by Chris Ewan
I raised my hands and cracked my knuckles, like a concert pianist or, more accurately, a thief with mild arthritis. Then I flexed my fingers, waggling them in the air as if I was capable of tuning in to some cosmic presence and divining the hiding place of the safe. My fingers made a faint swishing noise as I did this because I was wearing disposable surgical gloves from a box I had at home which, in turn, I’d taken from the city hospital during a recent visit (for my arthritis, naturally). I was wearing the gloves out of habit—my fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere outside of the UK and it was unlikely anyone would look for them here—but habit and routine were my friends, the surest way I knew of protecting myself against costly mistakes.
But I digress. The safe.
Finger waggling aside, the best way to find it was to conduct a reasoned, methodical search, beginning at the front of the boat and working my way along either side, port then starboard, checking each cupboard and cubby hole and cavity until I reached the bedroom area at the rear, assuming it took me that long. And this was the approach I would surely take, in just a moment, after I’d tried a few things first.
So now, if I were a safe, where would I be hiding? Antigua? Hmmm. The bathroom? No, not there. The kitchen? What kitchen? Above the bed? No sign of it. Behind the not-quite-straight picture of a field of tulips hanging on the wall above the couch? Ah, I thank you. Our boat owner, it would appear, was not afraid of the odd cliche or two.
Neither, sadly for me, was he a fan of the classic combination lock safe. Now this was a shame because I’ve spent more evenings than I’d care to remember with my ear pressed against the metal doors of one or two of the more common makes, listening for the tell-tale click of contact points on a drive cam dial, plotting the numbers these clicks correspond to onto graph paper and coming up with the sequence of digits necessary to open the once impregnable door. All that practice was wasted here, though, because the safe in front of me had an electronic lock. Ten digits in all, from zero through to nine, housed in a no-nonsense keypad. I could try listening for clicks, but it wouldn’t do me any good, since an electronic lock doesn’t make any noise. Or I could try every possible combination for what might very well turn out to be the remainder of my time here on earth, though I was a little short on patience for that. No, an electronic lock was a difficult customer, alright, and I knew of only three ways around it.
The first, and the least appealing, was to torch the thing. You see, safes generally fall into two categories—they’re either burglar-proof or fire-proof. Amazing as it may seem, it’s rare to come across a domestic safe that does both jobs for the simple reason that it would make the safe very expensive. So while burglar-proof safes are designed and manufactured to resist attempts to break into them, they lack fire protection. Which is all well and good, but didn’t help me very much, since I didn’t have time to lay a controlled fire that could reach the kind of intense heats necessary to buckle the metal casing and, more to the point, taking that approach would likely transform the safe into an oven and cook the very item I was aiming to steal.
The second, and much more preferable method, was to use the code. Forgive me for stating the obvious here, but the truth is that no matter how many times and ways we’re told not to, most of us keep a written record of the codes to our credit cards and mobile telephones and, yes, our safes, and more often than not we keep these handy notes right beside the very items the codes are meant to protect. So I had a good look for the code. I looked on the fascia of the safe itself, on the wall surrounding the safe, on the front and then the back of the painting that had been hanging in front of the safe, in the nearby cupboards and drawers, in the not so near cupboards and drawers, in the bathroom, among the dirty linen, under the bed. And I didn’t find a thing. Not a digit. But it was worth a try.
All of which left me with my final option, which although similar to the second is a little more devious, even though it’s based on the most simple of facts—in order to open an electronic lock, you have to press the keypad. And if you press the keypad, come now, what does that mean? Fingerprints, yes! Lots of them. And assuming you don’t change your code all that often (or even better, ever) your fingerprints can tell the resourceful burglar which buttons to press, although sadly, not which order to press them in. Incidentally, the only way I can think of avoiding this trap is to wear gloves whenever you access your safe, but then, who wears gloves inside their home, other than your friendly neighbourhood burglar?
If I’d had a little more time, I could have used a particularly neat trick and smeared a little ultraviolet ink on a nearby surface the owner of the boat was liable to touch before opening the safe, such as the picture frame, and then returned at my leisure with a black light (which would have complemented the decor nicely) and got the code that way. But sadly, time was not on my side and I was left to rely on the next best thing—a fingerprint kit.
So, from among the small collection of burglar tools in my pocket, I removed a make-up compact that I’d re-filled some months beforehand with fingerprint powder. I popped the compact open, removed the small brush that was clipped inside and began to carefully dust each numbered key. When I was done, I blew the excess away, then turned off the overhead lights for a moment and angled the beam of my pocket torch over the keypad until I could see what I was looking for. And there they were—four keys smeared in layers and layers of prints—the mystery numbers being 9, 4, 1 and 0. Once this bit of magic was done with, I put the overhead lights back on, wiped the fingerprint powder from the keypad as best I could and began to enter various combinations of the code I’d obtained, working on the assumption that it consisted of just four digits. At some point around ten minutes later, when I was deep into a fantasy that involved me punching the keypad way into next Sunday, I finally heard the welcome clunk and whirr of the locking mechanism retracting and, wouldn’t you know it, the door to the safe popped open.
