Prime Target

5

At 9.10 a.m. on Monday, C.W. Whitlock downloaded the final piece of information to expand the details of the list Philpott had given him on Friday morning. The job had been painstaking, frustrating and exhausting. Worse than that, the expenditure of a whole weekend on the work had put a strain on Whitlock’s private life. Following a hurried and stressful cancellation of a Saturday-night dinner party, his wife was no longer communicating.

After the fourth attempt to reach her that morning he put down the telephone and saw the final lines of text scroll up on the computer screen. He sat back and yawned. Feeling old, he decided, was a matter of how much hope you abandoned. For twenty-four hours he had felt rundown and sinking, aware of no clear end. Seeing the long job finished did not quite lift his spirits, but there was a measure of relief. Relief, in turn, fired a tiny hope: things between himself and Carmen might work out with a minimum of fighting. ‘And a pig will go flapping over the UN complex any minute,’ he said aloud.

Whitlock was a man people tended to like on sight, a native Kenyan with skin a girl once called light umber, and gold-brown eyes his mother swore would break many hearts. His skin colour was part of a legacy from his grandfather, a white British Army officer, whose genes had also conferred a strong jaw and a firm mouth, which C.W. softened with a moustache.

He leaned forward, tapped the PRINT button and checked the clock. He was up against the deadline. Too often, it seemed, he was handed jobs with no slack in the schedule. He picked up the internal telephone and dialled 3 for Security.

‘Calvin? Has Mr Philpott arrived yet?’

‘He signed in five minutes ago.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sorry to dash your hopes.’

‘That’s all right, Calvin. The day he does turn up late, I’ll buy you lunch.’ He put down the phone. ‘This,’ he sighed, ‘is no life for a sensitive boy.’

He was Oxford-educated, a former soldier with wide experience as an officer in the Kenya Intelligence Corps. He had been recruited into UNACO by Philpott himself, and was now the longest serving member of Task Force Three. On two occasions Philpott had openly acknowledged that Whitlock was the most versatile and well-informed of his active agents - a distinction, Whitlock believed, that invited abuse.

As the last piece of information came off the printer he signalled Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Berlin and switched momentarily to voice contact. He thanked the duty information controller for his help and expressed the hope that he could return the favour.

Two minutes later he walked into the washroom with the accumulated data in a manila folder under his arm. Mike Graham was there, standing by the basins, bending to see himself in the mirror as he combed his hair. His reflection nodded at Whitlock, who looked grim.

‘Morning, C.W. Nice to see a guy who can start the week with a grin.’

Whitlock put down his folder and rolled back his shirtsleeves. He washed his hands and face, re-tied his tie and buffed his toecaps at the polisher. He came back to the basins and leaned close to the mirror, pulling up one eyelid, then the other.

‘I can’t decide if I’m anaemic, or if clinical depression has crept in.’

‘I hear you’ve been on all weekend.’

‘The Selby case. I did a workup on a list of German citizens, most of them hard to nail. Not a criminal record among them, so I had to trespass on a lot of legitimate secrecy.’

‘Nobody does it better.’

‘Go ahead,’ Whitlock sighed, ‘patronize me. I thrive on that.’

Mike put on his jacket as he went to the door. ‘Meeting in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t be late.’

‘I’m moving as fast as I can…’

Three sides of UNACO’s briefing room were panelled in dark shiny wood. The fourth was a ceiling-to-floor window looking out on the East River. The centrepiece of the room was a long polished table with three chairs at each side and one at the end near the window. On the table were notepads, pencils, glasses and two water pitchers. A long ebony sideboard against the right-hand wall had a steel tray with coffee, tea and a Thermos jug of chilled Coke.

Philpott was already there when Mike Graham and C.W. Whitlock walked in. He stood by the window reading a fax. Lucy Dow sat at the end of the table nearest the door. Lucy was a tall, solemn-faced young woman, an authority on Arab affairs with three years experience in Lebanon as a field operative. Sabrina was there too, pouring coffee.

‘Welcome home,’ Mike said. ‘How was England?’

‘Strenuous.’

‘Did you remember my Bath Olivers?’ Whitlock said. ‘Or did they get forgotten in the whirl of events?’

