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

out of the office, Gladwell pulled a cheap-looking burner phone out of his drawer. Turning it on, he walked over to his office door, closing it as he dialled a number. After a few rings, it went to voicemail.

‘They’re watching you,’ he said. ‘We need to talk as soon as possible.’

Disconnecting the call, Gladwell once more dismantled the phone, placing it back into his drawer. Sitting back in his chair, he leaned up, staring at the ceiling.

He was so close right now.

Nobody was going to stop him.

6

Wine Barred

Anjli had returned to Temple Inn after a hastily grabbed lunch, and a change of clothes back in her shared apartment in Shoreditch. She hadn’t been out the night before, but had thrown on the first things that she could find, half in the dark, when she’d heard the news about Monroe. Now she’d showered, imbibed a litre of the finest coffee she had in stock, checked in with her mum to ensure that the chemotherapy sessions were still going okay, and now had what she called her battle armour on; her most official looking suit and her bitch please boots. If anything or anyone came at her today, she’d give them a damned good kicking.

Billy was waiting outside the Crime Unit when she arrived. She didn’t have a car because of a lack of parking around her home, so she often pooled any driving cases with him, including a terrifying, breakneck drive through country roads the previous day as they hunted the captured Monroe.

Fat lot of good that did.

‘What have you got?’ she asked. ‘Or has Marcos kicked you out of the office again?’

‘She’s with Monroe right now,’ Billy replied indignantly. Anjli smiled.

‘So it’s DC Davey that’s kicked you out?’

‘Shut up,’ Billy muttered. ‘She scares me.’

‘Everyone scares you,’ Anjli replied, patting Billy on the shoulder. ‘So again, what have you got?’

‘Not sure,’ Billy admitted. ‘The file that Monroe had on his laptop, the one that had frozen it? I realised that there was no route for it.’

‘What do you mean, route?’ Anjli frowned.

‘Journey, procedure, whatever you want to call it. To end up on Monroe’s screen, there had to be a route. Either he had it emailed to him, or he downloaded it from a server, maybe even found it on a website, it doesn’t matter. Files don’t magically appear.’

‘Except this one did.’

Billy nodded. ‘You know when you’re online and a cookie window appears, advertising something? That’s exactly what happened here. Something or rather someone sent this to Monroe without him asking for it, and straight through the network.’

‘I thought we had fail-safes on the network?’

Billy shrugged, looking around the car park. ‘We’re City of London police. We have exactly the same firewalls as they do. More so, because I upgraded them. The only way that this could have come in was if someone had a backdoor in. So, I ran a few processes, and bingo. Someone used a backdoor to send this directly to his laptop. However, someone else seemed to have the same idea to hack our server at the same time, there was some kind of server blip when they did, and it broke the laptop.’

Anjli raised a hand to stop Billy. ‘Someone with a backdoor… Are you saying this was Trix?’

Trixibelle Preston had been an intern at the unit a few weeks ago, but was forcibly removed when it was discovered that she was a mole for a suspect in a murder case, and had been working for Pearce Associates the whole time. She’d bugged the rooms in the Crime Unit when she was in the offices, so there was no reason she couldn’t have bypassed the network.

‘Possibly,’ Billy said. ‘But then I don’t know how we’d find out. She disappeared off the grid after the Devington affair.’

‘We should do something about that,’ Anjli muttered. ‘Okay then. Anything else?’

Billy shook his head. ‘CCTV had nothing and nobody was in the other buildings.’

Anjli nodded, deciding. ‘Right then, we need to sweep the area. See if anyone saw something suspicious.’

‘There’s a bar just outside the Eastern Gate,’ Billy suggested. ‘It’s a long shot, but they might have seen the attacker enter?’

Anjli and Billy started down Temple Lane, out into Tudor Street. It wasn’t worth driving, as everything nearby was within a short walk. And, exactly as Billy had said, outside the gates of Temple Inn was a wine bar. Walking across the road and up to the door, Anjli could see that the afternoon trade was already thriving. With Billy beside her, Anjli opened the glass door and entered.

To the outside it looked like a simple bar with blacked-out windows and minimal flamboyance, but once inside it was like a new world. Mirrors lined the walls, reflecting into the bar, with comfortable chairs and expensive looking oak tables on either side of the hardwood floor. Along the top of the walls were old drinks adverts, lit by small lamps and a selection of fairy lights, stapled up so that they were strewn across the ceiling.

Walking through to the end, Anjli found that the wine bar opened up more as they passed into a larger back room, a long wooden bar to their left, and diners to the right sitting at small tables, deep in conversation. Behind the bar was a man in a black shirt, currently pouring a generous white wine for a group of ladies on the other side.

‘With you in a minute,’ he said, passing the glass over and taking a credit card. Pressing it to his card machine, allowing the receipt to go through, he passed card and paper to the ladies and, as they walked away turned his attention to Anjli.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. Anjli showed her warrant card.

‘I’m DS Kapoor, and this is DC Fitzwarren,’ she said. ‘We work in the Temple Inn Crime Unit.’

The barman nodded conversationally. ‘Do you want to see the manager?’ he asked. ‘I’m guessing this is a noise thing?’

‘Actually, no,’ Billy interrupted. ‘There