Being a resourceful type, I pulled the door fully back and peered inside. It was only a small space and it contained just four items. First off was a crumpled photograph of two men stood in front of a muddy river, holding fishing rods and tackle boxes, smiling to camera. I recognised one of the men as the thin man from the cafe and the second figure was almost certainly his father. Beneath the photograph was a stack of euro notes. I picked them up and counted them. The bills were in denominations of one hundred euros and there were sixty of them altogether. I put the bills back where I’d found them, next to a tan coloured bar of what looked to be cannabis. Beside the cannabis was the monkey figurine. The monkey was clutching his ears, as if he was afraid I’d been planning to blow the safe apart. I picked him up and hefted him in my palm and he felt exactly like the figurine the American had shown me. I slipped him into my pocket and had a think about what to do next.
What I decided to do next was pocket the money. Sure, I was being paid over the odds for the job I was carrying out, but that didn’t mean I had to pass on a little extra cash when it was right there waiting for me to take it. And while the cannabis held no attraction to me—Amsterdam was hardly a seller’s market and if I was ever in the mood for a smoke, I would likely get a much better high from the cheap weed being sold in any number of coffee houses within walking distance of my apartment—I took the drugs too. That way, if the thin man happened to check his safe when he got home he might not automatically assume that the person who’d broken in had been after the figurine. Or at least that was my theory.
With the safe emptied of everything except the photograph, I closed and re-locked the door, hung the painting back on the wall as I had found it and turned off the overhead lights. Then I opened the curtains I’d drawn and made my way outside again, locking the door to the barge behind me and removing my gloves.
I checked my watch. It was already a quarter to nine and I would have to get a move on if I was to meet my deadline. With a casual flick of my wrist, I tossed the cannabis over the side of the barge and into the dark canal waters below and then I
stepped up onto the pavement and went in search of a,bike.
THREE
Bicycles are stolen all the time in Amsterdam. It’s one of the reasons why all the bikes are so old—nobody wants to invest in something that’s likely to be taken at any moment. The funny thing is how many locals are willing to replace their stolen bikes with other stolen ones. They buy them from the thieves who operate in Dam Square, keeping the whole racket alive.
I couldn’t tell you how many bikes are stolen each day but I know it’s a lot. So it stands to reason that there are more than a few bike thieves around. Virtually all of them, it seems to me, use bolt cutters to break through the bike chains and padlocks as quickly as possible. In that sense I’m unusual because I like to use my picks. If a padlock is straightforward enough, I’m almost as fast as a pair of bolt cutters anyway, and my picks are a lot less awkward to carry around. And as an added bonus, I don’t destroy the owner’s lock, which is often worth more than the bike in the first place.
On this occasion, I chose a bike with Dynamo lights and a comfortable-looking saddle and then I removed the lock and chain in less than a minute. After that, I locked the chain back around a railing and peddled clean away. It turned out the gearing was a little higher than I would have liked but I couldn’t do much about that because the bike only had one gear. The brakes were operated by pedalling backwards, something that’s illegal in the UK, and though the Dynamo hummed willingly against my back tyre, the front lamp barely flickered. But I enjoyed the ride nonetheless. It lasted a little over five minutes and when I reached the street I was after, I was almost sorry to get off and leave the bike resting against a tree.
The building the apartment was housed in was typical of the Jordaan. Dark-stoned, tall and thin, it had a gabled roof and an old winching hook extending from its very highest point. It was part of a terrace of perhaps forty similar buildings that each overlooked the Singel canal, and a fine location it was too.
I climbed the steps to the front door and cast my eyes over the buzzers that were affixed to the door frame. The uppermost buzzer, which I assumed belonged to the fifth floor apartment I was after, had no name written on it. I leaned on the buzzer and waited. Given the age of the building, and since there was no speaker positioned nearby, I didn’t think I’d operated a modern-day intercom system and so I allowed the occupant enough time to either open a window and yell down at me or to descend the full five floors and open the door. I waited for the minute hand on my watch to complete two revolutions and, when nothing had happened, I gave the buzzer one more ring and waited some more. Eventually, switched-on chap that I am, I deduced that nobody was in.
Of course, the lack of an intercom system cost me not only time, but also an easy way into the building. With a modern apartment block, I could always buzz one of the other apartments and have an unsuspecting person admit me. I couldn’t do that here, though, because anyone I buzzed who happened to be in would have to come and open the door, meaning I’d need to somehow talk my way inside while giving them a chance to remember my face. It was unlikely to work and even if it did it was risky.
The front door itself was a mighty thing, fully two feet taller and wider than standard, as though it hoped to deter me through intimidation alone. Fortunate for me, then, that the lock that had been fitted to it was about as resistant to my charms as any one of the near-naked women who danced in the red-lit windows only a few streets away. And just like the more commercial of those particular ladies, the door accepted my credit card, which I slid up the frame until the snap lock slid back. There was a second lock, with a recessed bolt, and it would have been an altogether trickier prospect had the good people who lived in the building decided to engage it.
