Another nod. I moved her into position.
"I want you to stand on the corner here. Your job is also to look after that bag, because there's a lot of important stuff in it. If you see anything, just tap me on the shoulder like before."
She nodded, and I got out the lock-pick gun.
I got to the first door and started to squeeze. I opened it with the tension wrench and popped my head in, made sure I couldn't see any windows, and turned on the light. It was basically just one office, quite large, about twenty feet by fifteen, a couple of telephones, a picture of the worker's wife, a couple of filing cabinets, very basic furniture. Nothing resembling what I was looking for. I didn't check the filing cabinets--the first look is nothing more than a once-over;
you don't want to spend ages in one location only to find out that what you want is sitting on a desk in the room next door.
I didn't relock the door because I might have to go back in.
I looked at Kelly, still at her post; I stuck my thumb up and she grinned. She had a big job to do.
I went into office number two. Exactly the same, normal office shit: the year planner with different-colored bits of tape on it, signs stating that there was a strict no-smoking policy, and individual mugs of coffee. People's offices are a reflection of themselves; that's why on a job like this it's so important that nothing be left out of place. They would notice immediately.
I continued down the corridor and went to number three.
The same. Four: the same. I was starting to feel I was on a wild-goose chase.
Now for the other three offices; I crossed over the T, and as I passed Kelly she tried to look even more hard at work. I gave her another thumbs-up and went to number five.
It was a much bigger office. There were two couches facing each other with a coffee table in between and a neat arrangement of magazines; a wooden liquor cabinet, smart wooden filing cabinets, framed diplomas and all sorts of things on the wall. But nothing that looked like what I was looking for.
However, behind a large desk and leather swing chair, there was another door. I got the lock-pick gun working. Inside, I found filing cabinets, a fantastically expensive-looking leather-topped desk, and a swivel chair. On the desk was a PC. It wasn't connected to another computer, nor was it connected to a phone line. There wasn't even a telephone in the room.
This could be where the key point was.
It could be a fiber-optic cable that's controlling fixed Scud launching sites in northern Iraq, or it could be just one small component in the control room of a nuclear power station, but a key point has to be protected. If it's damaged, everything else is inoperable. It might not take a hundred pounds of explosives to destroy a target; if you can identify the key point, then sometimes one blow from a two-pound hammer will do the trick. I quickly checked the remaining two offices and confirmed that this was the one I should be concentrating on.
I went back to the bag and got out the Polaroid camera.
Kelly was still working on her gold star for best spy. I smiled:
"I think I've found it, Kelly!"
She smiled back. She didn't have a clue what I was talking about.
I took pictures of the outer office, of what the desktop looked like, a couple of panoramic shots of the area, the coffee table in detail, including the way the magazines were lying; the way that the stuff was set on the table, a picture of all the drawers. In all I took eight shots of the inside of the first office. I now knew exactly what it had looked like when I entered, so when we left I could make sure it looked exactly the same.
I laid the Polaroids in a row on the floor against the wall by the door, just inside the office. The trash from the prints went straight into my pockets.
Waiting for the photographs to develop, I put my head around the door to check on Kelly.
I picked up the bag and brought Kelly with me into the bigger office. I said, "I want you to tell me when those pictures are all developed. Make sure you don't touch a thing, but it's really important I know when those pictures are ready.
Your daddy used to do this job."
"Really?"
I closed the door behind us and jammed two wedges in place.
I remembered a job I'd once done with Kev. We'd been sent to plan the insertion of a visual and audio device into an arms dealer's house in Vancouver. This guy was selling nuclear detonators on the black market and we were assigned to recon the house, come back to the UK, and plan how to put the devices in so that a listening station set up in a nearby hotel room could find out what was happening.
Once we got into the house we took photographs of all the bits and pieces that were needed to plan and prepare our technical attack. After a while we were just bored; it wasn't that hard a job. We went into the bedroom, wedged the door, and started going through his wife's closets. She was very young, and Danish; looking at the two of them in their pictures in the living room, I'd been sure she loved her fifty-eight-year-old grossly overweight husband: there was no way it was his millions of dollars she was interested in. It was then that Kev opened a drawer and discovered untold amounts of kinky underwear.
The rest of the night was spent taking pictures of each other with her panties over our heads. In fact, more time and effort, planning and preparation went into getting her underwear out than into most of the rest of the job. It was while we were tittering in the darkroom back at the embassy that Kev had suddenly broken out in a cold sweat, convinced he'd left a pair of panties on the bed. If he had, there was nothing we could do about it--except imagine the overweight arms dealer finding a pair of frillies on his pillow and thinking all his Christmases had come at once.
I told Kelly to stay where she was, moved into the second office, and started taking more pictures. The cleaning service hadn't been in here. The other offices had empty wastebaskets, but these two offices hadn't been touched; they obviously did these themselves, but not every day. Even more indication that this was a secure area. As I moved around this small room I saw a shredder beside the filing cabinet, and that confirmed it. What was being kept secret, however, I didn't yet know. I put the pictures of the second room on the floor and went back into the main office.
Looking over Kelly's shoulder, I asked, "How's it going?"
"One's nearly ready, look!"
"Great. What Daddy does also is collect the other pictures."
I pointed to the ones next door on the carpet.
"But one at a time, and put them in a nice long line just here." I showed her that I wanted them against the wall.
"Can you manage that?"
"Yeah, sure." She walked off.
I went back next door and had a quick look at the PC. It was on but asleep. Kelly was walking in and out, carrying one picture at a time as if it were a bomb.
I pressed the Return key on the keyboard; I didn't want to touch the mouse because maybe it was positioned as a telltale. The screen came alive with Windows 95 and the Microsoft sound which pleased me, because I'd have been struggling with any other system.
I went back to Kelly, who was still staring at the pictures in the other office.
"Look," she said, "some more are ready!"
I nodded as I delved into the bag for the disk with the sniffer program. I was not as good with computers as the sixteen-year-olds who hack into the USAF computer defense system, but I knew how to use one of these. All you have to do is insert a floppy and off it goes, rooting into passwords, infiltrating programs. There is nothing that they can't get into.
I got up and turned toward the back office.
"Won't be long," I said.
"Come and tell me when they're ready to look at."
Eyes glued to the pictures, she just nodded. As I walked back in, I looked at the tracks our feet had brushed in the carpet. I'd have to smooth it out again once we had finished.