he news about Cass quickly spread to Kevin, Roger, Wa
T lid, and Gordon. Walid briefed Winston, and Winston called Willie.
At 4:00 p.m., after school finished, Willie called Gordon and agreed to come to the garage at 8:00 p.m. “Bring your computer-hacking gear,” Gordon told him. “And wear dark clothes.”
“Do I need a balaclava?”
“Up to you,” Gordon replied, “as long as we can recognise you. Just bring a floppy disk or one of those little sticks with caps. And we won’t be doing any risk assessments.”
Ritchie left the London office of Asher & Asher at 5:00 p.m.
and by 8:00 p.m. was sitting with Gordon, Roger, Kevin, and Walid with Gordon’s big brown teapot and tea-stained mugs.
At 8:15, Walid was instructed to find two more mugs and to add more tea bags to the pot as Winston and Willie joined them.
“There’s a lot to tell you,” Ritchie began before explaining the conclusions he and Colin Asher had drawn by cross-checking Cass’s photographs with other data. “If he’d not survived it would have been lost forever,” he said. “And if they’d discovered what he’d been doing before he escaped, I dread to think what they would have done.”
“Yeh,” Walid said passing a finger across his neck. Walid’s sordid humour was best ignored until you remembered where he’d come from and that he’d been in the thick of it.
Ritchie kept going. “Your mum helped a lot, Kevin,” he said.
“We are 99 percent sure that the photos of Hassan Bashir and Mahmoud Al-Sahili and an Italian are, in fact, photos of Muhammad Khokhar, your father. Colin is still looking into data so we’ve got the absolute proof.”
Then it was Gordon’s turn to explain the plan for the evening.
“We’re going in to mop up,” he said like a general directing troops on a final sortie.
“You think there’s more than what you’ve already got?”
Willie asked.
“There’s a lot of password-protected files,” Winston said. He looked at Ritchie. “Willie taught me how to open encrypted files. He’s teaching me computer science so I can go to university.”
Willie, with his thin grey hair roughly cut just short of his shoulders, patted Winston’s back. “A good student,” he saidto Ritchie. “And all done on a weak Wi-Fi signal from downstairs.”
Winston grinned. “Why didn’t you ask me to come with you last night, Kevs?”
“Because you were working in the bakery, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Kevin replied.
“We still need enough to convince the police to act,” Roger said remembering what Hamish had told him. “Otherwise, I can see another street demonstration being organised by Councillor Mohammed Basra,”
“Agreed,” Ritchie said. “Gathering evidence. is what Asher & Asher does. Only when we’ve got as much as possible do we advise clients to involve law enforcement. Also, I’d like to go in with you three guys. We’ll video it live to Colin in London so he can decide what to do. And let’s not forget Cass in all
this. We can only get him back home on the basis of evidence.
What I’m saying is, there’s nothing wrong with you three guys going in tonight, but we need urgent top-level action afterwards. To call the local police and ask them to drop by to see what you found during a break in of Mr. Khan’s shop on Park Road is only going to delay things. Let’s bypass the locals and take the evidence straight to the top. Agreed?”