He stared at the filing cabinet for a few seconds and walked over and opened the top drawer. The drawer held various documents relating to the fake animal rights investigation, but Holm rummaged behind them and pulled out the index card he’d discovered when they’d first moved in to the office.
‘Christ.’ He read the name on the card. Robert Gerard Sands. The full name of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who’d died way back in the nineteen eighties. There were seventeen letters in the name and there were seventeen numbers in the tweet. He jabbed a finger at the name, not quite believing what he was seeing. ‘This is the key. This is the one-time pad.’
‘How the—?’
‘I’ve no bloody idea.’
‘A is zero, right?’ Javed was at his shoulder now, the lad’s face creased in concentration. ‘At least that’s what I was taught.’
‘Yes, let’s start with that.’ Holm began to do the calculations himself. He wrote out the full code sequence, below that the name, and below that an A to Z scale numbered zero to twenty-five.
18, 18, 14, 0, 21, 11, 25, 8, 8, 13, 9, 23, 23, 5, 1, 14, 2
Robert Gerard Sands
A/0 B/1 C/2 D/3 E/4 F/5 G/6 H/7 I/8 J/9 K/10 L/11 M/12 N/13 O/14 P/15 Q/16 R/17 S/18 T/19 U/20 V/21 W/22 X/23 Y/24 Z/25
The first number in the code was 18, while the first letter in the one-time pad sequence was R. The position of R on Holm’s scale was 17 so he took that from 18, which left 1. Letter 1 on the same scale was B, so B was the answer. He moved on to the second number, which was also 18. However, the second letter on the pad was O which was 14 on the scale. 18 minus 14 was 4 so that became E. The third number was 14 and the third letter B. 14 minus… before he got any further Javed had it.
‘Ben Western Suffolk.’ Javed smiled and moved back to his chair. ‘Whoever the hell that is.’
‘Search it.’
‘I am.’ Javed’s fingers were already tapping his keyboard. He ran his eyes down a screen of search results. ‘There’s a number of newspaper reports from last week. A man called Ben Western went missing in Suffolk. Doesn’t appear to be anything particularly interesting about the case.’
‘A misper?’ Holm used his old police shorthand. ‘That’s it?’
Javed peered at the screen again. ‘Well it can’t be a coincidence.’
Holm slumped back and tried to get his head round the information. How could it have anything to do with the master terrorist he’d been hunting for years?
‘Do you want me to look him up?’ Javed had closed the browser and opened MI5’s internal database. It held huge amounts of information and cross-referenced the Police National Computer, material held at GCHQ and MI6, as well as international databases from foreign agencies and police forces. Javed began to type. ‘Might be a chance—’
‘No!’ Holm swung his chair round. ‘There could be a flag on the record.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Think about it. Whoever sent us the information on this Ben Western guy must be in MI5 or have some sort of access. That could have been any one of hundreds, even thousands, of people.’ Holm glanced at the filing cabinet. ‘Nobody else would have been able to get the index card in there.’
‘But why the subterfuge?’
‘I’m not sure, but whoever it is can’t want Huxtable or anyone else to know what we’re up to. They must realise Taher has a contact in the security services. It’s what I’ve been saying for ages.’ Holm held up a finger and thumb and squeezed them together. ‘Every time I’ve been close to catching Taher he’s slipped away. I’m not risking that again.’
‘So what do we do?’
Holm thought for a moment. ‘Animal rights. Start searching the PNC for crimes suspected of being committed by animal liberation groups. That will bring up dozens of records spread across the country. Pick a few from the Suffolk area we can use as decoys.’
‘And then?’
‘We follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.’ Holm waited for a quip back from Javed but there was nothing. He shook his head, wondering if the lad’s cultural references bore any relation to his own. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of The Wizard of Oz?’
‘Of course I’ve heard of it. I’ve dreamed of being Dorothy for half my life.’ Javed pouted and laughed as Holm reddened. ‘But you, I imagine, would be better suited to playing the scarecrow.’
Chapter Eleven
They arranged to rendezvous on Plymouth Hoe, close to the spot where Silva had sat in the rain on the day of her mother’s death. She strolled across the expanse of grass towards the red and white lighthouse where a man stood looking out at the view. Hair the colour of desert sand and just as fine swirled in light curls. There was a hint of red in the hair and a dusting of freckles on the face. If he’d been standing at the bar in a pub in Galway he could have been mistaken for an Irish poet, the type of man who always had a smile for the teenage girls, a rhyming couplet for the women, a tall tale and a pint of Guinness for his mates.
As she approached, Sean turned as if something had alerted him to her presence. He didn’t smile, simply made a shrugging motion and opened his arms and embraced her. She’d steeled herself not to get emotional, but the gesture overwhelmed her. With her mother gone, there was no one else she’d ever been as close to as Sean. She held him for a long time and neither of them said anything until she sniffed away the last of her tears.
‘I wished you’d met her,’ Silva said.
Sean nodded. ‘So do I. From what you told me and what I read she was—’
‘Stop.’ Silva raised a finger to Sean’s lips. ‘It doesn’t matter what she was or wasn’t beyond the fact
