by Andy McNab
The flat roof got closer on-screen and the bulk bag came to rest. I watched the grips release, and then there was a moment when the drone sorted itself out, making sure it was free of the bag, before James zipped it skywards at such a rate the screen fast went to black.
James was very happy with himself. ‘You wanna cut that landline now?’
I called Charlotte on the Samsung and she answered on the second ring. ‘It’s me. All good this end. Once you’re finished, give me a call, and head back here, okay?’
‘No problem. And, James?’
‘What?’
‘See you in Sanctuary.’
‘Yep, see you in Sanctuary.’
I closed down and waited for her return call. Skye might have explained that the alarms were on the cell-net system, but disconnecting the landline was belt and braces. No matter what hi-tech security or underground conduits hid the line going into Sanctuary, it had to come from somewhere along Hunter Road, and eventually branch off specifically for the house. It was the same everywhere in the world. And that was exactly what Charlotte and Gemma were doing right now. They were at the last pole before Sanctuary’s line headed off the road and went underground to emerge somewhere in the house. They were unscrewing the junction box and making sure the wiring became loose enough for the line not to work, yet at the same time not look like it had been sabotaged. Pulling just two of the wires loose would do it, Tony had said. Then, once we were successful in Sanctuary, Gemma would reconnect the line on her way back to Queenstown, and, along with Tony and Warren, catch the first flight to anywhere.
While they got on with their job, I heaved my daysack onto my back. It contained all of Tony’s odds and ends, apart from a large square lump of something heavy in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t that so much that made me curious, it was that one of my socks was half hanging out of the same pocket. I pointed. ‘What?’
He pulled at the sock to bring out a shape, maybe 150 millimetres square, where my foot would have been. The cotton had stretched to twice its length with the weight.
‘That, son, is a rare-earth magnet – and, no, I won’t tell you why, because you’re making me go in one of those things.’
Tony had said it with a brief smile but didn’t look too enthusiastic as he adjusted the drone’s lifting strap under his armpits.
‘You’re going under it, not in it, so stop complaining.’
The second machine hovered over him in the dark, being prepped and checked for the next lift. He saw me watching him. ‘I suppose you’re going to say again that people round here pay good money to do this.’
I pulled my own strap over my head and into position. ‘They probably do. But I wouldn’t.’
As the drone came closer, Jamie gripped Tony’s strap behind and above his head and engaged the claws ever so gently, then signalled to James to take the strain. Tony stared up at his new leader in the sky, not sure what to make of it.
There was another buzz as the first drone returned from Sanctuary and Jamie now held the strap up behind my head. I felt the downdraught, then the strain round my chest as the drone took my weight and waited along with Tony’s. The buzz from two machines filled my head as they hovered, waiting for the order to lift off.
I kept watching the Samsung’s screen, waiting for Charlotte. It finally lit up and I felt it vibrate. I heard a bit of the ring tone over the drones and shoved my forefinger into my other ear.
‘All good, bro. All done.’
‘Great. See you there.’
I turned the mobile off, put it into my pocket alongside my mobile and gave the Js a double thumbs-up. They took over. The strap tightened round my chest even more as my feet left the ground. I didn’t want to look at Tony in case he was having second thoughts. I lost sight of him anyway as the drones parted and his dropped back to give us both more space.
I gained height, maybe five metres, enough to clear the trees. Below us, as the ground sloped down towards Speargrass Flat, I could see a set of headlights cutting into the increasing darkness over to the left. They had to be moving along Hunter Road. They got to what was the end of the road at the T-junction and the lights turned left towards us.
The wind blew in my face as the drone picked up speed. Soon, what I hoped was Gemma’s Nissan passed beneath us, and we were closing on the dark silhouette of Sanctuary.
We began losing height, and were manoeuvring between trees. The weight of the daysack pulled down on my shoulders, and the strap around my chest pulled up.
Sanctuary came into clearer view and the drones slowed to walking pace, eight or nine metres off the ground. I could hear Tony’s behind me now, and ahead was the gently pulsing red glow outside the outbuilding, as if it was guiding us in.
There was no point worrying about it. The bubble was in place, and if the plan wasn’t working, well, we were about to find out. We were there. We had to get on with this.
We passed the red glow and turned left to face the other elevation of the building, the shutter. Soon, I was being gently lowered onto the concrete hard-standing. My feet touched the ground and the strap relaxed, but the Meccano claws would be retaining the straps for the others to use. I had to wriggle and drop out. James was watching: the moment I was free, the drone lifted and zipped away into the darkness.
Tony slowly approached under his drone and I guided his feet to the ground and helped him out of his strap. Exactly as mine, the high-pitched whine faded skywards and was gone. We were in complete silence, apart from the rasp of Tony trying to get his breath back. He got tight up to me. ‘I’m not looking forward to the lift back, boy, that’s for sure.’
We stood there in the darkness for seconds that felt like for ever. I touched the steel shuttering that filled the whole side of the elevation, both levels. ‘Okay, how are we going to get through this, then?’
‘Get that bag off your back, boy, and I’ll show you.’
52
Tony helped me ease the daysack off my back and onto the hard-standing.
