by AJ Kirby
Finally, Mark heaved the steering wheel to the right and pulled the van into an unseen opening in the dry-stone wall. A rough track led them deep into the woods and away from the view of the road. The four-wheel drive capability of the van was, as expected, very welcome as the tyres fought against the suction of great swathing puddles which tried to drag them down into their black depths.
Mark parked the van before the track became impassable. A slight nagging fear bit into his mind; they did have to drive back that way, and it was still raining. Conditions would be even worse later in the night.
‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘This is the end of the road; as far as we can go.’
Mark dimmed the lights. Chris tutted and sneered under the cover of what he thought was now complete darkness. Danny made a strange sort of whimpering noise.
‘This is it, boys,’ said Mark with a confidence that he did not feel. It all felt too real now. It felt as though he’d sleep-walked through the past few days and had only now woken up to find himself about to do something that he’d never have even allowed himself to imagine before his father had gone…
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ said Chris.
Chris and Danny got out and lit up cigarettes to calm their nerves; to Mark, the cigarettes’ puny lights simply served to highlight the trio’s insignificance against the twin powers which they were planning to fight; nature and technology. Mark stepped out of the van; the air was chillingly, bitingly cold. He walked round to the cavernous back of the van and promptly geared up the diesel generator. He blew into his hands, attempting to generate a little heat; the gloves could only be put on once he had completed the fiddly electronics which only he could perform. His job was to rebuild the dummy system; something he had done many, many times before. He was glad of something to do to take his mind off what he was going to do in the next hour; doing such a repetitive task was actually very therapeutic.
From outside the van, Mark could hear the shuffling disquiet of Chris and Danny, and their constant lighting of cigarettes; the scratch as their thumbs rolled across the wheel at the top of Danny’s lighter. They were both impatient at the best of times, and Mark could only imagine their discomfort now. He had seen Danny’s fingers tapping out a tune on the dashboard throughout their journey; a Morse code operator would have read distress into his every dot-dot-dot. Chris had constantly checked through the large sports bag they had brought along to carry their tools and eventually the loot; hiding the real reason for his unease under the cover of more petty concerns; had they remembered the cable cutters?
Mark worked quickly; his fingers gradually becoming more flexible as the diesel generator had cranked into full power. The generator provided a soothing purr which almost blocked out Chris’s nervous attempts at a tuneless whistle. Satisfied that his system was working, Mark stepped back outside, pulling his heavy black fleece around him for warmth. He retrieved a woollen hat and gloves from the pocket and took a quick look at himself in the van’s wing-mirror. Staring back at him were the hollow eyes of his father; he almost fell backwards in shock. He’d always known that he was the spit of his father, but now, wearing the same kind of outfit that his father had always worn on the building site, he resembled his father’s avenging ghost. He forced himself to remember why he was doing this foul deed; perhaps his father, who had always frowned upon Mark’s passivity, would finally admire his new-found determination to make things happen.
Fleeting looks passed between the three of them; their buccaneering spirit was now completely gone, replaced by apprehension. Only Chris looked remotely composed. Even in his standard black clothes, he looked stylish. Instead of a fleece covering black overalls, Chris had chosen a black Barbour jacket and dark blue jeans; he looked like some city slicker going for a stroll in the country. Danny, who didn’t actually have to go to site, was dressed as though he was on an Arctic mission, complete with a fur-lined hood to his voluminous coat, and what looked like snow boots. He was still twitching; couldn’t keep still.
Mark was sure that, of the three, he would look the most anxious: as though he was about to pass out. He tried to give himself comfort in the fact that they had gone over every detail of what they were going to do. He took a quick look at his watch and nodded over at Danny. The moment of truth was about to arrive and the clock was ticking…
The operation was meticulously planned; Chris and Mark knew the exact number of paces they would have to make from where they had left their van under cover of heavy foliage to their entrance point to the site. What they hadn’t anticipated from the plans they had so carefully studied, was the fact that the weather conditions had turned the surrounding woodland into an almost impenetrable bog. The river, which had powered the old paper mill which was previously on the Edison Printers’ site, had burst its banks due to three days of precipitate rainfall. Chris and Mark cursed their luck as they were forced to battle through ankle deep mud and detritus from the river.
Even without the handicap of a leg that was not quite right, Mark would have found the going difficult. The wet and the cold seemed to exacerbate the slight, almost imperceptible limp that he usually tried so hard to cover up. He found himself lurching through the undergrowth, stumbling over uprooted trees and creaking through the overhanging branches. It was like the leg wasn’t part of him and refused to obey his brain’s commands. Perhaps some dummy signal had been implanted somewhere.
The land started to rise up from the river’s gorge and onto the flat land on which Edison’s Printers was built. The ground was saturated and sucked at Mark’s boots with every forced step. It felt as though something was trying to stop him from doing what he was going to do. At the top of the slope Chris started to get frustrated with waiting for Mark. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he hissed into the darkness. ‘We’ve not got time to piss about like this. Come on; hurry up.’
‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ muttered Mark, breathing heavily from the effort that it took him to climb the slippery bank. Chris offered him a hand to pull him to the top but Mark shook his head. He had to prove that he was not a liability. All he needed to do was grab onto the trunk of a tree and he’d be able to lever himself upwards. He reached out and felt his gloves touch on the tree’s solidity.
Just drag yourself up there.
Mark felt his leg whine in complaint as he tried to drag himself forward. He also felt the ground underneath him start to slip away, back to the river from whence it came.
‘Chris!’ he yelped, but too late, he was already falling. He felt his bad leg buckle underneath him. He felt his ankle connect with something as he fell backwards. He felt the weight of his own body wrench himself free from whatever it was; a root or an old trap. His ankle twisted. He felt himself slipping down the bank.
Then he felt the reassuring strength of Chris Parker’s hands as they grasped for his fleece. He felt himself being tugged upright again. He felt his ankle start to give way, but Chris’s look of steely determination stopped him from crying out.
‘You all right, Mark?’ asked Chris, not sounding overly concerned.
Mark grimaced: ‘Let’s just get on with it.’
Unfortunately, his hard-man act was undermined by the fact that a loud crack as a branch ripped away from one of the trees which was buckling in the wind. Mark dropped the sports bag in alarm. He thought the sound was gunfire; the police already on their trail before they had even broken in to Edison’s Printers.
Chris picked the bag up for him from where it had landed in a thick bush and pointed. Through the diminishing tree cover, they could see the outline of the first of the buildings, and closer, the ominous line of the perimeter fence.
By the time they began their approach to the perimeter fencing, Chris and Mark were both covered from head to toe in a thick coating of mud. They took a moment to try and brush themselves down and Mark regarded the fence. It was approximately three metres in height and was tipped with a thick mesh of barbed wire. Concrete posts had been drive
n into the ground every ten metres or so, to reinforce the strength of the fence to a vehicular attack, and a sensitive anti-intruder system had been installed to catch those on foot.
‘Good fencing this,’ said Mark. He made as though to run his hand over the chain links which arranged in a pattern of tight squares. Chris pulled his arm back and gave him a warning look; a sinister light danced in his eyes.
‘Whoah there; we don’t care how good the system is or that you used to come out to maintain it on a six-monthly basis. All we care about is getting past it.’
Mark knew all about the angles which Edison’s Printers had covered. The purpose of any perimeter intruder detection system was to keep people from getting in, or out of a site without authority or away from permitted routes. The new technology installed by EyeSpy enabled the entire boundary of the site to be monitored and the precise location of any activity, be it the cutting the chain links; an attempted intrusion; or anyone climbing over the fence, could be discovered very rapidly. The system worked by utilising a cable - securely wrapped into the chain link - which could detect vibrations from any interference. The cable then transmitted its data back to a central monitoring point; in the case of Edison’s Printers, the MMC.
Mark admired the capability of the intelligent technology; it could determine independently whether the vibrations sensed were due to the wind or due to an attempted intrusion, and then act accordingly. But such reliance on the technological ‘eye’ can bring problems, and Mark planned to exploit the lack of a real, human eye watching him as he pulled the cable shears out of his sports bag.
Time stood still as Mark drove the sharp edge of the shears through the thick cable. He could hear the uneven breath of Chris close by, but didn’t look up. This was the moment of truth; the tectonic collision which was the Intertel Shift. The tidal wave of digital world engulfing the dying analogue world; reverberations would be felt throughout the rest of their lives.
As the big bang of the Intertel Shift occurred, Mark’s shears snapped through the final strand of the cable, and he held his breath… He counted to ten in his head, took a swift glance at Chris and then placed the first of his steel toe caps within the narrow chain links of the fence.
There was no way of knowing whether their plan had worked.
Static
Jim Hunter almost choked on his scalding tea; the urn which had been installed in the Security Lodge somehow contrived to produce water which was hotter than boiling. He replaced the mug on the desk rather forcefully, causing an eruption of the mug’s molten contents to be spilled; Jim could imagine the liquid burning through the cold steel surface.
He was always spilling things these days; it was surely the onset of old age, the beginning of the end; the loss of his faculties. He was losing that sharpness of mind which had so defined him as a detective… Nevertheless, something had set those sensitive antennae of his twitching that night; they had picked up the faint signal of something about to happen.
Wearily, Jim wiped away the spillage with his newspaper; he wasn’t supposed to be reading anyway. He crumpled up the sodden parchment and deposited it into the bin below his desk, his hand involuntarily creeping past the panic button; committing its exact location to sensory memory.
Jim hadn’t been expecting to be working that night, but had been called in by Charlie Wade early that morning. Charlie had told him a scare story about something called the Intertel Shift, which he’d heard talk about at his Golf Club. Jim, a natural worrier, had immediately called the EyeSpy Security salesman, Danny Morris, to get a full explanation, however had been met by the eternal middle C tone which indicated that the line was dead.
A familiar crackle and hiss of suspicion had begun to burn in the back of Jim Hunter’s head; something was not right. His unease was heightened by the fact that EyeSpy’s elusive Managing Director, Martin Thomas, had finally returned one of Jim’s numerous calls, and had seemed extremely evasive in his answers; indeed, Jim thought, the man clearly did not even want to talk about what had happened to Danny Morris.
