Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (37 page)

Angie made a note in her book, and Gemma continued.

‘So she sets a couple of practice fires to make sure this is going to work and at the same time creates the possibility that an arsonist is on the loose. And she gets hold of a bright yellow BMW and off she goes up to Nelson Bay with her little cylinder of CO. Let’s assume she’s spent time with Benjamin previously at Nelson Bay. She could have easily found out the security code to the house. Benjamin is there on his own. Maybe she gives him one last chance to redeem himself. We’ll never really know. Then’—Gemma paused—‘it might have gone something like this: she opens her bag, grabs her spray and lets him have it with a good blast of CO. He’s shocked and coughing. He wouldn’t know that he’s inhaling pure carbon monoxide. This girl wants to make sure he doesn’t escape. He’s dead very quickly. She sets the fire and off she goes. She’s practised the detonation time on the other two fires. But she’s got no fight with his cat so she takes that back with her. Maybe she’d always liked it. But then I drop in on her and by sheer bad luck, the cat appears on the windowsill. She denies all knowledge of it, of course, but now the cat has to go. So she kills it with her little canister and dumps it in a garbage bag somewhere in the Cross, knowing that there’s no way she can now be connected with the dead man.’ She paused, aware of Angie’s amazement. ‘How am I doing?’

Angie nodded. ‘Pretty impressive, I’d say.’

‘And I haven’t finished yet,’ said Gemma. ‘She’s a smart girl. She’s set up a murder that she hopes will destroy his wife as well as the man she’s come to hate. So she creates a path of powerful circumstantial evidence that seems to lead straight to the door of the person with the most to gain from Benjamin Glass’s death. It only takes a phone call to the insurance brokers and a copy of the policy is sent to Minkie Montreau’s address. Skanda knows that’s going to look bad for Minkie.’

Angie nodded. ‘As far as she’s concerned,’ she said, ‘it’s perfect payback. The man who rejected her dead, and the woman he wouldn’t leave, her rival, serving life for his murder.’

‘And one more thing,’ said Gemma. ‘Tell Sean to make sure he collects cat hair from Skanda’s flat. Match it with cat hair from Benjamin Glass’s factory. You could even suggest he goes and collects the dead cat. If it’s still there in the lane. Then get Lance at Paradigm Laboratories on the job. He specialises in mitochondrial DNA. I can guarantee he’ll get a match.’

‘If you say so,’ said Angie.

‘Ms Bergen’s already admitted knowing the dead man,’ said Gemma. ‘But the presence of a lot of cat hair will help a jury establish she had his cat at her place, not just him. And they’d have to ask why that might be so. Tell Sean to find the yellow BMW she hired and he’ll get cat hair from that, I’ll bet. He should put it to her that she’d do well to come clean about it. There’s a canister of carbon monoxide with her on it. She’d probably wipe prints, but with her skin condition, the analysts might get lucky and find plenty of material for a profile.’

‘Where’s the canister?’ Angie asked.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Gemma. She paused, thinking back. ‘There was much more to it than the sex worker and client relationship.’

‘There’s always more to it,’ said Angie. She shrugged. ‘Humans are funny critters.’

‘So I’m discovering,’ said Gemma. ‘I didn’t know you worked with Mike Moody last year.’

‘Who?’ Angie looked genuinely puzzled.

Gemma filled her in and Angie nodded.

‘Hardly remember him,’ she said. ‘It was one of those joint operations. People coming and going. I think I only spoke to him once.’

Two grubby-looking creatures with dreadlocks, wild facial hair and torn jeans walked past Gemma and Angie through the security gates, surrounded by a stench of engine oil, flashing ID as they went.

‘Will you look at them?’Angie said.

‘Drug Squad?’ Gemma asked. Angie nodded.

Gemma said goodbye and walked out of the building, remembering the old days when she’d worked there when anyone could walk in and out almost unchallenged.

On her way back to the car, she decided to double the account she would finally present to the widow Glass. After all, Minkie had had her running around in circles. Gemma drove home, worked out the amount, then thought of the insurance pay-out coming to Minkie and tripled it. It came to a tidy sum. She put it in an envelope with her business card and posted it.

•

Now, she sat perched uneasily on a stool in the operatives’ office, watching Mike as he sat hunched in front of his laptop.