I eased the door open and stepped inside. Ahead of me was a near vertical staircase that I began to climb in a style not dissimilar from climbing a ladder. The steps were wooden and full of unpredictable creaks and groans and part of me worried that a nosy neighbour might be drawn out from one of the other apartments to ask me who I was. The other part of me cussed the fool who’d built the staircase on such a fun-house angle in the first place. It made me think that anyone who lived above ground level had to be relatively young and healthy and that if I needed to get away from them in a hurry, it wouldn’t be straightforward. A nasty image of me slipping and falling and breaking my leg in several places appeared in my head and I winced as I heard the imaginary sound of my femur snapping repeatedly, like an ice cube plunged into a glass of tap water.
I made it to the top floor eventually. I may have stopped twice to catch my breath and to allow the acid to leak away from my thighs, but I didn’t encounter anyone else and I was grateful for that. The door I was looking for was at the far end of the hallway and as I squared my shoulders and faced up to it, I experienced a tingle of nervous energy at the thought of entering yet another space that was forbidden to me. This time, part of the buzz was the challenge the locks presented. There were three of them, just as the American had said, but they were of a different order to the locks I’d bypassed earlier. The reason for this was that they were Wespensloten, meaning literally, Wasp Locks. Wespensloten were the most expensive locks on the Dutch market, and for good reason too. I’d bought several when I first arrived in the Netherlands and it had taken me a while to become familiar with their particular quirks. My big breakthrough only came when I dismantled one of the locks and then rebuilt it in order to understand what was proving so awkward. The answer was that there was an extra set of pins at the base of the cylinder as well as the top, but knowing that still didn’t make the lock a cinch and it would usually take me a few attempts to pick my way through.
But before I confronted the locks, I knocked firmly on the door and waited again. When nobody came to see what I wanted, I felt safe enough to slip my surgical gloves on and remove my torch from my pocket. I shone the torch beam around the edge of the door, checking for any tell-tale wires. The American had been right about everything he’d told me so far, but it was my neck on the line if I got caught, so I wanted to be as sure as I could be that there was no alarm. I couldn’t see any wires, and while that was hardly conclusive, it was close enough for me to get started.
I decided to tackle the top lock first, and the bottom lock second, because they were both snap locks and likely to be easier than the dead-bolt in the middle. So I got out my micro screwdriver and my picks and, torch in mouth, began to probe away at the internal pins that were preventing the bolt on the top lock from sliding back. Soon, the torch became uncomfortable against my teeth and my jaw began to ache, and, since the light wasn’t really helping me a great deal anyway, I pulled the torch out of my mouth and slipped it back into my pocket. I worked my jaw around until it cracked and once it felt comfortable again I resumed teasing and probing away inside the lock cylinder, being rewarded every once in a while with the muffled tick of a pin lifting up to rest upon the delicate internal ledge I was visualising in my mind. Before very long, I had the top set of pins raised and at that point I turned the pick upside down and probed at the bottom set of pins. It was fiddly stuff, but I was stubborn enough to want to do the job right without breaking down the door, and I stuck at it until the last pin fell into place and the force I was applying through the screwdriver caused the cylinder mechanism to rotate. Now the difficult part was over, I wedged the cylinder open and repeated the same procedure on the bottom lock until a little while later that was undone too.
That only left the middle lock, something I delayed tackling for a little while longer by pausing to catch my breath and to wipe the sweat from my forehead with my coat sleeve. When at last I turned my full attention to the lock, I realised with a groan that it was a Wespenslot Speciaal, a product that for once lived up to the name the marketing people had conjured for it. The Speciaal, you see, worked on the same basic principles as the two locks I’d already disarmed but it also had a few other tricks besides, none of which are worth going into, save to say that they require a little mor
e thought and a good deal more ingenuity, and while that might be something capable of amusing me in the comfort of my own home, it was a good deal more irritating when it happened to be preventing me from entering someone else’s. So I cussed my luck and I gritted my teeth and I sighed, and then I got myself together again and began to focus on the damn thing, tackling the pins to begin with and then turning my hand to all kinds of jiggery-pokery and improvisation and sheer brute force until, in a shade over five minutes, I had the cylinder ready to turn. And it was then that I discovered something nasty I should probably have seen coming—the locking mechanism wasn’t connected to a simple door-bolt, it was attached to a much larger steel rod that was braced right across the back of the door.
Now this was a problem, and the reason it was a problem was because I didn’t seem to be able to transfer enough force through my micro screwdriver to move the rod and I hadn’t had the foresight to bring a bigger screwdriver along with me. I stepped back and thought for a moment and what I decided was that I didn’t have enough time to get hold of the right tool for the job. The wrong tool would just have to do. So, closing my mind to all the things that could very likely go wrong, I twisted as hard and as fast as I could on the tiny screwdriver and, to my considerable relief, the steel rod gave way before the screwdriver snapped.
With the final obstacle negotiated, I removed my prods and picks from each of the locks and then I eased the door open and peered around it, looking for the infra-red blink of any movement sensors. When I didn’t see any, I stepped in way over the doormat in order to avoid any pressure sensors and then I checked under the mat to finally satisfy myself that the apartment really had no alarm. Once I was convinced, I closed and re-locked the door behind me, switched on the main lights and set off in search of the bedroom.