Sabrina pointed to a Fortnum and Mason’s bag on the sideboard. ‘Six packets. Enough to turn up the flame of nostalgia till it hurts.’

‘Bless you.’ Whitlock pecked Sabrina’s cheek. ‘Those biscuits are all I really miss about my student days.’

‘You must have really lived it up,’ Mike said. ‘What did you do - crumble them into a chillum and smoke them?’

‘Right.’ Philpott looked up from his fax and pointed at the table. ‘Sit down, will you? I’ve a busy day so we must keep this brief.’

Whitlock and Mike brought coffee to the table and sat opposite each other as they always did. Sabrina sat somewhere different every time. She did that in case anyone imagined there was significance in the way the only permanent female member of the unit sat in relation to the other two operatives and to the chief. Today she sat at the top of the table on the same side as Whitlock, adjacent to Philpott.

‘You’re all familiar with the superficial details of the Emily Selby shooting,’ Philpott said, opening a folder in front of him. ‘Lucy is here this morning to add anything that might help in formulating at least the nucleus of a procedure. I can add to what you all know about the case by telling you that early on Saturday, a call was received here at the UN from Colonel Wolrich of Security Liaison, working out of the US Embassy in London. He talked about the case with the Deputy Secretary General of the Security Council. As a result of their discussion, the Selby inquiry has been made our business.’

‘So my weekend wasn’t a complete waste,’ Whitlock said.

‘Why did they pass it straight to UNACO?’ Lucy asked.

‘Well, there’s the hard evidence the gunman was a trained assassin, and a high-profile one at that. There’s the fact that he travelled West to kill an American who happened to be a Jew, and who happened to be working for the government, right inside the White House. That bare-bones synopsis alone makes this our kind of case. We have a strong enough indication of international crime, with the attendant danger of escalation, to warrant UNACO intervention.’

‘I can vouch for the killer’s prominent profile,’ Lucy said, crossing and uncrossing her long legs as she spoke. ‘They were very proud of Yaqub Hisham in the Lebanon.’

‘Ever meet him?’ Sabrina said.

‘He wasn’t a social animal, but yes, I was in the same big tent as him one time, along with maybe fifty others, while I was doing a hill-gypsy routine for cover. He was nothing unusual as terrorists go, except he was maybe luckier than most, or more foolhardy. Until he got too hot a target for the Israelis, he was really the main man. Scourge of the Jews, they called him. When things warmed up and Mossad started closing in, it was a top Arab surgeon that volunteered to change Yaqub’s face. A big freebie, carried out in one of the finest hospitals in Egypt.’

‘Was it business as usual after the face-change?’ Philpott said.

Lucy shook her head. ‘Mossad got leaked a picture of him. From Yaqub’s point of view it was a waste of time. He ended up with a face he thought wasn’t nearly as pretty as his real one, and the way things turned out he might as well have hung on to the old face. He had to get back into hiding. That’s why he went to Morocco. Hard for the avenging Israelis to get at him there.’

Philpott looked at Mike. ‘Fill us in on what you learned.’

Mike gave them a summary on the Arab’s un-exceptional stay in London, up to the time he killed Emily Selby and then shot himself. ‘Lucy could tell us more, but the things we most need to know are his reason for killing Emily Selby, and the source of the gun he used. So far, those things remain a mystery.’

‘Sabrina?’

Sabrina explained how she got into Emily Selby’s hotel room, and what she found during her search. ‘For a tourist Emily carried a lot of stuff, but the key and the list were the only items out of the ordinary. The key wouldn’t be half so interesting if it hadn’t been stitched into her jacket.’

‘What impressions did you get about the woman herself?’ Philpott asked.

‘Tidy and well organized, though perhaps to a pathological extent.’ Sabrina explained about the piece of ruler she had found, and about clothes stored by colour, bottles in the bathroom regimented by size. ‘The kind of clothes she wore indicated she had good fashion sense, but she was also reticent, modest probably, because she had what I call an extravagance-shut-off. She had limits and barriers, she showed flair but with enough of a conservative streak to stop herself from being flamboyant.’

‘Overall impression?’ Philpott said.

