Treasonous

by David Hickson

  “Call the sex-bomb,” he said, and pulled a canvas tarpaulin over the disembowelled junction box to protect it from the rain and prying eyes, then started the three-minute walk to the archives.

  I called Robyn, who told me that she was standing by, although I’d seen her carry the duvet up to the roof when we left, and so I knew there wasn’t a lot of standing going on. She had the binoculars and was watching the roof we’d agreed was the correct one yesterday. As soon as Fat-Boy had convinced the Gold archive staff that he needed to get onto their roof in order to fix their phone lines she’d be ready to provide the signal for him to orientate the transmission dish. Then I could reconnect the lines at the same time that Fat-Boy was connecting his breakfast dish into their patch-bay.

  There was nothing for me to do but wait. I searched the van and ended up sitting glumly in the back making sure that no one was taking too much interest in the exposed junction box. I cursed Fat-Boy for taking his cigarettes with him.

  Robyn called back twelve minutes later. Fat-Boy had appeared on the roof in the company of a security guard who had helped him bolt the dish onto the parapet. We were all set. And the Colonel wanted us to buy bread rolls on our way back. We were having vegetable soup for lunch.

  I sat in the rain and reconnected the panel in the box. Pedestrians hurried past with their coat collars pulled up, and umbrellas sprouted from the underground parking ramps like an invasion of black mushrooms. It occurred to me when I’d closed the box and returned the tools to the back of the van that I hadn’t checked the glove compartment. But Fat-Boy hadn’t left any cigarettes there either. I cursed him afresh.

  We gathered in front of the monitors just before lunch like a bunch of excited schoolchildren. Fat-Boy had been wielding the mouse and tapping on the keyboard since our return, but now the screens were dark for added effect. We said we were ready, and all eight screens sprang to life. Bird's-eye views of the rooms and corridors of the Gold Archive arranged in a cubist pattern across all eight monitors.

  Robyn gave a small Hollywood gasp and clapped her hands.

  “It’s a thing of beauty,” said Chandler. “Now let’s get to work.”

  Sixteen

  The next three days were spent in front of those monitors. We took it in turns to watch the comings and goings of the foreshortened figures as they moved through the complex puzzle of bird's-eye views.

  The archivists, researchers and office workers lived dreary lives, arriving in the morning in their suits and skirts, applying their fingers to the scanners in the entrance hall, waving at the security, waiting at the lifts, then spreading through the building to their cubicle offices, emerging at lunchtime and reversing the process in order to leave the building and forage for food. The afternoons were shorter and more weary. By early evening only the most dedicated survived, and they were soon replaced by a team of stooped cleaners who worked their way through the building with mops and vacuum cleaners.

  Robyn wanted to be a cleaner, but we agreed that the security team provided us with our best opportunity. Their fingerprints allowed them to move freely throughout the building whereas the cleaners had limitations.

  “BB’s little army,” said Chandler as he looked over my shoulder and warmed his hands on his third mug of coffee.

  “Not so little anymore,” I said. Breytenbach had always taken security seriously. His gold mines were protected by security teams that were recruited locally, then sent away for training by retired military experts. By the time they returned from their training they had surpassed any level normally associated with your run-of-the-mill security guard and were more like an army of over-trained and dangerously under-utilised soldiers.

  “We’ll get ourselves kitted out in their fancy dress,” said Chandler, referring to the black uniforms the guards wore. Like military fatigues with more straps and pockets than any soldier would need, but which projected a sense of preparedness to anyone who might be foolish enough to think of challenging the wearer. “How are you doing with their schedule, Fat-Boy?”

  “Almost there, Colonel,” said Fat-Boy who had built himself a satellite station with two laptops, a large plate of doughnuts, and a flask of instant coffee that Robyn was under instruction to keep filled. The guards were on rotating shifts, and Chandler’s plan was for us to find a way of substituting ourselves into one of those shifts. “Watch this guy,” said Fat-Boy. “Redhead coming in now.”

