The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  Chris suddenly moved toward the edge of his seat; his cigarette was now burning away, untouched, in the ashtray. Clearly Danny had suddenly regained some of the power in the relationship. He was now sitting more comfortably, almost slouching in his chair, which was a good job because otherwise Chris’s cigarette would have probably set fire to his tie.

  ‘So how do we demonstrate to a company the level of risk, or the potential results of such a breach? Well, quite simple, we stage a mock break-in.’

  ‘What?’ said Chris; he’d clearly not seen Danny’s conclusion coming.

  ‘I’m sure that you’ve heard of internet security companies which now employ hackers. That works on the same principle; they hack into a business’s network, just to show how easily it’s done, and then they give them their solution.’

  ‘And some of your clients will pay you to do this?’

  ‘Not as such,’ admitted Danny. ‘It has to be unexpected, you see…’

  ‘But isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘Probably, but if your company had its computer network breached, how much sensitive information would they lose? How much of your client’s private information would be jeopardised? You would hardly want the publicity of a police investigation. Washing your dirty linen in public is just about the worst thing you can do… business works on trust.’

  ‘I don’t buy it; this all sounds like trouble to me…’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it, Chris; I wouldn’t have to get my hands dirty at all,’ said Danny, with a satisfied smile.

  ‘So you won’t be donning a balaclava and attempting to break into a site then?’

  ‘Nope; all I have to do is provide the plans. You see, for each and every security system installation EyeSpy conduct, we have to produce fully marked-up plans of the buildings, the security solutions utilised and where all of the cameras are located. They’re a bloody treasure map mate. We keep them in a locked cabinet at work, but I have access to it because I sold some of the jobs.’

  ‘So, this little scheme of yours is not EyeSpy approved?’

  ‘No; I’ll be working on behalf of a consultant. Foreign-based, but believe me, they are good.’

  ‘And what do you need the money for exactly?” said Chris, nervously drumming his fingers on the table.

  ‘It’s a little complicated mate, but basically they require the money up-front to buy my way in… a grand is the minimum amount I can invest. It will make me, and you, members of this organisation. We’ll share the profits when they start to roll in; believe me, it will take-off, big-style.’

  Chris slowly shook his head. ‘I’m still not convinced by this; it sounds like one of those email hoaxes which go round claiming to be from some exiled African prince. You give him a few grand up-front, or perhaps your bank account details, and then he’s supposed to transfer a few million over to you, for safe-keeping. Only he doesn’t; there’s no Quick Fix. Instead he robs you blind. You’re not desperate enough to fall for a scam like that are you?’

  Danny drained the last of his pint and winked at Chris. ‘I’ve already done it; that’s how I know that it’s not a scam.’

  ‘What?’ shouted Chris, too loudly. The barman looked up from his crossword and gave them an icy stare.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ whispered Danny, and waited until the barman returned to sticking his pen in his ear, perhaps trying to retrieve a stray piece of ear-wax.

  ‘They gave me a trial-run a few weeks back; a call-centre in the North East. I provided them with copies of the plans, and hey-presto, three hundred ding arrived in my account this morning.’

  ‘And that’s what you lost at the bookies? You idiot.’

  Danny waved away Chris’s interruption. ‘I know I’m an idiot, but there was some method in my madness you see; I had to give them account details in which to transfer the payment, and I couldn’t very well give them my real bank account. For one; at that stage, it could have been one of your African prince scams; and for two, the police monitor suspicious payments. Nobody gets suspicious of payments into gambling accounts though, do they? All it would have looked like was my winnings…’

  This part of Danny’s speech was a lie. He hardly even noticed that it had slipped out before it was there, on the table, waiting to be consumed by Chris. But Chris, it seemed, bought the lie.

  ‘So what happened to the call-centre?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘All I know is that last week they called up EyeSpy and asked for me to come and survey their premises for a new, upgraded security system. No expense spared. Believe it or not, a few hundred quid commission should be coming my way as well.’

