His eyes having adjusted to the dark, Henrik walked to the front door and opened it, then locked it behind him, using the mortise dead bolt as well as the Yale. The light was on at the far end of the hall, where the central alarm system was contained in a metal box secured to the wall beside the door to the kitchen. He used one key to open the box, and another to turn on the system. The bedrooms upstairs were en suite, so he set the pressure-pad alarm for the whole house. No need for anyone to leave their rooms before morning. In the morning, the first person up would have a minute to deactivate the alarm system before the bells started ringing both outside the house itself and inside the police station.
Now, having turned on the system, he had a minute to get to his room, a minute before it was fully operational. He headed for the stairs. There was a soft buzzing from the alarm box which told him it was working. When the buzzing stopped, the various window devices and movement-sensitive beams and pressure pads woke up for the evening. Silence upstairs, and no light from Khan’s bedroom. Henrik switched off the hall lights and closed his door behind him.
She knows the house almost as well as she knows the surrounding area. In the past two days, she’s been here half a dozen times, and twice at the dead of night, the witching hour.
She’s been on the grounds, and has peered through windows into rooms, through the letter box into the hall. She has seen that the alarm box sits at the end of the hall, attached to the wall. She knows the kind of alarm it will be. She has checked door and window locks. She has even gone so far as to pass an angled mirror on the end of a stick through the letter box, the better to see the locks from the inside. All has proven very satisfactory. The nearest house is half a mile away. There are no alarms in the garden, no infrared beams which, when broken, would turn on floodlights. No lights at all to complicate her approach. No cameras. No dogs. She is especially pleased that there are no dogs.
The gates are high and topped with spikes, but the wall is a pathetic affair with broken bottle-glass cemented to its top. Too pathetic for it to have been Khan’s work. It must already have been in place when he bought the house. The glass has been worn smooth over the years. She won’t even bother to cover it with a blanket before she climbs into the garden.
But first, there is the alarm system. She straps on a special climbing belt — the sort known to every telephone engineer — and attaches spiked soles to her shoes. The spiked soles are for wear by gardeners so they can aerate their lawns. She has modified the spikes only a little. She drove to a garden center outside Perth for the spiked shoes and bought a lot of other stuff as well, stuff she didn’t need, bought solely to disguise this singular purchase. She passed two garden centers before reaching Perth. Police might investigate one or two garden centers, but she doubts they would go much further afield.
She is now standing beside a utility pole in a field across the lane from Khan’s house. She knows this is a dangerous period. She will soon be visible from the house. She checks her watch. Two. The bodyguard locked up two hours ago. They will rise early tomorrow to catch their plane back south. Or rather, if things go as intended, they won’t.
She waits another minute. What moon there is disappears behind a hefty bank of cloud. She ties her belt around the pole as well as herself, grips the pole, hugging herself to it, and begins to climb. Eventually, she knows, twenty-odd feet up, there will be footholds to help her. But for now she has only her own strength. She knows it will be enough. She does not hesitate.
At the top of the pole, beneath the wires themselves, sits a large junction box containing the thinner wires running back to homes in the area. She thinks Khan’s alarm system works via telephone lines. From what she’s seen of it, it looks just the type. If it doesn’t... Well, she will fall back on other plans, other options. But for now she has to keep busy, working fast while the moon stays hidden. She slips a pencil-thin torch into her mouth, holding it as she would a cigarette, and, by its light, begins to unscrew the front from the junction box.
Terrorists aren’t just people who terrorize. They are people who hunger for knowledge, the knowledge of how things work. In knowing how things work, you discover how society works, and that knowledge can help cripple society. She knows she can disrupt communications, bring transport systems to a halt, generate mayhem by computer. Given the knowledge, anything can be achieved. The junction box holds no surprises for her, only a certain measure of relief. She stares at the confusion of wires for a moment, and knows that she can stay with plan one.
There is a distinct color coding for the wires from Khan’s alarm system. The puzzle is that there seem to be two sets. One for the main house... The other? A room inside the house, perhaps, or a garage or workshop. She decides to take both sets out with her neat rubber-handled wire clippers. It was a good alarm system, but not a great one. A great alarm system would send a constant pulse to the outside world. And if that pulse were interrupted, then the alarm bells would ring. Cutting the wires would cause the alarm to sound in the distant police station. But such systems are unreliable and seldom used. They are nuisances, sounding whenever a fluctuation in current occurs, or a phone line momentarily breaks up. Society demands that alarms not be a nuisance.
There were times when Witch worried about society.
The job done, she slipped slowly back down the pole and untied her harness at the bottom, putting it back in her heavy black holdall along with the spikes and her tools. Now for the wall. She clambered up and sat on the top for a second, studying the windows in the house, then fell into the dark garden. She had climbed the wall precisely twelve feet to the left of the gate, so that she fell onto grass and not into shrubbery. She’d decided to enter the way most burglars would — by the back entrance — not that she was intending to make this look like a burglary. No, this was to be messy. Her employers wanted her to leave a message, a clear statement of their feelings.
The kitchen then, its door bolted top and bottom with a mortise lock beside the handle. The bedrooms are to the front of the house. She can make a certain amount of noise here. Silence, of course, would be best. Silence is the ideal. In her holdall is a carefully measured and cut piece of contact paper, purchased at a department store in Perth. Ghastly pattern and color, though the assistant had praised it as though it were an Impressionist painting. Witch is surprised people still use it. She measured the kitchen windows yesterday and chose the smaller for her purpose. Slowly, carefully, she unpeels the contact paper and presses it against the smaller window, covering it exactly. In the department store, she also purchased some good-quality yellow dusters, while at a small hardware shop, the keen young assistant was only too pleased to sell some garden twine and a hammer to a lady keen to stake out her future vegetable plots.
She takes the hammer from her holdall. She has used some twine to tie a duster around the head. Out of the spare cuts of contact paper she has made some makeshift handles, which she attaches to the sheet of paper stuck to the window. She grips one of these handles as, softly, near soundlessly, she begins to tap away at the glass, which falls away from the window frame but stays attached to the contact paper. Within three minutes she is lifting the whole window out of its frame, laying it on the ground. The alarm is just outside the kitchen door. If she’d set it off, it would probably be buzzing by now. But she can’t hear it. She can’t hear anything, not even her heart.
Upstairs, Henrik is asleep and dreaming in Danish. He’s dreaming of barmaids with pumps attached to their breasts, and of flying champagne bottles, and of winning a bodybuilding contest against Khan and the pre-movie star Schwarzenegger. He drank one glass of neat vodka before retiring and watched ten minutes of the satellite movie on his eighteen-inch television before falling asleep, waking half an hour later just long enough to switch off the television.