The Black Hand Gang Read online

  As Jack walked into his home, little did he realise that a faceless technician under the volcano in deepest Africa had logged a statistic on his computer that named Kate, Jack and Roger in the world’s top ten newcomers to the Facebook game of “world domination”.

  ‘Mum...is tea ready, I’m starving.’ Jack always shouted each demand at home.

  ‘Ask your dad,’ she partly turned from the computer screen where she was looking at the work emails from the day before that she hadn’t had time to review. ‘He’s in charge.’

  ‘Dad... what’s fur tea?’ Jack shouted again at the top of his voice without knowing where dad was. Timmo, Jack’s brother came into the kitchen and slid on his stocking feet across the shiny tile floor before ending his skid next to Jack.

  Timmo announced in his best BBC voice. ‘Fabtastic, Tim - nice and thin, has now perfected his skiing technique, whilst waiting to be summoned for training with the British squad in Val D’Isere.’

  Jack ignored his younger brother’s ambitions. ‘Dad.......what’s fur...’

  ‘He won’t answer you bro, he’s on the bog.’

  Mum closed the lid of the laptop. ‘Timmo! Please don’t use that word.’

  ‘But isn’t it better than crapper, like they constantly use in America?’ Tim had an answer for everything. Jack turned and vigorously pushed him along the floor as Timmo balanced in a perfect snowboarding pose before collapsing onto an armchair with a ‘yippee.’

  ‘Boys, please!’ She remonstrated.

  They stopped giggling as soon as Dad appeared. ‘Did someone want me?’

  ‘Yes’ the boys said in unison, ‘what’s for tea?’ Dad busied himself by the cooker and mumbled something. ‘What dad?’ He mumbled again and found his wife had approached from behind to give him a hug.

  She whispered in his ear. ‘Did we forget tea my wonderful man? My hunter-gatherer who guards the nest until mummy bird comes home?’ Jack turned to Timmo and made a poking sign with his finger prodding towards his open mouth.

  Jack mouthed the words ‘love’ just before his mum turned to announce. ‘Fish and chips is what we are having for tea my honey buns, so who wants to come and fetch them with their mum?’ Raucous shouts of ‘me’ surrounded her as she found her car keys to drive the boys to King Louie’s chip emporium in the next village. Which left dad with a single task to complete that Saturday teatime, the best part of the week apart from later when watching Match of the Day. He gratefully opened a can of cold lager and sat down with a sigh.

  As England slept, the same faceless technician was on duty at 11 pm GMT, Greenwich Mean Time and was surprised to see Kate, Jack and Roger had been joined in the top newcomers to the “world domination” game by someone nicknamed Timmo, who happened to share a computer IP address with the boy called Jack. This new boy’s Facebook profile photo was a Bentley Mausanne Cabriolet and Timmo had been busy all evening trading in sports cars, mainly Ferraris. His Facebook profile said that he was brother to a complete twerp who kept calling him dim, when indeed he was not. The notes also said his only interests in life were Top Gear and fast cars. One of his family picture albums showed a nine-year-old boy, who was the spitting image of his brother who lay snoring on his back in the small bedroom next door. The Facebook age restriction didn’t matter to the technician, all that mattered was skill playing the game.

  * * *

  It was also 11 pm in East London and all good children were asleep to make sure they were fresh and alert at school on Monday morning but Marshall Hines couldn’t sleep. His dreams had become too scary recently. He was tall and gangly, with a mop of red hair above his thin white face. His mum was at work in Canary Wharf, as a cleaner on the 27th floor, as Marshall crouched in front of her netbook playing “world domination”. As she flicked her feather duster across the PC’s of the world’s biggest bank, he studied his assets and guessed at which to trade. He wasn’t particularly good at it, he bounced around the world buying and selling assets made from cocoa because he liked chocolate and then he bought some sugar cane because sugar went into the chocolate. He couldn’t understand why he was doing so well in the league tables as he only played three evenings a week and always when his mum was at work, but somehow his scores were terrific. He sold a tonne of cocoa powder to a trader in China and turned the netbook off. Now he was sufficiently tired to go to sleep but he still dreaded the newly recurring dreams of his dad running away and the brother he vaguely remembered making a crystal radio set. The ongoing nightmare was his mum not returning from work. An illogical nightmare, as she was just a cleaner in the big offices of The City, so nothing could possibly happen to her. However, the emotional scars of desertion ran through his heart and straight into his brain as he slept.