  ‘Is there any way that you might be found out?’ said Chris, excited now; you could almost see the fishing hook caught in the side of his mouth, reeling him in to an inevitable conclusion. For all of his flaws, Danny appeared to be a pretty adept salesman.

  ‘It’s not totally risk-free,’ said Danny. ‘But I am ninety-nine point nine percent sure that we will not only get away with this, but that we will also make a shed-load of cash.’

  ‘And where’s the next one that you are supposed to be providing the information on?’

  ‘There’s a couple in the pipeline; one of them is a brewery, and I have a bit of work to do on that one, because they aren’t even an existing client. The second site is Edison’s Printers.’

  ‘Edison’s Printers; shit mate; that could be worth a bomb…’

  Danny regarded his old mate with care, knowing that he was surely about to seal the deal. ‘Remember what we used to talk about at uni?’

  ‘That a shark would beat a bear in a fight?’ laughed Chris, seemingly unflustered by the illegality of their previous conversation.

  ‘Ha… no; how we wanted to get out of this rat-infested shit-hole of a country; get out of the rat race…’

  ‘You may win the rat-race, but you are still a rat,’ interrupted Chris, irrelevantly.

  ‘That’s right; so we talked about fleeing the place while we still could, while we were still relatively uninfected.’

  ‘It’s a genetic disorder with me though,’ said Chris. ‘My dad is the King Rat.’

  ‘But if we make enough money from these deals, we can just up-and-leave; you only rent your flat, there’s nothing tying you down…’

  ‘All right, but what about Cheryl?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Leave that to me,’ said Danny, dismissively. ‘So, are you in, or are you out?’

  Chris sparked up yet another cigarette, weighing up his response. His hand was shaking a little.

  ‘Number one; I won’t lend you the money… no, hear me out… I will give you that money. But consider it a business deal on my part. I expect a return on my investment. I’m also expecting that absolutely no blame can be placed at my door, should the worst happen, mate. This deal is all about trust.’

  He took a long, measured draw on his cigarette and eyed his friend. ‘Number two; you are to never, ever set foot in a bookies, a casino, or even so much a bloody penny-arcade in Blackpool again. Stay away from temptation. Number three; get me a whisky to wash down this fucking awful-tasting bitter.’

  The handover of the money was conducted under the table. Chris took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit, and dropped it at Danny’s feet.

  ‘Is there a grand in there?’ said Danny, already knowing the answer. His friend had come to the pub knowing that he would have to give him money, had come prepared. Hell, Danny almost felt guilty.

  ‘I feel just like my dad; doing business like this,’ sighed Chris as Danny crouched to pick up the envelope. He glanced quickly over to the barman, and noted that he still had the pen sticking out of his ear and was now reading a newspaper. The tabloid had blocked his view of any of the transaction under the table, unless he’d cut two eye-holes in the paper like in comedy spy movies.

  ‘And like my dad, I’ll seal the deal with a whisky,’ said Chris.

  ‘I heard you the first time,’ said Danny, who head-bowed, made
his way back to the bar.

  Startled, the sleepy barman tried to pretend that there was not a biro in his ear; he tried to carry on as though there was, in fact, nothing out of the ordinary going on at all.

  ‘Another couple of pints mate?’ he asked.

  ‘Two whiskies this time, squire,’ replied Danny, who’d picked up enough barroom etiquette not to question why the barman was trying to either write inside his own head, or use his ear to manipulate the writing instrument. ‘We’re celebrating; I’ve just given up betting; as of tomorrow, I’m going down to Gamblers Anonymous. I will never bet again.’

  ‘Never is a hell of a long time,’ said the barman, sagely. For an uncomfortable moment, he reminded Danny of Jackie at the bookies. But Danny had moved on to a far more risky form of gambling now, hadn’t he? One in which the rewards were far greater but if he were to lose…

  He wouldn’t lose. He couldn’t lose. Nobody could afford the price he’d have to pay if he did.

