Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

attracted the attention of the authorities, he might start making mistakes or do something stupid. But of course he couldn’t say that.

Dave Nicholls, one of the more junior agents assigned to the operation, had just echoed Rogers’s own private views about the surveillance operation that morning.

‘I didn’t say we should arrest them,’ Nicholls protested, his Texas drawl making him sound like a frontiersman though he looked more like a sharp-suited accountant with somewhat pointed features clustered below a thatch of neatly cut black hair. ‘All I said was let’s lean on them a little. Let them see the same guy maybe two or three times the same day, that sort of thing. Nothing close up and personal, just enough to spook them a bit, make them jump at shadows.’

Rogers shook his head.

‘Can’t do that right now,’ he said, ‘because these guys haven’t done anything wrong. About all we can do is take a look at the transcription of whatever the shotgun mics managed to pick up and see if FACE was able to put any names to the three unsubs sitting with the target.’

The operations room they were using had the usual suite of electronic equipment including multiple computers, projection screens, whiteboards, telephones and so on, and Rogers guessed that if any of the three unknown subjects had had their photographs taken for any official purpose while in America, he would have their names within an hour or so. Transcribing the microphone recordings would obviously take a lot longer because of the circumstances.

They had access to voice recognition software that could convert clear speech into a piece of printable text quickly and fairly accurately, but the determining factor was the word ‘clear’. A person in a quiet room speaking into a microphone was one thing, but filtering out the extraneous noises like traffic, the comments from people walking past the cafe and all the other factors that would affect the clarity of the recordings they’d made that morning was going to take some time.

‘There’s something I want to say, Grant.’ The speaker was a fair-haired middle-aged man wearing a dark blue suit and standing at the back of the room. William Clark was a very experienced agent and had been the leader of one of the three-man teams assigned to follow the unsubs. His normally cheerful face looked troubled, perhaps even perplexed.

‘What is it, Bill?’ Grant Rogers asked. ‘And before you say anything, nobody blames you for losing the target. In those crowds it would have been amazing if you hadn’t. And we have other leads we can follow.’

Clark shook his head.

‘I wasn’t going to apologise,’ he said, ‘but I do want to explain what happened, because it didn’t make sense.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘We followed the target easily enough. Because of the pandemic, there are a lot less people out on the streets than usual. It’s still crowded, of course, but the target was quite distinctive in his appearance: blue jeans, blue denim jacket and when he left the cafe he put on a light blue disposable face mask. All three of us were keeping pace with him about fifty yards back, but obviously well separated. I’m reasonably certain we hadn’t been spotted, not least because all three of us were wearing face masks just like most of the other people on the streets, but he went into a department store, maybe just as a precaution to shake any tails he might have thought he’d picked up. I went in after him and Nick and Ivan covered the other exits. He headed for the lavatories and I decided it was too risky to follow him into such a small space in case he had seen me earlier on. So I found a place where I could see the lavatory door and waited for him to come out. The trouble was, he didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rogers asked.

‘Exactly what I said. The man I’d been following didn’t come out, but three other men did. Obviously I checked all three of them very carefully, but none of them looked anything like the target. I used the camera in my phone to take a picture of each one – I can put the images up on the screen if you’d like to see them.’

‘Finish the story first.’

‘I gave him ten minutes, then went into the lavatory after him. All the stalls were empty and there was nobody else in the room. There were also no exits apart from a small square window maybe eighteen inches on the side and about eight feet off the ground. It was closed, the glass had wire mesh running through it and the opening was protected by steel bars, so he certainly didn’t go out that way.’

Grant Rogers stated the obvious.

‘So he must have changed his appearance. Let’s see the pictures you took.’

It took a couple of minutes for Clark to connect his mobile to the display system so that he could show the photographs.

‘Just to remind you,’ he said before he brought up the first image, ‘the target has black hair and a black beard, brown eyes and a tanned complexion and he was wearing a denim jacket, blue jeans and a blue face mask. Now check these out.’

The first image showed a man wearing a casual jacket and trousers and with fair hair and fair skin who didn’t look unlike Clark himself. He had a light blue face mask in his left hand that he was apparently about to put on.

‘There’s no way the target could have made himself look like this in about three minutes,’ Clark said, ‘and that was roughly how long between the target going into the lavatory and this guy coming out.’

The second photograph was of a heavily built white man, the crown of his skull shining in the overhead lights, flanked by the U-shape of his remaining hair and emphasised by the white face mask he was wearing. Again, simply the difference in body size and shape meant that this individual could not