by Stephen Cole
The man in the chair gave a dirty chuckle. ‘Man, I am watching them.’
Be my guest, thought Con coldly, as behind him on one of the fuzzy grey monitors three dark figures flitted past.
* * *
Patch skidded to a halt at the sound of deep voices calling to each other in some foreign language. He dropped swiftly to the ground and Motti and Jonah followed suit. They held themselves still as stone till the voices moved away.
‘What was that about?’ Patch wondered.
‘The guards may not believe the girls came alone,’ Motti hissed in his ear. ‘If they’ve figured it’s a distraction tactic, they’ll be looking for trouble.’
Jonah swore under his breath. ‘But if they find your box hooked up to the power supply –’
‘So let’s get going, huh? Patch, the door we need open is right across the courtyard.’ Motti gestured to a dark, towering building that kept a vast swathe of stars from sight. ‘The door recess ain’t well lit, so chances are the CCTV won’t catch you. You just gotta get there quick, don’t make no sudden moves, and get us inside.’
Patch glared at him. ‘You don’t have to treat me like a kid.’
‘You’re fourteen, you are a kid.’
‘Technically, maybe.’
‘So go get technical before I poke you in the eye.’
Patch flipped up his leather patch, reached under his eyelid and plucked out his glass eyeball with a soft sucking noise. To his delight, Motti cringed and nearly gagged.
‘God damn it, you cyclops freak,’ he gasped. ‘Will you quit with the “utility eye” crap!’
‘Jonah thinks it’s cool, don’t you, mate?’ Patch unscrewed the top half of the false eyeball to reveal a soft squishy blob inside.
‘Plastic explosive?’ asked Jonah.
‘Play-Doh,’ Patch replied. Then he flipped down his eyepatch and sprinted for the doorway. His nerves ebbed away as he studied the barriers to opening the door. Fingerprint scanner – from the make and model, Patch guessed it was maybe two years old – linked to an older numeric keypad with eight-character capacity.
Piece of cake.
He pressed the Play-Doh against the 1 key on the keypad. Bound to be an impression there, it hadn’t been cleaned since for ever. He daubed the squashy blob against the scanner plate. OK, so the match might be muddy, but after so long exposed to the elements the plate would be less sensitive and –
A green light winked on as the fingerprint was accepted. ‘Bob’s your auntie,’ Patch muttered to himself, sticking the squishy blob back in his false eye. ‘Now for the keycode.’
‘C’mon, cyclops!’ Motti hissed from across the overgrown courtyard.
‘Gonna have to use the bit-buster.’ So saying, Patch pulled a little gadget the size of a TV remote from his back pocket, raised its little backlit screen, and attached it to the keypad. Numbers streamed across the display in blurring columns. The bit-buster used a wireless link to interrogate the keypad’s chip and find the last successfully input code. Sometimes it took a while for the two little computers to hook up, but –
With a beep of quiet pride, the bit-buster finished its digital chat. Now its screen displayed eight numbers. But were they the right numbers?
Holding his breath, Patch tapped in the sequence: 1-5-3-0-9-0-1-5.
The door clicked loudly as it unlocked and opened, but still Patch held his breath, staring warily into the pitch darkness beyond.
What was waiting for them in there?
Chapter Two
A smear of dark movement on the screen told Tye that Patch was going to work on the door to the containment vessel. Con had seen it too and was holding eye contact with José, smiling coyly, making sure he kept his attention only on her.
Tye decided to play a game she was better equipped for. She cleared her throat and once she had the driver’s attention she tilted her head to one side. ‘Look, we’re sorry if we trespassed. We honestly didn’t know. You do believe us, right? You will let us go?’
He hesitated for less than a second. But Tye could read body language like Patch could read comics, and this doofus had licked his lips, glanced over at his friend and shifted on the balls of his feet before he’d even drawn breath – classic signals that he was about to tell a point-blank lie. ‘Sure. I’m just taking precautions. Whatever happens, you’ll be OK.’
Uh-huh. Right. ‘Thank you.’
‘Keep watching them, José. I gotta pee.’
