Firewall

by Andy McNab

  Once at the top of the track, I stopped, looked, and listened.

  Nothing. It would take another fifteen minutes for my eyes to adapt to the lack of light. Then, with any luck, I'd be able to see a little more of the treeline than just a wall of black.

  I turned into the track and started slowly down it. A lot of vehicles had obviously been up and down; there was no snow in the ruts on either side of the small central mound, just compacted ice. The trees were hard up against the edge of the track.

  Three feet in front of me was pitch-black, but I knew it wouldn't be like that for long once my night vision kicked in. I moved like a tightrope walker along the rut, to cut down ground sign. The last thing I wanted was to slip and fall in the snow at the side of the track, leaving evidence that even a five-year-old would pick up.

  After about five minutes I began to see weak, intermittent light ahead in the direction of the target. The beams flashed up into the sky or straight at me, disappeared for a while, then bounced toward me again.

  I knew exactly what they were: vehicle lights, and they were coming my way.

  I couldn't even hear the engine yet, so it would be impossible for them to see me. The lights continued to flash against the trees. There was nothing I could do without leaving sign but dive out of the way.

  The rumble of the engine reached me and brighter beams of light swept the area around. I faced the drift at the trackside, hopefully aiming between two trees, rocked back to try to get some sort of momentum, then leaped. I managed to clear the first few feet of snow, rolling like a high jumper, and landed like a bag of shit. The snow lay over solid granite and I hit it hard, knocking the wind out of my lungs.

  I started to crawl like an animal, trying to burrow under the branches.

  The vehicle was getting closer.

  Still facing away from the road, I dug myself in and waited in the freezing snow, listening as it closed in on me. The transmission was in low ratio, suggesting a 4x4.

  It finally drew parallel with me, its wheels crunching into fresh snow on the side of the track as it was steered off line. Without hesitation, it kept on going.

  I raised myself slowly onto my knees, keeping my right eye closed: At least that way I would save 50 percent of what night vision I had. The smell of diesel hung in the air. The driveway was about fifteen or twenty feet away from me and it was a 4x4 for sure, but I couldn't make out what type or how many were inside. All I could see was a massive ball of white light in the front, and a red one at the rear, moving slowly along the tree tunnel, followed by a cloud of diesel fumes.

  I watched and listened as the light died. They must have reached the top of the track, because I heard revving and the transmission ratios change, then the noise disappeared completely.

  Crawling on my hands and knees to avoid the branches, I made my way back to my impact site, stood up, put one foot forward and launched myself over the bank again. My right shin connected painfully with the central mound, and the combination of stones and hard ice did its work on me big time. I lay on my back in one of the ruts, holding my shin, rocking, taking the pain and thinking of the money.

  After a minute of feeling sorry for myself, I got up and checked that the snow on the side of the track was still untouched. My dive had been Olympic, but the pain had been worth it. I was covered from head to toe in snow, like a bad skier. Brushing as much of it off me as I could, I readjusted my hat and carried on down the track, walking the tightrope with a bit of a hobble now.

  After about a half a mile, my night vision fully returned. I also started to hear the low, continuous rumble of what sounded like a generator.

  What had been concerning me most all along was, How many bayonets? How many were going to fight if I was compromised and couldn't run away? If there were, say, four people in the house, two of them might be Tom-type characters who'd played Quake for years but had never held a gun, but the other two could be hoods who had, and who'd go for it.

  They were the bayonets, male or female. The term went back to the First World War, when it wasn't the whole of an enemy battalion of 1,200 that you had to worry about, it was the 800 fighting men. The remaining 400 cooks and bottle-washers didn't matter. I didn't know how many I'd be up against, and Liv couldn't tell me. It was quite worrying. Getting to the house to discover there was a Hoods '% Us convention going on in the front room would not make for a good day out.

  The track went gently downhill and I got closer to the noise. It began to sound quite substantial; if they were running lots of machinery they would need more juice than the trickle the local substation would give them. To check if they were on the electrical supply I tried to look above me for power lines, but it was too dark to see anything.

  The track began to curve. As I rounded a gentle right-hand bend the ground started to open up on either side of me. The treeline here wasn't so close to the track. I could see two dim lights directly ahead, maybe one hundred yards away.

  Now that I was in line with the house the rumble of the generator was louder still, channeled toward me by the trees. Cupping my hand round my wrist, I pressed the backlight on Baby G. It was just after 4:45.

  Edging forward, still in the rut, I kept looking for places to dive if the vehicle came back or there was some other kind of drama-such as coming across the Maliskia on the same sort of outing. I was a bit pissed this was the only approach route available to me, but any other would leave sign.

  Every five or six paces I stopped, looked, and listened.

  The trees stopped about fifteen feet from a fence that I could now clearly see in front of me, leaving an empty area running left and right of the track, about two or three feet deep in snow. A large set of double gates was directly ahead. Keeping in the rut, I moved up close. It was made of the same material as the fencing: diamond shaped latticework pressed out of quarter-inch steel sheeting; the sort you'd see in the windows of liquor stores or the protected kiosks of twenty-four-hour shops.