  What he didn’t see later, was his mum kneeling by his bed to stroke his hair and kiss him goodnight. After coping with her husband’s desertion, she had thought of suicide when her eldest boy had runaway. It was the love of Marshall that had kept her alive and when she stared at the lights of the city from the heights of Canary Wharf she would sometimes cry into her reflection as life was so hard.

  * * *

  Twip Twop was quite a nasty piece of work. Techno had given him the crazy nickname after seeing the Twitter site called “Twop Twips”, which was one of his favourites. Now the name was commonly used by everyone in the volcano rather than the real one, Les Teppes. Twip Twop was uncontrollable and unpredictable, like the Twitter website. His white hair, and small pink eyes made him scary. He was an albino 1.5 metres tall with stooped shoulders and pigeon toes. He had met Madam Musseine and Biceps in the grimy French prison near Nice. The judge who had sentenced MM, had decided she was stronger and more ferocious than any man and so had decided a man’s prison was the only safe place for her. No one had ever dared approach the black duo but the French albino idiot called Les Teppes, felt compelled to sidle up to them one day. His nonsensical mind had no boundaries and so fear of the two brutes was not on his agenda.

  ‘Getting out soon are we?’ The gruesome twosome ignored him. ‘If not getting out, maybe I can help you leave?’ MM signalled to Biceps with a nod.

  He asked the obvious question in a rough and accusing voice. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have a plan that involves garbage from the kitchen.’ Les Teppes squirmed his feet in the dusty yard and rung his hands together as he waited.

  ‘And your point is?’ Said the brute.

  ‘My point, my giant friend, is I work in the kitchen and I put the garbage in the refuse lorry each day.’

  MM turned to the albino and smiled with brown teeth ruined by years of hashish. ‘Dear little man, or should I say Les Teppes? May I be so bold to call you that, my new friend?’

  Twip Twop giggled uncontrollably, his mind was warped. ‘Yes Madam, you can call me anything you want based on the numbers of men you have murdered with your bare hands!’ He giggled again before she led him aside to work out the escape plan and arrange for his reward. But Les Teppes was never paid, he wanted a job. One of power and in submission to his dearest love, Madam Musseine. That was why the technician delivered the computer printouts of the world league tables to him at midnight GMT. It was Twip Twop who delved into the software matrix that controlled the core of the game and it was he who manipulated Marshall Hine’s scores to make him win, no matter how badly he played.

  MM had told him Marshall must be a winner and what MM said, Twip Twop did.

  Chapter 3

  Cloak and dagger

  Somerset House in London, England was best known for the official departments who had worked there to maintain the country’s record of births, marriages and deaths and of course the dreaded Inland Revenue, the tax man. The beautiful and very large mansion had always contained important societies over the centuries. The Royal Academy of the Arts, The Royal Society, the oldest scientific society in Britain. Now it is still a centre for art and culture but some government departments remain hidden away from the visitors of the general
public, who form a perfect front, for the most secretive of secret departments.

  It is an imposing building, a Georgian aspect with giant columns either side of a large wooden door that leads into a colossal hallway that extends to the sky above. It is a building where anyone used to be able to ascertain who or what they are and where they came from. It was all a matter of public record, your data. However, people who have signed the official secrets act and belong to section electronicA have a lot more data than meets the official eye. No one truly knows who they are and where they came from, even the recruiters for this section of MI6, Britains’ secret intelligence agency.