Yes. Go on, go. Tye willed the driver not to look back round at the screens before he left. Luckily he was too busy scratching his crotch. Once he’d gone, she spoke to Con quietly in English. ‘He’s lying, and he’s pretty sure that we are too. We’re dead if we hang around here for too long.’
‘Or sooner if he sees that the door’s been opened,’ Con murmured.
Tye glanced up to see a dark figure – it looked like Patch – move cautiously through the now-open doorway.
Con smiled. ‘I’d better get to work.’
‘What’re you saying?’ asked José, suddenly suspicious.
‘My friend was wondering which of us you like best. I think you like me. Look into my eyes, José. Into my eyes.’
‘No tricks,’ he warned. ‘Not from either of you.’
‘No tricks,’ Con agreed in a lower voice, soothing and exotic. ‘Just look into my eyes, José, and forget about her. Forget about anything else.’
Tye caught a flicker of movement on the screen. Another figure had come into shot and glanced nervously up at the security camera. Through the fuzz she saw Jonah’s sweet face, lined with worry.
The same second, some instinct made José break eye contact with Con, turn in the chair and spy Jonah too.
With a roar he leaped up from the chair and pointed a handgun at Con. She threw herself aside as he fired. Tye picked up one of her walking boots and hurled it like a missile. The steel toecap cracked into the man’s forehead and he fell backwards over his swivel chair. He didn’t get back up.
‘Thanks, sweets,’ Con said shakily, picking herself up from the filthy floor. But Tye could hear running footsteps. The driver returned, face twisted in anger, his flies gaping open. Leaping forwards, Con landed a karate kick there with vicious satisfaction. He doubled up with a hoarse squeak. Tye punched him in the jaw and sent him crashing back into the poker table, which collapsed under his weight.
Con crouched beside the driver and slapped his face lightly to try and revive him. ‘God, Tye, did you have to hit him so hard?’
‘Can you put the ’fluence on him?’ Tye asked anxiously.
‘It’s not voodoo magic, Tye,’ said Con curtly. ‘It’s mesmerism. And I can’t work it when the subject is out cold.’
Tye bit her lip. The way Con could hypnotise just about anyone into doing just about anything was magical to her. And the plan had been to get at least one of these guys under Con’s ’fluence so he could steer the rest of security well away from the thieves’ planned exit. Now, when the mercenaries in the grounds radioed back in, there would be no one to answer them – and something very nasty would hit the fan.
Con pulled out her mobile phone and hit the speed-dial. ‘Motti? You’d better move things along in there, yes?’
Jonah followed Patch up a flight of concrete steps that led to a blast door. Predictably it was locked – another fingerprint scanner.
Patch was already getting busy with his Play-Doh. ‘Where’s Motti?’
Jonah looked behind him nervously. ‘Mot?’
‘Right here,’ he hissed, scaling the steps soundlessly. ‘Con just called. We don’t got long.’
‘Then it’s lucky this old relic’s as crap as its twin outside,’ said Patch, as the lifted fingerprint did the job again. The blast door slid open to reveal an antechamber of mouldering concrete, empty save for a high-spec PC perched on a rickety camping table. Thick snaking cables connected it to an uninterruptible power supply. A high-res webcam was fixed to the top of the monitor with a blob of pl
asticine.
‘This place is a real lash-up, isn’t it,’ said Jonah.
‘Could be what the owner wants you to think,’ Motti warned him, ‘trying to catch you off-guard.’ He pointed to another set of blast doors. ‘The main containment vessel should be just through there. Which makes this the last line of defence.’
Jonah kneeled down in front of the PC, which was quietly humming to itself, and nudged the mouse to wake the display. A box appeared at once, prompting for a password. He pulled a CD from the inner pocket of his lightweight jacket and loaded it up. It was crammed with enough hack ’n’ crack software to break the toughest encryption algorithms.
He hoped.
Slowly, as he worked, pitting his wits and his code against the computer, he became totally immersed in the challenge. He could have been anywhere: in the dark bedroom of one of his many past foster homes, or in the computer lab of one of his endless dreary new schools. It was like the monitor was a window on another world, one he could retreat to. An orderly world that made beautiful, crystal-clear sense if you could only see it in just the right way. And right through his teens, the sorrier his circumstances became, the stronger the urge inside him had grown to crack ever greater codes.