  The Mission

  Sausaged-in between his meaty-thick fingers, Callum Burr’s phone felt poxy and insignificant. But that really wasn’t the case, was it? The phone was significant all right. It was his only connection with the mysterious man on the other side of the world that had somehow become his life-line.

  Callum could feel the heat of the phone burning against his ear and could understand why all of those folk said that mobile phones were dangerous and could cause cancer. Hell, the way that it was throbbing, he could have sworn that he was developing a tumour right there and then.

  ‘So everything has been taken care of?’ asked the voice on the other end of the line; that sickly-sweet voice that was now morbidly familiar to him.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Burr, allowing the slight colouring of impatience to taint his voice. He’d heard the same question, asked in a variety of different ways, on four or five separate occasions now. Familiarity breeds contempt.

  ‘It is unwise to be contemptuous of me or be condescending of me,’ said the man on the other side of the world rather coldly. There was a slightly foreign tint to the voice; certain words were pronounced and used differently.

  Embarrassed, Burr busied himself with plucking some of the grass in front of him and then casting it away into the breeze. He loved the feel of grass; he grew up with it on his father’s farm, only the army had got in the way, hadn’t it, and there hadn’t been much grass out there in the desert. Even Edison’s, which was surrounded by countryside, was too carefully manicured, too humanised. Sometimes he wished he had chosen a different life for himself; one in which he was his own boss and didn’t have to follow the barked orders of his superiors, or apologise to pansy-sounding foreigners like the guy on the other end of the line.

  ‘Sorry ‘bout that,’ he breathed. ‘I just wanted to let you know that everything was carried out to the letter, sir. But I’ve told you that about six times now.’

  ‘Not to worry, Callum. I’m sure you’ll make up for your lapse one day,’ said the voice.

  Burr froze; although the threat wasn’t obvious, it was still a threat. What did he mean by one day? He glanced back at the printworks over the fence and wondered whether he was being watched. He certainly felt like he was being watched. Or maybe, he thought, that prickly feeling at the back of his great thick neck was actually something else entirely; maybe it was guilt.

  ‘So, run through it again please Callum. And this time tell me exactly what occurred today. Thus far, you are only telling me the minor issues. Who was this security man that came to site? Danny Morris, you say?’

  Callum looked confused; his lamb-chop forehead wrinkled in incomprehension: ‘No; I don’t know where you got that name from. No, it was a man called Mark something. Hold on, it’ll come to me…’

  He stared at the freckles on his hands as though they’d give him inspiration. Surely something would come back to him.

  What was that name? It was something simple; something typically English; a little boring.

  ‘He was a Geordie,’ said Burr, slowly, training himself. ‘Whistled some tune off the Billy Connolly show…’

  ‘What is a Geordie?’ asked the foreign voice.

  Callum felt like saying that Geordies were the unluckiest people on the planet; but for a cruel twist of fate, a quirk of historical circumstance, they could have been Scottish. Of course, he said nothing of the sort. To have been so flippant again would have been to invite more threats, more insecurity.

  ‘From the North East,’ he said instead. ‘He was a stocky guy; very determined. The quiet-type…’

  The foreigner seemed to sense that he was playing for time however, and interrupted: ‘Name, please?’

  Sweat started to seep out of the pores on Burr’s face. His back already felt damp. He knew that on his return to the Security Lodge, he’d look as though he’d been for a quick swim. Profuse sweating had been a side-effect of his new rotundity that he hadn’t really considered, and in the tight-fitting polyester uniforms of Edison’s Printers, that was a real mistake. Daily, his uniform became a wet-suit.

  He stared at the little private road which ran up to the main gate for inspiration now. A large, lumbering Edison’s truck was creeping up to the main gate and the Security Lodge. He tried to pick out the driver, but the afternoon sun reflected too brightly off the windscreen.

  ‘Burr? You still there?’ asked the voice.

