‘Can I be excused?’ Jake said, trying to disguise his tears as Mac handed him a square of kitchen towel to wipe his face.
‘Can you sort out the police?’ Lauren asked.
‘I expect so,’ Mac sighed. ‘I’ve already contacted campus and hopefully the officers will get a message from above telling them not to investigate the fight too closely.’
Jake looked sadly at Lauren. ‘Please don’t tell Bethany about this,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want everyone on campus ribbing me.’
After all Jake’s smart-arsed comments, there was part of Lauren that wanted to see him humiliated. But for their mission to work, the two agents had to trust each other.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ Lauren said. ‘I’ll keep this quiet, but you’ve got to stop acting crazy and start listening to what I say.’
‘OK,’ Jake said, as he rubbed his eye with the back of his hand.
‘We all make mistakes, Jake,’ Mac said, sounding less angry. ‘The important thing is to make sure you learn from them.’
25. CANDY
Lauren met Fahim as he stepped off the bus in his uniform. They had a full hour until school started.
‘Where’s Jake?’ Fahim asked, as they walked towards a workman’s café.
‘Battered ribs,’ Lauren replied. ‘He’s basically OK, but he’s not really up to argy-bargy in school corridors.’
‘Or another encounter with Alom and his crew,’ Fahim smiled.
‘The school called the police, but Mac squished the investigation,’ Lauren explained. ‘Officially, they’re investigating conflicting evidence about the fight. Unofficially, the cops will sit on the evidence for a few days before letting it drop.’
‘Your people can do that?’
Lauren nodded. ‘You can’t stop a murder investigation or something massive like that, but the intelligence services can lean on senior police officers to make sure that our routine break-ins and punch-ups wind up at the bottom of the investigator’s pile.’
‘Did you hear any news about the gang?’ Fahim asked.
‘Jake broke one guy’s jaw and the one Jake kicked unconscious will have a headache for a few days. The others were just cuts and bruises.’
‘The way you two fight,’ Fahim said, smiling admiringly. ‘It must be so cool just walking into a room and knowing that you can annihilate anyone if they give you hassle. If I join CHERUB, how long would it take me to get really good?’
‘You can pick up most techniques with six months of intensive training, but mastering all of them takes years.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Fahim grinned.
‘You probably won’t get in,’ Lauren warned. ‘I’m not trying to be big-headed about myself, but cherubs are hand-picked. As well as basic intelligence, you need to be mentally and physically fit. There’s a big chance you won’t even pass the recruitment tests, let alone basic training.’
‘I know, Lauren. But I want a shot and that’s all I’m asking for.’
‘We can promise you that,’ Lauren said.
The café was a kilometre away from Camden Central and it was crowded out with builders and taxi drivers eating fried breakfasts, but there was enough background noise to hold a quiet conversation without being overheard.
Mac was seated at a table at the rear of the café and Fahim took an instant liking to his bald head and soft Scottish tones.
‘I think this is everything you asked for,’ Mac said, as he slid a laser-printed sheet across the laminate table top.
A waitress took orders for tea and toast as Fahim studied the sheet carefully. As well as a shot at joining CHERUB, the document promised him a new identity and a home with an adopted family. Money would be available for a private education if Fahim wanted one, and he would be provided for up until he completed university, including a gap year, a second-hand car when he passed his driving test and a twenty-five per cent deposit on his first home.
‘It’s the same package that CHERUB agents get,’ Mac said reassuringly. ‘If any of your father’s assets are seized under anti-terrorist legislation, the money will be put into a trust fund for you. Obviously, none of this applies if your mother is found.’
Fahim looked at Lauren. ‘Do you have a trust fund?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Lauren said. ‘My mum owned her flat and had another one she rented out. The insurance paid off both mortgages when she died. She also had some antique jewellery in a safety deposit box and a bit of cash. Me and my brother will get half each when we leave CHERUB.’
‘OK,’ Fahim smiled. ‘Where do I sign?’
