Footnote1: This was not, strictly speaking, Alex’s mobile. It was his only inasmuch as he had had it in his pocket for an hour or two. He’d bought the phone in a club in Wapping for 50 euros. It had been stolen to order and while he waited – it had been important to Alex that the phone had not been reported lost – at least not before he was through with it. A couple of the calls he made in that time would have the goons at Menwith, the Harrogate spooks as he knew them, running around like headless chickens and he really needed for them not to know who he was or where he was. Using an unencrypted line would have delayed things, they were, he knew, actively monitoring all encrypted traffic, had been for years, but the clear traffic was monitored primarily by machines and until a pre-set threshold, and Alex knew exactly where that threshold was currently set and how many calls he had made before the alarms started flashing, was met no human would be involved. He had separated the Menwith critical calls by sufficiently long gaps to maximise his clean time.
Footnote the first
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