Seven Degress (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Nikolina had been captured then transferred to a stolen Ford Transit van where a small group of men had stripped her of her dignity and her clothes, taunting her and forcing her to listen to a phone call from her husband– or rather the man who said that Roma folklore had declared them man and wife.

  She met her demise in the River Thames. A solitary, frigid way to end a life, strapped to a rudimentary wooden frame and left at low tide to watch the rushing water coming in from the sea, slowly, then more rapidly consuming her.

  The group that did this to her, deprived her of a young life in such a violent and cold way, later set fire to the van and left it on an industrial estate as interesting and grey as its paintwork. A few small exhibits were recovered from parts of the vehicle but proved to be worthless.

  Any forensic evidence from the van was most likely gone. The almost-obliterated Mondeo would act as a source. Blood deposits, if nothing else, gave them an opportunity. Hair fibres, possibly clothing too. They would try any avenue.

  When had these people arrived into the United Kingdom? Last week, the week before, the month before? A year, maybe two? Had they even, possibly, been born there? The latter would at least help, but both Roberts and Cade considered it unlikely.

  “A common theme is the tattoo, Jason. I’ve heard about it, read about it, seen one up close and it was also present on the two deceased. They had the simple outline of the wave on their right wrist. These were obviously new marks, perhaps an indicator that our boys were freshly badged – you know, trying out for the bigger league by kidnapping Niko? Expendable resources…” Cade’s voice petered off as he began to visualise the tattoo.

  “And then, of course,” said Roberts feverishly chewing the end of someone else’s pen, “there’s the bastard that got away. Who the hell, and where the hell is he?”

  Like so many similar days in the rapidly changing world of law enforcement, this one was unravelling and disappearing at a rate of knots.

  The newly promoted colleagues visited O’Shea who was sat behind a larger-than-normal screen. She was clearly in her element. Cade considered it a positive that her skills were being used. He chose not to endorse them publicly for fear of being considered patronising and worse still, for fear of being identified as the new man in her life. He wanted to, but couldn’t announce that he was also desperate to exploit as many of her hidden talents as he could.

  Despite what he had said the evening before, it was not a good look for them to be in a relationship quite so soon. Besides, he rather liked the clandestine approach.

  “So, professor, how’s it going with the crime science stuff?” Roberts had a broad understanding of the unique ability to extract data from a series of software programmes, extrapolating the sexier bits and then producing a few graphs. Beyond that, like most non-practitioners, he was lost. What he needed was a report, preferably one, that like all quality intelligence recommendations was actionable, which made him look good. It was often said that a great intelligence team was invisible, that its finest work was never publicly discussed – only when they got it wrong.

  “Looking good, Carrie. Looking good. So how are we doing with Eastern Euro activity in the Big Smoke then?”

  “I’ve looked at London boss, I’ve done as you asked too and thrown the net wider. Essex has responded with a negative. Nothing for the last twelve months. Surrey likewise. Kent on the other hand have seen a lot of lower-level activity in the Medway Towns’ area.”

  Cade nodded. He knew the region like the back of his hand.

  “So why north Kent?”

  O’Shea took a short moment, then offered a considered opinion.

  “Boss, I look at it like this. If you want to enter the heart of the greatest financial centre in the world why not go through its arteries?”

  Cade nodded. “So you think they enter the UK via the sea port at Dover, set up camp as close to London as they could, hit a few sites and retreat back to a safe haven, before doing it all again and then heading back home with their ill-gotten gains before Old Bill has a chance to lock them up?”

  She smiled “Absolutely, Inspector. Look at the other night, the van we all ended up pursuing? It was heading to the A2. Lots of older back roads, with fewer electronic monitoring systems than the motorways. It was heading south alright, straight back to one of the main towns around the Medway area; Gillingham, Strood, Chatham or Rochester.”

  “OK, get to work with Kent too. I’ll get the DCI to start making some higher-level connections with their organised crime teams. We want everything they have on ATM targeting, however small. Let’s speak to our colleagues at Port of Dover Police too, see if they have ANPR – pretty sure they do, and CCTV. In fact, give them what we know so far and let them go hunting. We need as many friends as possible. The Channel Tunnel too – they have UK staff on both sides of the channel, build some relationships, you never know when we might need to cash in. As you said the other night, we are missing something. I think this is just the beginning.”

  He felt positive for the first time in days.

  “OK, Jason, starting with the most recent event that we went to. Let’s look at available evidence, get something out to the troops, we want to go overt now. Stand by with the media, though. Agreed?”

  He didn’t wait for affirmation.

  “Then we need to commence twice-daily briefings on this and treat every single report of ATM-related crime as our priority – if it’s within our boundary let’s get our guys to speak to every victim. I want a template of questions to ask each and every one. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “Go ahead…”

  “Let’s get someone checking the outgoing international mail. It’s dawned on me that they won’t just be taking cash from the machines – they are extracting security data too…”

  She slapped herself on the head.

  “Of course! They post that back to larger cells overseas where it can be sold as a package, all with less…”

  They both looked at one another and said in unison: “risk!”