  To the side of the floating island on the marble-floored expanse on the ground-floor hall that was the visitor’s reception desk, was a channel used by security staff. A security guard we had come to recognise from his bright red hair was stuck at the gate, applying his finger to the reader with frustrated jabs. A guard behind the desk was suggesting that he wipe his finger and try again, a suggestion that wasn’t being well received by the redhead.

  “What have you done?” asked Chandler.

  “Wiped his fingerprint file, haven’t I?” said Fat-Boy with a smug smile.

  “It’s how we’ll get in,” said Robyn who was curled up on a chair like a cat beside me. “Watch what they do. Fats tried this earlier.”

  Redhead produced a plastic card from his wallet, and the guard behind the desk scanned it. Then Redhead applied each of his fingers to the reader. Less than a minute later the gate swung open, and he pushed through.

  “It cannot be that easy,” said Chandler.

  “Nothing easy about it,” said Fat-Boy. “It takes genius to wipe those files.”

  “And all they do is scan the fingerprints again,” said Robyn.

  “But we need to present one of those ID cards?” said Chandler.

  Fat-Boy spun one of his laptops around to show us a mock-up of an ID card with the surly face of a man with bright red hair, a name and a strip of bar-code.

  “What d’you think I’ve been doing all this time, Colonel?” Fat-Boy stuck his lower lip forward in a childlike pout. “Lot of good it’ll do us though,” he mumbled, returning to his favourite theme. “Nothing but a bunch of old paper in there.”

  “We need to be patient,” said Chandler. It was not the first time he had said it, and his voice was beginning to show the strain of bolstering the team’s faltering motivation. Long hours of watching the screens and seeing no sign of anything remotely gold-like were taking their toll. We all looked at the dimly glowing box that was the security station on the fourth underground level. Two security guards immobile in their bleak white world. White walls, white floors, and a white door that never opened. One guard standing, the other seated at a desk with a phone and a small control box.

  “It’s in there,” said Chandler. “I know it is.”

  “But they never open it,” complained Fat-Boy. “You don’t know nothing, Colonel, ‘cos you ain’t seen nothing. Besides, if that door never opens, how are we gonna get the gold out of there?”

  “We’ll find a way,” said Chandler with as much positivity as he could muster. “It won’t take long.” Fat-Boy blew a disparaging riff on his lips, but as it happened we didn’t have long to wait at all.

  “Who are those two characters?” asked Robyn an hour later. It was her turn in the big chair, the one that tilted back and swivelled on its hydraulic base so that we didn’t have to suffer from neck cramp during our vigil.

  Fat-Boy and I were working on our ID cards, and Chandler was filling the place with the smell of frying onions from the lower level where he was getting the lunch started.

  Two black-suited guards we hadn’t seen before had appeared in the white stretch of corridor on the fourth level below ground. They followed the portly figure of Lategan, who looked as if he was giving them a guided tour, gesturing around the empty space with his fleshy hands. One of the guards had short blond hair like a tight cap, and down the side of his face we caught the glimpse of a bright red scar. The other guard walked a pace behind him, a narrow bony skull and ebony skin. When he turned his face to look up at the camera, there was hardly any flesh on it, just a gaunt skull with ho
llow cheeks.

  We watched as they reached the blank white door, Lategan completed a jig with his hands, and flourished towards the guard seated at the controls. Like magic, the door smoothly retracted into the wall beside it, moving slowly as befitted the kind of door that would withstand any and all efforts to be breached. The space beyond the door was brightly lit. We could see a polished concrete floor, a corridor that extended beyond our view, flanked by steel cages. Each steel cage was about the size of a rabbit hutch, and they were piled on top of one another. Each cage had layers of neatly stacked bars which shone with a golden light, like tightly wrapped bars of chocolate.

  “Fuck me,” said Fat-Boy, and his lazy eye jumped to see it better.

