48 Hours - A City of London Thriller Read Online Free PDF

doesn’t
necessarily mean our man ever stayed there. He could simply have
used their internet access to mislead us.”
    “ Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Simon agreed. “Put
yourself in his shoes. He would try very hard not to leave a trail
to follow. Also, it’s rather unlikely that Quadrille would get back
to me with that information today, or even tomorrow. The chances
are the internet access is subcontracted out to another company
somewhere in the UK, and the IT guys who could track this data back
might be freelancers, working for the subcontractor from home. I
guess what I’m saying is that it’s a long shot, and it would not
necessarily guarantee us any worthwhile data in any
case.”
    I shook my head. “On the BBC last night, the Silent Witness
team did what you just described in 20 seconds and traced the
message to an individual office in a block of offices.”
    “ Artistic license,” Simon replied. “It simply doesn’t work
like that in real life. Let’s turn to the texts and the phone
records and see if we can find anything useful there.” With a few
more keystrokes the screen changed again. “We know the number that
sent the texts, they all came from the same phone, but guess
what....”
    “ It was an unregistered pay-as-you-go phone,” Dee guessed out
loud.
    “ Spot on,” Simon acknowledged with more than a little
admiration in his voice. “It gets worse, though.” The analyst
paused as he flicked more buttons. “From the phone number we can
tell that the phone is a Nokia 2690 and that it was acquired
recently. The records show that it was first activated yesterday
and it may only have been on the shelf of the shop where it was
bought for a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks. I draw
that conclusion because that particular telephone number was only
allocated earlier this month. We are waiting for confirmation, but
my guess is that it was bought at a supermarket in the London area.
Some place where they sell phones by the dozen and the sales
assistants will have no idea who bought it. Unless Bob is a bit
dim, he’ll have paid cash for it. No credit card which could be
traced. But you never know. Sometimes people are
careless.”
    My mind had been racing while Simon had been
speaking.
    “ Simon, you’re probably right to think that the email and
texts were sent from the City. That makes sense when you consider
that I was photographed in the City yesterday and shot with
paintballs in Greenwich last night. I was wondering, can’t we trace
where the phone is now? I understand we can track mobile phones by
triangulation or cell location or something.”
    Simon looked directly at the two of us facing him. He looked
into my eyes as he spoke. “Josh, we’ve pinged that number, by
computer, every thirty seconds since five o’clock yesterday, and we
haven’t had a hit. That suggests to me that Bob knows exactly what
he’s doing. If he’s seen any Hollywood movies he will know that we
can track a phone, even when it’s switched off, or on standby to be
more accurate. However, if you remove the battery......” he let the
thought hang in the air.
    I looked at Dee, my mood plummeting. “This is hopeless,” I
said.
    Dee tried to find some positives from the meeting. “If you
ping the phone when it’s switched on, can you trace it?”
    “ Yes, given enough time,” Simon answered, “but Bob has, so far
at least, kept his messages short and not so sweet. Nothing he’s
sent so far would have given us enough time to track him.” Simon
hesitated before offering more negative news. “To be honest, people
think that we can get an address from a phone’s location, and
sometimes that’s possible in a rural area, but in a place the size
of London the best we can do is narrow it down to a diameter of two
or three hundred yards. A radius like that will include thousands
of people on the street, in shops, offices and hotels, and hundreds
of those will be using phones at any given