Mr Hook's Big Black Box

«Irrelevance»

"So this John guy told you everything the police had in their records, everything you needed to know?" Kris asked, "I kind of assumed you'd have to do a lot more chasing to find all the intelligence."

"Not really," Ferrari glanced down at her hands again as she spoke, "He was just the first point of contact. I got him to call somebody else, and asked them to confirm some facts about another case I was interested in, and then to put me through to someone else. It was a hard slog to find all the things I needed to know without explicitly asking anything that would reveal me to not be who that particular cop thought I was."

"I don't think we need to know all the details," Dwayne pointed out, "It could take all day at that rate. Just let us know if you learned anything that affects the story, right?"

"Pretty much what I was planning on," Ferrari answered, "I can't tell you all the tricks I used to manipulate them anyway, or reveal who I could get to tell me things. If you don't know them it would be irrelevant, if you do then I don't want to tell you their secrets. And there's probably Company secrets in my recollection as well, things I could still get in trouble for telling you. So I think we can skip over that, a half hour of me telling different lies to different people based on what they wanted to hear."

"Until you got to the truth?" Destinee guessed.

"Until I got to a chief super, the guy who should have been in charge, but was thrashing around in frustration because he had special orders from MI6, and his superiors all expected him to follow their instructions without question. He just wasn't that kind of guy, though, he'd joined the police to protect people and fight crime, and he was determined that would be what he did. So he was angry about those 'so-called specialists' from London coming up to interfere with a drugs sting that some of his colleagues had been working on for months. He didn't know what was going on, of course, he thought Spenser was the target, as the only person on Century House's hit list who the local police already had a huge file on."

"So they were working with the local police?" Marco seemed surprised, but Ferrari was quite determined that she wasn't going to be drawn any further how she'd got information from the cops. She'd revealed her political connections, and that was all that was relevant as far as her friends were concerned.

"They'd have to," Destinee got it, "The neighbours would have called the police as soon as armed men showed up at the townhouse. If they had the address, they could assume the Box was stashed there and just break in, but like you said before, nothing goes unreported in curtain-twitcher land."

"Right," Ferrari confirmed, "Once upon a time, if they wanted to avoid the local cops getting involved, they would have cut power or phone lines to the whole street. But cutting the phones without triggering an alarm is a complex process, and there's a chance people would make the call on mobiles anyway, even going down the street into the next cell if they don't have signal. And I think the networks were upgrading to 3G around that time, so it wasn't so easy as it used to be to spoof the tower and divert or intercept outgoing calls in the immediate area. So now, they had to have the police informed, and they tell them what to say if anyone calls with a report."

"So the police told you it was these Century guys at Daddy's house. I guess that's all you got there, so what did you do next?"

"Well, technically that wasn't all they told me. And that old super, he doesn't like being pushed around by the secret service, and he's a sly old fox in his way. Master of the departmental paperwork, and when I went out on a limb and told him that this was a power play for them to increase their political power within their own organisation, he returned the trust by giving me a little help that he never should have."

"So that's where the van came from?" Dwayne grinned, "It's all starting to make sense now. I must have spent the whole ride wondering how you managed it..."