Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [97]
And when Webster logged into the security software it came back to life. Waking up after years of dormant existence, the software decided it was fresh from the factory and that Webster was the authorized user. So it made him a god of the network and it showed him everything.
Thousands of files that seemed damaged and unreadable were simply in code. And the green beast software let Webster run around the system like a kid with X-ray specs, looking inside at the real contents.
That’s how he’d found out the true story about the man called Vincent.
He’d gone straight to Mr Harrigan with the facts.
‘You’re gonna have to get on the pony and ride, son,’ said the old Texan when he heard the facts.
‘You want me to follow them? Go over there and locate them physically?’
‘I’ll follow as soon as possible. You can do it, Webster. They’ll spend a while getting organized after they land. If we get you on a direct flight right away you just might catch up with them. Grab whatever you need and go now. I’ll have transport waiting for you at the other end. Something fast.’
Something fast turned out to be a police Porsche waiting on the tarmac at Thanet airport. Webster’s charter jet had rolled to a stop in the painted rectangle directly opposite the one where the IDEA jet was refuelling. It had apparently landed only an hour earlier.
The ground crew told Webster that the team had touched down and been in the middle of a huge English breakfast when they’d picked up a police bulletin.
The local authorities had been requested by IDEA to monitor the movements of Justine and Vincent. They had been picked up by a traffic monitor fleeing their home in London. Traffic records showed the progress of the vehicle every time it passed a traffic camera and had its bar‐code read.
Their destination looked like Canterbury and Creed and the others had bundled into a minibus to rendezvous with the couple there.
Webster had never left the USA before, but the computer on the Porsche helped him with the local traffic rules and he’d just about mastered the art of driving on the left by the time he’d entered Canterbury.
He’d found the black IDEA minibus almost immediately. But when he parked and went over to inspect it he found it was empty. That meant they were out in the city somewhere, poised to make an arrest. Webster was sitting in the Porsche, wracking his brains helplessly, when he looked up and saw camera crews running past on foot.
That meant the data silence was broken. Mr Harrigan always said that getting good coverage of an arrest was as important as the arrest itself. If Creed’s team had alerted the local media that meant they were about to do it.
They were about to make contact.
Webster got out of his car and ran after the camera crews. Canterbury was like something out of a computer game. Old cobbled streets, little narrow lanes. And the huge, weird‐looking cathedral in the background. It looked ancient and kind of frightening. But then Webster tended to play the kind of computer games where the cathedral always concealed a baleful slumbering dragon. If the unlucky player woke it up, that was the end of him.
It occurred to Webster as he ran that he’d worked out the identity of the small green beast on the King Building computer. It was supposed to be a dragon.
And he’d woken it up.
He ran past crooked little gabled shops that overlooked the streets like sinister fairy‐tale cottages. The camera teams were scrambling down an alley and Webster followed. They ran across a footbridge over a narrow stream and then along a side‐street, their footsteps echoing in the afternoon sunlight. Webster had begun to feel a pain in his side. He was wondering how much longer he could keep running when he looked up and read a sign on an old stone wall. Orange Street.
He ran past