Having passed through the customs hall and now traversing the arrivals hall, Gillian scanned the crowds of greeters holding up signs seeking named customers for various hotels and car hire companies. To her extreme left she spotted the MI5 watcher. He was dressed in chinos and a Hawaiian styled silk shirt. His Ray Ban sunglasses were perched on his head amid a sea of wavy medium length salt and pepper hair. He had a folded copy of the local newspaper, oddly entitled the ‘Granma’, with the red banner title facing towards her. The reason the observer drew her attention was that he occasionally looked down at the paper before again scanning the crowd of new arrivals. Each time he looked around his hand relaxed a little and the newspaper was lowered enough for Gillian to note that the newspaper was concealing a sheet of paper to which the observer’s attention regularly returned. Gillian was quite certain that the paper contained her photograph and her description.
The man appeared increasingly anxious as he failed to spot his quarry, and so Gil removed her wide brimmed hat and shook loose her long fair hair to give him a better view. She smiled to herself as he spotted her immediately and compared her to the photo in his hand.
Job done, Gil walked off in the direction of her tour group and boarded the bus which would drop her and a rowdy crowd of Geordies and Mackems at the Hotel Nacional.
***
Jared Stevens dropped the newspaper into the trash and followed the tourists out onto the concourse, where he watched as their luggage was loaded onto a bus which had a crudely printed sheet of A4 paper blu-tacked to the windscreen. The writing on the paper read “Nacional”.
Jared waited until the target had entered the bus and the door had closed with a loud hiss of air before he extracted his mobile phone. Carefully scrolling down the Cubacell Nokia 8 phone’s screen, he selected ‘Moriarty’ and pressed the speed dial. The phone was answered almost immediately at the other end.
“Holmes, has the bird landed?” Moriarty asked.
“Yes indeed. She is winging her way to you as we speak,” Stevens responded, replying to his codename.
“Excellent,” Moriarty replied. “I’ll be waiting.”
***
Thom Passerell, alias Moriarty, was the senior half of the two man team that MI5 had assigned to watch Gillian Davis. Neither operative was supposed to be active in Cuba. Usually, they operated entirely separately from the MI5 man in the Embassy, Laurence Hinds, who was allegedly the commercial attaché, a title which fooled no-one, especially the Cubans.
The middle aged Jared Stevens and Thom Passerell constituted a covert unit who were essentially the eyes and ears of Whitehall in the Revolutionary Republic. Both held down real jobs in Havana, and both were part timers. Nonetheless, they were well trained and had been considered to be highly skilled operatives at one time. But, completely against regulations, and the QA policy drafted at Thames House in 2002 that demanded refresher training every two years, neither man had been back to the UK for skills training for over five years. As a result they had become lazy, and their skills were perhaps less well honed than they might have been.
Stevens would take up the surveillance later in the day, but for now he had to return to his office at Cubapetrolio, sometimes known as Cupet, where he needed to finalise a proposal for a new semi submersible oil platform for presentation to the Cupet board the next morning.
***
The elderly bus disgorged the tourists at the Nacional and the concierge staff swarmed over the luggage, hoping that the owners of the individual suitcases would present them with a generous tip when they delivered them to their rooms. Gil waited her turn in line and duly checked in, after touching up her make up using a small compact. She had spotted Thom Passarell as soon as she had walked into the hotel lobby. She obviously did not know his name, but she knew his type.
As Gillian stepped up to check in, Passarell moved over to the counter a few feet away and perused some leaflets offering boat trips and bus tours of the locale.
“Ah, Senora Davis, it is so good to welcome you to Habana,” the small grinning receptionist gushed as he looked at Gillian’s passport. “You are in room 431 which is on the fourth floor. I am sure you will like the room.” Then, after preening his thin, immaculately neat moustache, he pointed to the bank of elevators.
“The lifts are to your left. Is there anything else I can you with?”
Gillian spoke loudly enough for Thom Passerell to hear.
“Yes. I’m booked in for a pampering session this afternoon, I believe?”
