Blood Money (34 page)

The two nervous uniforms need a little bit of reassuring before they're happy to re-enter the bank, and they only seem truly convinced that it's safe to do so when Dave Picken shows them the zero readings being registered by his gas detector.

Once inside, they waste no time in putting the kettle on for a bit of ‘chink-chink' and whilst waiting for the water to boil Dave talks Bill through how he wants him to check the CO levels in the exhaust gas. Bill follows Dave's instructions to the letter and begins keeping a log of the ppm levels in the gas being purged outside to open atmosphere. These records will then help them to judge the rate of progress inside the vault as time passes.

As they drink their tea, the jokes and smiles across all their faces indicate the degree to which everyone is feeling more relaxed about the situation. Everything is safe and seems to be proceeding just as Dave Picken had told them it would. Come 5 o'clock, Dave heads for home on the understanding that Bill will contact him several times a day to keep him appraised of the latest gas readings.

*

With Picken gone, Bill figures that he'll give it an hour or so before he too heads home for some kip. With a period of time to kill, he gets out his cell phone and sends Gibson a text (as promised). ‘We all survived. Might take a few days before vault is fully safe though.'

Seconds later, a return text reads ‘R U alone?'. Bill replies ‘Y' and then Gibson texts back, ‘I seem to be missing all the action. Please txt me a picture of the vault door'.

Bill thinks for a moment, it's a strange request, but who knows what John has on his mind. He might as well humour the kid, so he gets to his feet and leaves the other two policemen in the reception area, commenting to them as he passes “Just got to check on something. Back shortly.” He grabs a gas detector (just in case) and begins descending the steps into the basement.

As Bill gets halfway down he hears a worrying noise. It's a faint tapping sound, metal against metal, only just audible above the humming sound from the centrifugal fan.

He knows instinctively that something's not right, so before taking another step he checks the portable gas detector, it reads 2ppm, a reassuringly low level that proves that the air is still safe to breath. Bill continues to the bottom of the flight of steps and enters the basement. The metallic tapping sound is louder still.

Bill's aging face wrinkles in an expression of confused puzzlement.

He checks the fan, but once he's next to it it's clear that the tapping noise is coming from somewhere else. Perhaps trace levels of carbon monoxide are affecting his mind? Surely the noise can't be coming from inside the vault itself?

To check inside without Dave Picken as a back-up would be madness, and anyway it would require him to don all that breathing apparatus once more. But as he get closer to the sheeting he realises the sound is now most definitely behind him. Pretty sure he's homing-in on its source; he opens the door to the little store room.

The tapping is now much louder, so Bill flicks on the light to cast aside the shadowy darkness. The room is small, maybe 8ft deep by 6ft across. The rhythmic tapping continues in spite of the fact that the small ante-room is completely deserted. Moving cautiously forward he examines the trolleys and the metal ramp lent up against the far wall. The metallic tapping continues unrelentingly.

Feeling like he's in a real-life horror movie he decides he's going to have to pull away the metal ramp from against the wall.

And peering behind it, he gets the shock of his life.

The tapping noise stops as soon as Bill leans back the metal ramp from the store room wall. He wasn't exactly sure what he'd find behind it, he'd been figuring that there might be any number of crazy things causing such a repetitive noise…some sort of vent with a broken fan blade, a rat stuck in a trap…or something like that. But what Bill hadn't been prepared to see was a thumping great hole, some two foot across, made just above the level of the floor.

Dragging the heavy metal ramp across to one side, Bill fully exposes the entire end-wall, uncovering the roughly hewn opening excavated into the brickwork.

Firstly stooping at the waist, then getting down on all fours (knee joints creaking) he's peering into the gloom when suddenly, torchlight shines across from the far side straight into Bill's eyes. And as if that isn't startling enough, the light now begins to move, wobbling from side to side, causing him to retreat back across the floor.

Alarmed and uncertain, he does the instinctive thing and scrambles up onto his feet, ready to defend himself. A gloved hand appears out of the hole. Then another. Then a pair of arms wriggle forward through the opening.

Fighting the urge to retreat, DI Warren holds his position. With a few more awkward shuffling movements a head attached to a set of shoulders emerges through the opening. A man, dressed in white decorators overalls (complete with hood), strains to lift his torso up off the floor. Raising his covered head causes a super-bright head-torch to shine directly into Bill's eyes. Having to squint past the fierce light, the obscured face behind the dazzling beam is starting to become recognisable only once Bill's pupils begin adjusting to the glare.

“When you said you'd done a bit of damage to a wall,
I thought you meant back at your flat…”

Bill grabs his friend's wrists and helps to drag the rest of his body out of the narrow hole. Whilst John gets to his feet and dusts himself off, Bill closes the store room door so the sound of their voices won't be heard by the two officers upstairs.

“Where the fuck have you just come from?” whispers Bill.

