12 CHARLES STREET
MAYFAIR
LONDON
JANUARY 14, 2012
1435 HOURS LONDON CITY
Sir William slowly pecked at the keyboard as he inserted his password.
"William, what are you doing? I can have a young tech sent here to do that type of work." Ronan glanced up from his review of the midday security briefings.
"Aaah, dear lad, he would need my piercing eyes," the barrister replied as he peered into the iris scanner. "Tell me again why I have to ensure that I can't have high blood pressure for these damned things."
"Your iris scan is based on the blood vessels in your eye. High blood pressure causes these vessels to swell. If that happens, the iris scan doesn't work. So watch what you eat." Ronan returned to peering at a large map of the Middle East.
"Have we discovered how those vaccinations made their way into the prison?"
"I told you already, William. The medical program has been outsourced to some damned security company. We've been traipsing through their records, but haven't had any success."
"Which company?" Sir William grunted in satisfaction as he passed the security check.
"Anglo-Saxon Security Services, or ASSS, as my team loves to call them. They're an international company based in Delaware so we will never discover who the beneficial owner is. They provide security services to the American State Department, some of our NGOs and several smaller federal American Departments in Afghanistan and the Middle East."
Sir William glanced up from his painful typing. "How the hell did they get the Prisons contract? Who signed off on that?"
"I'm working on determining that, William."
The computer screen transitioned through several screens and finally produced a grainy image of a pedestrian crossing. Sir William tapped the side of the monitor in an attempt to improve the image.
"What are you doing, William?"
"I'm trying to get a better view. This method always works with these damned screens." He tapped the side of the display harder.
"Let me do that." Ronan brushed his friend aside and clicked on the application's menu. "What are you trying to do?"
"That's the CTV tapes for the central control archives for all tube stations. If someone erased those tapes, they had to do it from here. You can't erase the tapes by a remote connection. You have to be in this room. Make the picture better," Sir William demanded.
Shaking his head, Ronan gradually sharpened the image. "That's the best you can get. How do you know what time these tapes were tampered with?"
"Inspector Russell, that woman of great beauty and intellect, gave me the time parameters, dear boy. Can't you make this sharper?"
"William, look!" Ronan pointed at the logo on the employee's lab coat in the CTV image.
"What in God's name are you pointing at?"
Ronan tapped on the keyboard and the image magnified. "That technician works for Anglo-Saxon Security Services. That's their logo."
"Do we have any individuals who work directly for the British Government? Have we outsourced everything? At this rate, we'll be like the Americans with an army of mercenaries on call!" Sir William lamented. "So now we have the same company responsible for two weak points. Who runs this company?"
YOU ARE READING
The Shaddad Conspiracy
Adventure“Your murder victim was not an innocent, naive woman. She was on our terrorist watch list. The fact that she escaped from Basra and lived a normal life in London buggers belief, but she was planted here by a foreign government to wreck the Taliban p...