The man tapped a few keys on his computer, while his eyes quickly scanned the information on the screen. He smiled at her, and spoke.
“Yes Senora, that is at 4pm for two hours. I also note that you are booked on the city tour tomorrow. That tour is due to leave at eight in the morning. Do you wish an alarm call?”
“Yes please. Tell me, what time does the tour return in the evening?”
The receptionist picked up an itinerary and read off the details.
“After visiting National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, you have a boat tour followed by lunch. The afternoon is spent touring the region by bus, culminating in a delicious dinner at the famous Club Paradiso, where you will be watching and dancing salsa until 11pm, when the bus leaves for your hotel.” He paused whilst he thought. “You should be back at the hotel around midnight tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Gillian replied gracefully. “I have a full week of events planned. I want to make the most of my week in Havana.” The receptionist bowed and Gillian walked across the lobby to be reacquainted with her luggage, which was in the safe hands of a smartly uniformed young man whose name badge read ‘Jesus’.
***
Across the Atlantic a phone rang in Thames House. Maureen Lassiter answered it without giving her name.
“This is Moriarty. Our little bird has settled. This afternoon I will visit her room and by this evening we will have audio in the bedroom and bathroom. There will also be limited motion sensor video from the alarm clock. I’ll send you the IP address of the server so that you can watch and listen in real time on the website.”
“Good. When do you plan to extract her?” Maureen asked.
“We will have a subcontracted team waiting in her room when she returns tomorrow night. They will lift her and she will be on the company transport back to London by the early hours of the morning.”
“That is acceptable. Call me when she has boarded.” At that Maureen replaced the receiver, then lifted it again to dial Barry Mitchinson.
***
Mrs. Docherty went to a good deal of trouble naming her baby boy. After much considered thought she and her husband eventually alighted on a name that was stylish and cool without sounding odd. She called him Vaughan. When her baby boy started school, the much considered name was abandoned and he was thereafter called ‘Doc’. Now approaching twenty nine years of age, he was a geeky computer genius who eschewed people and the outside world for the world of multi core chipsets, motherboards, flat screen monitors and superfast graphic sets. Doc could build, or disassemble, anything electronic.
Without formal qualifications, he rebuilt computers that people had discarded and sold them second hand. He had a ready market, because his reconditioned gaming machines were faster than any production model. Unfortunately, like many isolated young men running virtual worlds from his bedroom, he descended into the murky world of computer hacking. After successful efforts to shut down some of the USA’s top law enforcement websites, he tried to close down the SOCA website. Unfortunately for Doc and his friends, the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency had an ex hacker geek of their own, ‘The Repeller’. Sitting in an almost empty office on a Sunday night and playing war games, ‘The Repeller’ saw an unexpected spike in data requests which were multiplying geometrically by the minute, and quickly realised that his baby was under attack. ‘The Repeller’ quickly took the website offline and repelled the attack by sending back a barrage of data from an array of computers that Doc and his
friends simply could not match. The quickly escalating data requests were now swamping their originator’s machines and closing them down, whilst stripping their hard drives. Before Doc managed to shut down his system, ‘The Repeller’ had a full copy of his system registry, along with a list of his IP addresses and his contacts list.
Less than an hour later, whilst Doc was trying to revive his useless computers, the front door came in and his mum screamed as men streamed in to her neatly maintained bungalow. Doc was in trouble.
Since then Doc had been on the side of the angels, or at least of the authorities, and it was here that he found the resources that allowed him to show his capability. Ten years later he had seven ‘apps’ on the top hundred Apple iPhone Apps list, and it was widely believed that Apple had incorporated one of his rejected ‘apps’ into the architecture of the new iPhone 4.
Doc was the UK Security Services go-to guy for anything Apple, be it iPad, iPod or iPhone. Such was his expertise that within days of the release of a new iPad, Doc would be selling his own souped up version at many times the price. Disassembled, improved and reassembled, the iPad VOX looked and behaved like an ordinary iPad, but it also did so much more.
