Hunter Hunted by Jack Gatland (best value ebook reader .TXT) 📗

proof that they can get to me. Rattlestone want to scare me off, to get me to back down.’

She looked to the floor, back to the still smouldering cigarette butt.

‘I’m not gonna do that,’ she hissed. ‘I’m not gonna betray Donna like that.’

Declan leaned in. ‘And us?’ he whispered. Kendis smiled, a sad, remorseful one as she stroked at his hair, protruding out from under the baseball cap.

‘Once I do this, we can go away together,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Peter. It’ll work out.’ She kissed Declan on the cheek. ‘Just watch out for me. I’ll be off grid for a few days. And then I’ll bring the fireworks.’

With that, Kendis Taylor nodded to Nasir and walked off down the path, back towards the southern entrance of the cemetery. Declan looked back to the photographer.

‘And you’re alright with this?’ he asked angrily. Nasir shrugged.

‘You’ve met her, right?’ he replied. ‘You tell her not to do something, it’ll just make her more intent at doing it. I’ll monitor her. It’s my job.’

Declan sighed. Nasir was right. All he could do was wait now and hope to hell that nothing bad happened to Kendis Taylor before he killed her himself.

Billy Fitzwarren sat at his desk, examining a hard drive in his hands, turning it carefully around as he did so. This was the brains of DCI Monroe’s laptop, and somewhere deep inside it was the clue that he needed to find, that explained how this random file had arrived on the screen.

He’d worked out that the file had been uploaded rather than downloaded, so perhaps Monroe had clicked onto a link that had provided malware to do so? No, because that couldn’t happen because of the firewall. Billy had designed it himself, and would have ensured that strange files couldn’t travel through it. Because of the firewall, you could log every keystroke that—

Billy almost dropped the hard drive as a thought came to him. Placing it aside, he opened up his own laptop, clicking on a homemade server application that he’d built from scratch a few months back, firing up the application. Taking the laptop into the briefing room, he attached it directly to the LAN network port, entering the router details. Then, bringing up a second terminal window, he started typing in commands at machine gun speed, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he sent process after process into the system.

Eventually, after what felt like a dozen failed attempts, he stopped.

On the screen was a terminal process receipt.

‘Jo, are you still there?’ he called out.

‘You meant ‘DC Davey,’ didn’t you?’ A voice called out from Monroe’s office, where the forensics officer was still hunting for the smallest clues that could help.

‘Sorry,’ Billy replied. ‘Can you confirm the time of attack again?’

‘The guard claimed that he heard glass breaking at ten-twelve pm,’ DC Davey now popped her head around the door, her frizzy ginger hair wild. ‘Why?’

‘The file didn’t appear on Monroe’s screen until ten-fifteen,’ Billy replied. ‘Which meant that Monroe never saw it, because by that point he’d been attacked.’

‘The attacker put it on?’

‘No, it would have been sent before then, but it’d been delayed in the server, like in some kind of command code limbo,’ Billy spun the laptop to show DC Davey. ‘Look, you see? There’s a back door into our system. Someone opened it and entered our system at ten on the dot, and then attempted to upload it to a particular address, Monroe’s laptop, a minute or so later. But then here, you can see that something else forced the network to freeze for ten minutes. Dumb luck, but they countered each other out. That’s probably why only the front page appeared.’

‘So the network freezing and the attack were two separate incidents?’

Billy leaned back in the chair, staring at the screen.

‘Yeah, I actually think so,’ he said. ‘Which means this could have been two different people, working without knowledge of the other.’ He smiled. ‘But with this, I can now start trying to reverse the transaction.’

‘Good,’ DC Davey left the door, walking back into the office. ‘Can you do it outside? You’re still trailing contaminates all over the crime scene.’

‘But it’s cold outside!’ Billy protested.

‘Then wear a coat,’ Davey’s voice shouted out.

‘You know we’re the same rank, right?’ Billy folded his arms. ‘I don’t have to take orders from you.’

DC Davey’s head popped around the door again.

‘I know how to kill you and make you disappear forever,’ she said, before leaving once more.

Billy shivered.

‘I’ll get my coat then,’ he muttered.

In a small office in Portcullis House, Malcolm Gladwell sat at his desk, reading a daily report while munching on a chocolate digestive. It was his only vice, really. Everything he ate was organically grown and ethically farmed, but these bloody things were his Kryptonite. He’d finished one and was about to reach for another when a line in the report stopped him.

‘Denise!’ he shouted out of his door. A moment later a mousey blonde woman in her late thirties, slim but shapelessly dressed appeared, notebook in hand.

‘You summoned me, oh lord and master?’ she enquired. Gladwell glared at her.

‘Why was I under surveillance last night?’ he asked, pointing at a line in the report. Denise squinted, but standing across the room, there was no way that she could see what he was showing. Irritated, Gladwell looked back at it.

‘It says here that security services were outside The Horse and Guard last night, while I was in there,’ he muttered. ‘Is someone making a bloody play for me? Have you heard anything?’

‘Nothing on the drums,’ Denise walked in now, snatching the report from Gladwell and reading it. ‘And this doesn’t say that they were surveilling you. Just that they were there.’

‘It’s a pokey little nowhere pub in the arse end of Chelsea,’ Gladwell snapped. ‘Nobody else would…’

He stopped.

‘Unless they were following who I met with.’

‘And who was that?’

‘Never you mind,’ Gladwell rummaged through his desk. ‘I don’t need you now.’

As Denise wandered back