Perfect People (49 page)

I just keep thinking about where L and P might be, what’s happened to them. I know I’ve been finding them difficult, but that’s all gone from my head now. I love them to death. I know in some ways they may be strong, but they are still infants, tiny, little people. What we’ve done, John and I, very stupidly, is to make them too smart for their own good (or Dettore did, or whatever). They’ve been made smart enough to communicate with the adult world, but not to understand its dangers. That’s how this has come about.

That image, that video footage of the children trotting into the arms of these strangers, that is what really gets to me. After three years of doing all we could for Luke and Phoebe, they’ve run off willingly with strangers. That’s the worst thing of all.

That they may have been groomed by paedophiles over the internet, is one of the police lines of enquiry, although they haven’t found any evidence of that on their computer, so far. They think it’s possible that the dead man was part of a rival paedophile group and they had a falling out.

Great.

My children are in the hands of some paedophile monsters who shot a man in the back of the head. And no one has any clue where they are.

At some point during the sleepless night they had made love. Maybe
screwed
would have been a better description, John thought, because that’s what it was. A coupling borne out of some primal need. They hadn’t even kissed, Naomi had just drawn him into her, and they had worked away until they had both come, then returned to their respective sides of the hotel room bed.

At seven o’clock he pulled on his tracksuit and trainers, slipped out of the room and down to the lobby of the hotel. Then, as he walked through the revolving doors and out into the dry, grey morning, a battery of flashlights strobed at him, and he immediately went back inside, in panic.

There was an entire army of reporters and news vehicles out there.

He ran across the foyer, following signs marked first to the ballroom, then to the conference centre, and moments later found himself in a large, empty, conference hall.

He made his way to the back of it and out of the rear exit, walked up a wheelchair ramp and came to double doors with a metal bar. He pushed them and to his relief found himself in a deserted side street.

He ran through the bitterly cold air, up a long hill, heading away from the reporters and the sea towards the town centre, and after a few minutes emerged into a wide, deserted shopping street. A police car went by, then a taxi, then a bus with just a couple of passengers. He ran along, past shop windows filled with mannequins, hi-fi, furniture, lights, computers, past a bank that had been converted into a bar, then halted at stop lights and looked at his watch.

Luke and Phoebe were in the hands of strangers. What was happening to them? Were they still alive? He closed his eyes, wishing he could do something more than just answer damned questions, wishing he had woken and looked out of the window and seen those bastards taking his children and torn them to pieces with his bare hands.

As he ran across the road, he saw a teenage boy on a bicycle pedalling away from a newsagent, and stopped as he reached the shop, then went inside.

It was a small, narrow space, lined on one side with magazines, several of them soft porn, and on the other with both British and international newspapers. The proprietor, a surly-looking man, watched him from behind the counter.

Every British paper had the story on its front page. Several international ones did, too. There was even a photograph of himself and Naomi beneath the splash of one newspaper printed in a language he didn’t recognize.

He picked out one paper at random and opened it. His and Naomi’s photographs stared out at him. Taken in front of their house. The image was a little soft – it must have been taken with a long lens by one of the photographers in the fields yesterday morning.

He started reading the article.

‘Hey.’

John looked up, startled, to realize the proprietor was addressing him.

‘Either buy it, mate, or clear off.’

John held up the page showing his photograph for the man to see. ‘They’re my children,’ he said lamely.

‘What’s that?’ The man wasn’t even looking at him, he was rummaging below the counter for something.

‘These twins, in the headlines, these are my children.’

He looked up at him and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Either buy it or clear off.’

John put the paper back on the rack and patted his pockets. He had no money on him, not a bean.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, distraught. ‘I’ll come back.’

The man wasn’t interested; he wasn’t even looking at him any more.

John slunk out of the shop and ran, half-heartedly, back towards the hotel and in through the door he had exited and left open.

Naomi was in the shower when he came into the room. ‘Renate Harrison rang to see how we were. She’s going to be waiting outside the rear entrance just before nine,’ she said.

‘Has she any news?’

‘She said there have been some developments overnight, we’ll get details at the police station.’

‘But they haven’t found them?’

‘No.’

Naomi switched off the shower and stepped out. John passed her a towel. She looked so vulnerable, he thought, with her hair plastered to her head, and water running off her body. He wrapped the towel around her and stood silently, for some moments, hugging her.

At least if they haven’t found Luke and Phoebe, there’s a chance they are still alive
, he thought.

And in Naomi’s eyes, he saw exactly the same thought reflected back at him.

As they sat at the round table in his small office, accompanied by Renate Harrison, it seemed to John much longer than twenty-four hours since Detective Inspector Pelham had entered their lives.

‘Right,’ he said, looking sharp and fresh. ‘Did you manage some sleep?’

‘Not really,’ John said.

‘None,’ Naomi said.

‘You’ll be able to go back home tonight.’

‘Thank you,’ John said.

Addressing Renate Harrison, Pelham said, ‘You’d better get them fixed up with something to help them sleep.’

‘What news do you have?’ Naomi asked.