  Cade and his colleague spent the next thirty minutes recording what they had so far and drawing up the template. They sent the list of questions out to all stations and reporting lines. Nobody was to miss the opportunity to record the data. Only when they had what they needed could the analysts really conduct a true scan of the criminal environment.

  The pair continued throwing ideas around, hypotheses at its best – raw and straight from the mind without critique. Cade had found in his relatively short career that it was often the most productive way of gaining the answer.

  “So what?”

  Roberts looked temporarily puzzled and replied with exactly the same question.

  “So what?”

  “Indeed, my thoughts entirely Dr Watson.”

  “You’ll ‘ave to stop being so bloody cryptic Jack, I’m a DS, correction, Acting DI, so spare me the rocket science.”

  “It’s a phrase that any good Intelligence Officer uses. It should follow every statement. In our case, we know that a group of what we believe to be entirely Eastern European offenders are targeting the British financial markets via the easiest entry point – ATMs. The risks are relatively low, with the general public writing off the offences as ‘victimless’. So what?”

  Roberts stood to stretch his legs and gazed out of the window.

  “So…we know we are not talking about the whole of Romania coming into Britain and stealing everyone’s cash. That would be at best xenophobic and extreme. So what we are looking at is a smaller group, well organised but expendable, as in the case of our boy with his throat hanging out…he didn’t make the cut.”

  He winced at the unintended pun and continued, now riding the crest of the wave.

  “…and this group may be living under our noses. Coming into the city and striking quickly, gathering cash and buggering off before we even have a chance of catching ‘em. We should speak to the councils, get their CCTV operators to concentrate on ATMs, we could
do the same, let’s start gathering some imagery, if nothing else it will show us who we might be dealing with – we could then cross-match that with our colleagues at Dover and see if they have observed similar folk crossing into the UK.”

  Daniel joined them.

  “So gents, what do we know? Anymore new activity in the last twelve or so hours? Have we got someone liaising with the banks? Do we have anything at all? Let’s be honest with one another.”

  “All fair questions boss,” said Cade, “since the pursuit and the male escaping we’ve seen no activity whatsoever. Which tells me that they were a three-man cell. Our thoughts are that they go to ground in a north Kent town, strike out and return – it’s possible to do this within thirty minutes at night. I think we need to monitor the trunk roads into the city. Our guess is that each cell, assuming there are indeed more, uses a van, but in truth they could use anything.”

  “Trains?”

  “Planes, or automobiles, boss. I’m sorry, but we are no nearer.”

  The team spent the rest of that day working through every piece of data they had. Detectives not gainfully employed on the streets were ringing around financial institutions, offering prevention advice and gathering information. Like worker bees, they fed back the intelligence to the Queen Bee – in this case O’Shea. Her confidence was growing by the hour and her newfound status within the team appeared to provide her with additional thinking skills too.

  She called over to Roberts.

  “Boss, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Ooh, this could be interesting. Someone grab me a coffee and some biscuits. I need biscuits but remember, no fucking ginger…they play havoc with my teeth.”

  “Nuts!” said O’Shea. “We get it, boss. No ginger nuts. Promise. Whilst there won’t be any offending biscuits in the tin what I can tell you is I’ve seen a pattern developing on our patch.”

  Roberts was now very much alert.

  “I’m all ears. Jack, are you all over this like the proverbial rash, my son? Come on, grab a Rosie Lee and join us.”

  Cade accepted the offer and en route poured himself a strong mug of tea, snatched a handful of biscuits to replenish his ebbing blood sugar and sat down next to O’Shea who, he thought, smelled of freshly peeled lemons and a night of sin.

  It was, to say the least, very arousing. He hoped Roberts couldn’t detect it.

  “My, my, Carrie O’Shea, are you wearing perfume? Not like you. Not at all. You remind me of a night I once had in Santorini among the lemon groves.”

  “Is that right, boss? I’ll remember to wear it more often.”

  Roberts took a sip of his hot drink. “So what’s it called?”

  She looked sideways at Cade before answering.

  “Lust.”

  Without flinching, she started to point out the developing patterns on the screen. She had created a map from the previous twelve months’ ATM attacks – first starting with all offences. She included filters to show fraud, robberies, theft and miscellaneous offences.

  Then she allowed the software to update the map, slowly filtering out the offending that didn’t – for this operation – interest them. It meant that robberies went first. Cade had studied this m.o. for long enough to know that his potential offender’s favoured crimes that were lucrative, not violent. He recalled however that the group was highly capable of inflicting pain upon their victims, just not on the streets of London.

  The map was quite non-descript – as bland as a crime map for one of the biggest cities in the world could be.

  Six months had passed. The pattern was irregular with events both north and south of the river, a few in the east and hardly any in the west.

  At five months, the pattern altered. Robberies almost stopped. The Metropolitan Police task force set up to target street robberies was having an impact.

  The four-month mark saw a shift across the river into the west – within spitting distance of Scotland Yard. O’Shea had drawn a boundary around the crimes. The almost perfect circle covered about ten square miles of prime inner-city territory.

