At the same time, Charlie gave me almost the same look as he hugged Lorna, and with that, the atmosphere loosened up considerably. From now on, there would be no more dwelling on what had happened, and we could all go on and go forward.
“Right you two, kick-off, or whatever you call it, is at 10. 00, off you go, get a proper lunch, the food concession stands at Banbury are lethal, don’t eat there, see you back here as late as you can without getting sozzled, Lu and I have some girl things to discuss, and we don’t need you two hulking men to know about it, so shove-off, there’s my darling boys, Ta-Ta!”
With that, Lorna shoved them out the front door, closed it, and leaned against it, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
“Coffee, Lu, lots of coffee, dark deeds to discuss, need caffeine!” and with that, she marched off into the kitchen, me trailing behind her, to put the coffee-maker on and plonk down into one of the dining chairs.
Lorna chatted about inconsequential’s while we waited for the coffee, and eventually, large mugs in hand, we retired to the lounge, where she proceeded to unfold the whole distressing scheme she’d cooked up to get Charlie off the hook and this influential civil servant off her back and out of her life forever.
“So Lu, as I told you before, I’d decoyed this bloke, this so-called family friend to a nice, quiet, secluded little hotel, leaving him to believe he was in for a night of uninhibited rumpy-pumpy. What he got was a drink with a little something in it, just enough to make him sleepy and want to lie down, snooze for a few hours. While he was out, Gerry and his little coterie of computer geniuses, hackers, crims and other sorts you don’t want to know about, got together and did some serious character assassination, stitched-him right up! And here’s the best part they didn’t do anything, not a damn’ thing that’s traceable, left no trails, no mucky little fingerprints, no hacker signatures, nothing!”
I was agog, couldn’t wait to hear how Lorna had pulled this off, knowing she’d tell me in her own way and at her own pace, so I quelled my curiosity and let her get on with her tale. She continued.
“The first thing they did was lift his wallet and break all his bank cards, took them about 30 seconds or so, then they cloned all his access cards for the various Ministry of Defence sites and computer and accounting hubs, plus the big one The Treasury. This… person has the authority to sign off on multi-million pound defence contractor and vendor budgets, and apparently his random PIN gateway key (whatever that is) was laughably simple for the boys to break, and that gave them access to all his emails, project and budget files, accounting logins, everything that makes a civil servant so very, very dull.
“Now they had all this, they effectively created a complete virtual copy of his life on-line, a mirror-image of all his budgets, sign-off’s and expenditure forecasts, everything, but in a virtual format. At no time did they touch or manipulate any real government information, but they did make snapshots of everything he’d ever touched, signed-off, authorised or cancelled. Then they went wandering in the banking world, looking for a good fall-guy, and they found one, a small bank in a middle-eastern country we don’t like, with laughable computer security, and did a complete number on our little civil servant.
What they did, basically, was to fiddle around with all the invoices he’d ever signed-off on, all the budgets he’d ever approved or rejected, and moved nice round sums from one to the other in a paper chase, ending up in a numbered account in this patsy bank in you-know-where. They then took printouts and phony deposit certificates from the bank’s own servers, printed them out, and put them on a pen-drive for me, as well as copies all over the internet, in locked encrypted accounts, with a decryption key several thousand characters long; Gerry tells me it will take several trillion years to randomly break that key, plus I have a little programme on the drive he gave me that will seek out and destroy these phony bank records any time I need to, without anyone suspecting they ever existed. All I have to do is go to an internet cafe, log onto the internet, and click the drive into place, everything happens automatically after that.”
“The printouts and invoices seem to show that our chum has been siphoning cash from military budgets for years, and has stashed something over 30, 000, 000 in a bank in an unfriendly middle-eastern country, anybody astute enough to track those invoices on-line will activate our virtual mirror-image of his budgets, and there it will all be, in glorious Technicolor. As soon as a real computer tech tries to download it, though, it will activate something Gerry called a file- shredder, and it all vanishes like morning mist, leaving absolutely no trace, because it never really existed; the assumption, however, will be that our chum has just covered his tracks after having perpetrated the computer crime of the decade, he’s bunked-off millions of pounds that our soldiers desperately need, and stashed it in an unfriendly country, and his lifespan will be measured in minutes when the Defence Minister, his boss, gets his hand on our chum’s scrawny little neck! A nice touch was creating virtual audit-trails of access through doors into the computer sites of the various departments he worked with; any attempt by him to kick back and Gerry’s friends impose those over the real records, then let him explain to the police how, if he never committed computer fraud, there’s records of him actually going into the computer data centres at the times these frauds were supposed to have happened!”
