Alex looked around him. On the building site, the day’s work was coming to an end. Some of the men were already leaving, and as he watched, he saw a trapdoor open about a hundred and fifty yards above him and a stocky man begin the long climb down from the top of the crane. Alex closed his eyes. A whole series of images suddenly flashed into his mind, like different sections of a jigsaw puzzle.
The barge. The building site. The police station. The crane with its big hook, dangling underneath the jib.
And the Blackpool amusement park. He’d gone there once with his housekeeper, Jack Starbright, and had watched as she won a teddy bear, hooking it out of a glass case and carrying it over to a chute.
Could it be done? Alex looked again, working out the angles. Yes. It probably could.
He stood up and crept back across the deck to the door that Skoda had entered. A length of wire was lying to one side, and he picked it up, then wound it several times around the handle of the door. He looped the wire over a hook in the wall and pulled it tight. The door was effectively locked. There was a second door at the back of the boat. Alex secured this one with his own bicycle padlock. As far as he could see, the windows were too narrow to crawl through.
There was no other way in or out.
He crept off the barge and back onto the jetty. Then he untied it, leaving the thick rope loosely curled up beside the metal pegs—the stanchions—that had secured it. The river was still. It would be a while before the barge drifted away.
He straightened up. Satisfied with his work so far, he began to run.
HOOKED
« ^ »
THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUILDING site was crowded with construction workers preparing to go home. Alex was reminded of Brookfield an hour earlier. Nothing really changed when you got older—except that maybe you weren’t given homework. The men and women drifting out of the site were tired, in a hurry to be away. That was probably why none of them tried to stop Alex as he slipped in among them, walking purposefully as if he knew where he was going, as if he had every right to be there.
But the shift wasn’t completely finished yet. Other workers were still carrying tools, stowing away machinery, packing up for the night. They all wore protective headgear, and seeing a pile of plastic helmets, Alex snatched one up and put it on. The great sweep of the block of apartments that was being built loomed up ahead of him. To pass through it, he was forced into a narrow corridor between two scaffolding towers. Suddenly a heavy-set man in white overalls stepped in front of him, blocking his way.
‚Where are you going?' he demanded.
‚My dad…' Alex gestured vaguely in the direction of another worker and kept walking.
The trick worked. The man didn’t challenge him again.
He headed toward the crane. It stood in the open, the high priest of construction. Alex hadn’t realized how very tall it was until he had reached it. The supporting tower was bolted into a massive block of concrete. It was very narrow—once he squeezed through the iron girders, he could reach out and touch all four sides. A ladder ran straight up the center. Without stopping to think, Alex began to climb.
It’s only a ladder, he told himself. You’ve climbed ladders before. You’ve got nothing to worry about. But this was a ladder with three hundred rungs. If Alex let go or slipped, there would be nothing to stop him from falling to his death. There were rest platforms at intervals, but Alex didn’t dare stop to catch his breath. Somebody might look up and see him. And there was always a chance that the barge, loose from its moorings, might begin to drift. Alex knew he had to hurry.
After two hundred and fifty rungs, the tower narrowed. Alex could see the crane’s control cabin directly above him. He looked back down. The men on the building site were suddenly very small and far away. He climbed the last ladder. There was a trapdoor over his head, leading into the cabin. But the trapdoor was locked.
Fortunately, Alex was ready for this. When MI6 had sent him on his first mission, they had given him a number of gadgets—he couldn’t exactly call them weapons—to help him out of a tight spot. One of these was a tube marked ZIT-CLEAN, FOR HEALTHIER SKIN. But the cream inside the tube did much more than clean up pimples.
Although Alex had used most of it, he had managed to hold on to the last remnants and often carried the tube with him as a sort of souvenir. He had it in his pocket now. Holding on to the ladder with one hand, he took the tube out with the other. There was very little of the cream left, but Alex knew that a little was all he needed. He opened the tube, squeezed some of the cream onto the lock, and waited. There was a moment’s pause, then a hiss and a wisp of smoke.
The cream was eating into the metal. The lock sprang open. Alex pushed back the trapdoor and climbed the last few rungs. He was in.
He had to close the trapdoor again to create enough floor space to stand on. He found himself in a square, metal box, about the same size as a sit-in arcade game. There was a pilot’s chair with two joysticks—one on each arm—and instead of a screen, a floor-to-ceiling window with a spectacular view of the building site, the river, and the whole of West London. A small computer monitor had been built into one corner, and at knee level, there was a radio transmitter.
The joysticks beside the arms were surprisingly uncomplicated. Each had just six buttons—
two green, two black, and two red. There were even helpful diagrams to show what they did.
The right hand lifted the hook up and down. The left hand moved it along the jib, closer or farther from the cabin. The left hand also controlled the whole top of the crane, rotating it three hundred and sixty degrees. It couldn’t have been much simpler. Even the START button was clearly labeled. A big switch for a big toy.
He turned the switch and felt power surge into the control cabin. The computer lit up with a graphic of a barking dog as the warm-up program spun into life. Alex eased himself into the operator’s chair. There were still twenty or thirty men on the site. Looking down between his knees, he saw them moving silently far below. Nobody had noticed that anything was wrong.
But still he knew he had to move fast.
He pressed the green button on the right-hand control—green for go—then touched his fingers against the joystick and pushed. Nothing happened! Alex frowned. Maybe it was going to be more complicated than he’d thought. What had he missed? He rested his hands on the joysticks, looking left and right for another control. His right hand moved slightly and suddenly the hook soared up from the ground. It was working!
Unknown to Alex, heat sensors concealed inside the handles of the joysticks had read his body temperature and activated the crane. All modern cranes have the same security system built into them, in case the operator has a heart attack and dies. There can be no accidents. Body heat is needed to make the crane work.
And luckily for him, this crane was a Liebherr 154 EC-H, one of the most modern in the world. The Liebherr is incredibly easy to use, and also remarkably accurate. Even sitting so high above the ground, the operator can pick up a tea bag and drop it into a small china pot. Now Alex pushed sideways with his left hand and gasped as the crane swung around. In front of him he could see the jib stretching out, swinging high over the rooftops of London. The more he Alex settled himself in the chair and pulled back, wondering what would happen next.