Blood in the Water by Oliver Davies (book club reads .TXT) 📕

keen to give the police his fullest cooperation after his little chat with my cousin, the poor chump. I could just imagine how that had gone.

Once the phone was on and good to go, I plugged it into my laptop and passed all the files through my Contain and Analyse routines before starting to dig around. It didn’t take long to find the spyware by searching on a few commonly used code strings. It wasn’t the dumbest package I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t super smart either. It had the capability to dig itself in well enough so that deactivating and uninstalling the system update service wouldn’t get rid of it, but apart from that, it wasn’t much better than the commercial packages that way too many people subscribed to for monitoring their kids online activity or checking up on cheating spouses.

It wouldn’t be hard to ‘turn the tables’ on this little sucker. Whoever had put it together was a second-rate programmer, at best. I considered popping my earbuds in and putting some music on to listen to while I worked, but my cousin’s occasional swearing under his breath indicated that he’d probably want to vent a bit sometime soon. I duplicated the spyware bundle, split my screen and started on my modifications.

I set up my own laptop as another, hidden, destination device and pulled up the phone’s web browser. After visiting a few recently viewed pages, I checked that all of that had come through okay. All good. It had also obligingly bounced everything off to another IP address. Their hub? I’d soon find out. There was something very satisfying about improving a shoddy piece of work, and I tapped away happily as I composed my little counterstrike package.

“Bastards!” Conall’s volume had gone up a bit there. I paused, waiting. “Did you read through all this?” he asked, quietly fuming.

“No, just Osborne’s work history. I didn’t open up any of the case files I pulled.” I hadn’t felt like depressing myself with a refresher on how shitty the life of an undercover operative usually was. I’d had my fill of brooding over crap I couldn’t fix already this week. It wasn’t healthy, or productive. Conall scrolled back up a bit and offered me his phone.

“Read from there.”

I scanned the section that had set him off. It was nothing unusual. At his debriefing, Osborne had recommended maximum leniency for Cory Phelps and been adamant that he should be released on bail until he could be tried. Phelps, he insisted, was not a flight risk. He was just a dumb kid who had no idea what he was really involved in. Osborne’s character assessment and recommendations had all been buried, of course. It wasn’t politically expedient to be seen to be lenient with arms smugglers.

Besides, Osborne’s judgement was not to be relied upon. Long term undercover operatives couldn’t help but sometimes feel as if they really had made friends with the subjects they ‘wrongly perceived’ to be harmless and insignificant, not after interacting with them on a daily basis for months on end.

“You can’t pretend any of this surprised you, Cuz. You know what the politicos are like, and the kind of pressures they’ll apply when they decide it’s necessary. By the time the psych boys had finished reconditioning Osborne and declared him fit for active duty again, I bet he was perfectly willing to agree with their assessment and retract his earlier recommendations.”

Conall looked suitably disgusted at the thought of it. “In that case, those people are also indirectly partly responsible for the murder of Damien Price.”

“To some degree, perhaps,” I agreed. “And also for ensuring that that arms shipment never got into the wrong hands, thereby preventing who knows how many armed robberies and shootings.”

If you really wanted to kill someone, you’d find a way, gun or no gun, although I detested the use of firearms for a lot of very good reasons. Something as irrevocable as purposefully ending a life shouldn’t be so easy to do and so hard to prevent. I shrugged and handed him his phone back. That was one thing in favour of the laws here, despite how many stupid ones there still were. The statistics spoke for themselves. Give more people guns, and your crime figures spiked proportionally, pure and simple.

Conall had finished reading and made himself a coffee by the time I was happy with my code bundle. “Did you hit the ‘wipe’ link I sent at the end of that file, Con?” It was always better to check. He nodded.

“All gone.” As if it was never there. “And you were right about Osborne’s retraction.” Again, not surprising.

I overwrote the spyware on Whitaker’s phone with my own package and pulled up a few more pages on the browser to give it something to communicate. We waited a couple of minutes, and then I typed in a query: the location coordinates for the other IP address the phone had contacted came up on my screen. I set my system up to feed all incoming locations into the map and brought that up on the left half of the screen. It was in Aberdeen, the warehouse district down by the quays.

“That’s probably the hub. We’ll see soon enough when the rest of the bundle’s installed and deployed itself.” I set up my next query and waited for a system ready notification before sending it out. A few more green dots appeared on the map around the city. Tagged phones. Yeah, that first dot had been their hub, alright.

“What about Lewis and Harris?” Conall asked, and I switched the map view over.

One green dot appeared for Whitaker’s phone, sitting right on top of us, and another also flashed to life, out on the open sea, about a quarter of the way to Ullapool. Bother! That made things a bit more complicated. Well, at least I had my laptop with me, so I didn’t need to call in to ask for a satellite feed. I could get