“Obviously, no money has actually gone missing, but it will take years to prove it, impossible in some cases, especially with vendors who’ve gone out of business or were never based in the UK, and we took care to select as many of those as possible, just to make the lives of any investigating forensic accountants that much more difficult. In the mean-time, chummy is sitting in Belmarsh Prison awaiting trial. This was the scenario I painted for him last night, when he came around and we played our own version of ‘You’ve Been Framed'”
“I showed him the benefits of, for instance, re-deploying a certain Lieutenant Charles Manville, 2nd Battalion, Blues & Royals to say, England, into a permanent training post or similar, as against the horrible repercussions of these records I have here, voila, finding their way into the in-tray of say, The Secretary of State for Defence, the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad, Military Intelligence, Military Police, and every possible tabloid newspaper. I required him to get his finger out and start getting things moving, or Splash! one career in the toilet, and one little man doing 40 years for treason! As a rider to that, I also ensured that all details of my life and family remain completely undisclosed, and he stays away from me forever and ever, amen. Any breach of that agreement means these records go on public display in every scurrilous news-rag in the country. As an added bonus, we found an account his wife knew nothing about, so we transferred most of the funds to his wife, poor thing, she almost deserves it just for being married to him!”
“As for the Middle-Eastern bank, when they opened for business, they would have found evidence of a series of massive overseas deposits. By the time they’d dragged the manager in from washing the camel or whatever it is they do when the sun comes up, a worm planted by Gerry’s little playmates will have destroyed all trace of the phony deposits, they sit there scratching their bristly blue chins, and no evidence exists to inconveniently surface ten days or ten years from now. You can thank me now, darling, we dunnit!”
I was almost choking with laughter; only Lorna, with her sheer barefaced cheek, could have been audacious enough to think this up and then put it into play! I tended to forget that, underneath all the dizziness and capricious moods was a brilliant, devious and not-overly scrupulous mind, and she’d displayed all those traits spectacularly.
“Lorna, I don’t know how to thank you, you’ve made it possible for Charlie and I to have a future, thank you, darling, thank you!”
Lor brushed it off. “Don’t mention it Lu, that little creep had it coming, and it was such immense fun, I think I might have a talent for this whole ‘Honey-Trap’ game! Maybe I should give the Secret Service a call! Mind you, most of the plan was Gerry’s; behind that pretty face lurks the mind of a true Moriarty!”
I laughed, and told her to get her boots and socks, we were going to find a brunch with our name on it!
We drove into Bicester to a little French restaurant and splashed out on a lobster salad and a couple of glasses of house white to celebrate, to talk over the last few days, and clear up any lingering doubts. It transpired that she and Gerry had had pretty much the same conversation as Charlie and I, and we agreed that there would be no more of that between us; we didn’t need it, we were already closer than most families could ever be, and we agreed that now we were going to be trying for families, it would be foolish and foolhardy to muddy the waters.
We left any further discussion of the subject for another day, and with our partners present. Lorna and I understood each other perfectly; I didn’t want Gerry, but I loved him like a brother, because he was Lorna’s brother, the one person in the world I love as much as Charlie; and Lorna still loved Charlie, but had no interest in him, she only had eyes for Gerry. Charlie was right; Lorna may have been a man-eater, but she would never stoop as low as man-stealing.
We got quite convivial over our extended brunch, re-hashing school days, screaming with laughter at some of Lorna’s antics and escapades, making tentative plans for when Charlie came home for good, and planning how and where to have our babies. Lorna seemed to have assumed that motherhood was for her, her yes-no attitude of earlier in the week finally resolved, her eyes going soft and faraway whenever she contemplated Gerry, and I felt pleased that scatterbrain Lorna was finally looking to settle down and be an adult at last. I wanted her to be near me, especially when I was pregnant; we both had no other female relatives, just work colleagues and a few occasional calls or cards from some of the girls we were at school with, so we would have to be our own support network.