Authors: Robert Muchamore
JUNE 2005
It was a fine day and this part of Cambridge had the whiff of serious money. The immaculate lawns were
coiffured
by professional gardeners and James drooled over the expensive lumps of German metal parked on the driveways. He was walking with
Shakeel
and both boys felt self-conscious in the summer uniform of Trinity school. It consisted of a white shirt, a tie, grey trousers with orange piping, an orange and grey blazer and matching felt cap.
‘I’m telling you,’ James moaned, ‘even if you sat down and tried
really
hard, I don’t think you could come up with a way to make this uniform look any dumber.’
‘I
dunno
, James. Maybe we could have partridge feathers sticking out of the hats or something.’
‘And these trousers were meant for
Callum’s
skinny butt. They’re killing my balls.’
Shak couldn’t help seeing the funny side of James’ discomfort. ‘You can’t blame
Callum
for pulling out of the mission at the last minute. It’s that stomach bug that’s going around campus.’
James nodded. ‘I had it last week. I was barely off the bog for two whole days.’
Shak looked at his watch for the millionth time. ‘We need to up the pace.’
‘What’s the big deal?’ James asked.
‘This isn’t some London comprehensive full up with scummy little Arsenal fans like you,’
Shak
explained. ‘Trinity is one of the top fee-paying schools in the country and the pupils aren’t allowed to wander around the corridors whenever it suits them. Our arrival’s got to coincide with the changeover between third and fourth periods, when there’s hundreds of other kids moving around.’
James nodded. ‘Gotcha.’
Shak looked at his watch for the millionth and first time as they cut into a cobbled alleyway that was barely wide enough for a single car.
‘Come
on
, James.’
‘I’m trying,’ James said. ‘But I’m seriously gonna rip the arse out of these trousers if I’m not careful.’
Once they’d cut between two large houses, the alleyway opened out into a run-down park with knee-high grass and a set of tangled swings. To the boys’ left stood a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, behind which lay the grounds of Trinity Day. The main gates were carefully monitored during school hours, so this was their only way in.
Shak wandered through the long grass next to the fence, placing his shoe carefully to avoid
turds
and litter, as he searched for an entry point made by an MI5 operative the previous night. He found the flap cut in the wire behind the trunk of a large tree.
Shak
lifted it, doffed his cap and attempted a snooty accent. ‘After you James, my good man.’
James fed his backpack and hat through the gap, before sliding under. He stood with his back against the tree and brushed dirt off his uniform, while
Shak
followed.
‘All set?’ James asked, as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. It weighed a ton and the equipment inside clattered around.
‘Cap,’
Shak
reminded him.
James let out a little gasp as he leaned forward and picked the cap out of the grass. A claxon sounded inside the school building a couple of hundred metres away, indicating a lesson change.
‘OK, let’s shift,’
Shak
said.
The boys broke out from behind the tree and began jogging across a rugby pitch towards the school building. As they did, they noticed a groundskeeper striding purposefully towards them from the opposite end of the field.
‘You two,’ he bellowed.
Because James had been pulled on to the mission at the last minute to replace
Callum
, he’d only had time to skim through the mission briefing. He looked uneasily at
Shak
for guidance.
‘Don’t sweat it,’
Shak
whispered. ‘I’ve got it covered.’
The groundskeeper intercepted the boys near a set of rugby posts. He was a fit looking fellow with thinning grey hair, dressed in workman’s boots and a grubby overall.
‘Exactly
what
do you think you’re doing out here?’ he demanded pompously.
‘I was reading under the tree at lunchtime,’
Shak
explained, pointing backwards with his thumb. ‘I left my cap behind.’
‘You know the rules of the school, don’t you?’
Shak and James both looked confused.
‘Don’t try playing the fool with me, you
know
as well as I do. If you’re not attending a lesson, a match, or an official practice, you do not set foot on the games pitches because it causes unnecessary wear and tear.’
‘Yes,’
Shak
nodded. ‘Sorry, sir. I was in a hurry to get to my lesson, that’s all.’
‘Sorry,’ James added. ‘But it’s not like the pitches are muddy or anything. We’re not really tearing them up.’
The groundskeeper took James’ comment as a threat to his authority. He swooped down and showered James with spit as he spoke. ‘I make the rules here, young man.
You
don’t decide when you can and can’t set foot on
my
pitches. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ James said.
‘What’s your name and house?’
‘Joseph Mail, King Henry House,’ James lied, recalling one of the few elements of his background story he’d managed to remember from the mission briefing.
‘Faisal
Asmal
, same house,’
Shak
said.
‘Right,’ the groundskeeper said, bouncing smugly on the balls of his feet. ‘I’ll be reporting both of you to your housemaster and I expect your cheek will have earned you both a detention. Now, you’d better get yourselves to your next lesson.’
‘Why’d you answer back?’
Shak
asked irritably, as the boys walked towards the back entrance of the school.
‘I know I shouldn’t have,’ James said, raising his palms defensively. ‘But he was so full of himself.’
They passed through a set of double doors into the main school building, then up a short flight of steps and into the busy thoroughfare that ran the length of the ground floor. There was plenty of noise, but the Trinity boys walked purposefully, nodding politely to the teachers standing in the doorways as they entered their classrooms.
‘What a bunch of geeks,’ James whispered. ‘I bet these dudes don’t even fart.’