Gillian owned an iPad Vox, iPod Vox and iPhoneVox. They had been extraordinarily useful to her as the Chameleon, and now they were going to be pressed into service to help her escape the clutches of MI5.
Gil Davis had returned to room 431 after her sojourn in the spa and by the pool, and was now sitting on the bed with her iPad VOX. Laying it to one side for a moment, she donned her headphones and walked around the room, holding her iPod Vox and shaking her head in time with some unheard music. She casually danced her way through the en-suite room, tunelessly singing Abba’s Dancing Queen as she went. The iPod was not playing music at all, although there were some three thousand tunes on its hard drive. Rather, the iPod was listening and sending out a series of beeps that would have been perceptible only to dolphins or whales.
After a minute or two Gil unplugged the headphones and laid the iPod on the bed close to the iPad. They synchronised immediately, and the iPad screen came to life, showing a series of white dashes, lighting and dimming as they raced around the perimeter of an unseen circle. In a few seconds a floor plan appeared, showing two bright green dots along with a single red dot.
One green dot was in the bathroom, in the vicinity of the wash hand basin. The other was in the vicinity of a large oil painting on the wall. The red dot was beside the bed. Gil clicked an icon labelled 3D View and a skeletal 3D picture of her room appeared on the screen.
The new screen showed the red dot, a video source, on the bedside table, probably hidden in the clock. The first green dot, an audio only source, was right behind the painting, and the second green dot was indeed on the wall behind the pedestal wash hand basin.
Content that she now knew that she was being spied upon, she decided that listening was acceptable but watching, well, that was just plain rude. Gil sniffed a couple of times and left the bed to pick up a cube shaped box of tissues. Returning to her iPad and the bed, she sat down and blew her nose loudly before placing the tissue box, without looking, on the bedside table. The box had landed, as she planned, right in front of the camera clock, obscuring its view entirely. She tried not to smile as she imagined her watcher swearing and blaspheming at his or her appalling bad luck.
A little while later Gil retired to the bathroom for a few minutes, singing as she went, to offer a few crumbs of comfort to the surveillance team who were no doubt listening in. As soon as she had prepared herself for bed she returned to the bedroom, lay down and fluffed the pillow. Twenty minutes later, Jared Stevens was sitting at a monitor in a nearby room, listening to gentle snoring and keeping his eye on the picture from the hallway security camera that pointed straight at the door of room 431.
Chapter 40
The Frank Sinatra Suite, The Savoy, London.
Thursday, 2am.
Katie Norman was wearing fluffy pink pyjamas with red hearts of all sizes displayed in a random but repeating pattern. The pyjamas were still too big for her petite frame, even though they were the smallest adult size. Her make-up was gone and her hair was brushed out. Her young skin radiated good health and her moisturiser gave her a slight glow. She looked about twelve years old again as she reclined on the sofa, holding a Las Vegas themed cushion across her stomach as she cradled a large mug of hot chocolate.
Dee had secured the room and was ready for bed also. She wasn’t generally a night bird, preferring to get to sleep before eleven at night, as a general rule, so that she could arise early. Dee dropped her weary frame into an oversized armchair facing the young Katie. Wearing short pyjamas under a Savoy branded robe, she curled her legs up under her. The robe opened around her knees, revealing the beginnings of a dark purple bruise where the cage fighter’s forehead had connected with Dee’s leg.
Katie noticed the bruise and mentioned it. Dee touched it tenderly. It was already beginning to hurt, but she had rubbed in witch hazel to reduce the discomfort and to speed up the healing process. Later she would take some Boiron Arnica Montana capsules to minimise the overnight swelling and bruising. In the close protection business it was always wise to be aware of homeopathic remedies for minor injuries, or you would spend your life consuming painkillers and destroying your stomach lining.
“Is that the leg you were shot in?” Katie asked in as tactful a way as she could manage late in the day.
Dee slid the robe over to show a scar on her thigh.
“This is where I was shot last year,” she said, stretching the skin to show the full effect of the injury, which had healed exceptionally well.