‘That she was intelligent, gifted and inquisitive, with a tragedy at the centre of her life, supported by the evidence of her compulsive neurosis,’ Sabrina said. ‘Compulsive rituals, notably in the behaviour patterns of intelligent people, indicate that they use rigid and complicated routines to divert their minds from areas of pain.’

C.W. was nodding. So was Lucy.

‘Emily Selby’s history supports that interpretation,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Her employment record, which I read as soon as I got here this morning, shows she was widowed three years ago. She suffered a compound tragedy, because her husband and father died at the same time and in the same place.’

Philpott tapped the photocopy in front of him. ‘Lake Cayuga, Ithaca, New York State,’ he said. ‘A fishing accident. Verdict of drowning on both men. We will look into the details. Now, Sabrina, did you find anything at all to link Emily Selby with Erika Stramm, the woman with her in the picture?’

‘I’m assuming the pencilled initials ES at the bottom of the list stand for Erika Stramm. But that’s all I have. I’m still working on a connection.’

Philpott looked at Whitlock. ‘Tell us how you fared with the list.’

Whitlock had his folder open, the sheets of information spread out before him. ‘It’s a list of thirty German names and addresses, and all the names are male,’ he said. ‘I sifted the criminal records first, but there was nothing. Whatever else they are, these are law-abiding citizens. Then I had to go the slow route, with the help of Interpol. Everybody was very helpful, and eventually I got expansion -as much as is known - on every name on the list.’

‘What’s their connection?’ Mike said.

‘Nothing worthy of the name. They don’t appear to be related by blood or commercial ties. They’re apparently prospering in various quiet ways, but that’s all they seem to have in common. Well, except for one factor. We know that fifteen of the men on the list were adopted. They were war orphans.’

‘And the others?’ Philpott said.

‘No childhood records extant. Destroyed by enemy action. The bombing of Dresden and Berlin and countless other communities wiped out millions of official histories. It simultaneously provided a blank slate for the creation of others.’ C.W. spread his hands. ‘About two-thirds of the population records collated in Germany during the immediate post-war years are just not reliable, from an investigative standpoint.’

‘What’s the men’s professional range?’ Sabrina asked.

‘Everything from bookbinding and carpet-tile manufacture to medicine and law - there are two doctors and two lawyers - the rest are one-offs. Interpol tried a few test searches with the records of marriages but no links showed up.’

Mike asked if they were all about the same age.

‘It’s tight, between fifty-nine and sixty-five years old.’

‘I think there might be something in the fact there are so many orphans,’ Sabrina said. She saw Mike shake his head. ‘At least I won’t close my mind to the possibility,’ she added, giving it an edge.

‘And in the meantime,’ Philpott said, ‘I won’t make any wild guesses about the significance of this list. However…’ He pushed forward a copy of the list and pointed to a name halfway down the page. ‘I’m concerned that this man’s name appears on it.’

The others turned their heads to peer at the list.

‘His name is Andreas Wolff. He’s an Austrian computer systems engineer and program designer.’

‘I can see his face now,’ Mike said.

The others looked at him.

‘Youthful middle-aged, short salt-and-pepper haircut, steel-framed glasses and a great smile.’

Philpott nodded slowly. ‘What are you trying to tell us, Michael?’

‘His picture’s on the boxes of a very expensive series of computer games. They’re on sale all over the place.’

‘Mike spends a lot of time in toy shops,’ Sabrina said.

‘This guy is a king of contemporary games design. He specializes in hybrids: dungeons and dragons, arcade stuff and straight crime detection rolled into one. It must be a great formula, the games sell fast and they ain’t cheap.’

‘Andreas Wolff is certainly well known for his recreational software,’ Philpott said dryly. ‘However, in security and law-enforcement circles, which is to say serious circles, he’s also an eminent individual. He created the software that protects all the data carried by ICON.’

ICON - the International Criminal Observation Network - was the main criminal intelligence service in the West. Criminal records, fingerprint files, modus operandi profiles and databases, plus details of hundreds of current and impending police operations were carried and interchanged on the ICON network. With appropriate clearance and the necessary keyboard skills, an operator could call up the details of virtually any crime, any criminal or any current police record in a matter of seconds.

‘The man on the list is definitely the same Andreas Wolff?’ Sabrina said.