  The red icons on the map were changing, slowly, obviously moving from the east into the City of London, Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham and an emerging hotspot in Richmond upon Thames.

  Cade was not a native of the city, but he knew the wealthiest suburbs and they were staring back at him from the map. All north of the river and all, united, worth more than the wealth of some small countries.

  “This area south of the river, Carrie?” He pointed to the map, brushing her back as his hand glided over her shoulder.

  “It’s Lambeth, Jack. Another borough with a bank balance to make your eyes bleed.

  “But why are these clustered like this? Surely there are plenty more ATMs in the city than just here.

  Roberts interjected, “Fair point Jack, fair point. My view is that the majority of the victims won’t bother reporting the loss of twenty quid, whereas in the lower-socio-economic areas to the east and south, they will. And trust me, in some of these places on Carrie’s map the owners of accounts that have lost twenty quid have plenty more in the bank, and I mean plenty!”

  “He’s right, Jack.”

  Daniel leaned over the group. “As an example, that property just…there. How much?”

  “Ball park sir? Given the current climate, I’d guess two million.” Cade’s estimate was reasonable, but stratospherically wrong.

  “If only Jack. A flat sold on Green Street recently, two point four million. A flat! A leasehold bloody flat. The one I’m pointing to? Four million. There’s an urban legend, which I suspect is true, that if you combined the property values in this borough alone, they’d be worth more than the entire value of all the properties in Wales. As Jason rightly alludes, these folk won’t miss twenty quid.”

  “Don’t you remember telling us that the group were likely to target wealthier areas, Jack? You are looking at them right there.” Roberts dunked a formidable-looking biscuit into his drink and cursed when its rigidity failed to live up to his expectations.

  “So what?” asked Cade, again.

  “So I think we should set up an ATM right in the middle of the crime pattern, Jack. Use the crime triangle as a guide.”

  She explained the concept behind the science. Each crime had a location, an offender, and a victim. Eradicate one and you were on the way to preventing the offence.

  “In the case of Westminster we can’t remove the location, we can’t yet locate and remove the offender, but we can prevent victimisation at least.”

  “Agent provocateur?”

  “Indeed. I think we should find a way of equipping one of these five ATMs in the hotspot with CCTV or our own device to counter the equipment that the offenders are using. Worst case, we carry out surveillance on the identified target machines and catch them in the act.”

  O’Shea had planted a seed. All Cade and Roberts needed to do was allow it to germinate – and Daniel was to be the Head Gardener.

  Roberts gathered the unit together and conducted a quick-fire tactical briefing. He finished within fifteen minutes.

  “OK team, let’s wrap it up for today,” announced Roberts.

  “Everyone except Phil and Mark head home. Tomorrow, my legion of gladiators, is another day. We shall rise at dawn and attack the enemy when and where he least expects it. Phil, Mark, you know where to head. You’ve got my cell phone number, if the soft brown stuff should collide with the rapidly revolving white blades, ring me.”

  Cade and Roberts stayed behind, hoping to convince Daniel that their plan was robust.

  “It’s a sound and well thought-out idea lads, I’m all for it, but the problem I have is a lack of manpower. Each ATM will take two staff to surveil. It means putting teams onto nightshift, and for how long? The Regional Crime Squad is working on something that not even I have a need to know about, apparently. So that counts them out. Flying Squad don’t want to know unless it involves shooting people, and all ot
her local CID units are drowning. If we are going to do this, everyone is going to have to dig deep.”

  “We’ve started already, boss. Piecemeal I know, but I’ve got two volunteers watching the identified ATMs within the target location tonight. We’ve picked out the ones that appear chronic rather than ad hoc.”

  “Fine, then you have my backing. See you tomorrow, Jason. Jack, see you at seven. Don’t be late, I’ve got a bottle of Macallan Fine Oak that needs investigating.”

  Chapter Four

  The four diners finished a sensational meal. Simply roasted Mediterranean vegetables had complimented a perfectly cooked fillet of salmon. Lynne Daniel had drizzled something equally mesmerising upon the plate and had served it all with an accompanying Sauvignon Blanc.

  The deeply attractive Daniel smiled across at Cade.

  “What do you think of the wine, Jack? It’s a Sancerre.”

  “It’s fine Mrs Daniel, be sincere by all means, but, if you want me to be brutally honest, it’s a close second to a New Zealand Sav in my humble opinion. The salmon on the other hand was sublime.”

  O’Shea discreetly rubbed his leg under the table. Both Daniels noticed but said nothing until much later that evening.

  “Is that so Jack? Have you been there?”

  “Not yet, but I plan to one day. I even have a notion to open a restaurant alongside the Pacific Ocean. Call it the top of my bucket list.”

  “Bucket?”

  Cade laughed. “Bucket list. It’s a quote from a book by Patrick Carlisle. I read it somewhere recently, on a train or in a newspaper magazine more like. ‘…in his querulous twilight years, who doesn’t want to go gently into that blacky black night. He wants to cut loose, dance on the razor’s edge, pry the lid off his bucket list!’”