The side door had turned out to be exactly what we’d anticipated: it would have taken a big physical attack to get past it, and we couldn’t have hidden the evidence. There were two chunky locks, a third of the way down and a third of the way up, but Tony hadn’t spent much time looking at them when he’d studied the drone footage. His focus had been entirely on the shutters.
He set himself up on the hard-standing with his back against the door, the stonework of the frame and the shuttering to his right. The first bit of kit out of the daysack was a small LED head-torch, which he positioned in the centre of his forehead. Then came a Fire HD tablet that had seen much better days. The yellow plastic was filthy and scratched, the corners dented. It looked like it had spent its entire life with Tony on sites, which it had. He never went on any job without that and a few other essentials.
The tablet’s aesthetics weren’t helped by the fact that Tony had obviously pulled it apart and made holes and all sorts so he could get some wires into it. They dangled out of the right-hand side, and the whole thing seemed to be held together by silver duct tape.
I crouched next to him as he pulled out the pink kids’ toy he’d shown me last night. The plastic Im-Me was small enough for a ten-year-old to get their hands around, yet still had a keyboard and LED display. He’d busted that up as well, and there were leads that Mattel would never have intended coming out of the back of it and into the tablet.
While we’d practised assembling the holoport, he’d lowered his tone and glanced around my empty hotel room. ‘They stopped making these years ago, but in my trade they’re gold dust. This big boy goes with me everywhere. They were designed for youngsters to be able to text each other – maybe they thought little kids would never have mobiles.’
He’d chuckled to himself. ‘The thing is, anything smart is really stupid. They all work on just two things: power and binary code. And that’s it. Power on or off. Zero or one – on or off.’ He jabbed a thumb to his right. ‘Just like that bugger.
’
His face was serious now as he laid the device beside him on the concrete floor and the torchlight bounced off the duct tape.
Remote controls, Tony had explained to me, all had to operate in the ISM, the Industrial, Scientific and Medical spectrum. ‘Radio-frequency energy, whatever you want to call it, for a framework that is internationally agreed. Otherwise there’d be chaos – we’d all be stepping on each other’s toes. Microwaves turning on the TV. You go to text somebody and it starts your neighbour’s car.’ He’d given himself an even bigger chuckle. ‘So things like these shutters, they’ve all got to conform to ISM rules. It’s a disgrace. If your bank account password had only two characters, it would be more secure than most of these things.
‘All I’ve done is taken every code possibility that could be in one of the clickers that would open it, anything from three-bit switches to twelve-bit, and even that’s just over four thousand codes. Compare that with two characters in your password, which would give you over five thousand codes. That’s how insecure these things are.
‘All I had to do was pull down the open-source software and code them up on the pad.’ He had hit the screen and opened up a file with lines of zeroes and ones.
‘This here is what’s called the De Bruijn sequence. He’s one clever Dutchman who worked out how receivers can read all this nonsense on the screen really quickly. That’s what we have here: every code that that thing can possibly read. And what is more –’ he’d tapped the screen ‘– it will send them all, thanks to our favourite Dutchman, in just 8.214 seconds on Im-Me.’
I watched as he picked up the pink device, connected the leads from the yellow tablet, and the backlight on the LED screen came to life. He pressed send on the keypad, and I waited for the shutters to start rolling up.
Last night in the hotel room, I hadn’t been able to resist asking him: ‘How did you get into all this tech stuff? I didn’t have you down as a big-time hacker.’
His face had lit up. ‘It’s not hacking, boy. And it’s not hard if you know electricity. You have to know this stuff to work modern systems. I’ve been doing it for years on jobs, working out ways to get access when stuff goes wrong. You have people losing their clickers, forgetting combinations, all sorts. It’s experience, that’s all. But, like I say, anything called smart isn’t. How can it be, if old farts like me can get past it?’
But we were still waiting for the shutter to lift. Nothing.
Tony looked at me. He wasn’t fazed, but he knew I was.
‘Not a problem, son. They must have a rolling code. The code changes all the time within the FR frequency range, but it’s still within the ISM, and is still binary. It just takes a different way to access it, that’s all, random codes that will be interrogated and received, and we’ll bluff our way in. I have the codes, but it’s going to take longer – maybe ten minutes.’
The Samsung vibrated, and I dug it out of my pocket to check the message. I spoke into Tony’s ear as he concentrated on his device, head-torch on and the tablet’s screen illuminating his face. ‘Charlotte and Gemma. They’re with Warren, and all’s good. They’re asking how we’re doing.’
Tony gave me a thumbs-up.
I messaged back: All okay.
Before sending another: Calling now.
53
I stayed on the hard-standing, but moved a few steps away from Tony so the call didn’t distract him. He was still sitting against the door, eyes fixed on the tablet screen, where binary code cascaded like something out of The Matrix. I scanned the darkness, as if I was about to see figures with weapons emerging out of the night.
‘Well done.’
‘Gemma did all the work. I was just on dog.’
‘What?’
‘Gemma calls it dog. Guard dog?’
‘You know what to do if we’re discovered out here?’
‘Yes, all good.’
It might be at the moment, but what if our luck ran out and heads started to flap?
