Chapter 12

Over the four days it had taken WPC Wilson to investigate and compile her report for Drew, WPC Heather Cairns' e-mail had sparked a flurry of activity elsewhere in the Strathclyde police force. The Chief Superintendent in charge of the Child Protection Unit knew he didn't have enough to get a warrant to search the Cambo House Estate but he had to go through the motions anyway. The importance of the anonymous call and the information it provided - indicating that children were at serious risk - meant that he had to be seen to press for immediate and urgent action. That had wasted a day and a half of his time and really was frustrating.

Once he had it on the record that he had tried to press for a warrant and had been refused, he could turn to slower, more old-fashioned police methods. He had already ordered two of his team to pay the Cambo House Estate a visit. Their instructions were to establish covert surveillance and to record any comings and goings. If there was any chance of gaining access to the premises without being seen, they were authorised to do so. The pair had already been in place for a day and a half but hadn't uncovered anything useful so far.

Kenny was still at the early stages of working through the messages on the memory stick. In four days he had worked through over four hundred of them - studying the detail of what he had been ordered to do and scribbling the key points down on a notepad he had open in front of himself.

He had established the pattern of how he had initially been controlled very quickly. From the paper trail it looked as if someone had taken over pretty soon after he had developed the brain defragmenter programme. He had been ordered to report anything interesting to his controller on a weekly basis or immediately if it was vital or really significant. Kenny knew that once he felt safe to turn on his other PC then these 'reports' and the address they were sent to would be one way of tracking his controller down.

He knew that he had more studying to do before he would be able to turn the PC on however. He would need to read all of the messages on the memory stick in order to find out what level of control over the PC he had set up for whoever was controlling him. Only then might he be able to think up a safe way of turning the unit on without further valuable information being deleted.

Kenny was using a new page of his notebook for each message he read - setting out who he had controlled, what damage he had done and noting key aspects that might help him begin to unpick what he could. He logged any potentially useful technical information - such as instructions to do with the computer - on a separate sheet.

It was still traumatic reading the detail but somehow he was becoming de-sensitised to most of it. Now and again a message was still able to break through the curtain he had drawn round himself - like the one where he had been told to control and seduce some new and younger girls. The memories of how he had acted on this command were suddenly very clear and instead of exciting him, they now made Kenny sick to his stomach. Thinking about young girls as a fantasy thing had been okay somehow, but actually doing what he had done, actually living out the fantasies - even allowing for the fact that he was being controlled by someone else - was shocking.

The deeper Kenny sank into the swamp his life seemed to have become, the more determined he became to find out who was behind all of it and to settle the score.

He had just reached the point where he had been ordered to set up an account for the Church of Cyberscience and to begin to gather in money from his converts. Once more Kenny was honest enough to admit to himself that his controller was very good, very clever indeed. He had picked up on Kenny's greed for money and worked on his subconscious to make it even worse, to bring it out and build on it. He read the details of how that had been done, how his greed had been fuelled to the point where setting up donations every month seemed like a fine idea.

Now, without the handicap of the mind control to subdue his conscience, Kenny was appalled at the scale of what he had been doing. He was aware of his sense of morality and principle returning and that made him feel hellish about what had been done to hundreds, possibly thousands of people who he had exposed to the programme.

Kenny was halfway through one message that made it clear he was now controlling some major criminals when he decided he needed to take a break. He jotted the names of the Hamilton brothers down on a fresh page in his notebook and stood up to stretch his legs.

All of the details of the Hamiltons and what he had ordered them to do were now clear to him. He felt close to being physically sick at the realisation that he had ordered someone's death - he had ordered the Hamiltons to kill a journalist. Kenny staggered through the house in a daze and out to the car that sat in the driveway. He started the car and aimed it towards the estate's gates, no real idea of where he was going just that he needed to get away for a while.

As Kenny disappeared down the drive, two plainclothes policemen emerged from the woods that surrounded the house and raced across the lawns to the front door. Finding it open, they entered to see what they could find.

"You take upstairs and I'll see what I can find down here," the taller of the two said.

"How long do you think we've got?" his partner asked.

"Let's say fifteen minutes - no more than that so be as quick as you can."

As his partner dashed upstairs, the first policeman began to go through the rooms on the ground floor. When he came to the sitting room he spotted the used whisky glass and pulled a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket. He carefully put the glass in the bag and sealed it - happy that they would be able to lift fingerprints from it and hopefully confirm the identity of the man who was living here.

Moving further into the house he at last came to the computer room. Kenny's notepad sat open on the desktop and he immediately began to flick through the pages, speed-reading the notes that Kenny had made.

"Bingo!" he said out loud.

