‘No.’
Ravensbrook was not used to hearing that word, and now he had heard it twice in the same exchange. He stopped dead, holding his glasses up again, before sliding them back into place, his eyes fixed on Van Cleef. Now it was Van Cleef’s turn to show his strength. He removed a card from his pocket and held it up.
‘You will call this man. He is the best in his field, and we need the best. He will be expecting your call. Until he is here, we wait.’
Ravensbrook paused. He held Van Cleef’s gaze and didn’t blink. His Lordship allowed a long, uncomfortable silence to spread around the room like a bad smell. Then he nodded to Knowles, who emerged from the corner of the room and took the card from Van Cleef.
‘Give that to Jagger, tell him to make all the necessary arrangements.’ He waved Knowles away with a hand.
Ravensbrook stood and went to a small drinks table. He collected three tumbler glasses in one hand and a chunky crystal decanter filled with dark, brown liquid. His Lordship walked around the other side of the desk, roughly dropped the glasses onto the antique wood and poured three generous measures of whisky. ‘Taking our time actually suits me.’ He handed a glass to Van Cleef and one to Ogilvy before raising his own in a toast. ‘Now, to a matter where I refuse to demonstrate any more patience: my man, Martin Spengler. I want him back, Mr Van Cleef.’
‘The father?’ Van Cleef nodded. ‘Of course, he is unharmed. You can have him with my apologies.’
‘In that case, gentlemen,’ Ravensbrook said with a smile. ‘I propose a toast; to the Trinity Guild.’
Van Cleef and his Lordship brought their glasses together. Ogilvy hesitated long enough that the other men both fired uncertain glances in his direction. The Home Secretary swiftly brought his glass up to meet theirs and it struck with a loud ‘CLINK’; some of the sticky liquid spilled over his hand and he smiled nervously. It looked like he was going to be part of this after all.
Can You Hack It?
Fitz was still trying to take in all the revelations about Boyd’s past. The story was so extraordinary, it couldn’t be true. But then it also made perfect sense; it explained why Boyd was the way he was. Ever since Fitz had known him, Boyd had been unlike anyone else he knew: quick to temper, cold and withdrawn from everyone and everything in life. Ophelia had told them how Martin had set up a home with Boyd as his son when he was just five-years-old. Fitz couldn’t even imagine what Boyd had been through up to then and whatever happened must still be lurking inside of him, locked away in his head.
‘So where was he up until then?’ Fitz asked.
‘Where he is now – they’ve taken him home, in a sense.’
‘You know where he is? So we should just call the police or tell someone in the government? My dad might be able to help.’
‘It’s not that simple. Ravensbrook is extremely well-connected and the location where they are holding Boyd and Skye isn’t somewhere you can just walk into, no matter who you are.’
‘But we are going to find a way? I mean, we are going in there?’
‘Oh, we’re definitely going in there,’ Harry said. ‘But not without your help.’ He took the remote control and clicked it. An image of what looked like an aeroplane hangar appeared on the screen; a long building with a curved metal roof, set in the middle of a wooded area.
‘This is a top-secret facility on the outskirts of His Lordship’s land in Bloomfield. It doesn’t have a name, as such, but its nickname is the Barn.’
‘If it’s so top-secret,’ Azima pointed out. ‘How do you know about it?’
Harry smiled. ‘Because there’s a tiny hole in Ravensbrook’s operation and he has no idea it’s even there.’ Harry raised his hand and pressed the remote. An image of a tall, broad man with curly blond hair and a dissatisfied sneer appeared on the screen. ‘This fella is such an over-confident fool, he doesn’t even know he’s passing information to us. I’d like you to meet former MI5 data analyst, Elliot Jagger. He is now the head of cyber-security for the Lockmead estates. Since he left the secret service, Jagger believes he has been successfully wandering in and out the back door to their network and pinching anything he wants.’
‘But he hasn’t?’ Fitz asked.
‘Well, technically, yes, he has, but only because we’ve not bothered to tell MI5 about it. Unfortunately, Ravensbrook’s entire network at the Lockmead estate is all but impenetrable, but Barnaby did have some success when we began tracing Mr Jagger, here.’
