Face Value: A Wright & Tran Novel Read online

  Kara sat down in the spare chair next to Tien. She steepled her fingers and lent her forehead against them. After a few moments she raised her head again, “How do we figure out who got on the plane?”

  “Not easy,” Tien said. “The chances of me getting to look at CCTV in the arrivals hall of Miami is nil. There’s no way I’m getting into that and as for US customs; Homeland Security would be all over a breach attempt. So that’s out. As for the UK, it might be possible but I really don’t have the first clue who or what to target.” Tien shook her head and then gave Kara her best smile, “You need to make a phone call.”

  Kara pulled a face that she hoped conveyed ‘Oh Piss Off’ but she knew Tien was right. “Fine, I’ll go make a call. But you need to make one too. Call up Sandy Marrs at Chicksands and find out what Chris Sterling did in the Royal Navy. I want to know if he was mainstream or had gone over to the dark side. Once that’s done can you get the car and we’ll head up to the Sterling’s house in Arlesey? I’d like you to get at their computer and I want to have a look at the place anyway. All good?” Kara asked as she pulled her mobile out.

  “Yep,” Tien said and began to shut down her computers.

  *

  “Hi Sis, how’s you?”

  “I’m good. How’s Alice and the kids?”

  “Yeah great. Kyas fell out of a tree last week and nearly broke his leg but didn’t. He was quite gutted that he couldn’t have a cast. Apparently some other kid in his school has one and he thought it was ‘coo-ool’.”

  Kara laughed, “And Marli?”

  “Oh you know Marli. She started nursery school last week and loves it. Wants to go every day and was quite upset when we explained that even when she does go full-time she’ll have to have Saturdays and Sundays off.”

  “Nursery? Already?”

  “Yeah but it’s just a pre-school playgroup for three year olds. We’re only sending her there two days a week ‘cos Alice started back part-time at the Yard.”

  “Is she enjoying being back?”

  “Well, she says she is but she’s knackered at the end of the week. Understandable though. It’s been almost seven years since she left to have Kyas and she didn’t go back at all in the middle. Saying that I’m sure she’ll cope okay and be back full-time as soon as Marli goes to Primary. Anyway, how’s you? How’s the love life?”

  “Ha! I’m good and the other is non-existent,” Kara paused and waited for her brother to speak again but he didn’t. “Umm, David?” she finally said.

  “Yes Kara, what do you want?” His voice carried the slightly disapproving tone that he reserved for her when she phoned to ask him questions or elicit favours. She reflected that it was on these occasions that she felt like the younger sibling when in fact she was two years his senior.

  “I just wondered if you could tell me something about surveillance at Heathrow departures?”

  David laughed, “Well of course. Have you got all day?”

  “Well not all of the systems, obviously,” she stressed the last word and also reigned in her frustration. She loved her brother dearly but he could be an arse sometimes. “I only need to know what cameras would pick you up going through departures or where they store the scan of your passport when you go through passport control.”

  “Kara, seriously. I’m a Detective Sergeant in the Met. I don’t have access to that information. It’s all Border Force stuff. Anyway, what do you want to know for?”

  “I have some people who allegedly went to the US but I’m not sure it was them travelling. I need to get eyes on them and the only place I can do that is when they went through departures here. Any ideas?”

  “To be honest, no not really,” this time David paused, “If they went through on false passports why aren’t SO15 all over it?”

  “Because the two people aren’t a threat. They’ve no apparent links to anything dodgy and all the circumstances surrounding their trip check out. I have no evidence at all that it wasn’t the real people.” She didn’t add that no one in the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorist Command would want to take a second look at them now because that would mean having to admit to the US Department of Homeland Security that the Brits let two fakes get on a jet and head to the States. Kara had never worked for the Police but she knew enough about inter-nation military rivalries and doubted it would be any different for members of the ‘thin blue line’. Cock-ups were not for sharing with your international friends.

  “So why are you looking?” David asked bluntly.

  “Because there’s something not right about it.”

  “Your sneaky-beaky senses kicking in Sis?”

  “Yep.” Kara knew her brother well enough to wait out the silence on the phone line.

  “Fine,” he said eventually. “You know you could just save us a lot of time and tell me that the hairs on the back of your neck are up and you need some help.”

  “Yeah, but then I’d never hear all about Alice and the kids. You never call me!” she said the last with a comedic but melodramatic pout to her voice that made her kid-brother laugh again.

  “I never call you. Huh! Hello pot, this is kettle. Hang on,” he said and Kara could hear what sounded like the phone being placed on a surface. “I’ve put you on speaker. I just need to get a card for you. If I can find the damn thing.”

  She heard muffled scrapings and the background hum of traffic. She had visited his office often and despite being on the seventh floor of the New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Street, behind bullet and blast proof glazing, the hubbub of central London always seemed to permeate the space.

  “Right, get in touch with a woman called Wendy Mead. I met her briefly at a conference in February. I think she’s a consultant security advisor on the payroll of the Border Force. I know she works out of Gatwick. Thing is Kara, they’re all as tight as a duck’s arse when it comes to this sort of stuff. I mean, she might be able to clue you in on what happens but whether she will or not is a different matter.”