  If you walk up the marble staircase and turn right, there is a lift. Standing inside this lift, you can go up and down to the various exhibitions as many visitors discover each day. But the government employees of section electronicA can also go through the lift. All you need to press is the level one, three and six buttons in a strict order making a secret door open onto a bland corridor that ends in a metal door. After pressing one’s eye against the retina recognition scanner you hear the hiss of the door sliding back, allowing you into a glass cubicle. The door closes behind you and the extra security checks begin. Firstly, the gamma radiation scan that is similar to an x-ray but takes a scan of your digital skeleton and compares it to that on your personnel file. Secondly, the air around you is analysed for explosives and tobacco – it is a strictly no smoking zone and then finally you have to speak a few words. Usually, most employees recite a few lines of Shakespeare, occasionally a bright spark sings some “One Direction” to annoy the security guards who monitor every action. If you meet all the entry criteria you are allowed into the department, which is rather boring after all the high technology for entry. There are a series of medium sized desks mounted with large PC screens, telephones and personal junk, complemented by rather smart and comfortable black leather chairs. The real technological secrets of section electronicA are in the giant super computers housed in the basement 100 metres below ground. The section naming using the word Electronic was an obvious choice but A was a designation by the previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. At a cabinet meeting one summer morning he signed off the £100 million expenditure to create the department. J, the new head of the section had asked him what he wanted to call it and the PM hadn’t clearly heard as he was signing the order, obviously distracted by the huge expenditure. Therefore he had rudely replied ‘A?’ in a broad Scottish accent, and thereafter the section was called ElectronicA as J’s little joke with the Civil Service bureaucrats.

  In the darkest corner of the department, Wolf had both his feet on the beech desk. No senior agent ever objected, they always left Wolf alone and although he was truly a loner that was not why he got the nickname Wolf, as everyone knew that wolves hunt in packs. No, the nickname was earned from his colleagues because of his cunning ability to electronically stalk his prey and bring them down in a swift, clean movement that never failed. No one knew his real name anymore as he was a persona non grata but Wolf was the best there was in the entire section of ElectronicA. Wolf, real name John Smith, a nobody, a no one. He had been acquired by the section from a deprived area of Manchester called Moss side. At age 13 he had been running a successful set of internet shopping scams for the gang masters of the area. When his talent had come to the attention of the local head of CID, who was a former colleague of J, he had been sent to meet the head of ElectronicA, rather than enter a juvenile detention centre. John Smith had been tough since he was a baby. As hard as nails with no family, only a succession of brothers to fend for him and the black brotherhood who had been using his talent for committing crime. Smith was skinny, 2 metres tall and sported dreadlocks. He always wore yellow and green clothes to advertise his Jamaican roots and if he chose to speak to a colleague in the section, it was always about work or how he was proud to be black and equally proud of his Bob Marley music. He was also a Rastafarian and wanted the people of the world to live in peace and harmony but Wolf never touched drugs unlike the idiots of the brotherhood. He was too clever for that.

