DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [71]
Renu’s sixth sense was also telling him that something strange was happening. He would watch, listen and smell for the faintest rustle, like a deer alert for danger. He thought he had noticed a couple of animals stalking him. From the corner of his eye he became convinced he could see a pack of lions around the Java Bean café. He would also scan the heavens for circling vultures.
Was this paranoia, or were his two parallel lives as Renu and JiLsi in danger of colliding? Whatever the truth, it was best to plan for all conceivable outcomes. He could no longer blithely dismiss the obvious signs: a car parked near the café for too long; strangers dropping into the shop who just didn’t fit – wrong demographic, wrong clothes. After a couple of weeks Renu started varying his route to and from the Java Bean. Sure enough, he had company. These were the lions.
The vultures were members of a less-organised but equally threatening team who had issued warnings regarding certain financial obligations that Renu had assumed after the disastrous episode with the memory stick more than a year earlier. They now wanted their pound of flesh. Might either group be willing to negotiate? Or would he have to flee them both?
Mick Jameson had taken over as lead officer for the JiLsi case a couple of months earlier, in March. For more than half a year his employer, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), had been tracking JiLsi following a tip-off from Keith Mularski. Both the US Secret Service and the FBI had been targeting JiLsi for a long time, thanks to his hyperactive posting on virtually every criminal website out there (almost to the point where, if JiLsi wasn’t on your site, you weren’t really kosher). His distinctive chirpy avatar, the pirate with an eye-patch and tricorne, was irrepressible.
SOCA was the only police agency that was privy to both the FBI and the Secret Service DarkMarket operations and, to a degree, Britain’s anti-organised-crime force acted as a passive peace-maker, at least ensuring that the arrest date for Lord Kaisersose and Theeeel in France should be the same one as that for Matrix in Germany and JiLsi in England.
A surveillance team had been focusing their cameras and listening devices on the Java Bean since February. Officers had been tailing Renu. They had clocked him meeting a few people, often speaking in Tamil. They had seen him hand over cash and memory sticks to others, who would pull up in cars before shooting off again. They even stumbled across a second DarkMarket user who also frequented the Java Bean. But it was Renu they wanted. They had taken pictures of his screen with a telephoto lens. One of Jameson’s colleagues had infiltrated DarkMarket as an ordinary member and so they were able to monitor a lot of JiLsi’s postings. In addition, Mularski was feeding them invaluable intelligence. But they did not yet have definitive proof that Renukanth Subramaniam was JiLsi. For that they would need to arrest him.
The various police forces had resolved to move against him in the second week of June. Some measure of agreement had finally been reached between the Secret Service and the FBI – 12th June was D-Day. That plan was then wrecked by the anonymous emails sent to Matrix001. If JiLsi’s arrest was botched, then there was a good chance that word would get out through DarkMarket in a matter of minutes, and many years of painstaking preparation would have been in vain.
And then Jameson’s worst fears were realised – a couple of days after Matrix’s arrest, JiLsi went AWOL. One morning JiLsi had been walking not to the Java Bean, but to the nearby Wembley Park station, heading for the centre of London. As he passed IKEA on the North Circular, London’s traffic-clogged inner ring road, he noticed a peculiar-looking man. Or was it a woman? He couldn’t decide. Androgynous was perhaps the best description. He continued on his way to Wembley Park. Just as he was walking