  Kara heard the background hum disappear as her brother took the phone off speaker and raised it back to his ear.

  “It’s okay David. Trust me. You know I’ll come up with a reason for her to tell me. I’ll let you know what reason I’ve used, just in case she rings you. I wouldn’t want us to get our lines crossed, now would I?” she said it with a hint of mischief in her voice.

  “Kara, you will be the end of my career one day.”

  “Ah come on I wouldn’t do that. Mine maybe, yours, never.”

  “Alright, I’ll take a photo of her card and text it to you. Ok?”

  “You’re a lovely person David and God will reward you for this. You know that don’t you?” Kara said in her best Sunday-school teacher’s voice.

  “Yeah, but not with a sister that I wouldn’t swap for a decent Scalextric set.”

  Chapter 8

  Monday Afternoon. Arlesey, Bedfordshire

  Breaking and entering was a lot easier when you had the house keys and alarm codes. Tien entered the 6-digit sequence that Zoe Sterling had given her and the chirping from the alarm control box ceased. The entrance hall and the rest of the large house fell quiet. Kara shut the front door and opened the first door on the right. Michael had provided them with a floor plan so she knew she was walking into the main lounge. What she hadn’t expected was a Zulu war shield, cross-mounted with a short-staff assegai, mounted directly above the wide fireplace. Kara walked to it and examined it closely. She didn’t know much about antiques but thought there was a chance this was an authentic version. Maybe even from the Zulu wars. Tien came in behind her and gave a low whistle. “I know,” Kara said, “It’s amazing.” She turned to see Tien wasn’t looking at the shield.

  “That’s a set of Bang and Olufsen Beolab 18’s,” Tien nodded towards the tall silver and oak structures standing in the midpoint of each wall either side of the fire.

  “I thought they were sculptures,” Kara said.

  “Yeah, well, you could get che
aper statues. Those’ll set you back about four and a half grand.”

  “Really? Anything else worth that sort of money?”

  Tien turned in a slow circle. “The TV is B and O too so I would imagine the rest of the audio system is as well. You’ve probably got upwards of thirty-K just in sound and vision equipment in this room alone.”

  Kara walked across to the French doors that led into a medium sized conservatory and looked beyond it into the garden. “His workshop’s a lot bigger than I imagined,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Do you want to start in here or out there?” Tien asked.

  “In here.”

  Tien started taking photos from each corner and midpoint of the lounge so she could recreate it later in a 3-D computer-rendered model if necessary. It was unlikely it’d be needed to investigate what happened to the Sterlings but Kara and Tien had routines. So now it didn’t matter if it was going to be needed or not, Tien took the photos. The ability to revisit a place, examine the sight angles, the overall layout, the fixtures and the fittings had served them well in the past. When she’d taken all the photos she logged the dimensions of the room using a laser distance measure.

  Kara waited in the conservatory. Her brother had joked about hairs on the back of her neck standing up when she felt things weren’t right and that was exactly how she felt standing in the Sterling’s house. Zoe and Michael had said they hadn’t disturbed anything when they first came up almost a week earlier and Kara believed them. However, they had said that whilst their parents were clean and tidy they thought the house looked ‘too neat’. She had to agree. Just from looking at the lounge and conservatory she could feel something was wrong. There was a slight dust on surfaces, exactly what you would expect from a week of inactivity, but there was also a clinical feel to the place. “I’m going to go look through the rest of it, you follow as you’re ready,” Kara said and Tien nodded from behind the camera.

  Off the main hallway was a door to what had once been a formal dining room but was now a study, another to a kitchen come breakfast room and a last one that opened on to a downstairs toilet. All the rooms were similarly neat, clean and overly tidy.

  Kara went upstairs, passing family portraits of the Sterlings that tracked their progress from the wedding of Chris and Brenda through to the graduations of Zoe and Michael. Upstairs she found four bedrooms, an en-suite, a main bathroom and a large linen cupboard that was big enough to contain a drop ladder to the roof space. The rooms were tastefully furnished in what looked a casual manner but had obviously had a lot of time and care devoted to the effect. Each room had quality artwork on the walls and dotted here and there were fine art sculptures, including a set of exquisitely cast bronze ballerinas in what Kara assumed had been Zoe’s room. But as for obvious clues to where Brenda Sterling and her husband Chris had gone, there was nothing.

  She waited for Tien to join her in the master bedroom and take the final set of photos. Then both of them donned gloves and began to conduct a thorough but cautious search of the rooms. When Kara opened a drawer or a cupboard Tien photographed the exact state of the contents before either of them began to move anything. It was slow and painstaking but necessary. Depending on what had happened to the Sterlings the house might yet become a crime scene and neither Tien nor Kara had any desire to destroy or disturb evidence that could be of use later. Before closing the cupboard or drawer they replaced the contents and compared the results to the original photo. They did the same with objects on shelves or on top of cupboards and made sure everything went back exactly. They took pictures off walls and checked behind them, lifted rugs and mats and searched under mattresses and in pillow cases.

