Bill Thomas securely locked up his small, family run jeweler’s shop. His wife would be preparing the evening meal in the flat above.
Their twenty one year old daughter Maureen had checked the audio/visual feeds were working and had written up a detailed guest list, in the general office of the hotel where she worked.
As usual, she would arrive home for tea and drop off the information she had prepared, to Bill’s disabled son Mark. He was older than her by 2 years. Mark received the audio/visual feeds on a large array of computer monitors in the basement of the jeweler’s shop.
***
In ten of the most expensive hotel rooms, Maureen had replaced the bedside lamps with specially adapted ones, that Mark had assembled from cheap home computer webcams. The silvered glass body of each lamp hid the self-tracking cameras. Even if the lamp was held up to daylight, the camera was indistinguishable from the central stem inside.
The camera always had power, from the mains. The signal was transmitted over the mains wiring, using a home-plug network device built into the lamp base. Maureen gathered the signals on her laptop at work, and sent them over the hotel network, to the internet and onwards to Mark.
Mark observed and listened to the feeds on his monitors, noting anything that might be useful. His father arranged the blackmail; Bill used his brother Tim to carry out the burglaries.
***
Bill never considered himself a greedy man, he was content to re-work the stolen jewelry and resell it making, on average, fifteen thousand pounds profit, each week. If scrutinized, his books would be perfectly in order. It would be seen that he used a thousand pounds of materials, genuinely purchased, and charged fourteen thousand pounds for the finished article.
The cunning system of blackmail worked extremely well, because when the insurance paid out for the loss, there was no need or desire for the victim to seek revenge. Bill was careful never to use the same jeweler twice, or to specify a unique piece. The insurance company saw no pattern to the thefts and Bill could avoid pieces that were difficult to re-work.
Mark Thomas propelled himself in his wheelchair, from one keyboard to the next; his spinal malformation had crippled him two years ago. The loss of mobility did not bother him because of his reclusive, geeky personality; he was happy working on his own, with his toys.
With ten rooms to monitor, there were times when he could only skip from conversation to conversation, noting items of interest for review later. Everything was recorded and stored, so during quiet periods he could examine the content for blackmail potential. His father and sister would actually assess the value of the material, and decide to blackmail, or not.
Mark had downgraded the business meeting of the six men, in favor of two steamy affairs taking place simultaneously, in separate rooms. This was the stuff of quality blackmail and extortion; the male celebrity and tart in one room, a pop diva and a young man, not her husband, in the other.
He wondered how these people who were so-called role models for many, could carry on this way and face the public as though innocent.
***
Mark was also unaware that the tracking camera had jammed in room 236, several hours after the meeting, and the faint humming from the mechanism caught the attention of the resting occupant.
He unplugged the lamp and examined it; it had a normal filament bulb, not a low energy fluorescent type, so there was no reason for it to hum like a stalled electric motor. The man carefully dismantled the lamp, and the camera was exposed. No security agency would use this type of equipment, this was an amateur setup he thought. None the less, the spy had recorded the meeting and must be traced immediately.
The man freed the camera tracking motor, reassembled the lamp and plugged it in again. He did not want to alert the spy to the discovery and cause him to run. The short break in transmission might be overlooked, or put down to a glitch.
He left the room and made a call to one of the other men, suggesting they met for a drink. This was a pre-arranged code, there is something vitally important to discuss, get the others!
***
Carla met with Robert again and they walked through Hyde Park, re-examining every detail of the case. Carla said she needed to book into the same room that Robert had used and she would meet him there, at the same time as he had met his female contact.
Using the photos provided by the blackmailer, Carla soon realized they had been altered and would not point back to the camera location. The cunning blackmailer had digitally cut out the images of the two people, and overlaid them on the background of a similar room. The perspective had also been manipulated.
The victim would know the background was a room with which they were familiar, so they would just accept what they saw. An investigator, however, would use the photo to home in on the camera location, only to find it was a false lead. That would automatically cast doubt on any other clues found.
Carla was convinced the camera was a permanent fixture and the victims were not targeted, just unlucky. The camera would need a power supply, and she thought a battery would be bulky because it might have to last at least 4 hours, to capture anything worthwhile. Therefore it would need frequent replacement, probably by the house cleaner.
She examined everything in the room, bigger than a pencil stub, with a good field of view, but found nothing containing a camera, or microphone. Perhaps the device had not been placed yet. The evening would be best for that, juicy bedroom scenes make good blackmail material.