“The second bullet wound is now virtually invisible, because the gun was pointed upwards when it fired and it passed through my under arm.” Dee unconsciously touched the spot with her left hand as Katie spoke.
“In the movie I made with that ex-wrestler last year, I was a rich heiress being guarded by an ex marine, and he was shot in the leg early on in the film, but he managed to strap it up and struggle through the rest of the day, and the next day he barely had a limp. I guess that was artistic license.”
Dee smiled. “Yes. Although the man that shot me in the leg deliberately tried to avoid the bone and the arteries, it was still a week before I could stand up without fainting and a month before I could limp about. At least when you’re shot in the arm you can stay mobile.”
Katie stood up and set her mug down on the table before moving over to Dee’s chair and squeezing in beside her. The young woman curled her left arm around Dee’s waist and rested her head on the older woman’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” Katie murmured in a tiny voice. “It’s not that I wouldn’t have survived a kiss from that slimy toad, but it would have been humiliating and I would have had nightmares about it for weeks. In this business everyone thinks they own a part of you. The fans love Clara and they think that she and I are their best friends. It’s scary how possessive they can be sometimes.”
Dee smiled as she placed a comforting arm around Katie’s shoulder. She was an only child, and had often envied her friends who had younger sisters, whose hair they would style and tweak as if they were a live doll.
The two of them had a busy schedule for Thursday, today and Friday, culminating in a late Friday flight back to the USA, but luckily the first assignment for Thursday was at eleven in the morning.
They sat on the chair in silence for a while until Dee noticed Katie’s shallow, rhythmic breathing. Recognising the younger woman was falling asleep, she roused her gently, and they both retired to their beds, hoping for a good rest before the next day’s turmoil started afresh.
Chapter 41
Room 431, Hotel Nacional, Havana. Cuba. Thursday 7am.
From its privileged location on top of a promontory overlooking Havana's coastline and seawall drive, the Nacional was perfectly placed. Room 431 commanded a magnificent view of the sea and the bustling Vedado section of Havana
. With its elegance and timeless splendour, the Nacional had played host to hundreds of celebrities from the world of arts, science and politics since the 1930s, according to the brochure, and Gil could see why. Its location in the busiest part of town, its one hundred year heritage and its closeness to Old Havana, about a twenty minute walk along the Malecon, made it an ideal holiday spot. It was a pity she would not be taking full advantage of her stay.
Gil had been up early and had been busy. Once she was dressed and ready to go, she tidied the bed and replaced the tissue box on the table top beneath the TV. The hidden camera would have immediately sprung into action, being activated by sensing any motion, and the watchers would now be enjoying full audio and video coverage of Gil’s tidying up.
***
Holmes and Moriarty had switched duties at 6am, and so Thom Passerell would be keeping his eye on the Chameleon until later tonight, when she would be snatched and rendered back to the UK. The plan was that Jared and Thom would follow her into the room, where she would be apprehended by three subcontractors from a local security company. As well trained as she was, Gillian Davis would not be able to meaningfully resist, rather she would be met with overwhelming force and a very potent chemical cosh.
Thom looked at the screen showing the hotel room. The box covering the hidden camera had been removed in a bout of tidying up by the target, who was now fussing around and making herself ready for her long (and last) tourist day in Cuba.
The camera had the equivalent of a wide angle lens and so almost the entire room could be seen. Against the wall he could see a designer suitcase on a stand constructed so that it folded flat in the wardrobe when not in use. The lid of the suitcase was open and clothing and toiletries spilled out. A hot air brush was left cooling on the opposite bedside table, beside a can of hair spray and a can of Sure deodorant.
Gil Davis came into view. She was dressed in a long floaty summery dress that hung from her shoulders and brushed the floor. Her fair hair was flowing across her shoulders and down her back. A large floppy sun hat completed the ensemble. Gil looked in a mirror as she set the hat correctly on her head, and Thom noticed that she was very heavily made up, but did not wonder why. He supposed it was just something women always did.