Gillian Davis, otherwise known as Gillian Miles on her citizenship papers, is the admitted illegitimate offspring of Denton Miles III. It seems your rumour mill was right on the nail, Pete.
Denton Miles himself returned to the US, and two years later married the socialite and banking heiress Elizabeth Chase-Markham. They have no children. It may be that she is not capable of bearing children. Either that or the decision was to give kids a miss and concentrate on their careers.
For almost eleven years Denton ran the family business whilst hid dad ran unsuccessfully for the Senate. He almost made it, too. He was only a few votes away from success, and the backlash from the Clinton years seemed likely to propel him to victory, when he suddenly took ill and died.
The business is now a listed corporation and Denton’s interest in it is managed under a blind trust, freeing him to be involved in politics himself. As you already know, he is now Senator Denton Miles III. What you maybe do not know is that he is a potential Republican Presidential nominee; the only one the party thinks can compete with Sarah Paling and my fellow Mormon, Mitt Romney.
Your girl has some powerful allies in the US. You’ll have to tread carefully. Unless the evidence against her is rock solid you won’t be getting an extradition warrant. You may not get one even if it’s a slam dunk. We don’t send American citizens away to face justice very easily.”
“Surely, if Denton Miles is contemplating running for President he’ll try to distance himself from any scandal,” Dee postulated.
“True, but sticking by the errant daughter you didn’t know you had, a few tears and a promise to get her straightened out stateside, may play well with the Republican vote and Virginia hasn’t had a President for a long time. You might recall a couple from the past; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson”
Dee and Pete both frowned. They found Pete’s analysis hard to accept, but they knew he was in a better position to opine on the matter than most.
***
The meeting ran on for almost three hours, a mixture of business and personal reminiscences taking the time. Eventually Steve asked, “Do you still want that special equipment you asked for? I have it in the car.”
Dee nodded, and Pete said that he felt he had a duty to make Gillian Davis pay for what she had done to the Hokobus, regardless of her contacts in the States. Steve shrugged.
“OK. As I said before, you’re borrowing twenty thousand dollars worth of kit, the optics alone account for almost five thousand dollars, but you can pick out a fruit fly on a tree branch half a mile away, depending on the weather conditions.
So, please remember, you break it, you pay for it. If it doesn’t get returned to the field office there will be an investigation and I’ll be in trouble.”
Dee and Pete promised that they would be careful and that Steve would not be implicated in anything they did with the equipment. After sharing a joke with his two British friends, Steve Post rose and said goodbye, agreeing to meet to debrief them on Friday, but they were destined to meet again a little sooner than that.
Chapter 5 2
Walt Disney World, Florida, USA, Sunday 9am.
Gil’s iPad, iPod and iPhone were all connected as she used all of their computing power and stored memory to carry out the research she knew was necessary if she wanted to remain safe. Already today she’d had Doc hack into two UK commercial databases and change data for her benefit, a task he had sniffed was below him. Sure enough, twenty minutes later he was reporting that the tasks had been completed and had offered no challenge whatsoever as neither company was using complex encryption software. He was slightly mollified when Gil promised to pay him the full fee anyway.
Sitting on her king sized hotel bed, Gil ticked the final item off her list. It was a story, a fiction but one that she would swear was fact, knowing that if she didn’t she could find herself back in the UK waiting for a court hearing or, more likely, the inevitable attempt on her life. The story had been carefully woven around known facts. She had created a convincing story that took incriminating evidence and turned it around so that it portrayed her as an unwitting victim of powerful people and institutions.
The fact that MI5 would know immediately that her story was fabricated did not concern Gil; they would not share that knowledge with the police. She knew that MI5 would not be able to prove their assertions, and in any case they would not want the true version of the story aired in public. Given the choice between being humiliated but seeing Gillian serve life in prison, and saving themselves from humiliation but letting her go free, she fully expected them to choose the latter.
Gil had a patsy who could take the fall for her, and, much as she regretted using him, she had little choice if she wanted to stay free.
The edited story was saved on her hard drive and on a mini USB drive under the title “affidavit”.
Gil took her rather bulky sunglasses and extracted from one of the arms a micro SD card. The glasses, commercially available from companies dealing in spyware and which were even available on Amazon, recorded HD video and high quality stills at the touch of a button on the side arm of the glasses.
Sliding the micro SD card into her specially adapted iPhone VOX, she used the screen to preview the video and the still photos she had taken. She isolated about twenty minutes of video and around thirty still pictures which she then downloaded onto her iPad VOX. The pictures and video transferred over rapidly and the preview screen flashed up. Opening each still picture with Photoshop Elements, she cropped them to isolate two figures, two figures who appeared far more times than they had a right to appear in a sample of this size.
The man was in his mid twenties, with short dark hair and prominent eyebrows. He had dark eyes and a strong nose. His mouth was large and his lips full. He was clean shaven, but a shadow of beard growth was still visible. The woman was probably in her twenties too, but she looked much younger. She was probably chosen on that basis. She was pretty and petite but she was much too handy with that camera when Gil was in the picture.
Gil examined the pictures as they were loading onto an FTP site that Doc had nominated. From their remote computers Gil and Doc could both load data onto the server and download it. Doc’s task, computer genius that he was, would be to see if he could hack into any photo recognition databases and get a hit. Gil would dearly like to know who they were. Doc, on the other hand, saw the task as nothing more than a chance to beat the US law enforcement firewalls and give them yet another headache by leaving a destructive little ‘worm’ behind.
The Chameleon had survived far too long, in a competitive and deadly business, to fail to notice a mock bride and groom appearing at every turn in her peripheral vision. They would not be MI5, neither would they be likely to be CIA; even the FBI seemed unlikely. In any event, how would any of those agencies know where she was?
Gil had a sudden thought. It was obvious, really, and so she booted up a newspaper picture archive. The archive belonged to the Washington Picture Library. A password or a fee was due from anyone wanting to search the archive. Gil attached a dongle to her iPad via the USB port and rebooted the site. The dongle, provided by Doc, did its work, and soon the picture site security software was cooing over the dongle, revealing all of her secrets. Good old Doc, he knew what he was doing. The dongle, having taken what it wanted from its suitor, dumped the link and listed the last twenty passwords used to enter the site. Gil picked one at random and inserted the password into the box. The search engine appeared instantly.