  A large chain fed through both gates and was secured with a heavy steel high-security padlock-a pain in the ass to decode and do up again; it wasn't the type that just snapped into position.

  As I lay along the rut, I could feel the hardness of the ice beneath me and knew the cold would start attacking me long before the Maliskia did. I wasn't worried about them at the moment, or the players in the house. Fuck 'em. At such short notice there was no other way to recce this place.

  The fence looked about forty-five feet high, and was made up of maybe three sections of latticework, bolted together and supported by spaced steel poles about a foot in diameter. The house was beyond the fence, about forty yards away. There were no Christmas decorations in this one, just the two lights. One came from a stained-glass panel that I thought was the top half of a door, set back on a deck. The other was coming from a window further to the left.

  I couldn't see that much detail, but the house seemed quite large and old. It had a chateau-style tower on the far right-hand side, with a Russian onion-shaped dome that I could just see silhouetted against the night sky. I remembered Liv on the way to Helsinki saying that the Russians controlled Finland until Lenin gave it independence in 1920.

  The old clashed dramatically with the modern: To the left of the house were five satellite dishes, massive things at least ten feet across and set into the ground, looking like something an American would have had in his yard in the early eighties, the sort that picked up 500 channels telling him what the weather was like in Mongolia but still couldn't give him the local news. This was a proper little Microsoft HQ. I could clearly see their dark mesh dishes looking upward, each in a different direction or elevation, and they all looked as if the snow had been dug away from the base and scraped off the dish.

  As I lay there, chin on forearms, taking in as much information about the target as I could, I saw why the bases were dug out: All of a sudden there was a high-pitched whine that drowned out the noise of the generator, and one of the dishes started to swivel. Maybe the
y were trying to catch the Japanese repeats of Friends. Or maybe they were up and running already?

  It seemed a strange location for a setup like this. Maybe these people were as illegal as Val? I started to wonder, but soon gave myself a good mental slapping. Who cared? I was here for Kelly, to get this job done and paid for before the dollar exchange rate took another tumble.

  Getting back to the real world, it seemed that concealment was their biggest weapon. The lattice fence was as high tech as they got on the security front, apart from the sterile area between it and the treeline. That not only stopped anyone climbing a tree to get in, but also meant they could look out of their windows in the morning while cleaning their teeth and see at once if people like me had been lurking about.

  I lay in the rut, working out how to get in based on the little information I had. The numbing cold ate through my clothes and the snow that had found its way down my neck when I fell started to attack my back. My toes were beginning to freeze and my nose was running. I couldn't make any noise by clearing it into the snow, so had to be content with wiping it on my icy-cold glove.

  There was a sound behind me. I cocked my head so my right ear was pointing back toward the track. The vehicle was returning. No time to think about it, I just got up and ran back to the nearest of my dive points. To clear the bank and the trees, which were slightly off the track, before the headlights rounded the bend, I had to throw myself about three feet up and five feet over, just to get near the treeline's branches. I went for it, not quite making the five feet and hitting rock again. It probably hurt, but I wouldn't feel it until later; adrenalin was doing its job, fighting the pain.

  Plowing through the snow, trying to get under the branches once more, I listened as the wagon got closer. The vehicle noise suddenly increased as it rounded the bend.

  I swiveled round on my hands and knees, slowly lifting my head, and tried to get into a position from where I could see the track. I didn't bother to wipe the snow off my face in case the movement was detected.

  A moment later the 4x4 passed, its headlights sweeping across the gates, the rear lights turning the snow behind them bright red.

  My face was stinging, but now wasn't the time to deal with it. I needed to take in anything from what the occupants of the 4x4 were going to do to what the front and rear lights revealed to me about the surroundings. Fuck the night vision now.

  The vehicle stopped just short of the gate and the red glow brightened as the brakes engaged and the engine idled.

  Pulling two branches apart with my hands, I saw the right-hand passenger door open and the interior light come on. It was two up two people aboard and a very padded body climbed out and started to move toward the gates.

  The clatter of the chain was momentarily louder than the engine noise.

  It was left dangling as both gates were pushed inward, creaking and rattling, just enough to let the vehicle pass.

  The wagon inched forward, its headlights revealing that the snow beyond the gates and inside the target was full of ground sign, feet and tires. Just as importantly, no alarms or trips appeared to have been turned off before entry.

  The headlights splashed across the house, and without the fence in my way I had a clear view. The building was faced with faded red or brown painted wooden slats and closed shutters on all the windows. The dim light on the left that I'd noticed earlier was escaping from a few missing slats in one of the shutters.

  The chain rattled again, but I wasn't paying much attention to the gate-closer any longer. It was more important that I saw what was being lit up, looking rather than thinking: My brain would absorb all the information and I'd work out later what I had seen.

  I kept my eyes on the 4x4's headlights as they swung to the right. A covered deck ran along the right half of the house.

  The gate loser came back into view as the 4x4 rolled to a stop parallel with the deck railings. I could hear the rustling of a nylon jacket and the crunch of snow boots as the brake lights went off and the engine and headlights died. I heard a man's voice as the passenger shouted something I couldn't understand to the driver as he was pushing open his vehicle door.