  It took them two and a half hours just to finish upstairs and at the end of it they had found nothing of use. The only saving grace had been that the roof space was empty other than the insulation batts and whilst Kara and Tien didn’t pull them up it was obvious from inspection that no one else had either.

  Returning downstairs they carried out the same search procedure in the lounge, conservatory and kitchen with the same results. That left the formal dining room come study. It offered their last and possibly best hope of eliciting any clues as to what was going on.

  Kara looked around it. Besides the computer desk and a small offside working area, it was lined with half-height bookcases. The library held, along with the occasional pulp fiction, mostly books of military genres, both fiction and historical reference. The walls were bare of artwork except for a stunning print of The Defence of Rorke's Drift, by Alphonse de Neuville that dominated the main space of the main wall. The search of the desk drawers, bookcases and behind the print revealed nothing. Only the computer remained. Tien turned it on and waited until the ‘enter password’ screen appeared.

  “Do you think you’ll get anything off the Mac?” Kara asked with an air of optimism that she didn’t really believe.

  “It’s password protected but that shouldn’t be a problem,” Tien said as she took a small USB drive from her jeans pocket and waved it in the air. “I’ll be able to get the IP and compare it to the ticket booking but that’s all I’d hold out hope for.”

  “I’m going to take a wander outside whilst you finish. I want to look at the workshop. Catch me up,” Kara said and went to leave but turned back. “Tien?”

  “Yes?”

  “What does this house look like to you?”

  Tien looked up from the computer and gazed around the study. She pursed her lips and then shrugged, “Honestly? It looks like the way we would’ve left a safe house if we’d had time before bugging out.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Kara said.

  “But when I spoke to Sandy Marrs he said that Chris Sterling didn’t go across to special ops. He was a photographer who became an Imagery Analyst and eventually an instructor back at Chicksands. We know heaps of folk that have done that and none of them got trained in the sanitisation of safe houses.”

  “Maybe Sandy didn’t have the whole story?” Kara said, but without conviction. Sandy Marrs was the Executive Officer at the Defence Intelligence College at Chicksands. It was the nearest Joint Service establishment to Arlesey and had been the favourite bet of where Chris Sterling had spent his last tour of duty. But if Sandy said Chris hadn’t done special ops training then he more than likely hadn’t.

  “You think they’ve been involved in something and now they’ve done a runner before being caught?” Tien asked.

  “It’s one possibility but it doesn’t explain why they’d leave a message like they did. It’s an obvious false flag to the kids.”

  “What’s the other possibilities?”

  “They might have been relocated by someone to protect them.” Kara looked around the room again. “But that’s doubtful for the same reasons. Agencies would have looked after the loose ends better. They wouldn’t have tipped the kids with the message.”

  “That leaves taken against their will. But by someone who was constructing a diversionary story and didn’t know anything about the fear of flying thing. Is that what you’re thinking?” Tien asked.

  “Probably. What do you think?”

  “I guess so, but for now it doesn’t really matter. Either way, free-running or dragged; what you need to do is figure out why and where. Then we’ll go find them, reunite the Sterling Family and live happily ever after.” Tien gave a little smile and turned back towards the computer.

  Kara made her way through the back door of the kitchen and out into a large garden that she reckoned was almost half an acre of land. The house, sitting as it did at the end of a single-track lane about five miles from the small town, had no neighbours within a good stone’s throw so the garden was a place of seclusion and tranquillity. Three offset screens of trees were cleverly placed to divide it into distinct planting areas. The first, nearest the house, was a simple run of well-tended lawn. The second had the workshop located off to one side with low shrubs and medium height plants opposite. Kara thought they looked nice
but couldn’t identify any of them. The last garden area had seemingly been left to nature and had the look and feel of a summer meadow. In the warm sun of a July afternoon it radiated in colour and fragrance.

  She breathed in the mix of freshness, light overtures of fine perfume and the slightly heavier notes of the surrounding country. Walking forward to the sound of water she found a small pond with a number of water pipes feeding into it. Not big enough to be a feature fountain, but enough to keep the water moving and oxygenated, it was home to half a dozen goldfish that swam around in the gaps between submerged plants. As she looked at this last third of the garden Kara realised the meadow effect had been achieved with a lot of hard work and thorough planning. The natural look and feel of it was carefully cultivated. She relaxed in the still lingering heat of the sun for a short while and then headed back to the second garden area and Chris Sterling’s workshop.

  According to Zoe and Michael their father had left the military in 1992 after serving twenty-two years, then had established a small photography business in Bedford. He shut up the shop and took early retirement in 2005 aged fifty-five. Not content to do nothing he apparently kept a small photo practice running out of home. He did the occasional wedding, took and sold some art shots and framed pictures. It was more a hobby than a continuing business according to Michael. The workshop was where he ran it from.

  Closer up it was even more substantial than it had looked from the conservatory. Stretching about forty feet in length, Kara also noticed it had a very large padlock on the door. She reached into her pocket and took out a small fabric fold that contained a set of picks. After a few moments the lock gave a soft click and the hasp popped up.

  “Nicely done,” said Tien who had come up behind her.