Page 51 of Savage Reckoning

“What is it?” This from Aaron.

“How did they know?”

“Know what?”

“Where the helicopter would be? Or who was on board?”

No one answers immediately, so she blunders on. “I was thinking, while you were in the hospital. I had a lot of time to turn it all over in my head. I could have lost you…”

“Yes, but—”

“We’re way up here, in the Hebrides. We make a lot of trips back and forth, to Glasgow. Or the school run. Regular trips, the same route every time. How often does any of us fly over Northamptonshire?”

Jack is staring at her, his brow creased. His eyes narrow as the implications of her ‘silly’ question sink in.

Beth continues. “Why set up there? It can’t have been chance, or random. They didn’t just ‘get lucky’. They must have known the helicopter’s flight path and schedule to be able to target it.”

“Fuck,” Jack mutters. “A mole?”

Aaron shakes his head. “No one outside our immediate inner circle knew. We didn’t even know until we were on our way home and Ethan phoned Cristina to tell her to expect us. We were shot down less than an hour later.”

“Well, then…?”

“Could that call have been… intercepted.” Beth turns to Casey. “Is that even possible?”

Casey meets her gaze and nods slowly. “It’s possible. And it makes sense. If the weapon was located in the south of England, Archer’s home turf, and he suddenly got wind Ethan Savage was passing through… It would be an opportunity not to be missed.”

“Could we find out?” Jack demands.

Casey is seated again, laptop open. “Hacking always leaves a digital trace. It can be almost imperceptible unless you know to look for it. I have systems set up to monitor all our phones, in case we need to erase incriminating content, obviously, so if anyone had been in there who shouldn’t be, I could isolate that.”

Her fingers dance across the keys, her eyes scanning the screen as incomprehensible rows of letters and numbers scroll across. Suddenly, she stops. “Fuck. Here it is.”

“What?”

We all gather behind her, as though any of us might decipher the coding flashing on the screen.

“Someone has hacked into Ethan’s phone. I have an IP address. It’s subtle. Sophisticated. Not a programme I’ve seen before. Probably custom-built. And it seems to have been going on for a while. Months, at least.”

“Shit. Is it Archer?” Aaron wants to know.

“I can’t tell. Not necessarily. The IP address is in… Manchester.”

“Can you isolate it?”

“Oh, yes. There he is.” A map appears on the screen, a blinking light indicating a location on a housing estate close to the M60 motorway. Casey zooms in using Google Earth. “It’s a block of flats. He’s on the eleventh floor.”

Jack curses under his breath. “I want to know who that bastard is. And who he works for. Gabe?”

“I’m on it.” I’m already striding for the door.

“Wait. I’ll come with you.” Rome is right behind me.

Manchester is approximately two and a half hours away by helicopter. We touch down on an empty supermarket car park just behind the tower block where we spotted the hacker’s signal.

“Why isn’t this place full of cars?” I wonder as the rotors slow.

“Sunday afternoon,” Rome tells me. “They close at four.”

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