‘Are the Js keeping a drone up? They got one up now? There’s no way of knowing if we tripped any alarm we haven’t cut. We need eyes up there.’
‘I’ll make sure.’
‘If it goes wrong, tell the other two to drop everything and get back to York any way they can.’
‘We know, we’re ready.’
‘Will you tell them again anyway?’
‘I will.’
‘Great.’
The police, Castro’s security, whoever was alerted, the first warning we’d get of it was when they were speeding their way along Hunter Road or if the drone missed that they’d be banging down the door or crashing in through the windows. If Castro could burn a man’s feet over a pair of trainers, I could imagine the sort of people he employed. They would be, like, well, Casper, and that wasn’t a good thought. As I stood outside the outbuilding, surrounded by darkness, Tony trying to work his kids’ toy to get inside, the reality of it hit home hard.
From behind me came a slightly louder chuckle than before. A split second later, the shutter motors whined and our first obstruction of the night began to rise.
I held out an arm to help Tony to his feet. He put the tablet and Im-Me carefully back into the daysack, then dug in his jeans pocket for a set of our blue rubber gloves.
‘Like I said, son, smart is really stupid.’
I wasn’t going to call in the drones yet. We had to get to the bung first. Gemma would be first up, but it was pointless bringing her in before we made sure we could get her where she needed to be.
I pulled a pair of gloves from my jeans. The moment the shutter was chest high I bent down and dived through as Tony waited a few more seconds. It was eerie in there: I could hear the emptiness, almost feel it. Tony’s head-torch flashed around as he scanned the walls for light switches, and very soon, fluorescent strips flickered into life above us from the ceiling. They revealed a smooth concrete floor, unplastered concrete-block walls, a high ceiling. The overpowering sensation was the new-build reek of concrete and paint. With lots of power points all along the walls, it was definitely a hangar, and it looked like nothing had been added since Richard was there, apart from a large pair of steel double doors at the far end.
As we headed towards them Tony flicked off his light and I soon spotted a rectangular steel box to the right of the double doors. Tony knew exactly what it was.
The box was a telephone entry system. There was a normal steel keypad on the lower right of the panel to code our way in, and to the left of that, a large call button. The top half consisted of a vent for the speaker and mic plus a small key-well.
Tony fished in his back pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys, all shiny-new. He flourished one between his thumb and forefinger and dangled the rest. ‘CH 751, son. It’s the everything key – plus a few others for luck. I bought all the stupid keys that I could think of, but this one will do the trick. It will even open filing cabinets. Can you believe it? Even toilet-roll holders in hotels. It’s the commonest key all around the world for all the stupid stuff. What is wrong with these people? Nobody’s updated these locks in thirty years.’
He inserted the key and started a gentle jiggling motion. ‘Like I said, boy, anything smart.’
The front of the entry system fell forward and stayed horizontal like a tray. Inside was what looked to me like an almighty mess of wires and circuit boards. Tony saw my reaction, but he wasn’t concerned. ‘There’s lots of stuff going on here, but it’s all bullshit. Bullshit baffles brains. All this stuff is froth. The only bit that concerns us is the relay.’ He studied the chaos of wiring and tapped one. ‘And it’s this little bugger here.’
He riffled through his keys and this time produced one of my paperclips, now straightened out. The U end had been placed over the key-ring, then stuck together with duct tape, leaving two prongs sticking out. ‘I used to keep boxes of these things in the van. Used them all the time to bridge dry contacts like these. It’ll be like we’ve tapped in a code on the keypad. Like I
said, boy, anything smart needs two things: power and binary code. Just like this little jobbie.’
I liked the explanations, but now wasn’t the time. There was a downside to being almost horizontal.
‘Tony, we’ve got to get a move on, mate.’
Leaning in, he touched the two ends to one of the circuit boards, and the door quietly clicked open. I ran the two paces to grab it and make sure it didn’t close again, as if Tony couldn’t redo what he’d just done. I used the daysack to jam the doors open while Tony went inside and looked about for light switches. Just like before, fluorescent lights were soon flickering on to expose a concrete landing and steps that would take us below ground level.
As we descended the ten concrete stairs, checking for power points beyond the ones above, the last of the light strips at the far end of the tunnel illuminated the bung, maybe sixty metres away.
I ran towards it, my boots bouncing off steel-grated duckboards, my head just half a metre from the roof. I stopped after a dozen strides and turned to face Tony. ‘I’ve got to check before we get Gemma in.’
Tony was doubled over, having a fit of coughing. The air stank of construction dust. I could feel it at the back of my throat as I ran again and my boots echoed around the tunnel as they hit the steel grating.
I was soon at the bung, a smooth concrete disc designed to fit the tunnel perfectly. I pushed it at the right side and then at the left, hoping it would move, then kicked. It didn’t budge. I checked the signal. Two bars on the Samsung. Good. As I ran back to Tony, I called Jamie.
I got an answer after three rings.
‘Hey, man.’
‘We’re at the bung. Let’s get the first wave in.’
‘No problem.’
‘You got a drone up checking?’
‘Yeah, I just told your sister. But you’ll lose it while we fly for you.’