‘Hang on – Grandpa is your IT guy?’
‘What of it, lad?’ Barnaby appeared, seemingly from nowhere.
Fitz jumped. ‘Whoa, there! Crikey, fella! Where did you crawl out from? No, that’s impressive. Great work. Truly,’ He composed himself. ‘So, Barnaby, what changed when Jagger arrived on the scene?’
‘He created and installed a highly sophisticated security system across the Lockmead site, and it became impossible for us to send any electronic device in there and expect to get a signal from it.’
‘So how does that help us?’ Azima said, quizzically.
‘It doesn’t, but he is also an arrogant twerp – as is so often the case with kids nowadays.’ He smiled at Fitz. ‘Elliot Jagger has a bee in his bonnet with MI5, so he likes to play games with their systems. Oh, it’s all fairly harmless stuff and we keep a close eye on him to make sure he’s not doing anything too disruptive. He enjoys sending dodgy emails between colleagues and changing room bookings so 25 people turn up to the wrong meeting – basically, the electronic version of putting dog poo through someone’s letterbox. But the point is, over time, he’s got careless and he likes to play his little pranks from the comfort of his own home. One day when he was online at the house he shares with his mum, I combed his system. The fool had all the plans for the security system, right there on his laptop, behind a flimsy firewall.’
‘So, I take it we’re going to give Mr Dog Poo a bit of a wake-up call?’ Fitz smiled.
‘Bingo, and here’s how.’ Harry brought up another image onto the screen. ‘Jagger had a call on his way home tonight, from this man: Erlich Schmidt.’
Azima perked upon hearing the name. ‘He’s a bio-physicist., an expert on nanotechnology.’
‘Ten points to Azima. Some say he’s the world’s best at nano-engineering.’
‘And remind me, how small is a nano?’ Fitz asked.
‘Well,’ Azima said, buzzing with enthusiasm, ‘a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick.’
‘Wow. So, he’s good.’
‘He is,’ Harry continued. ‘And he’s also completely without morals, available to the highest bidder and he’s now on his way to the Lockmead estate. He called and left Elliot a voicemail about a change to his travel arrangements. They want him there to start work on Friday but Schmidt wants to fly in earlier so he can have a look around London.’
‘And this gives the Toy Department the chance to intercept him,’ Ophelia said.
‘What’s this guy going to be doing at Lockmead?’ Fitz asked.
‘We presume that they are going to try to find out what Boyd is made of, literally. If they are experimenting on Boyd, well, as I said, we can’t let that happen. But they can’t start until Friday because of this.’ Ophelia pointed to the screen.
Harry pressed the remote and a YouTube clip exploded into life. There were stock cars smashing into each other, motocross bikes jumping over flaming buses and quad bikes speeding around a dirt track.
‘Lockmead’s annual SpeedFest starts tomorrow,’ Ophelia continued. ‘The whole estate will be full of press, the rich and famous, and everyone who is anyone in the motor industry, plus around 200,000 members of the general public. His Lordship will be followed by a camera for the next two days; he hosts a party every night and he can’t just disappear to deal with his secret experiments on a teenager. He’s waited 15 years and he’s going to have to wait for two more days, so, we have a window: 48 hours to get Harry into the Barn under Schmidt’s ID and break Boyd and Skye out.
And Fitz, that’s where you come in.’
‘Sure. What do you need?’
‘Jagger will have set up a profile for our friend Schmidt to access the Barn and we need to hack it,’ Ophelia looked to Barnaby. ‘Barnaby…’
‘And this is where I start to enjoy myself.’ Fitz pulled away from the desk and folded his arms. ‘What are we dealing with?’
‘To warm us up, the Barn uses voice recognition,’ Barnaby said.
‘Okay, that’s not too drastic. The key to voice recognition is to have a recording and playback device with a high bit-rate.’
‘And the next stage of security is biometric.’
Fitz’s eyes widened. ‘What kind of biometric security are we talking about?’ he asked.
‘Vein Authentication.’ Ophelia looked at Fitz, her head tilted downward, smiling at the idea of the challenge.
