Mad Dog - First Strike Ch. 11

10 - Funny Money:

VJ and I were killing time. We were chatting about nothing and waiting for the moment the clock struck five so we could bugger off home.

A baseball bat thudded onto the top of my cubicle divider. Vik and I jumped out of our skins. Fforbes grinned at us.

"Sorry to break up this meeting of the mothers union, but have you noticed?"

"Noticed what?" VJ asked.

He slid the bat up through his fist until he was holding it in the middle and used the handle end to point at the corner of the Bunker's bullpen. Our old adversary the evil laser printer had been replaced by a smaller, sleeker - and hopefully functioning - model.

"When did that happen?" I asked.

"Do you walk round with your eyes closed?" Fforbes responded. "We got a contract with a new IT facilities support firm, they came in over the weekend and put in new kit. The old printer's outside in a skip."

"Good riddance to bad rubbish!" VJ said emphatically.

"Really?" Fforbes said, "is that it? That's your response? C'mon, we can do better than that."

"What've you got in mind?" I asked.

"I say we go up above ground and get the printer out of the skip," a slow, malicious smile twisted his lips, "you, VJ, me and the printer; four of us go into the woods, but only three of us come out, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah, let's get some payback," Vik said, "and as everyone knows, payback's a bitch."

As we walked out of the bunker I glanced at Fforbes out of the corner of my eye. He's tall, lanky and black, dressed in chinos with turn ups and a polo shirt with all three buttons done up and neatly tucked into his trousers.

"Mate, why do you keep a baseball bat at work?" I asked him.

"I don't keep a bat at work," he replied, "but when I saw what'd happened I went home at lunchtime and got it."

We pulled the printer out of a battered, rust and crap encrusted skip. VJ carried our prisoner and we headed into the dense pine trees that surround the Bunker.

Vik dropped the printer, it hit the ground with a satisfying thud and the front flap sprang open. He moved in and stamped on the damned thing and the flap broke off. First blood to VJ.

Fforbes stepped forwards, he pressed the bat gently into Vik's chest, and ushered him out of the way before winding up into a good solid swing. The printer's glass scanner plate smashed. I mean it didn't just crack, it smashed, into a thousand fragments.

Rap music filled the air. VJ had his phone out and was playing P Diddy's Bad Boys For Life.

Fforbes handed the bat to me and I connected a couple of times. More devastation was done to the printer. I have to say, after all the frustration the damned thing had caused me, it felt good to lay into it.

"Who's the daddy now you fucker!" I hissed. "Who's the daddy? I am, and you aint never going to chew up a report I needed printed ever again!"

Vik handed me his phone and came back into the fight. He scooped a rock up and dropped to his knees, holding the stone in both hands over his head, he smashed down into the wreckage that had once been the hated printer.

There was a soft cough from behind us. We froze like schoolboys caught in the act of misbehaving.

"When you've quite finished your remake of Office Space..." Dirty Harriet said, "...or is it the Family Guy version? Either way, perhaps you'd be good enough to return to the bunker and do some actual work?"

We shuffled back to the bunker. VJ, Fforbes and I headed to the break area for coffee.

"By the way, I thought you'd like to know, weird shit is happening on the money market, and I think it's to do with the drone strike."

"Would you care to expand on that?" I suggested.

"Well, I've got this mate, Mongo, we were at Eton together..."

"Life's too short sunshine," VJ sighed in an exaggerated manner while rolling his eyes, "cut to the chase, one of the prime functions of the intelligence cycle is to disseminate intelligence in a TIMELY manner."

"Look, just bear with, OK?" he responded. "Mongo works for the Economist Intelligence Unit. He's noticed that there's been some bizarre trading activity with British defence and tech companies on the futures market."

"So, what's this got to do with the drone attack?"

"Let me put it like this; in August 2001 there was unusual trading activity on the Wall Street futures market. It involved anonymous offshore companies shorting American and United Airlines stocks," Fforbes explained. "Somebody made a huge, I mean obscene, amount of money when airline share prices collapsed after nine-eleven."

"Let me get this straight, you're saying that somebody with advance knowledge that the 9-11 attack was going to happen took up positions where they could profit from it?" VJ asked.

"Ah, yeah, that's about the size of it."

"And that'd be al Qaeda, right?" VJ asked.

"The CIA launched an investigation," Fforbes said, "and that was their conclusion. The four offshore shell companies turned a ten million dollar put position into something close to a hundred million bucks profit."

"What's a put position?" VJ asked.

"Basically a bet on the financial market," Fforbes explained, "you're putting your money on a company's share price going down instead of up."

"You can do that?" VJ sounded stunned. "Cunning buggers!"

But then something occurred to me.

"shit!" I swore and reached for my desk phone. I turned to VJ. "Get Cilla and meet me in Turing.

If ever there was candidate for patron saint of computers, then it would have to be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia. Apart from shortening the Second World War by a couple of years, he's credited with doing much of the theoretical work that led to modern computing.

If you want to distract a computer nerd, engage them in conversation about Turing's precise role in developing IT, but don't let it drift into speculation about conspiracy theories about his suicide as this can lead to actual physical violence.

I'm not kidding.

Turing is the smallest of the Bunker's four meeting suites. With myself, Fforbes, VJ and Cilla sitting round the table it was...snug. I gave Fforbes the lead, explaining what he'd found.

"Right, you," I nodded at Fforbes, "need to get in touch with your old school mate, whatshisface..."

"Mongo."

"Strange nicknames the posh have," Cilla shook her head with mock sadness.

"Get in touch with him, as in right now, and get all the info you can on who made those trades," I ordered him, "right."

"Yah, no problem guv'nor."

"You do know that the 1970s ended over forty years ago?" I reminded him, "and this isn't an episode of the Sweeney."

"So, when you have something on the trades do you want me to see if I can hack the brokerage's IT network and see who made them?" Cilla asked.

"That'd be damned decent of you," I said. "VJ, any more progress on confirming that Milton and Makarov are connected with the drone strike?"

"Yeah, I've now run down all the URLs on his iPhone, and there's enough evidence to say that he's connected to it," VJ shrugged and gave an unhappy pout, "but it's all tenuous, there's nothing solid to prove that him or Makarov are behind it."

"Would it be enough to take him in for questioning?" Fforbes asked.

"We don't do that, do we," Cilla said, "we're spooks, not the fuzz. We collect intelligence we don't make arrests."

"There may be enough evidence to let the police pick up Milton," I added my own contribution to the discussion, "and we'll possibly have something more tangible after we've visited Milton's London office."

"I still don't get how they can take over a drone using cheap off the shelf software and the internet," Fforbes said.

"It's not surprising really, what is surprising is the the RAF and ourselves haven't been expecting this. Technology is morphing all the time, getting faster, cheaper to buy, easier to use," I answered. "In the nineteen forties Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio, now people have Apple watches..."

"...Not cool people," Cilla interrupted.

"The point I'm trying to make is that technology moves on," I said, "what was sci-fi twenty years ago is just..." I shrugged, "... well, it's so ordinary now. This has always been on the cards, it's just bloody surprising that we weren't ready for it."