  What was the engineer’s name? What was his name? Something to do with a tree… Mark Oak-tree? Mark Appletree? Mark Pussy-willow? Mark Pussy, more like…

  Suddenly a blue transit van which had been coming from the other direction pulled into the ditch in order to allow the larger lorry to pass. Callum picked out the livery on the vehicle: EyeSpy Security. It took him a little longer to then realise that the engineer must have been driving the van. He peered into the windscreen and finally saw his man. The engineer was giving him a breezy little wave. Finally, Burr remembered.

  ‘Mark Birch,’ he said, with some finality. ‘His name was Mark Birch.’

  Callum turned away from the road. He didn’t want Mark to become suspicious about his motives for making a phone call so far outside the fences. Maybe Mark had not seen him? But no; the wave had confirmed that he had… Inwardly, Callum cursed.

  ‘Mark Birch,’ repeated the man on the other side of the world; tasting the name as though it was a strange fruit. ‘And did Mr. Mark Birch have the paperwork to back-up his claim that he was who he said he was.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ confirmed Callum. ‘Although he was a little shifty; a bit of a weirdo, like. You remember I told you ‘bout that Mick Stephenson up the Main Monitoring Centre? The two of them would be like peas in a pod. Both of them act like they have something to hide. Maybe this Birch has some kind of deformity like Stephenson does…’

  ‘What is “peas in a pod”, please?’

  ‘You know, like the same,’ said Callum. If they were now discussing the bizarre phrases and sayings of the English language then maybe the worst was over for now. Maybe the interrogation had ended.

  ‘You did well,’ said the voice finally, after another long silence. Absently, Callum wondered just how much these phone calls were costing his mysterious foreigner. How much, for example, had it cost him to stay quiet on the line for the past twenty seconds? Probably more than an hour of Callum’s meagre pay; that’s how much.

  ‘Why thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘Tell me; what’s the weather like in Mauritius at the moment?’

  A snort of laughter from the other end of the phone: ‘Sunny, believe me or not to believe me. Just like when you were over here.’

  ‘I should very much like to come over again… Maybe meet you this time,’ said Callum.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Nobody really gets to meet me, Burr,’ answered the foreigner. Burr thought he could trace regret in the man’s voice, as though he’d have liked to have bent his own rules just this once in order that he could spend some time with the remarkable human being that was C
allum Burr. And quite right too; everybody should have to spend time with him. It would be an education.

  ‘No worries,’ he said, and immediately hated himself for sounding like an Australian. ‘All right then? Everything tickety-boo? Well, I’d better get off then. Must crack-on; I’ve got all sorts that I need to do on site.’

  ‘Hold on, Burr,’ said the voice, suddenly sounding chilling again. ‘So when you told me that you managed to access the chip at the back of the printer; you did type in the right code, yes?’

  Callum sighed. Seven times he’d been asked now. He wasn’t some rookie, was he? Sure he was a bit rusty when it came to this new technology and stuff, but he was still clued-up up-top, wasn’t he? He’d got through twenty years in the forces, for Christ’s sake. He’d handled weapons which could have blown most of Mauritius to smithereens in his time. He wasn’t some common or garden imbecile.

  ‘I typed in your code while the engineer busied himself with the cameras,’ he said, wearily. ‘I even got one of the Main Monitoring Centre guys to buzz my walkie-talkie so that it looked as though I was going off to talk to someone. I walked up to the machine and I tapped in the code. I even printed out a few new notes just to make sure. The Precisioner’s set on Mauritian Rupees now. Or at least it will be until someone can break your code.’

  ‘Good.’

  Callum thought he’d ask that killer question; the one that the foreigner had refused to answer until now. ‘But why? Why do you want it set on those notes? What are you…’

  ‘Does not matter to you any more. Your part in this is almost at an end. Soon the monies will be transferred into your account and all will be – how you say – tickety-boo?’

  Callum grinned in spite of that nagging doubt in the back of his mind. It was a good job that the ‘monies’ were about to be transferred. He’d already spent most of it…

  ‘Keep your telephone switched on at all times though, please,’ continued the voice. ‘It always pays to be vigilant. You should know that, being a security guard.’