‘Ouch!’ she exclaimed, as the pain in her lower rib reminded her not to lean against the desk. Still, it felt good taking action like this, even if she didn’t fully understand what Mike was doing. Her knowledge of electronics was limited and she knew how much she relied on the expertise of the operatives she employed and felt grateful that Mike knew what he was doing. Now, as she looked at him, she wondered how she could ever have thought he was a spy.

‘Mike,’ she started to say, ‘I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I’ve been very concerned about Steve—’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, as he started up a program. ‘You’ve been under diabolical stress lately.’ He turned to her and flashed his white-toothed grin. ‘I’m feeling lucky that I got out alive. You looked very serious with that Glock.’

‘I was serious,’ she said. ‘It looked like you were the man in the frame.’

Mike turned back to his keyboard and screen. ‘The more intelligence we can get on Fayed, the better for Steve,’ Mike continued. ‘If something’s gone wrong, this way we’ve got a good chance of finding out what it is.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I did a complete RF sweep of all the frequencies in Fayed’s area,’ he said, indicating the laptop. ‘And what I’m doing now is running a merge program so I can analyse what I’ve grabbed from the air around Fayed’s joint.’ He tapped the side of the screen, busy at its work. ‘I’ve got a searchable data base on a CD-Rom with the details of every
licensed
transmission in the area. That way, we can eliminate all the transmissions we expect to see. Then I’ll see what’s left. The exception report will show me the ones we don’t know about. Anything that shouldn’t be there could prove to be very interesting.’ He saw Gemma’s face and paused.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘what I’m going to do is what any analyst does—take a sample, put it on a slide and see what we’ve got. Or, in this case, see what’s floating around in the airwaves.’

‘Okay, Mike,’ she said.

‘And I found an Optus micro cell up a telegraph pole about twenty metres from his castle. I picked up beacon signals from that and, would you believe, I found an extra little something—a low output transmission? That’s very interesting.’

‘I didn’t notice any micro cell on a telegraph pole,’ she said ‘and I’ve cruised past his place.’

‘You don’t see what you’re not looking for,’ said Mike.

That, at least, she understood.

‘Optus and Telstra both utilise telegraph poles for their networks. At the higher frequencies,’ he continued, ‘height is might. For very short range, you need to be in the line of sight for transmission.’

‘Mike, I’m the one losing transmission,’ Gemma said.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t need to know all that. Basically what I’m saying is that I picked up a signal that could belong to a Federal agency.’

‘You should know,’ she said drily. Mike laughed.

‘But what’s the point of gathering in police intelligence?’ she asked. ‘So far, the police have been spectacularly unsuccessful in touching George Fayed.’

‘Gemma, I’m interested in the police operation because it gives us a way in.’

‘A way in where?’ she asked.

‘You know from other situations that the best way to go is to use assets already in place.’

She nodded. It was classic strategy.

Mike turned his attention back to the screen. ‘See there?’ he said, indicating wave-like patterns. ‘That shows us what’s going on in the lower frequencies. Nothing very exciting. Remote controls for things like televisions, signals from babies’ sleep monitors, garage doors, that sort of thing. But if you have a look
here
, at 5.6 gigahertz—’

‘5.6?’ she repeated. ‘That sounds familiar.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s the surveillance operation we were talking about. You remember how police operations are always stymied by the Listening Devices Act? And how they grizzle about that. All they can do is pick up pieces of mosaic intelligence—watch whatever address it is that interests them, make a note of who comes and goes, check out the visitors, track them back to where they come from, check out rego plates. Slowly gather the bits that make up a picture of what goes on in and around the place.’

Gemma nodded. She remembered diagrams on white boards, flow charts that demonstrated criminal connections. ‘I’ve been through all that,’ she said.

‘I want to do something a bit cleverer than police surveillance,’ said Mike. He closed down his program. ‘I did a few things last night,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a van and I’ve found a garage we can rent not far away from Fayed’s place. We don’t want to be on the street.’

He jumped up and grabbed his coat. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s do our job.’

•

A short while later, Gemma huddled with Mike in the back of the borrowed van, watching him as he went to work.

‘What we can do first,’ he said to her, ‘is pick up the police surveillance frequency modulations.’

‘But you said you were going to do something smarter than that.’

She wondered if he’d even heard her.