Compared to cracking real life, it was a cinch.
‘I’m into the security systems,’ he announced, checking his watch. Three minutes. Not bad.
Patch and Motti were studying the double doors. ‘Can you get these open, geek?’ Motti demanded. ‘There’s no entry-coder, nothing to override.’
Jonah double-clicked on folders, sifted through directories. ‘Can’t see anything relating to … Wait.’ By opening a folder he had triggered a software program; his heart did a flip. ‘Uh, guys? This could screw us.’
‘What?’ Motti and Patch stalked over.
‘I’ve found the key to those doors.’ He gestured to the screen, where a wireframe map of a human face was picked out in vivid blue and green. ‘Facial recognition scan, hooked up to the webcam. And from the look of things, designed to recognise one face only.’
‘Whose?’ asked Patch.
Motti shoved him. ‘The guy who owns the place, dumb-ass.’
‘This is the mapped image. Let’s take a look.’ Jonah double-clicked it: Kabacra.jpg. ‘You never know, maybe he looks like one of us.’
He didn’t.
A gaunt Hispanic face glared out at them through hard, feral eyes. His features were narrow and angular, and livid scars criss-crossed the skin in all directions.
‘Jeez!’ said Patch. ‘Looks like someone tried to cross out his face with a Stanley knife!’
‘Son of a bitch ain’t beaten us yet,’ said Motti darkly. ‘That PC got Bluetooth, Jonah?’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘Well, so’s my cell phone, as well as a high-res camera. So one of us smiles for the camera, we Bluetooth it across to the PC, you dump it in that folder, and –’
‘It’s gonna take too long,’ said Patch nervously. ‘These systems make a map of every detail on your face – distance between your eyes, length of your nose, all of that.’
‘He’s right,’ Jonah agreed. ‘Converting that info into code for the Local Feature Analysis could take ages.’
Motti swore. ‘OK, plan B. Patch, drop your trousers and bend over.’
Patch frowned. ‘You could buy me a drink first!’
‘We need something with less local features – I’m guessing it’s quicker to map an ass than a face. Am I right, geek?’
‘That’s thinking outside the box. Or outside the pants anyway.’ Jonah was impressed. ‘I suppose with a bit of reprogramming it could work.’
‘Why not my back or something?’ Patch protested. ‘Or my arm?’
Jonah was already calling up the code. ‘Less reprogramming if it’s something round.’
‘Your ass, your face, same difference,’ Motti agreed.
Patch sighed and undid his belt. ‘If my pants have got skids, promise you won’t tell Con?’
Motti grimly angled the phone. ‘Man, I ain’t telling a soul.’
Tye straightened up from the security console. She had mashed up the wiring so none of the surveillance cameras worked – that might delay the mercenaries upon their return. And Con had tied up both men with some nylon twine she’d found out the back.
Suddenly the driver’s RT belched into life. Tye didn’t catch the urgent flurry of Spanish, but Con did, and at once she started trying to shake the driver awake. ‘They’ve found where we hid the 4x4. They want further instructions. We need this jerk to talk to them.’
The driver stirred groggily. ‘Go to hell,’ he hissed.
‘I don’t have time to mesmerise him now,’ Con said with a pointed look at Tye.
‘Then we’ll try the blunt approach.’ Tye grabbed Jose’s fallen handgun and jammed it up against the driver’s collarbone. Of course, no way would she ever use a gun for real – but he didn’t know that.
Con nodded, her eyes hard and arctic pale. ‘Tell Kristian to bring the car up to the main entrance. Tell him to wait there while the others keep looking.’
The man glared at her, said nothing.
The RT squawked again irately. Con grabbed it and shoved it in his face. ‘You heard me. Do it now.’
Through gritted teeth, the driver did as he was told. When he was through, Con blew him a kiss.
‘I’ll open the main gates,’ said Tye, throwing the switch.
Con nodded. ‘Make sure they stay open, yes?’
Tye brought the butt of the gun down hard on the controls, smashing them.
‘You’ll never get away with this, even if you get past my boys,’ snarled the driver. ‘Wherever you run, Kabacra will find you.’
