
He fished inside his pocket, looking for his new rail card. When he found it, he held it in the palm of his hands and studied the photograph again. Lucas North is dead again. Long live Andrew Marsden. After a brief glance back at the house he had stayed in, he shrugged his rucksack on and started walking.
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