The blackmailer had filmed Robert late afternoon, and the house cleaner had not come into the room until much later. This line of thought was not panning out.
The device must be on all the time. She thought about how she would have carried out the surveillance; ‘I would book the room for the night, then embed the device in the wall up near the ceiling, where two walls meet. It only needs a hole the size of a pin head for the camera lens to see through. That would give full coverage of the room.’
In her mind, she ran through her training on surveillance equipment and installation, and worked out the way she would install a system to meet the blackmailer’s requirements. However the blackmailer had done it, it was superbly clever.
Carla carried out a fingertip search of walls and ceiling, but there was no camera.
In frustration, she threw herself on the bed and called Max.
***
It took him half an hour to get to the room, and she had just climbed out of the bath. She answered the door, wrapped in a towel and pulled Max onto the bed, kicking the door shut behind her. Her towel fell away revealing her warm damp skin. She sat astride his hips and slowly removed his clothes.
He just lay there, smiling and looked into her sapphire blue eyes; she was going to have sex with him on her terms, but if he happened to enjoy it, that was fine too.
Max understood her unorthodox behavior. She was not solving this case, and it frustrated her; this was her way of taking back control, even if it had nothing to do with the problem.
He was naked now and Carla, still astride him, used the tip of his penis to slowly pleasure herself, her hot juices flowed as her sexual tension built. Her small but perfect breasts were pert, and the nipples hard.
She was allowing deeper penetration with each rise and fall of her hips, her beautiful face locked in a faint smile and her eyes glazed in concentration. Every supple muscle in her slim, toned body was tense and firm as she worked harder, deeper and wetter. Her chest and neck were flushing, her skin lightly coated with perspiration, and then she had her first wave of orgasm. Her deep throated groan was instantly followed by a frantic bucking, with whimpering gasping cries as she chased the fading wave of pleasure. Exhausted, she impaled herself on Max and they ground into one another.
She fell forward onto his chest, still coupled, and kissed his face and neck. After a few minutes her panting had diminished and she murmured, “Now it’s your turn, do it like there is no tomorrow, I am ready for so much more.”
***
Much later, when the endorphins in their bodies had calmed down, Max got up and went to the bathroom. The faint whirr of the camera as it tracked him across the room, caught Carla’s attention. She called him back.
“Sorry Carla, you have killed me. I can hardly walk, and you’re still making demands of my body.”
“Not for that, silly, I think I have found the answer!” she exclaimed.
Max walked back to her, and Carla listened carefully, to home in on the faint sound.
“It’s coming from the bedside,” she mouthed in a whisper, looking around, past the lamp and then back. “It’s the lamp,” she mouthed again, swinging her legs round and sitting on the side of the bed. She stood up and snuggled into Max, whispering in his ear,” the camera must be inside it, behind the silvered body. I thought it was chrome on a metal backing, but it’s a two way mirror.”
Max smiled and kissed her full wet lips, passionately. She looked back into his eyes and smiled, her eyes watered slightly from contained excitement and the realization of her deep love for him.
***
Having showered and dressed, they went for a meal in the hotel, away from the room. They discussed the next move, how to find the blackmailer?
Carla was still excited about finding the camera and not thinking as clearly as usual; it was Max who suggested they fit their own bug, unplug the lamp containing the camera, then wait to see who would plug it back in.
They left the hotel and went to Edgware Road, for a cheap Netbook PC with built in webcam.
Back at the hotel, they unpacked the computer and unplugged the lamp. If someone was watching them, they might assume the socket was being used to charge the computer.
The computer was set up across the room with a clear view of the lamp, the internal camera was set up and the screen put to sleep. The video would continue to record, but not show on the screen. Using a small peel off sticker, Carla covered the light next to the lens, so no one would see the camera was active.
They left the room.
***
Ruhab Gupta packed up his toolkit. He reported to the hotel manager that the firmware upgrade he had just made to the router, would speed up the broadband connection, and then left the hotel.
In fact, he had been able to trace the data stream from the spy cameras in the rooms, to a laptop connected to the hotel server. He sent an email to himself and replied to it, from his own laptop, secretly installing a program. It enabled him to read everything on this computer without the owner’s knowledge. He deleted the message on her machine, so she would never know what happened.
From her messages, he knew it was Maureen’s personal computer and Gupta intended to follow her home.
Ruhab Gupta phoned his handler at a pre-arranged time, phone box to phone box. He was instructed to follow, verify and then clean!