Shak explained the situation as they headed up the stairs to the second floor. ‘Every kid has to pass special exams and an interview to get into Trinity. There’s always a humungous waiting list, so they can afford to boot out anyone who doesn’t toe the line.’
‘Bet I wouldn’t last long,’ James grinned.
By the time they reached the second floor, most kids had found their way to lessons and the classroom doors had been pulled shut.
Shak
pulled a lock gun from the pocket of his blazer as they passed by a couple of classroom doors. He stopped at the door of an office with a nameplate on it:
Dr George Stein BSc, PhD, Head of Economics and Politics
.
Shak pushed the tip of the lock gun into the keyhole. James stood close by, blocking the view of a bunch of kids waiting outside a classroom fifteen metres away.
The lock had a simple single-lever mechanism, meaning
Shak
only had to give the lock gun a brief wiggle and pull on the trigger to open the door. The pair hurriedly stepped into the office and put the latch down so that nobody could burst in on them, even with a key.
‘Stein should be teaching two floors up,’
Shak
said. ‘We’ve got until the next lesson change in thirty-six minutes; let’s get to work.’
While
Shak
stepped behind Stein’s desk and dropped the Venetian blind, James surveyed the office. It contained nothing exciting: basic desk and chairs, two filing cabinets and a coat rack.
Shak
used the lock gun to undo the metal cabinets, then began sifting through the files. He was looking for any papers relating to George Stein’s personal life, especially anything to do with his campaigning for environmentalist groups.
James sat at the desk and switched on Stein’s PC. While the computer booted up, he pulled a miniature JVC notebook from his backpack and ran a network lead between the two computers. Stein’s machine demanded a password, but James wasn’t flustered. He started up a suite of hacking tools on his computer and used it to run system diagnostics on Stein’s machine.
Once the software had gleaned basic information about Stein’s hard drive and operating system, James opened another module of the hacking software, which allowed him to view all of Stein’s files.
‘Candy from a baby,’ James smiled confidently.
Now he could see the files, James clicked the
Clone
icon and the notebook began copying the entire contents of Stein’s PC on to its hard drive.
‘How much data’s he got?’
Shak
asked, as he pulled out the second drawer of the cabinet.
‘Eight-point-two gigabytes. The progress bar says it’ll take six minutes to copy it all across.’
While the computers went about their business, James shifted some papers and stood on the desk. He reached up and pulled out the metal reflector covering the ceiling-mounted light fitting. The resulting cloud of dust tickled his nostrils as he studied the line of fluorescent tubes above his head.
‘Cut them off,
Shak
.’
Shak leaned across and flipped the light switch. James reached into the fitting and pulled the starter plug from one of the fluorescent tubes before jumping down. He rummaged briefly inside his rucksack, emerging with an apparently identical plastic fitting. But whereas the starter unit James had removed cost less than a pound, the replacement cost three thousand. It was a listening device, consisting of a pinhead-sized microphone, a transmitter and a chip that could store five hours of sound.
Light fittings are perfect for locating listening devices. First because they’re usually located in open space high above a room, where it’s easy to pick up sound. Second because the device can easily be wired up to source electricity from the mains.
As James went up at full stretch to replace the grille, he heard the ripping noise he’d been dreading all morning. His trousers had cracked open around the crotch seam, revealing a garish set of boxers.
Shak couldn’t help smiling as he flipped the lights back on. ‘Nice shorts, J.’
‘Man, that feels
good
,’ James gasped. ‘I might be able to have children after all. What’s next?’
‘Keys,’
Shak
reminded him.
‘Assuming he’s left them in here,’ James said, as he walked towards the jacket hanging up by the door.
He fished a bunch of keys from Stein’s pocket, then grabbed a packet of wax tablets from his rucksack. Meanwhile,
Shak
had found some interesting documents in one of the filing cabinets and was copying the pages with a handheld scanner.
The wax tablets separated into two biscuit-sized pieces. James sandwiched each of Stein’s keys between a tablet, creating impressions that could be used to make duplicates. By the time James had worked his way through the whole bunch, the laptop had chimed, indicating that it had finished cloning.
James sat back in front of the laptop and used the hacking suite to install spyware on Stein’s machine. The spyware program would record every keystroke Stein typed and then transmit it covertly over the Internet to the MI5 monitoring station at
Caversham
.
Shak had finished rummaging through the filing cabinets. He grabbed a small metal box out of his backpack. It was held together with bits of insulating tape and looked like the creation of a mad professor. In fact, it had been built specifically to capture and replicate the radio signal from the
plipper
that worked Stein’s car alarm.
Shak turned the device on by taping a wire to the top of an AA battery. He flipped a switch on the front of the box to the receive position and asked James to press the
plipper
on Stein’s car key. It took a couple of attempts before a green LED on the front of the gadget flickered, indicating that the signal had been successfully recorded.
‘Is that everything?’ James asked.
Shak nodded as he checked the time. ‘In the bag with six minutes to spare.’
James and
Shak
did a final check, making sure they’d picked up their equipment and repositioned everything exactly the way they’d found it. When the claxon sounded for the lesson change, the boys darted outside and began heading down to the ground floor. James was conscious of the growing split in his trousers, but none of the Trinity pupils seemed to notice.
At the main entrance of the school building the boys stepped outdoors and turned left, heading down a gentle ramp towards a recently built sports complex that had a teachers’ car park beneath it.