‘Crikey. Yeah, that’s really not going to be easy.’
Harry clicked the remote and the screens were suddenly filled with diagrams and technical drawings of the Vein Authentication reader they had stolen from Elliot Jagger’s laptop. Fitz watched closely as a video showed a mock-up of a hand being lowered onto a soft gel pad before a metal cover closed around it. Then a light shone through the graphic of the hand and the veins were highlighted in blue as the machine scanned the precise location and size of the individual’s veins.
Fitz moved closer to the screens, a smile unfolding across his face as his eyes opened wide. ‘Now that is a thing of beauty.’ He stroked the screen in admiration. ‘Remind me how long have I got to figure this out?’
Ophelia looked to Harry; Fitz’s eyes followed hers.
‘Schmidt lands tomorrow morning at eleven,’ Harry said. ‘So, no pressure.’
Fire And Ice
Boyd woke up with a start, gasping for air. He had felt like he was falling; he had been reaching out to try to grab something to stop himself, but he just kept tumbling through the air, faster and faster. Then he felt an impact, like he had hit the floor, and he heard a desperate shout.
He realised it had been a dream and the shout had come from him.
He sat up and his head throbbed. He was on a single bed, in a large room that was covered floor-to-ceiling in silver metal panels that curved up from the floor on one side of the room into the middle, like an underground railway station. There was a door to the right of the bed. Boyd reached around to the back of his neck and rubbed at what felt like a mosquito bite. Then he remembered being injected with something when he climbed into the helicopter. He clenched his fists as he recalled Skye’s last words to him: ‘Keep your head.’ Easier said than done.
Boyd closed his eyes and swallowed down his anger. He knew Skye was right; he would need to find out exactly where he was and who he was dealing with if he was going to get them out of here alive. In the meantime, he meant to play them at their own game. That would mean facing whatever they threw at him and letting them think he was the same old Boyd, immature and naive. Because whatever their plan, it was obvious to him that they needed him desperately and he was going to have to convince them that if it helped Skye and Martin, maybe he would be on their side.
So he closed his eyes and drew in another long breath. Boyd felt the familiar fire of rage that usually ran through his veins turn into cold ice as he walked calmly to the door.
Never Doubt My Powers
Erlich Schmidt’s flight from Berlin was delayed. Fitz sat with Azima in the arrivals lounge and struggled to stay awake. No matter how much coffee he poured down his neck, with the chronic boredom of inactivity, Fitz’s brain just wanted to shut down.
He had called his father last night and told him as much about his activities as he could. Considering Fitz was missing from home and had been involved in a major incident in the middle of London, his dad had reacted very strangely. Roger Tork had tried to make out he was being cool about it, but something was not right, and Fitz had no clue what it was. Fitz had expected shouting and demands to return home, but his dad had just asked Fitz to keep him updated with everything. Fitz hadn’t had the time to dwell on it last night; he had to start researching the Vein Authentication system they had to hack to get into the Barn.
Harry had replayed the call Schmidt had made to Elliot Jagger:
‘Thank you for changing my flight to tomorrow. I will be ready to work Friday as requested. I’ve sent you the data you asked for.’
‘“I have sent you the data you asked for…” I would bet you anything you like that the data he has sent them is a scan of his hand.’
Fitz had nodded slowly as he suddenly realised what Barnaby meant. ‘So if he’s scanned his own hand and sent them the data, there must be a way for us to scan it too!’
Fitz then spent every minute of the long night working out how they could scan a copy of Schmidt’s hand, right down to the size and position of the veins. Finally, at around five am he believed he had cracked it. They all gathered around.
‘If we had just wanted Schmidt’s fingerprints, then we could simply pinch an object he’s touched, but this was always going to be much more complicated than that. So I’ve adapted a Single Lens Reflex camera, or SLR, by removing the infrared filter, which allowed me to get a perfect image of the veins inside my hand.’ Fitz held up an image. Now all he had to do was work out how to create a perfect replica of a human hand in around 24 hours. Absolute doddle. No problem at all.