***
Carla and Max returned to the hotel room and found the lamp plugged in again. The plug was behind the bedside cupboard, so they were sure it was not the house cleaner just being efficient. They skimmed through the video and saw a young girl come in, briefly verify no one was there, plug in the lamp, and leave.
“Got you,” Max murmured to Carla.
They left the room again and looked for the girl; she had to be working in the hotel, or she would not have free access to the rooms. According to the video, she had left the room just a few minutes before they came back.
Carla spotted her walking out of the hotel entrance, so they followed.
She was unaware of being followed by Max and Carla, but Ruhab Gupta was suspicious.
It was not by coincidence either, that Philippe happened to see Max and Carla. He noticed they were following the girl and also saw the man following them.
Gupta signaled to three other Pakistani males nearby, that there was a problem, so they all looked on as Max and Carla tailed Maureen.
Ten minutes later, the girl entered the alley leading to the rear of the jeweler’s shop; Max and Carla followed as soon as she went in the back door and up to the flat.
Max and Carla were anxious, because they had no idea what they were walking into. All they had on the girl so far, was that she plugged in a lamp. If they confronted her about it, she would admit to being in their room, but deny anything to do with blackmail. If they handled it badly, the sorry tale about Robert and his woman friend would come out.
No! This needed some careful thought.
They crept quietly down the stairs and out the back door, just as four young Asian men came towards them. Everyone hesitated, Max and Carla smiled politely and eased past in the alley. The men continued and went inside.
“That was close,” Max sighed. “Suppose we had blundered in and confronted the girl, and then those guys came in; we would’ve had a problem explaining that away.”
Carla agreed. She paused to get out her phone, and ring Robert for instructions.
***
Robert was astonished at how quickly Carla had found the blackmailer, and then understood the need for caution. The decision on what to do next was up to him, he would call Carla tomorrow.
Max and Carla returned to the Hilton, met up with James and Amy for dinner, and tried to anticipate what Robert would decide to do.
If he were to say, ‘get the data back,’ how would they force the blackmailer to hand it over? There was no point in threatening to involve the police, because the blackmailer would know they were bluffing. If they broke in and stole the data, how could they be sure it was not stored on a web server in some other country?
Perhaps James and Amy could track it down from records left on the blackmailer’s computer, but that was far from satisfactory. When they discussed the problem with James, he suggested some software Carla could install, to spy on the blackmailer’s computer.
Robert called Carla at 2am, he wanted the data found and destroyed.
***
Within minutes, Max & Carla dressed and headed for the jeweler’s house, hoping to find everyone that would have been involved in the blackmail, and hopefully no surprise guests.
Lights were still on upstairs and the curtains drawn, so someone was still awake. They quietly tiptoed down the side alley to the back of the house; lights were on there as well.
How would they play out this confrontation?
How many people were in the flat?
If confronted, would they become aggressive?
Max and Carla had assumed everyone would be asleep by now, but every room was lit up. Something was not right.
They slipped on their nitrile gloves to prevent leaving prints.
Carla picked the deadlock and Yale lock to the back door, they entered and silently climbed the stairs, stepping at the sides of each tread, to minimize the sound of creaking wood. They listened for a minute on the landing, ears close to the door, before turning the handle and entering the flat.
The usual household smells assaulted their nostrils, cooking, body odor, carpets and upholstery, but above this background was something unexpected. It was most likely that someone had just used the toilet to defecate. But also there was a metallic smell or taste in the air, it was hard to tell; however, they had both come across it before.
Hearing no sound, they glided across the hall towards the lounge. There were four dead bodies inside, lying face down on the gold colored carpet. Someone had gagged them and stood with one foot between their shoulder blades, forcing them down. The bloody footprint was clear to see. It appeared that the killer had pulled back their heads and sliced their necks, from left to right, down to the bone.
As they approached the bodies, their weight shifted the surface of the carpet slightly, causing the congealing blood between the fibers to break its sheen. It reminded Max of walking on wet sand at the water’s edge.
Carla explored rooms on the left of the hall and Max took the right. The killer had ransacked every room.
One of the three bedrooms, a man’s room, had a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but no computer. Carla immediately suspected this to be the work of a blackmail victim.
Max was surprised there was so little computer equipment in the flat; it was as if the missing computer was the bedtime toy, just to browse and look up, rather than active monitoring.
“Carla, I wonder if there is a basement,” whispered Max, “let’s check out the cupboard under the stairs.”
There was a door leading down to the basement, and the lights were on down there, as well.