  My nose was stinging and dripping but I couldn't risk missing a thing as the interior light came on and the driver barked a reply. The gate man carried on past the 4x4 and onto the deck as the driver leaned into the passenger foot well and lifted out some flat boxes and a small bag.

  The pair moved together, stamping their feet on the wooden floor of the deck to clear them of snow.

  The driver opened the front door of the house with a key. Light spilled out and I caught a brief glimpse of a hallway that looked invitingly warm and bright before they disappeared into the house.

  I stayed still, smearing the contents of my nose slowly into my gloves before wiping them on a tree branch, visualizing my entry first getting to the house, then into it. After that I'd have to play it by ear. I didn't even know which room the computers were in. So what was new? I seemed to have spent my life breaking into houses, offices, and homes, stealing, bugging, and planting stuff to incriminate people, all with hardly any information, no backup if it went wrong and no recognition for a job well done. The best I ever got was a "What took you so long?"

  I had to assume that the fifteen-foot sterile area from treeline to fence ran all round the house; even if I could fight my way through the trees and cover up any tracks, there simply wasn't enough time to check. Fuck it, it was too cold anyway.

  Moving forward to my splash point, I dived out again, this time taking the hit on my knees. I recovered on my back in the wheel rut for a while, just long enough for my shoulder to start reminding me that I'd taken a fall on some rocks on the way in. So adrenalin wasn't entirely effective as a means of pain relief. When I'd got my breath back, I rolled over and got up, keeping my eyes on target for that last look about.

  There was one more thing to be done. Going back to the gate, I took my glove off and very quickly touched the metal lattice, then leaned over to the left and did the same to the fence. Only then did I turn round and start hobbling back up the driveway, waiting for my knees to warm up so I could stop walking like an old man.

  Once I'd rounded the bend, I pushed my left nostril closed and cleared my right, then changed sides. It felt a lot better.

  Twenty minutes later I was scraping ice off the Saab's windshield.

  Moments after that I was heading back toward Helsinki, the heater blasting away ready to bust on hot hot hot.

  The driveway to the lead house came into sight after just under four and a half hours. I'd stopped at an unmanned gas station on the way, just two pumps and a pay machine between them. It was in the middle of nowhere and the bright white light burning down from the canopy made it look like a UFO landing site. You just placed your cash or credit card in the slot, selected fuel type and off you went. I wondered how quickly it would have been trashed and robbed if this was the U.K. I took the rest of the drive slowly, thinking things through, compiling a mental checklist of all the kit I'd need to make entry.

  Pulling up outside the big glass shutters, gagging for a coffee and something to eat, I realized I didn't have a key. There was nothing to do but hit the horn. A few seconds later a light came on and Liv appeared at the door. Thunderbird 3's hangar door opened and I drove in. Before I'd even switched the engine off she was making a drinking sign. I nodded and gave her a thumbs up, and she went back upstairs.

  By the time I joined her she was in the kitchen and I could smell coffee.

  "So, Nick," she called out as I closed the stairway door, "will you be able to get in?"

  "No problem. Where's Tom?"

  "He's working." She came round the kitchen door, indicating the other side of the house with a tilt of her head. "He's broken through the firewall, as I hoped." She said it without any excitement, and noticed my surprise. "You still have to get Tom into the house, Nick. Sit, I'll get the coffee."

  I did, taking off my jacket and checking Baby G. It
was just before midnight. I'd see Tom later; there were more important things to be dealt with first. I called out, "You'll need a pen and some paper."

  She came back in with the coffee tray and writing materials, still dressed in jeans and a sweater. She sat on the sofa opposite mine and poured two mugs.

  I picked one up. Black would do fine; what I needed was an instant wakeup after hours of car heating. "I'll run through a list of equipment with you," I said between sips. "I'm going to need quite a lot of stuff."

  She picked up the pen and pad and wrote as I dictated. She was surprised by my request for six-inch nails 150mm once she had converted them plus a three-foot length of 2x4 wood, which became a one-meter length of 100 x 50mm.

  "Why do you need this, Nick? Aren't lock picks and electronic gadgetry more the sort of thing?"

  "Can you get me some?"

  She smiled and shook her head.

  "That's why I want the electric toothbrush. Don't worry, I'll show you what it's for tomorrow. I'll also need the weather forecast, by the way, for a twenty-four-hour period starting at 9 A.M."

  I liked not telling her what these things were for. At last she was entering my world, things I knew about. There was one last item. "I'd also like a weapon a pistol, preferably silenced or suppressed."

  She looked genuinely taken aback. "Why?"

  I thought it was obvious. "Better to have it and not need it than the other way round."

  "Have you any idea of the weapons laws in this country?"

  I reminded her what my Russian friends and I had been doing to her Russian friends only a week earlier at the Intercontinental.

  It didn't work. "I'm sorry, Nick, I wouldn't get you one even if I could. I have nothing to do with that sort of thing. Besides, you were employed precisely because Valentin wanted finesse."

  The last time I'd gone on a job unarmed I'd ended up shot.