“St Gregory's…–the church next door.” The way John nonchalantly says it, it's like he thinks it should be completely obvious, “Actually, from the crypt underneath it to be more precise…”

“So what's this all about then Gibbo? Is this your idea of a practical joke? You're supposed to be at home getting your life back together. Well…? Oh, and you do realise there's a pair of coppers just above us who'd be more than happy to arrest you for tunnelling into a bank!
You can't just go around…”

Gibson raises his hands, cutting off his partner before the old boy gives himself a turn. “Calm down Billy Boy! I know I've got some explaining to do…But calm down first.” The older man scowls back at his young partner like a disapproving father would.

“Go on then…explain why you've done all this damage! This building is supposed to be locked-down whilst we make it safe, and what's more it's still the scene of an ongoing criminal investigation, so you'd better have good reason…”

“Alright, alright, keep your flaming wig on! The evidence supplied to the FSA…it was a DVD that got sent to them anonymously.”

“Yeah, ok. I know that…though I didn't get to see any of it. What of it?”

“It was me!” Gibson looks deep into his friend's eyes for some sort of recognition that he's understood what's just been said, but although the lights are on, nobody appears to be at home.

“I sent it in!” Bill's eyes open wide as the bombshell hits its target.

“I filmed what Vasilakos was doing down in this basement on his Cray computer. Turned out he was using it to decipher loads of private mobile-phone conversations that he was eavesdropping-in on. That's how he's been getting so much insider information, you see?”

“You've got some neck to pull off a stunt like this! –And you're in some seriously deep shit if just one person finds out what you've done. Everyone's assuming the tip-off came from some disgruntled employee at the bank, some whistle-blower who's scared of recriminations. So come on then…, I can see you've smashed a hole in this wall, what else did you do in order to make this DVD recording of yours?”

“I'll start at the beginning, so you get the full picture, okay?” Bill's response to all of this is to shake his head in amazement. Once they've both sat down on a trolley, Gibson's story begins.

“First of all, it started off with me trusting in Rebecca's data on suspicious trading patterns. It left me in no doubt that Kronos were guilty of catastrophic levels of insider dealing. Then when she died shortly after our flat had been broken into and the way it was done…(without leaving any evidence behind)…it was clear to me it was the work of a ‘professional'. And because she'd got no enemies other than Alexis Vasilakos, he simply had to have been behind it.

And conventional policing methods have proven to be a complete waste of time against these guys haven't they? Criminals of their calibre just don't allow themselves to get caught. So I decided to put my life (or at least my career) on the line in order to try and see some sort of justice done. I just couldn't stand by. She'd have died for nothing otherwise and anyway, I promised her just before she died that I'd help her nail ‘em you see? And a promise is a promise in my book.

The main ‘proof' I had was no more than the timing of her death. It just couldn't have been a coincidence. She and I had just agreed to team up and start properly investigating Alexis's business affairs. No one else knew, and it was going to be our little secret. Minutes later, she lay dead. So it only made any sense if someone had just heard our conversation and that meant that our apartment must have been bugged. When at last I managed to find the listening device I knew for sure that Kronos were responsible.

Not that I knew what I could possibly do about it, not straight away at least. However, a few days later I saw this article on Vasilakos in one of the investment magazines that Rebecca subscribes to. There was this picture, Alexis with the supercomputer on one side and the vault door on the other. That's when I realised.”

“What are you talking about? You realised what exactly?”

“That he must have been doing some pretty dodgy things on the Cray for him to hide it down here in the basement where no one else could see him using it. Remember how we'd spotted (on the day we interviewed him) how he'd fitted an iris scanner at the top of the stairs to restrict anyone from coming down here other than him. What I mean is…the vault's already impenetrable, so the only other thing he could have been trying to protect was this supercomputer. A normal CEO running a legitimate business would keep such a valuable asset in some sort of IT department wouldn't they? Anyway, in that one glossy image he showed the world that he kept his algorithmic trading computer next to his bank vault. Now as you know, I'm no gambler. But I was pretty confident that the Cray was therefore being used for illegal activities. So I began piecing together a plan to discover whatever it was that Alexis was using it for.
Because I just knew it had to be illegal!”

“Look, get to the all important bit will you? From what we were told during the pre-raid briefing, the evidence showed Alexis had been intercepting phone calls. But I don't see how on earth you could have managed to video what he was doing. There's simply nowhere to hide down here, the place is just too small.”

“Okay, okay. I'm almost there. I clearly couldn't film what he was doing over his shoulder and I'm no expert with computers neither…so hacking into it and uploading some sort of snooping software was out of the question.”

“Sure, you're a lot better than me on computers, but you're still not good enough to do that sort of thing.”