The naked, tortured body of a young man was slouched against the arm of his wheelchair. The floor was littered with the toes from both his feet, and short lengths of fingers from his left hand.
His torturer used the young man’s clothes to mop the pooling blood on the floor, to keep most of it from his shoes.
Scolding water from the nearby electric kettle had been poured over his genitals.
The killers were after more than the secrets stored on the missing computer, this room had also been totally ransacked.
***
“Who are you two?” demanded a voice behind Max and Carla, they spun round to face the man holding a large, hi-carbon kitchen knife.
He was ready for any attack, but calm and collected, as though this was a situation he had faced many times.
“We are not responsible for killing your older brother,” replied Carla. She recognized the strong similarity between his features and those of the man upstairs, and to a lesser extent, the young man in the wheelchair.
“Did you know my brother, Bill?” asked the man.
“No, I didn’t, I am sure he was an interesting person, he came up with a very cunning blackmail scheme, and it looks to me like a victim has caught up with him.” replied Carla frankly.
She noticed the man showed no surprise at her assumption, brother Bill was the mastermind behind the blackmail.
In Carla’s mind, this was a family affair. The girl, working at the hotel, was Bill’s daughter. Considering the number of bedrooms, she appeared to live here. The son in the wheelchair was the technical brains, but not mobile enough to travel and make phone calls to victims from the countryside. The man with the knife did not live here, so was less likely to be the mastermind; most likely, he was the burglar.
“We came to meet the blackmailer and check he had wiped our client’s data from his computer,” continued Carla, searching the man’s face for signs of errors in her reckoning.
He stared at her unflinching; he thought she was like him, cool and well prepared.
“As you can see, all the computer gear has been stolen, so you won’t be able to do that.”
“That is not true, is it?” countered Max. “The large video files need a lot of storage space, and I’ll bet your brother was smart enough to keep any incriminating evidence off site.”
A slight flicker of eye movement confirmed to Max that the knife man knew the data still existed.
***
The man lowered the knife and said, “My name is Tim, by the way, what is yours?”
“I am Max, this is Carla, and what do we do now?”
“If you help me to find who killed my family, you can have the data you want and see it destroyed, for good.
“I inherit everything, the flat and the shop, so with that and my pension from the Army, I will have no need to work ever again” Tim spoke quietly.
“What were you in, Special Forces?” asked Max, wanting to break the ice still further.
“Yes, I liked the life, and enjoyed the training and being with true mates, people you could trust, but we were all undervalued and betrayed by the head-shed. I got chucked out, so I put my skills to more profitable use.”
“I think we need to get out of here and talk in more amenable surroundings, we don’t want to leave evidence leading back to us, do we?” suggested Carla.
“We should go back to my place, “said Tim, “it is an extremely secure building; we don’t want any surprises if we are followed when we leave here.
“The victim who did all this is desperate to make sure no one ever sees what was recorded, and will come after anyone connected to this family. He will soon find thee is nothing of use on the computers he stole, and will also know the data must be stored somewhere off site, and will keep on looking.
“I suspect poor Mark died from shock, judging by his injuries; he and I are the only people who know where the data is stored. It was considered important that Bill, his daughter Maureen, and his wife never knew how to access it.”
“What prevents the victim from accessing the data, “asked Carla.
“Not only is the data encrypted, but when decoded the data fields are mixed up, so names, dates, video or audio packets are not related. For example, Mr. Smith becomes Miss Jones, living at 4 Oak Cottage, should be 21b New Road. Mark created a simple program that sorted it all out; it is disguised as a system file, amongst the thousands of other system files; one that would never be used or found by anybody else,”
Tim pulled the back door closed on the Yale lock, but deliberately left the deadlock unlocked.
“I only used the deadlock to stop someone creeping up on me while I was in the house, I found the door just as it is now.”
“Where did you hide when we went into the basement, Tim?” Max asked, “You weren’t upstairs or in the stair area. Did you slip outside to wait for us in the dark?”
“Yes, I was about to come out from under the stairs, when I heard you unlock the door. You obviously did not have a key, so I would have gutted you if you had gone to the cellar first. That is the first place the killers would go on a return visit, there would be no reason for them to go upstairs again.
“At first I thought you were burglars, but you did a search and didn’t appear too bothered or surprised about the bodies. Burglars would not have done that. Then I suspected you might be another victim that somehow found out where Bill lived.”
No one spoke again until well away from the shop. The streetlights spoilt their night vision, so they were unaware of the eight eyes set in dark brown faces, watching them from the shadows.
No one saw Philippe in the shadows, either.