  “I think you should take a look at this, Colonel,” called Robyn without taking her eyes from the screen. There was something hypnotic about that golden glow, and when Chandler joined us a few minutes later we were all still staring at it in complete silence.

  “Well, what do you know?” said Chandler. “There it is.”

  “Fuck me,” said Fat-Boy again. “There’s a lot of that shit. How the hell we supposed to get it out of there?”

  “We’re not greedy. We’ll just take a little,” said Chandler. “Can you tell me who those two clowns are with the big guy?”

  Fat-Boy turned back to his laptop and took less than a minute to find them.

  “That’s fucked up,” he said. “The guy with the scar is down here as a Captain, and the thin dude is a first lieutenant. But their postings aren’t listed, and when I go to view their history it’s denied.”

  Chandler nodded. “They’re here for a reason. Keep an eye on them. My guess is they’re BB’s version of special ops. His personal team.”

  “What do you think they’re doing?” asked Robyn. “You think they know we’re watching them?”

  Chandler shook his head. “They’d cut the cable if they knew that. But something is afoot. Those two are not doing a sightseeing tour. Let’s eat lunch and discuss speeding things up a little.”

  It was agreed over lunch that we needed to poke the beast and see how Breytenbach’s private army responded to stressful situations. And so Robyn tied her hair up, put on a skirt and some heels and we watched the top of her head as she signed the visitors' book and was ushered into the lobby on her way to the public Reading Room.

  In the Reading Room the ever-helpful Meghan provided Robyn with the last remaining copy of an obscure book about the language of the Strandloper people, and Robyn paged through it, and gazed up at the cameras in the ceiling as if she thought someone might be watching her. Fat-Boy told her she was being irresponsible, and she laughed. The laugh echoed around our concrete box because Fat-Boy had his phone connected to the speakers. It looked as if Robyn stuck her tongue out, but then Fat-Boy’s laptop showed him that an archivist from the fifth floor had returned from lunch and was waiting for a lift to carry him up to his office. Robyn abandoned her book, entered the lift lobby and ignored the sign indicating which lifts were reserved for staff only. Chandler had identified a weakness in the fingerprint control of the lift system: catching a ride with the owner of an authorised finger rendered it ineffective. Very few of the archive workers were likely to challenge anyone who climbed into a lift and travelled to the same floor as them. Particularly if that person looked like Robyn.

  Her timing was perfect. We watched as a lift door opened, revealing the feet of the archivist on his way up to the fifth floor. Robyn stepped into the lift and I imagined the smile and demure downturn of the eyes which would deter the archivist from questioning her right to be travelling with him.

  We had chosen the fifth floor because one of the corridor cameras was out of order. Fat-Boy had argued we would betray our presence to their security by choosing a corridor without a camera, but Chandler made ominous noises about the two clowns in the vault and said that in his opinion time was running out anyway.

  Robyn emerged from the lift behind the archivist and walked slowly down the corridor as if her skirt was limiting her stride. She turned the corner and disappeared from view. Her voice called out the numbers of the office doors she was passing, and Fat-Boy chose one that he knew was empty.

  “Start the timer,” said Robyn, and then came the slow intake of breath as she prepared to pick the lock. I’d watched her demonstrate her skill to Fat-Boy the day before. She had turned towards me, leaned her ear up against the door with a seductive gesture, opening her mouth slightly, her eyes closed. The tension bar was inserted into the lock, the spring was worked gently in and out. And her tongue moved inside her mouth as if it was mapping the position of the pins.

  “Done,” said Robyn. It had taken her twelve seconds. We heard the beeping of the office alarm demanding a fingerprint. But Robyn closed the door again and her breathing quickened as she moved down the corridor to the fire escape.

  “No running now,” said Fat-Boy.

  “You don’t think?” said Robyn and the sound of the crash bar on the fire escape door came to us, then the clatter of her feet down the escape stairs. She ended the call.