  Wolf’s keyboard was slung across his lap. His dark brown dreadlocks touched it as he sat contemplating the latest data on MI6’s WA program. WA - Walking Attributes was an old system now, The BBC had suggested it might exist on the TV programme called Spooks in 2011. It was four years old then and was considered useless now. Wolf sometimes still played with it as he liked the simplicity of the concept. The computer software would track a person caught walking on CCTV, Closed Circuit Television, when their face could not be seen and therefore identified. The program conceptualised the person’s size, weight and sex against known parameters. These were stored and used to review other images on cameras in the vicinity and when a match was made, invariably the change of view meant that MI6 could see the face. A simple ID system but only useful when reviewing CCTV footage near to the initial illegal activity. Wolf had taken the idea a stage further and was in the process of testing his new program. His amended software took the image of individuals near known terrorist targets or places under surveillance and broke them down to their individual pixels. These were analysed by the computer to determine how the pixels immediately alongside each other moved and shimmied, and it was this relationship that allowed Wolf to determine the type of fibre that had been used in the clothes worn. With a little help from The CIA’s grey spectrum analyser, the result was changed into a full colour spectrum, which could be applied on all the UK’s CCTV coverage that was piped into the giant computers in the basement. It was simple, colours and fabrics for known terrorists could be traced across the UK’s grainy and black and white CCTV pictures. The system was so close to success but he needed time to perfect it. Time that was in short supply as Wolf’s expertise was deemed more important by J for working on MI6’s – spatial awareness module, or SPAM for short. It was also SPAM that was driving Wolf nuts that afternoon as he reassembled the program code. SPAM took all the known electronic messages from digitalised telephone signals, to Facebook, emails, Twitter and electronic images on the World Wide Web and automatically assembled a profile against known intelligence concerns. Once the search criteria had been input into the SPAM search engine, it would identify potential digital signals that were related to the query and the electronic sources of any potential terrorists. However, that Monday morning, the program was looping and finding false negatives. Wolf pressed the search button again and waited impatiently for a result. SPAM returned a positive hit within ten seconds but it was a massive database of names instead of a handful of people. The result suggested a few thousand IP addresses i.e. the computer address by which every PC on the World Wide Web can be identified and therefore physically located. It was an impossible result against his advanced search term “Euro debt crisis”. Wolf threw his keyboard on the desk in disgust.

  ‘Computers – nothing changes, garbage in and garbage out. Such rubbish.’ He grumbled constantly when working at his desk and longed to be out in the field. He thrived on action and the adrenaline that pumped through his body when in a dangerous situation. However, he secretly loved every minute of his job and seven years after joining the team he was the main technician surpassing the brightest minds in the country. He was always quiet around the other technicians, which they took as smugness, but in fact he was simply a loner, that belied the name - Wolf.

  A red on white “Urgent” message flashed across the width of his computer screen and simultaneously the telephone on his desk loudly buzzed three times. It was the signal to attend the operations meeting room as quickly as possible. Wolf blew out a loud sigh,

  ‘more boring chat and no action.’ He surmised it would be about Peru or Chile as “the South American Spring” gathered pace against the dictatorships. A new thrust for freedom by the people, that was threatening to destabilise the world like in the Middle East in 2011. Reluctantly, he rolled his legs off the desk and replaced his “Vans” that were waiting on the grey carpet. Smoothly pushing himself upright sho
wed his athleticism as he moved at speed and without a sound. Nonchalantly Wolf strolled with long slow strides to the far end of the giant room, furtively he glanced to his left and right to see who else was moving for the meeting.

  Inside the operations meeting room, J the head of MI6 was worried. He sat waiting patiently for his electronicA elite team to arrive and was considering the red “Top Secret – for your eyes only” file that was open on the desk in front of him. It had been placed there a few minutes earlier by Brett Smart, of the CIA, a graduate of Princeton University, not just an honours graduate he had been way above honours. Brett glanced at the man called Johnson. He had been told that the Brit was one of the best, but J’s appearance suggested he had been one of the best. Porky, with heavy jowls resting on his starched white collar, the top British agent had run to fat from his last decade in The Office. J used to be a field man, a ruthless agent known to have eliminated some of the top Al Qaeda leaders in the Yemen and Afghanistan, including the real Bin Laden, ten years before the double’s death in Pakistan. Johnson still had steel grey hair and piercing black eyes. They made him look shrewd but the Tweed jacket with leather elbow pads and brown trousers that needed pressing made him look like a well-dressed tramp. Brett glanced at the man again. He never judged anyone by their appearance. He judged a fellow agent by what he said and what he did. That was what counted under pressure. J pushed the file back to Smart and appraised him carefully. Smart by name and Smart by nature. The Yank had a short crew cut, he appeared to be a typical Ivy Leaguer - athletic, a smart dresser in his dark blue suit, white shirt and yellow tie and like all CIA men the shoes hidden beneath the table would be highly polished.