‘There’s no such thing as a contract under these circumstances,’ Mac explained. ‘For official purposes, CHERUB doesn’t exist. I could go through the charade of writing out a contract, but it wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on. All I can give you is my word.’
‘And mine,’ Lauren added. ‘You’ll be looked after, Fahim. I swear on my life.’
Fahim hesitated for a moment, before smiling uneasily. ‘It’s not like I have a lot of options,’ he said. ‘What about my mum? Are the cops looking for her, or trying to find a body?’
‘I’ve put out some discreet feelers,’ Mac said. ‘But it’s difficult to conduct an investigation without letting your father know that we’re on to him. Our first task is to gather enough evidence to arrest your father, then we can launch a proper search for your mother.’
‘Fair enough,’ Fahim nodded. He was trying to stay calm, but his emotions crept into his voice. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night and the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that she’s dead. She knows what my dad’s like. There’s no way she’d just leave me with him, and even if she was in hospital or something she’d have found a way to call my mobile.’
‘You might be right,’ Mac said mournfully. ‘But I’ve worked on many investigations over the years and the one thing I’ve learned is that you can never be sure of anything until there’s hard evidence in front of you.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Fahim nodded. ‘The good news is that my dad’s left microwave spaghetti and meatballs. He’s got a meeting and when I asked when he’d be home he said he had a table booked at a restaurant at half-seven.’
‘Perfect,’ Lauren smiled.
‘That’s really excellent, Fahim,’ Mac said. ‘So when your dad goes out, he just leaves you alone? There isn’t a neighbour who keeps an eye out, or anything?’
‘The cleaning lady is gone by the time I get in from school and I’ve never even met the neighbours,’ Fahim said. ‘They’re on the other side of a dirty great wall. Dad tells me not to let anyone in the front gates and let the machine answer the phone and not to pick it up unless it’s him or Uncle Asif.’
*
The empty house was a golden opportunity to install surveillance equipment. To maximise the effectiveness of the operation, Mac arranged for three extra bodies to drive down from CHERUB campus. These were Bethany Parker, who was on holiday but keen to spend time with Lauren, plus retired agents Dave Moss and Jake McEwen who were helping out around campus until they went back to university in a few weeks’ time.
As an extra precaution Mac staked out the luxury home from inside a BMW 5-series with blacked-out windows. As Fahim predicted, the cleaning lady left at three followed half an hour later by Hassam and his brother Asif.
McEwen picked Lauren and Fahim up from school in a people carrier, which already had Bethany and Dave Moss inside. Fahim’s presence meant they couldn’t talk openly about life on campus, but Lauren couldn’t resist winding up the two white shirts about how she’d outwitted them in the training exercise two weeks earlier.
‘Don’t tease, sweetcakes,’ McEwen growled. ‘You might be a girl, but don’t think I won’t dip that blonde mop down a shitter if you wind me up.’
Lauren turned to see Bethany drawing a line across her throat. ‘Cut it out, he’s psycho,’ she mouthed.
Fahim and Lauren jumped out of the people carrier half a kilometre from his house. They
met Jake on the corner of his road. He’d spent most of the day lying on his bed, alternating between sulking and playing on his PS3.
‘You OK?’ Fahim asked. ‘You were amazing yesterday afternoon.’
Jake smiled. ‘It was nothing,’ he said casually. ‘I should be OK for school tomorrow.’
But his smile melted the instant he saw Lauren. He was terrified that Lauren might have told Bethany about him crying the night before.
‘Mind you,’ Fahim added, ‘Lauren saved your butt. Another two minutes and those guys would have killed you.’
‘Was there any trouble over the punch-up at school?’ Jake asked.
‘Rumours flying about that Alom’s mob got their arses kicked,’ Lauren said. ‘There was an appeal for witnesses in morning assembly and a few kids who knew the score hassled me, but I just told everyone to mind their own.’
‘But we’re not in trouble?’ Jake asked.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Lauren said. ‘I saw Alom in the corridor and he cacked himself and legged it.’
‘We’re lucky it was outside of school,’ Fahim added. ‘If I got suspended I’d be screwed.’