  The alarm was on a thirty second delay, and Robyn had just emerged into the entrance lobby when it must have sounded. We heard nothing, but it was obvious from the synchronous lifting of heads on the screens before us, and the slightly delayed emergence of office workers into the corridors.

  Chandler made notes and Fat-Boy called out times. The security response was fast but predictable. All guard stations in the building were double-manned, and from each station one of the two guards moved to an advance position while the other remained where they were. Three guards were dispatched to the fifth floor and drew their weapons as they moved down the corridor.

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” I said and Chandler grunted.

  It took fifteen minutes for them to stand everyone down.

  “We’ll need something more,” said Chandler.

  “Fire,” suggested Fat-Boy, “we start a fire. That’ll keep them busy.”

  Chandler considered that and nodded. But his eyes were on the screen with the vault. Scarface and his sidekick had not paid the slightest attention to the alarm. They were standing over a metal device which looked as if it belonged in a supermarket. A hand-pushed hydraulic loader of the sort used by the drivers of delivery trucks to enable them to move their heavy boxes from the truck into the storerooms.

  Chandler stood up abruptly. “They’re moving it,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing. They never expected to move it, so now they’re trying to figure out how to do it. The bastards are moving it.” He turned to us and his eyes were jumping with excitement or anger, it was difficult to tell which. “When our girl gets back, we go operational. We’re going in tomorrow.”

  “We’re not ready,” said Fat-Boy, and he did the sulky child thing with his lips.

  Chandler nodded. He turned to Robyn.

  “What do you think, Robyn? Are we ready?”

  “No,” said Robyn, and her eyes glowed as if the coals were alight. She had changed out of her skirt and heels and was back in her fatigues. That was all the time Chandler had given her before he started the ops meeting. We had been working on the plan for three hours, and there were still holes and unanswered questions.

  “But when are we ever ready?” said Robyn.

  Chandler nodded. “If we hit the evening shift change, we will have the full day to collect the uniforms, get ourselves a delivery truck and all the accessories.” He looked at the screens where Scarface and Sidekick were now testing loads. They had failed to lift an entire cage between four of them and Chandler had laughed at their comedy routine as they discovered just how heavy a cage loaded with Good Delivery bars was. “Looks like they’ve figured it out,” he said now. “How many bars is that?”

  “Twenty-four,” said Fats. “Two-hundred-eighty-eight kilos.”

  A guard had provided them with a stack of closed plastic crates. Scarface had opened up a cage, and they had been testing their
hydraulic loader up and down the corridor, presumably trying to work out how many bars could be pushed.

  “It’s getting too late for them to start now,” said Chandler. “That truck still closed up?”

  “Driver left it there,” said Fat-Boy. “He buggered off again.” An hour earlier an unmarked armoured vehicle of the sort used by banks to transfer cash had parked in one of the delivery bays near the lift two floors above the vault. It was still there. Chandler’s guess that Scarface and Sidekick were going to be moving the gold looked like a good one.

  “It’s tomorrow or never,” said Chandler. “If we wait any longer, there won’t be anything left. Do the A-B-C’s, Robyn.”

  “A-B-C’s?” I said.

  “There’s a limit to how much planning we can do,” said Robyn. “But every situation has three possible outcomes. Best case is A, Worst case is C. And B is how we twist the worst case in our favour. When we have our A-B-C’s we’re ready. Because it usually comes down to what we do in the moment. When we do what we do best, which is to improvise.”

  The idea of improvising didn’t sound appealing to me, but Chandler nodded. For a moment I wondered whether that had been the plan when Robyn and her boyfriend walked into the country bank with their burlap sack and enough weapons to shoot their way out of trouble. Had their plan been to improvise? I tried to ignore the slipping sensation I was getting. That feeling when you look around at your teammates before the big match and wonder whether you can actually play the game.

  “We can get in,” continued Robyn. “Getting in is the easy part. It’s the exit that’s hard. That’s where the A-B-C’s come in. Give me the A-plan, Fat-Boy.”