‘When I was doing my analysis of this set-up here,’ said Mike, ‘I picked up another signal in the 1–10 megahertz, very weak and close to the noise floor.’

‘And?’ she asked.

‘I detected the “noise” of closed circuit television screens.’

‘George Fayed has CCT inside and outside his place,’ said Gemma. Things were getting interesting now, she thought.

Mike nodded. ‘And with the right equipment and know-how, receivers can also act as transmitters. Receivers are transmitters are receivers are transmitters .
 
.
 
.’

‘You mean, his closed circuit system could work the other way and transmit out to us?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Mike.

Gemma felt a wave of hope lift her spirits. ‘We can see inside Fayed’s place right here?’ She indicated Mike’s screen.

‘All I have to do is find the cables,’ said Mike. ‘Once I find the cables, we’re in. We can piggyback in on the police surveillance frequency. I’ve just got to make sure there’s zero interference with the Optus system.’

If we can see inside Fayed’s house, Gemma thought, and if Steve’s there, I might be able to help him. And redeem myself for my earlier behaviour.

•

Gemma waited in the cramped van, the only sound the soft chattering of Mike’s keyboard as he worked.

‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘It’s time to get off the street. Let’s go and take cover.’

They climbed into the front of the van and drove away from Fayed’s corner and around into a tree-lined street running at a right-angle to it. Before they parked in the rented garage Gemma glanced up at the sky. It was dark with a threatening storm and the oppressive coldness chilled her to the bone.

An hour later, she was in the back of the van again, more cramped up than before, watching Mike’s fingers manipulate the arcane figures and symbols that appeared on his screen.

‘The Feds are using a broadband, frequency agile transmitter,’ Mike said, ‘capable of four video channels.’

Gemma grunted. Her body was seething; the inaction was frustrating.

‘Mike,’ she said, ‘I’m going crazy just sitting here. I need to be out there doing something.’

Mike, busy with frequency modulations and demodulations, translating these from one electronic ‘language’ to another, barely looked up, just nodded and kept working. She started to uncurl, feeling pins and needles shoot down one leg. Outside, the storm was building, coming closer and she could see the effects of its interference from time to time, shivering Mike’s screen. There was a silent brilliant flash and Gemma nearly jumped out of her skin as the thunderclap broke right over the roof. The figures on Mike’s screen convulsed and disappeared, returning seconds later.

‘Hey! Look.’ Mike said, utterly absorbed. A picture appeared on Mike’s laptop and Gemma noticed his forehead gleaming with sweat in the bluish light of the screen. ‘Picture and sound.’

‘What is it?’ She leaned forward to peer at the images on the screen in front of her. She saw the opulent, heavy furnishings of a bedroom as they flicked into view for a few seconds. Then the picture changed. Now she was looking down past a giant chandelier into some sort of reception room with grandiose gilt furniture. ‘What am I looking at?’ she asked. The screen flickered and the picture switched to a living room with heavy Italianate furnishings.

‘We’re in!’ Mike said, clapping his hands together. ‘Welcome to Casa Fayed’s closed circuit television home movies.’ Despite the chill of their surroundings, Mike wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, wincing as he touched the stitches over his brow.

Gemma held her breath as she stared into an ornate dining room, complete with long baronial table, carved chairs and heavy curtains. Twisted pillars featured beside the entrance. The decor was reminiscent, Gemma thought, of Hollywood biblical epics, circa 1960. The picture switched to a view of the kitchen where two handsome strong-featured women, possibly Fayed’s wife and mother, Gemma thought, busied themselves.

‘He’s got internal cameras everywhere,’ said Mike. ‘We can see what he can see now.’

Gemma leaned forward in excitement, her worries momentarily forgotten, as the screen changed yet again. They had access to a series of dress circle views into the house of the drug lord. Marble and gilt bathrooms, storerooms, a generator room, external and internal corridors, all were covered in the system of rotating closed circuit television angles. Anywhere an assassin might conceivably hide himself, Gemma thought, Fayed has cameras to make sure it can’t happen. Even the laundry, and what looked like a drying room, where sheets and towels hung. A generous lap pool, sauna and gym area took up half of one level. It was like a small city in there, Gemma thought, with all the services anyone could reasonably want. She sat transfixed, staring into the secret world of the drug lord.