By this time they were up to the gates. Mac lowered the tinted window of the BMW across the street and gave Lauren a nod, indicating that it was OK to move in.
The tall metal gates led on to thirty metres of brick driveway, but Fahim had a key for the metal door built into the brick pillar alongside them.
‘I’m home,’ Fahim shouted, as he came through the front door into the marble hallway. ‘Anyone in?’
Lauren was intimidated by the echoing marble hallway and the abstract paintings on the walls. It felt more like a museum than a home.
‘Check all the rooms quickly,’ Lauren said. ‘Then we’ll take out the CCTV so that we can bring the van up the drive.’
Fahim was sure nobody was in, but checked every room in the house and the office annexe just in case. After the survey he found a key in a kitchen drawer and opened up a panel built into the wall under the curved staircase. The four VCRs stacked inside were linked to the security cameras outside the house.
‘Do you know anything about how it works?’ Lauren asked.
‘I’m not supposed to touch it,’ Fahim said. ‘But it’s just like using a normal video, except that the tapes go for seventy-two hours.’
Lauren looked inside the cupboard, while Jake pulled one of the VCRs out gently and turned it sideways to look at the leads plugged in the back.
‘Just phono cables running from the video cameras,’ Jake said. ‘Nothing special.’
Lauren flipped her phone open and called Mac. ‘I’m in front of the CCTV system. It looks pretty basic, but I want an OK from you before I disconnect it.’
Mac sounded confident. ‘There’s a direct debit going out of Hassam’s bank account to the security company for thirty pounds a month. I called them up pretending to be a customer and that’s the fee for their standard call-out package. They’ll come out if the burglar alarm goes off, but there’s no remote video surveillance or anything like that.’
‘You’re the boss,’ Lauren said.
She went down the row of VCRs and stopped each tape from recording.
‘There will be a gap in the recorded footage, but that doesn’t prove anything,’ Lauren explained to Fahim. ‘In the unlikely event that your dad does decide to play it back, just deny everything.’
Two minutes later, Fahim opened the gate and McEwen drove the Volkswagen people carrier up the driveway. Bethany dashed inside, while Dave opened the back and took out a pair of laptop computers and a cricket bag filled with surveillance equipment.
‘OK,’ McEwen said, as the team gathered around the equipment in the hallway. ‘Dave and I will take the laptops around and clone every hard drive we can get our hands on. Jake, I want listening devices in every room. Bethany and Lauren, there’s a pair of high-speed document copiers in the back of the car. Go to the office and duplicate anything you find interesting.’
‘Can I help?’ Fahim asked.
McEwen sounded unfriendly. ‘Are sure you’ve told Mac where all the computers are?’
‘Definitely,’ Fahim said. ‘My dad’s no computer whiz. I have to install the software and sort out his internet whenever it crashes.’
‘Right,’ McEwen said. ‘And you gave us the combination of the safe, so the best thing you can do is sit on your can and let us do our jobs.’
As Bethany and Lauren ran outside to get the copiers, Jake unzipped the giant equipment bag Dave had brought in and pulled out a device that looked like a staple gun.
‘Come with me if you like, Fahim,’ Jake said warmly. ‘Show me where your dad likes to sit, then I’ll be able to put bugs in all the best places.’
‘What is that thing?’ Fahim asked, as they headed up the stairs.
When they reached the balcony, Jake opened up a catch on top of the device, then swung open a metal panel, exposing a reel of what looked like tiny black needles.
‘It’s the very latest,’ Jake explained. ‘We used to have bugs that were about the size of your little fingernail, but there was still a chance they’d be discovered. These new ones are like hairs: you just line up the gun over something soft and fire them in. As they leave the gun, a seal is broken which activates a small chemical battery and it transmits a compressed recording pulse about once every three seconds for the following eight to ten days, depending upon how often people talk.’
To demonstrate, Jake lined the gun up over the back of a velvet armchair and pressed down on the handle. There was a pulse of compressed air.