He couldn't quite believe some of the things that were written down but when he read about sex with fourteen year-old girls he knew he had enough to convince his gaffer to mount a raid on the house. The names of the Hamilton brothers and details of the need for a journalist to be killed also jumped out of the pages at him. Believing he had seen enough for the meantime, he retraced his steps and called out for his partner.

"What is it?"

"I've found enough to convince the chief a raid on this place can be justified. It's time to go, come on, before this bastard comes back and catches us."

Four days of being confined to the Police College with nothing to do was driving Mark and Felicity stir crazy. They ate all of their meals in the large staff canteen and the food was barely passable. They exercised in the extensive grounds of the college but the abrupt slowing down of the pace of their lives was difficult to adjust to.

"What is MacIntosh up to?" Flick asked.

"I don't know, but I hope we're not going to be kicking our heels here for much longer. I don't know if I can stand even one more day," Mark replied.

"Call him again," Flick suggested.

"I've left six different messages for him and he's not answered any of them. What makes you think I'll be able to get him now?" Mark asked.

Felicity's boredom and frustration were starting to get to her and it showed. Mark could read the signs and knew that he was feeling the same way.

"Look, he didn't tell us we couldn't leave. Why don't we just go and see what else we can find out for ourselves? I mean, the only leads he's got so far came from us anyway. It stands to reason that any other breaks we get are going to have to come from us - he's not proving himself to be much of a copper, is he?" Mark asked.

"Mark, he said we would be safe here. Remember, somebody has made at least three attempts to kill us in the past few weeks. Are you sure it's a good idea to leave?" Flick asked.

"If we stay here any longer we'll end up killing each other and save whoever is after us the bother," Mark replied.

Felicity laughed at his comment but could see the truth behind it; being confined to the college really was getting them both down.

"Okay. Where do we go and how do we get there? We've got no transport here remember," she said.

"Surely we can get one of the trainees here to give us a lift somewhere?" Mark suggested.

"Where to?" Flick asked again.

"Perth isn't far and there's a major train station there. That opens up most of the country," Mark replied.

"Perth it is then. You go upstairs and pack while I use my feminine charms to convince one of these young coppers to drive us."

Drew sat staring at WPC Wilson's latest notes in amazement. A high percentage of the names on the Church of Cyberscience bank account statements had attended schools where Kenny MacGovern had been a teacher. He was willing to bet that those that hadn't could also be linked somehow to MacGovern if he did a little more digging. Something else had been highlighted by Sheila, something that both he and Mark hadn't spotted. The Hamiltons were included in the bank statements; the Hamiltons were also donating money every month to the Church of Cyberscience.

This was incredible. What was the connection and why were all of these people donating money every month to this church?

"It's almost like a version of that group - what are they called again? - aye, the Bilderberg Group. What is it they do? Aye, that's right, they're supposed to be a secret group of people who influence world events. Capitalists, businessmen, politicians, crooks even - all getting together to do shady deals and influence what's going on around the world. Fucking nutters if you ask me, run by the oil companies for the benefit of the oil companies. Is this a Scottish version of something like that? If there weren't so many women on the list I'd be tempted to say it was a bunch of freemasons up to no good. I guess I'd better share this with Mark, maybe he'll have some idea of what's going on.

"I need to tell him that the Hamiltons appear in the Church accounts as well. That can't be a coincidence either and it's strange the way all of these different things are suddenly coming together and that they all lead back to this MacGovern character. It's definitely time that I looked at MacGovern a little bit closer." he thought to himself.

Before heading back to Tulliallan, Drew made his way to his own Chief Superintendent's office and knocked on the door.

"Come in."

Drew opened the door and entered to find Chief Superintendent Hugh Graham almost buried under tray after tray of paperwork. He laughed.

"I see you haven't lost touch with real police work, sir. That's good to know and it will do wonders for morale around the station," he joked.

"Fuck off, MacIntosh. What do you want?" his chief asked sourly.

Drew realised that his boss was not in the mood to have the micky taken so he got down to the point of his visit.

"I thought it was about time I gave you an update on several cases I've been working. Things are getting to an interesting point and you need to know what's going on," Drew said.

"Anything's got to be better than pen pushing. Okay, pull up a chair and tell me what you've got," Graham offered.

Drew took the chair in front of the desk and began to brief his boss on his initial interest in the Hamiltons, how he had involved the journalist and took him through the key points of what had happened over the past few weeks. Chief Superintendent Graham grew increasingly interested as Drew recounted the attempts on Mark's life and then introduced the links to the Church of Cyberscience, the Glasgow casinos, the monthly donations and the links to Kenny MacGovern.