Jim was concerned. Although Martin Thomas’s explanation of the Intertel Shift made it sound like a lot of panic about nothing - ‘a bit like the Millennium Bug’ - he had read caginess in the man’s voice. There was something Martin Thomas had not told him. Jim had encountered similar slipperiness so many times before; usually in a Police Station Interview Room. He preferred to conduct such interviews face-to face, which allowed him to read the person’s unconscious betrayals of the reality behind their lies. Perhaps it would be a scratch of the nose, or maybe a shifty, almost imperceptible upwards glance. Martin Thomas, however, had said that there was no way that he could comply with Jim’s request for him to come down to site and explain things further, and Jim no longer had the policeman’s power to make things happen.
A fourteen hour shift was Jim Hunter’s reward for his dedication. The way Jim figured it, this was his site and he couldn’t let anything happen there on his watch; he’d never be able to get another job, or live down the embarrassment when ex-police colleagues found out. An obsessive compulsion forced Jim to join his Deputy, Callum Burr, on the night shift. It was a dedication to the job which drew in feelings of loyalty to his colleagues; he could never forgive himself if anything happened to Callum which he could have averted by simply being there; but also wrapped up in the complicated parcel of Jim’s feelings was a complete inability to let go of control.
Perhaps that was why Callum Burr was in such a bad mood; he was not happy that he was being accompanied on that night’s shift. The Security Lodge was not designed for two people, especially when one was giving off such obvious signals of irritation. Callum Burr was a big man, and Jim was wedged in behind the desk, his elbows drowning in Burr’s flabby stomach. Burr’s snacking on the job had caused his weight to balloon; where once he had the regular fitness regime of the army to burn off the excess calories, he now channelled his innate aggression into eating.
‘Sure you don’t want to go home, boss?’ he asked, tucking into one of those supposedly low-fat chocolate bars. Evidently Burr believed that because they were low-fat, he could eat six times as many as any normal person. ‘Nothing going on here and we’re supposed to be getting busier next week; we’ll both be on longer hours then…’
‘I’m sure,’ said Hunter, trying to ignore the fact that Burr’s eyes were boring into the side of his head as though he was trying to cast a spell on him. Hunter was already aware that Burr had the short temper so often associated with red-haired people, and despite his weight, was still a very fit man. He had been to see him play rugby for a local ex-forces team and Burr was literally a force of nature; riding roughshod over his less potent opponents. He was of Scots descent, Jim had learned, and in more private moments, Jim had wondered whether Burr had been born of a clan of Highland Cattle. It paid to be careful when handling Highland Cattle. They were a law unto themselves.
‘Well, my legs have been giving me gip; I’ll need to put them up here,’ said Burr, trying Hunter’s patience still further. He watched as the vast size thirteen boots of Callum Burr landed on the top of the desk, and his chair groaned under his dead weight.
Hunter chose to say nothing. He chose the kid-gloves approach. He remembered something an old colleague once told him about his partner. The two of them had spent so much time cramped together in confined spaces on stake-outs that eventually they’d grown to hate each other more than the criminals they were supposed to be watching. ‘When it came to the end,’ the man told him, ‘and I couldn’t even stand the way that he stirred his tea and he couldn’t stand the way that I breathed, we knew that it was for the best to put in transfer requests.’
It was becoming a trial like that for Hunter and Burr. Jim noted that the big man had barely once looked up from his crossword to study the images on the monitors. Why couldn’t Hunter share his colleague’s complacency? Instead he remained on edge. Perhaps he was showing early symptoms of policeman’s paranoia; the fabled c
ondition of all retired officers. It involved a mistrust of anything and everyone; the reading impossible signals from the tiniest of signs. He needed to escape this neurotic having to check or else he would never be able to relax.
It was just when Jim Hunter was contemplating making a second cup of tea that the first of the blips on the monitors occurred. It was barely noticeable, but all the same, it was there. He briefly glanced at the near-somnambulant Callum Burr, but saw no hint of recognition in the man’s gnarled, red face. Jim looked back at the monitors, contemplating adjusting the settings, but then sat back and watched as a fuzzy line descended the second screen, followed by a brief flash of static, and then it was back to normal.
He had to make the call; was this simply a result of the Intertel Shift, or was there something more serious at play?
Going over the Top
Climbing the three metre high fence was much harder than expected, what with the threat of being caught constantly snapping at their heels as if it was a guard-dog. Chris tried to scale the fence far too quickly: a surge of adrenalin coursing through his veins. He missed his footing and slid right back down again, a stray wire ripping straight through his sodden, heavy Barbour coat, clearly now not the right choice of clothing.
Mark had been more careful on his ascent, but the wire mesh holes were far too small to fit his broad boots into properly, and he too had ended up cut to shreds by the barbed wire at the summit as he struggled to lift the bulky sports bag over. The pain hardly registered, though, and they dropped over to the other side far more stealthily. Still there was no sign that they had been seen; no sirens and no searching beam from the panopticon.