‘Now it’s embedded inside the cushion. It’s flexible, so it won’t prick you if you sit on it and it’s sensitive enough to pick up sound even if it’s embedded two or three centimetres inside a pillow or mattress.’
‘Nifty,’ Fahim smiled. ‘It must take you ages to learn how to use all this equipment.’
Jake held his thumb and fingers wide apart. ‘They give you massive fat technical manuals to read. You have to take a test before you’re authorised to use any piece of equipment and there’s no room for error. You get a hundred per cent, or you fail.
‘Of course, something like this is relatively simple. But it takes weeks to learn all the ins and outs of cloning computer hard drives and installing key loggers and stuff like that.’
Fahim’s eyes were wide with excitement. ‘All this is so cool,’ he beamed. ‘I’ve dreamed of doing stuff like this ever since I watched Spy Kids.’
Once Jake had injected listening devices into cushions, carpets and mattresses throughout the house and adjoining offices, he took out a PDA and walked around checking the signal strength.
‘The last step is to install a relay box,’ Jake explained, as he dug inside the equipment bag in the hallway. ‘We’ll probably need a pair for a house this size. The relays pick up the weak signals from the tiny needle bugs and boost them for transmission to a master receiver stationed a few hundred metres from the house.’
‘What about on TV, when you see people sweeping for bugs?’ Fahim said.
‘Only works with old technology,’ Jake said, as he showed Fahim the two relays, which were the size of drinks coasters but flatter. ‘The kind of bugs you’d buy in a spy shop transmit continously. Two disadvantages: transmitting all the time uses a lot of energy, which means they have to be fitted into something like a light socket or a clock radio. Continual transmission also means they’re easy to detect.
‘All our bugs store sound in memory and compress it into a tiny pulse which lasts less than a hundredth of a second. It’s impossible to detect them over the background static created by the earth’s magnetic field.’
Jake gave Fahim one of the relay boxes and he turned it over in his hand.
‘The best place to put this is in your room, inside a toy or somewhere else your dad never goes. The higher the better if you want a good signal.’
‘CD case?’ Fahim asked. ‘You know, if you snap out the
black bit that holds the CD? It would go inside and he’d never look there.’
‘Good thinking,’ Jake smiled.
The relay had a sticky backing, which they peeled off and fitted inside the case of Fahim’s Killers CD. Then they placed it on top of Fahim’s wardrobe under a stack of board games.
Jake pulled out his telephone and called Mac. ‘Hey boss, I need a signal test,’ he said. ‘I’ve installed unit IDs 65341 through 65409.’
Mac couldn’t help laughing as he pulled a PDA out of the glovebox and tapped the screen with a stylus to turn it on. ‘Sixty-nine listening devices in one house! Call me an old fart, but I can remember the days when we had to drill holes in the walls to fit devices the size of a fist … I’m getting medium or strong signals on everything except 65389 through 65404.’
‘More or less what I thought,’ Jake said. ‘We need another relay in the office wing. I’ll get right on it.’
The office annexe was a hive of activity. Hassam and Asif Bin Hassam had three PCs and three laptops between them, plus two extra machines in the third office which was used when they hired a temporary secretary, or when Yasmin did the bookkeeping.
While Dave and McEwen copied hard disks and backup data tapes on to a laptop specially configured to rip data to a bank of high-speed hard-disk drives, Lauren and Bethany worked with the document scanners.
The latest scanners were based around ultra-high-definition video cameras. All you had to do was flash a document in front of the lens and it would be recorded legibly within a fiftieth of a second. The two girls worked meticulously through the filing cabinets, with the cameras mounted on tripods as they flicked through pages as fast as their hands allowed. But even with near instant scanning, filming every page in a filing cabinet would take hours, so they had to make educated guesses as to which documents were likely to prove valuable before replacing them exactly as they found them.
‘Anyone seen a good spot for a second audio relay?’ Jake asked.
Dave Moss pointed towards the drawer unit built into the side of Hassam’s desk. ‘Pull the drawer out and stick it on the back. Nobody will ever look there, and even if someone does, it’ll just look like a sticker.’