‘Some progress,’ he said. ‘Not as much as any of us would like, but some. OK, this is the latest position. Our mystery man Bruce Preston is still in a coma following sixteen hours of neurosurgery yesterday. He’s under round-the-clock police guard in the Sussex County Hospital, and
if
he regains consciousness, we’ll interrogate him as soon as we are permitted. But he has severe brain damage and his prognosis is not good.’

‘Have you found out about his identity?’ John asked.

‘It’s false. I’ve had the FBI check him out and the trail goes cold in Rochester, New York State.’

‘No link between him and the cult we told you about?’ Naomi said.

‘The Disciples people?’

‘Yes.’

‘None so far. We’ve sent photographs of him and the woman in the picture in his wallet to the FBI, and we haven’t heard anything back yet.’ He paused to take a sip of coffee. ‘An analyst from our High Tech Crime Unit, who’s been working around the clock on your two computers, has a number of questions he wants to ask you – he’s coming in at ten.’

‘Did you find anything on Bruce Preston’s laptop?’ John asked.

‘Not yet; it seems he was very careful – or very good at hiding his tracks.’

‘How much longer do you need to keep my own laptop?’ John asked. ‘I need it back pretty badly.’

‘The analyst is bringing it back for you – both your computers.’

‘Thanks.’

‘We got the registration of the red Mitsubishi from the security cameras at the Channel Tunnel late yesterday,’ he announced. ‘The plates are false.’

John and Naomi said nothing.

‘At seven o’clock this morning I got a phone call from France. This car has been found at a small airport in Le Touquet. We’ve managed to ascertain between us that a man and a woman, in their mid-to-late twenties, boarded a Panamanian-registered private jet with a small boy and girl who fit Luke and Phoebe’s description, at half six in the morning yesterday. The pilot had flown in from Lyons and filed a flight plan to Nice. But the plane never showed up there.’

‘Where did it go?’ John asked.

‘It left French airspace, and disappeared into thin air.’

‘Does anyone have information about who owns this jet?’ Naomi asked.

‘We’re working on it.’

‘What’s the range of one of those aircraft?’ John asked. ‘How far could it travel?’

‘I’m told it depends entirely on the size of its fuel tanks. It had taken on sufficient fuel, given that its tanks weren’t empty when it arrived, for fourteen hours of flight. Apparently this particular aircraft has a cruising speed of three hundred and fifty knots. Which basically means enough to get to America and halfway back.’

Going back to his desk, Pelham produced a map of the world, which he laid out in front of them. It had a curved line drawn on it in red ink. ‘This line covers all the destinations the plane could have made safely on its cruising range.’

John and Naomi stared at it bleakly. The line stretched from Bombay in one direction, to Rio in another. And that was without taking into account any refuelling stops.

Their children could literally be anywhere on the planet.

The high tech crime analyst had a pallid complexion, bloodshot eyes and a large gold earring. He was dressed in grubby jeans and several layers of T-shirts and reeked of cigarette smoke. Addressing the floor rather than John and Naomi’s faces, he said, ‘Hi, I’m Cliff Palmer,’ then gave each of them in turn a wet-fish handshake.

Naomi noticed he had a slight nervous tic.

He sat down, placed John’s computer in front of him, then pushed his hair back from his forehead with both hands. It immediately slid forward again.

Renate went out of the room to fetch him a drink.

‘You’ve been looking through my computer and the kids’ computer?’ John said.

‘Yes, uh-huh.’ He nodded pensively, and pushed his hair back again. ‘I’ve made copies of both hard disks, I thought that was the best thing to do. I’ll go down to the car and fetch your children’s computer in a minute. You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve not been to bed yet – I worked through the night.’ He looked at each of them in turn, as if expecting sympathy. Naomi gave him one tepid quiver of her lips.

‘Have you found anything of interest?’ John asked.

He put his hand in front of his mouth and yawned loudly. ‘Yes, well, it might be of interest – stuff on both the computers, but I can’t do anything without the keys.’ He raised his eyebrows at John.

‘Keys?’

‘The encryption keys.’

‘Do you mean for the passwords?’ John asked.

Cliff shook his head. ‘Not just those – although there are plenty of those in both systems that I haven’t been able to get beyond, or bypass, yet. But it’s the language they’re using in emails and on chatrooms.’

Renate Harrison brought him a mug of tea and set it down, and coffees for John and Naomi.

John said, ‘I warned Detective Inspector Pelham about that yesterday when the computers were taken to you – that they’ve developed a speech code of talking backwards, with every fourth letter missing.’

The analyst stirred sugar into his tea, then sipped it. ‘Yes, I was told – but it’s way more sophisticated than that. From the progress I’ve made so far, all I can tell you is that they’ve been in touch with quite a number of people all over the world for at least a year – that’s as far back as I’ve gone at the moment. But all the addresses are encrypted and the language is impenetrable.’

He sipped some tea. ‘I’ve tried all the usual encryption suspects but there’s no match to any of them. There are ciphers out there that are just not breakable by anyone, you know that, don’t you?’

‘These are three-year-old children, Cliff,’ Renate Harrison reminded him.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said, a tad irritably. ‘But it’s the same on both machines.’

‘Are you saying they’ve devised these?’

‘Someone who has been accessing these computers has either been devising them or borrowing them. I can’t tell you who, all I can do is try to find out what they say, and I think I’ve hit a brick wall.’