The arrivals board had finally changed ten minutes ago to show that Schmidt’s plane had landed, and the passengers would now be collecting their luggage. Finally, a tall, slim man with a large bald patch at the back of his brown hair emerged through arrivals – Erlich Schmidt. Fitz and Azima could easily follow him from a safe distance, they just had to keep that bald spot in sight.
Barnaby was waiting on the other side of the arrivals barrier, posing as a limo driver. As Schmidt emerged, Barnaby pretended to wave at someone behind him and made his move. As he made his way towards his make-believe client, Barnaby ‘accidentally’ tripped over a suitcase, right at the feet of Erlich Schmidt. Despite appearances, Barnaby was as lithe and flexible as any man a quarter of his age. His fall may have looked bone-crunchingly painful but he was perfectly in control, fulfilling his clandestine task with precision timing.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ Barnaby said loudly. ‘I am so sorry, sir, I really am.’
Schmidt was pulling his own small roller suitcase with his right hand and he reached down to help Barnaby to his feet using his left. Barnaby only had a hold of the scientist’s wrist for around five seconds. He put both hands around there and pulled himself up onto his feet.
‘Are you okay?’ Schmidt asked.
‘I am, thank you for your kindness.’ Barnaby gave a smile and stepped aside.
Schmidt walked to the exit, went outside and hailed a taxi. Azima and Fitz exited and jumped in the Royal Parks van, where Harry was behind the wheel. They didn’t force their way out into traffic, and Harry didn’t put his foot down to keep up with Schmidt’s aggressive taxi driver – he didn’t need to. Barnaby had perfectly placed a tiny tracker onto the inside of Schmidt’s watch strap that would give them twelve hours of signal.
Harry pulled the van into traffic, looked at the screen of his phone and followed the pulsating dot as it headed towards London.
‘Well, that was a pretty good start, eh team?’ Azima nodded to Fitz.
‘Not bad,’ he replied. ‘Now all we have to do is find the ideal time to have him stand still for at least 45 seconds so you can scan his hand.’
‘I spent a year on the streets of London living on my wits.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Never doubt my powers, Fitzgerald, it won’t end well for you,’ she said with a grin.
Fitz sighed. He really needed another coffee.
Welcome Home
Boyd had knocked on the door twice before going back to his bed and lying on his back. After what felt like around ten minutes, someone on the other side punched
a code into the keypad. Hornet walked in. Boyd didn’t move; his face remained impassive.
‘Hello, Boyd.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry about the rough ride in.’
‘The Tube gets so stuffy at that time of day; it made a lovely change.’
Hornet’s smile grew but behind it was a sense of trepidation. She was wary of him; that was an interesting development. ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘A party? For me? How wonderful.’ He jumped off the bed as Hornet watched him carefully. ‘Everything okay?’ Boyd asked her.
‘Yes, why wouldn’t it be?’
‘No reason. You just seem a bit, oh I don’t know, on edge?’
He saw a flash of something in her eyes – anger perhaps. She was rattled, and his gloating was only making her more unsettled. She stepped aside and gestured for him to exit first.
‘Just get moving.’
‘Not very hospitable. I’ll mention this on TripAdvisor.’
Boyd walked out of the door and was surprised to be greeted by a group of five men, all dressed in black, all built like rugby players and each of them on their toes, ready for things to get nasty. Two of them had batons: thick black sticks like cattle prods, used to deliver a voltage of electricity into anyone who got caught on the wrong end of it. Boyd took some satisfaction in the fact that they were worried, but he was equally puzzled as to why they were so cautious with him; they were each twice his size.
Just like his room, the hallway had silver panels on the wall and ceiling. A door opposite was opened and Boyd was shown into a room that was set out like a lounge. The walls were white and in the middle of the room were two sofas facing each other. Hornet followed him in, along with the two guards with the cattle prods; the others stayed outside.
Boyd sat in the middle of the sofa that faced the door and crossed his legs. He put both arms up and rested them along the back of the cushions, laid his head back and closed his eyes. He had an eerie feeling about this place, this room, something he couldn’t shake off; it was like he had seen it somewhere before. The door opened again but Boyd stayed exactly where he was for a moment and didn’t react.
Operation Hurricane: The Evan Boyd Adventures #1 Page 23