“Thanks…anyway, there just had to be a way. And the simplest solution still seemed to be along the lines of me filming him doing whatever it was he was doing, I mean Rebecca and me already have a top of the range camcorder, and I'm actually quite handy with it even if I do say so myself. It seemed sensible for me to play to my strengths, so what I decided to do was to set up a second monitor screen which would display the same images (real time) as were being displayed on the main monitor. And as it turned out, it was a pretty easy thing to achieve too. Nothing particularly complicated. Nothing that needed me to load software or anything fancy like that onto the Cray to make it work.”

“Oh, and what was that?”

“A splitter cable…that's all! I started off a conversation on an internet chat-room site with some computer experts about wanting to drive two monitors with just one PC. And they were only too helpful in explaining that I needed to get myself an SVGA splitter cable. In a nutshell, it splits the signals going to the monitor and allows the same picture to be displayed on two separate screens. It was nice and small so I was happy that I could hide it without difficulty behind the Cray and I figured Alexis would never think to check behind it.”

“Ahhh, now I can see what you've done. –So you were hiding in here with a second monitor screen and a camcorder whilst Alexis was just a few feet away working at the real computer?”

“Almost, but I might have had to hide in here for an awfully long time before Alexis decided to come down and use it. And if I'd have been hiding in here, I could have sneezed or coughed, or the camcorder might have started bleeping or something and the game would have been up. Also I couldn't afford to have had a cable snaking its way across the floor from the Cray to the store room door, could I? So I took a bit more advice from the same computer experts and this time they suggested a bit of wireless technology. I bought myself a small transmitter/receiver set to allow me to get my duplicate monitor working without any wires going to it and without needing any software to run it. And before I brought any of it down here I set it all up at home to check that it worked okay, even experimenting as to how far away I could put the transmitter away from the receiver.”

“Clever boy. Liking it so far!”

“I'd closely examined the blueprints in your old case file, so I knew this storeroom existed on this side of the basement. And the easiest way to get in here was for me to come in from the crypt underneath the church next door. I had to do loads of measurements and calculations to be sure I knew the precise point to start digging and then all it took was the sheer bloody-minded effort to tunnel my way through five foot of stone, brickwork and rubble. Anyway, when I got in here I can't tell you how relieved I was to discover the positioning had been correct. And I had no way of knowing what (if anything) was stored in this room, but seeing what was in here gave me something perfect to use to cover-up the hole just in case anyone looked inside for whatever reason.

The following night, I returned and crawled all the way through for the first time. I dusted myself off and then went round behind the Cray to fit the splitter and the transmitter. Once I'd cleaned up all the dust and rubble from me breaking through I re-traced my steps back into the tunnel, leaving the receiver unit at the ‘bank-end' of the opening.

So back on the other side (in the church basement) I was able to set-up my second monitor that would get it's feed via the wireless receiver and then in front of the screen I set up Rebecca's fancy camcorder on a tri-pod. I had it powered off a mains socket in the crypt and left it recording onto the large capacity hard drive in extra-long play mode. It was then only a matter of leaving it for a few working-days before coming back to see what, if anything, it had managed to capture.”

“I really don't know how you summoned-up the nerve to do all of this, I truly don't.”

“I'm assuming Vasilakos doesn't yet know where the evidence against him has come from. He might however figure out that I'm one of the people who's definitely got sufficient motive to have gone after him. So there's half a chance he's going to come after me too, and considering he's already had me under observation night and day I think he always must have known the potential threat I posed after killing my girlfriend.

Bill, I've got to say I'm not at all proud of the fact that I've broken the law half a dozen times doing what I've done, but I don't regret any of my actions in the slightest. Someone had to take a stand, and it turned out it had to be me. So what I need to know is how you feel about everything I've done?
What I'm asking is…are you going to turn me in?”

“You're joking aren't you? –I'm old-school. Back in the day, coppers used to ‘fit people up' all the time, good and proper. Far as I'm concerned you've used a bit of initiative and what's more, you seem to have got a right old result, haven't you? No messing around. And don't get me wrong, this is no fit-up, that megalomaniac has been proven to be guilty of some major criminal activity. It's just that you used a few questionable methods to draw it all out into the open. You've taken down a major league arse-hole who must've thought he was well above the law. You done good my son, real good!”

“And the wall, can you help me fix it up?”

“Sure! –You're certainly going to need a bit of help making it look like this hole never existed aren't you?”

“Yeah, that's the one screw up I think I made throughout the whole of this. I was so focused on being able to fix things up on the church side that I forgot it'd also need fixing-up from this side too. And with the coppers upstairs and the amount of CCTV focused on the bank's entrances, I really can't afford to take the risk of being seen leaving 60 Lombard St, even with it as empty as it currently is.

So yeah…we need to plasterboard over this entire end wall so no one's the wiser. Everything we need I've got ready and waiting on the crypt side. I've even got buckets that'll fit through the hole and I've cut down the Gyproc into smallish sections too.”