The address is the same,’ Philpott said, ‘and I see from C.W.’s information that the age is right, too. Wolff is fifty-eight. I repeat, I won’t make wild guesses about the significance of the list, but it’s worrying that Wolff’s name comes up in a mysterious context at a time like this.’

‘Like what?’ Sabrina said.

‘Well, as you know, the complexities of ICON have multiplied in the past year. What you don’t know is that as more law-enforcement agencies have committed their data to the network, Andreas Wolff has become indispensable. ICON’S continued existence depends on his expertise.’

‘You mean,’ Mike said, ‘that half the world’s police and national security organizations have been silly enough to put all their eggs in one basket? How come?’

‘It’s not an ideal state of affairs,’ Philpott said, ‘and nobody planned it that way. Wolff has become so closely linked to the system, and to determining its rate of development, that he’s pulled ahead of others in the field. No one else understands his programming routines or his security protocols.’

‘So if anything were to happen to Wolff,’ Whitlock said, ‘archive security could stagnate and the files would soon be vulnerable.’

‘That’s precisely what I’m saying. The potential gain from hacking into ICON is vast. It’s inestimable. And it pains me to tell you that the possibility of getting inside ICON is the driving force behind a lot of developments in electronic crime.’

‘Do hackers stand a serious chance?’ Lucy said.

‘Oh, yes, they have a chance and they’ve taken it. ICON’S security has already been breached.’

Lucy looked startled. So did Sabrina.

‘Twice in three weeks,’ Philpott said. ‘Each time it was open for only a microsecond before alternative encryption routines cut in, but the warning is clear enough. The current generation of safeguards is being eroded, and we’re not over-stocked with alternatives.’

‘Who’s doing it?’ Lucy said.

‘Lord knows who. I shouldn’t think it’s any one group. It suits criminal organizations anywhere in the world to have a hole knocked in law enforcement. Hackers try all the time, and they’re fed big financial inducements to keep trying.’

‘So what’s being done?’ Mike said.

‘For the moment, Andreas Wolff provides emergency ICON security by changing the custodian routines at twelve-hour intervals. He will do this until his new generation of self-enhancing safeguards are test-run and installed.’

‘So if Wolff leaves the picture for any reason,’ Sabrina said, ‘the whole of ICON security collapses?’

‘It could be that extreme,’ Philpott said. ‘We could shut down ICON temporarily in an emergency, but the disruption would be catastrophic. It would be nearly as bad as having the system broken into. The new security arrangements will change everything. ICON will in effect become auto-secure. But until then we remain at serious risk. Without Wolff’s support, records and operational strategies could be uncloaked long enough to bring this organization’s security to its knees.’

Philpott stopped abruptly and looked at his watch.

‘Right.’ He stood. ‘That’s it. I have to go. Compare notes. Make sure you all know the same amount about the case. The facts as they stand present us with a paradox, but in theory the way forward is simple. Find out what links the names on that list and you will have a line on why Emily Selby was killed. When you know that, you’ll know what you’re up against. Lucy, thanks for your input.’

Halfway to the door he stopped. ‘I may change my mind later, but in the meantime I think Sabrina should dig up the whole story on Emily Selby, with special reference to her association with Erika Stramm.’

‘Shouldn’t we maybe get somebody to interview Stramm right away?’ Whitlock said.

‘No. I want us to know something about the relationship before she feeds us her version. Mike, I want you to get to work on that key Sabrina found. C.W., keep trying for a linking factor between the names on the list.’

Philpott strode to the door and pulled it open.

‘In order to proceed we need a picture, something with shape and features we can identify. Do your best for me on this one.’

Mike and C.W. muttered assurances. Sabrina nodded.

‘I deserve it, after all,’ Philpott said, and left.

6

‘Now, tell me honestly, what did you think? Were you bored? Or did you enjoy the visit as much as you told the guide you did?’

Karl Sonnemann, one week off his sixty-fourth birthday, stood smiling like a boy on the street outside Goethe’s birthplace in Frankfurt. His hands rested on the shoulders of Charlotte Gustl, a slender, shapely Münster girl with hair the colour of butter. Charlotte was twenty-two, one of Karl’s literature students at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University. As of last night she was technically his mistress, too.

‘I truly, truly loved the place,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’m sure I shall dream about it.’