A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two Mark Hobson (romantic novels in english TXT) 📖

He rocked back and forth, laughing so much his stomach quivered.

“Some people have no sense of humour.”

Chapter 19

A Winter’s Night

On his way back to the hospital to catch up with Kaatje’s progress he decided to swing by his house to pick up a few things for her.

He turned down the cobbled street alongside the canal, thinking back over the meetings with Saskia Vinke and Tobias Vinkes’ boss and the events they had related to him. Horrible though they were, their recollections didn’t provide any clues as to Nina Bakker’s current whereabouts, and Pieter felt his frustration rising. Their investigation was in danger of grinding to a halt; it felt like they were constantly playing catch-up.

He drew up near the front door and climbed out of his car, and skipped up the steps. He was just turning the key in the lock when something made him stop, and he turned back around.

That hire car was still parked up opposite his house.

He’d first noticed it several days ago, and although he hadn’t paid it too much attention since then, now that he thought back over the past few days he was fairly certain that it hadn’t moved in the intervening time.

He nearly dismissed the quandary from his mind.

He was in a hurry, and so what if someone had hired a car for several days? Perhaps it was one of his neighbours, or maybe it had been stolen and abandoned here. Hardly a priority.

But something about it tugged at his mind, and so Pieter moved back down the steps and wandered over the street.

It had been parked on the canal-side of the road with two of its wheels up on the pavement, which was slightly odd as everybody else parked right outside their houses or, like in his case, in the garages.

The car had tinted windows and so he leaned close and cupped his hand to the glass and peered in through the front passenger window.

He couldn’t make an awful lot out except what appeared to be a small, square aluminium case on the seat. Its lid was open but because it was angled away from his direct line-of-sight he couldn’t see what was inside, so he moved around the car and looked through the driver’s side.

Now he could see there was a laptop inside the case, hooked up to a gadget bristling with a number of tiny antennae, and coloured lights and numbers flickered across the screen lighting up the car’s interior.

Pieter stood upright and stepped back from the window.

He knew instantly what it was, and this made him glance nervously up and down the quiet street in alarm.

An IMSI-catcher, used by criminals – and sometimes by the police – to eavesdrop in on people’s mobile phone calls and read their text messages.

Pieter bent forward for a better look. It was a top-of-the-range model, not one of the cheap ones available online for a couple of hundred euros, and it must have some kind of remote function to allow it to be left here unmanned. Left here right outside his house.

He considered calling it in to HQ. Then he decided he was tired of doing things by the book.

Looking around, he bent over and scooped up a loose cobble from the roadway with his gloved hands. To lessen the noise he quickly took off his coat and wrapped the stone in it, hoping none of his neighbours would see him standing in the street, shoulder holster visible, breaking into someone’s car.

He didn’t strike at the glass. That would attract too much attention. Instead, and remembering a technique shown to him once by a lowlife car thief several years ago, he struck at the door’s side panel near the hinges, just about where the internal window gear pivot should be. If done correctly it should loosen the pivot arm.

With a dull thud, the driver’s window dropped down an inch or so. Tossing away the stone and putting his coat back on, Pieter shoved his gloved fingers through the narrow gap, and pulling and pushing, he forced the window down far enough to allow him to reach inside and pull the door catch and pop open the door, all without denting the bodywork.

Pieter lowered himself into the driver’s seat and quietly closed the door and then reached over and picked up the aluminium case.

Quickly, he ran his eyes over the laptop’s screen, noting the green lines flickering back and forth to show the signal strength of the phone-catcher. It was plugged into a portable USB hub, which in turn was powered by a large battery-pack, supplying enough juice to keep the thing running for days.

To confirm his suspicion that he himself was the target of the phone-catcher’s surreptitious spying (what other explanation could there be?) Pieter took out his mobile phone and dialled his own work’s telephone number, and sure enough within just a few seconds, his mobile number appeared on screen with the words TARGET CAPTUREDflashing alongside.

He cut the call and sat for a moment, trying to think back to the first time he had noticed the hire car parked outside his home, and going over all of the phone calls and messages that would consequently have been intercepted.

His mood didn’t improve.

He decided to try something else.

Raising his mobile once again, he switched over to his home Wi-Fi network – the signal was quite strong sitting just feet from his front door – and then did the same on the laptop, remembering to keep his gloves on while he used the mouse and keyboard.

Using his home Wi-Fi like this ensured that whoever was intercepting his calls would have no knowledge of what he was about to try. Hopefully.

With the laptop logged into his home Wi-Fi, he opened up its terminal dialogue box and typed in IPCONFIGto reveal two IP addresses. One for the laptop/phone-catcher combo sitting here on his knees, and another for a second laptop together with the word