The conviction in his voice sent a small shiver through Tye. She knew he meant what he said. But Con ignored him and switched back into low, soothing Spanish. ‘Shh, little man. Look into my eyes. See how they glitter? You are feeling tired, I think. Relax a little … If anyone else calls you on the radio, you tell them to stay out there searching the woods. They are not to return. You don’t want to be disturbed when you’re feeling so tired, do you? So listen to what I say …’
The driver’s eyes were slowly glazing over. It was uncanny, the way Con could put just about anyone into a trance, given enough time. But Tye had the uneasy feeling that their time, like their luck, was close to running out.
‘Sorted,’ said Jonah. ‘Patch’s bum is now access-all-areas. Let’s see if the computer can recognise the real thing.’
Patch dropped his trousers again and mooned the webcam. His buttocks graced the screen in stereo as the software began cross-referencing the new image against the stored photo. It had mapped just eleven nodal points, so fingers crossed it wouldn’t take too –
The computer bleeped. ACCESS GRANTED.
‘Yes!’ hissed Jonah.
Patch planted a smacker on the monitor screen. ‘Kiss my ass!’
Jonah grimaced. ‘I’m not even going to shake its hand.’
Motti took no part in the celebrations, crossing at once to the containment vessel’s blast doors. They opened smoothly and he hesitated in the dark doorway. ‘Let’s spill some light in here,’ he said, groping for a switch. ‘See what we’re stealing.’
The lights faded up, and he walked purposefully inside. Jonah stood in the doorway with Patch as the nerves crawled back into his stomach. He had never seen inside a nuclear reactor before, but he imagined that not many looked like this.
The vast, square concrete chamber had been turned into a secret museum. Mounted around the walls were precious antique weapons – swords and scimitars, rapiers and daggers. They ranged from crude, primitive knives to cavalry swords with exquisitely designed hilts and jewel-encrusted scabbards. But, beautiful as they were, they sent a shiver through Jonah. He had the feeling these were swords that had been used, and used often.
‘Looks like there’s pistols and rifles and stuff downstairs,’ Patch observed, pointing
to a spiral staircase in the corner that led down to the next level of the containment chamber.
‘We ain’t here for pistols and rifles and stuff,’ said Motti, moving from sword to sword, peering at each intently.
‘So come on, then,’ Jonah said impatiently. ‘You’re our designated treasure-finder, we’re only here to help you get access … Where is it? Where’s Cortes’s sword?’
Hernando Cortes.
It was a name that until recently had meant nothing to Jonah, though it was written big in the history books. In 1519, with only six hundred men, twenty horses and ten small cannons he sailed from Spain, arrived in Mexico and conquered the entire Aztec empire of more than five million people. Never before had such a massive and wealthy region been taken by such a small force. So all in all, Jonah guessed it was fair enough that the very sword Cortes used when he took the capital city and imprisoned the rightful Aztec ruler would be worth a few quid and be a tempting target for thieves. But was it really worth him and the others risking their lives for?
Do we work for the boss, or does he own us?
‘It ain’t here.’ Motti was staring round the room, confusion on his face hardening to anger. ‘After all that, the goddamned thing ain’t here!’ He bunched his fists, punched the wall in frustration. ‘Coldhardt’s fouled up, he gave us dud info! Jesus, what a f—’
‘Look at this space.’ Patch was pointing to an area of bare wall. ‘Maybe the special sword was here.’
‘Well, it ain’t now.’ Motti started setting about random swords, impatiently unhooking them from their mountings. ‘I’m damned if we’re not taking something away with us. This crap’s gotta be worth a fortune to some dumb-ass collector. Give me a hand.’
‘Shouldn’t we just get the hell out of here?’ Jonah worried.
Motti ignored him and hurled a sword in his direction. Jonah caught it awkwardly and thanked God it was still in its scabbard.
‘Hang on,’ said Patch, waving a hand frantically for silence. ‘I think I heard something.’
He was right. Jonah could hear the stealthy tread of someone on the concrete steps. He gripped hold of the sheathed sword tightly and turned to Patch and Motti. ‘Do we hide or fight?’
