5
Charlie knelt on the towel in front of the safe, the bag to his right, and carefully unrolled the fibre-optic viewing device from a strip of hotel towel. Every item in the bag had been wrapped to prevent noise or damage.
I fired up the camcorder and went over to Baz’s desk, filming everything on the top first, then the positions of individual drawers. There were about ten of them each side, designed to hold a thin file or a selection of pens. Some were slightly open, some closed; some pushed further in than they should have been.
I lifted the telephone, but there was nothing taped underneath. There was a small wooden box beside it, loaded with pens, pencils, elastic bands and paper clips. No joy there, either.
I checked for telltales on each drawer, and went through them one by one. I found sheet after sheet of paper in Paperclip and Russian, but no key to the safe, or anything scribbled down that resembled a combination.
I looked over at Charlie. Torch clenched between his ski-mask-clad teeth, fibre optic inside the keyway, he was manipulating the controls like a surgeon performing arthroscopy – except that he was doing it on his hands and knees, with his arse in the air. He was attacking the day lock first, in case it was the only one being used.
It was decision time. Nothing had turned up on this sweep, and I could spend all night searching this place for the key or any hint of a combination, and the more I looked, the more I would disrupt the area. I called it a day and went and knelt down on the towel, waiting until Charlie was ready to speak to me.
It was as quiet as Tengiz’s grave now – quieter, probably, if the knitting circle were still gobbing off right next door to it. The only sounds were the old disco-dancer’s manic breathing and the distant ticking of the clock, and once or twice a vehicle in the distance.
He finally removed the fibre optic and leaned towards me. I got my mouth into his ear. ‘How long do you reckon?’
He rolled the fibre optic into its piece of towel, and replaced it in the satchel.
That was a good sign; you never leave anything out that you’re not using; it gets packed up straight away in case you have to do a runner.
‘Piece of piss, lad. The day lock is warded, and the combination, well, it’s a combination. Anything up to four hours. Don’t worry, there were loads like this in Bosnia.’ He paused and I knew there was a funny coming. ‘Any longer than that and I’ll let you blow it.’ This time I could see the grin, even behind the nylon. He shoved the key-ring torch back in his mouth, taking the mask with it.
He was right; the ward lock, at least, was going to be easy. It was basically a spring-loaded bolt into which a notch had been cut. These things had been around since Ancient Roman times. The key fitted into the notch and slid the bolt backwards and forwards. It takes its name from the fixed projections, or wards, inside the mechanism and around the keyhole, which prevent the wrong key from doing the business.
Charlie tucked the fibre optic away and unwrapped a set of what looked like button-hooks, fashioned from strong, thin steel. All being well, one of them would bypass the wards and shift the bolt into the unlock position.
In next to no time I heard the deadlock clunk open, and Charlie’s head swayed from side to side in triumph as he packed the hooks away.
The combination cylinder was next. This time, the lock would be released once an arrow on the left-hand side of the dial had triggered the correct sequence of numbers. Our problem was that there was no way of telling when the tumblers had reached their correct position; the only noise we’d hear was when the lever finally descended into the slot, once the right combination had been dialled.
Charlie started rotating the cylinder left and right. He may have been trying Baz’s number plate first, or running through the Russian factory default settings.
Once he’d exhausted the obvious ones, he would have to go through every possible permutation. In theory there’d be about a million of the little bastards, but the good thing about old and low-quality cylinders like this one was that the numbers didn’t have to be located precisely; up to two digits either side of true and the lock would still open, which cut the possible combinations down to a mere 8,000 or so. It wasn’t what Charlie might call a piece of piss, but even with his hands wasting away he should be able to rattle through them in a few hours. He told me once that he really never thought about what he was doing; he just switched onto autopilot.
He leaned over to me. ‘DOB?’
He hadn’t asked me for it since my trip to the bookshop because there was no need. If I hadn’t found Baz’s date of birth, I’d have told him.
‘Twenty-two ten fifty-nine.’
His hands started to turn the cylinder: 22 anticlockwise . . . 10 clockwise . . . 59 anti-clockwise . . .
For some reason, that was the most commonly used sequence of movements.
I realized I was holding my breath.
Nothing. No sound. No falling lever; no question of simply turning the handle and hearing the bolts slide back into the door.
Charlie played with the three number sets in sequence, but varying the direction of rotation.
After a dozen or so other attempts, he tried 22 anticlockwise, 59 clockwise, 22 anticlockwise.
There was a gentle clunk from inside the door.
Charlie picked up his torch and shone it round the floor to make triply sure that he’d left nothing lying around.
I could have opened the safe while he did so, but there was a protocol to be observed at times like this. That honour belonged to Charlie.
He turned back when he was satisfied everything had been packed away. He pulled down the handle. The bolts retracted from both the hinged and the opening side, and it swung open with a small metallic creak.
Charlie still had the key-ring torch in his mouth, and his head was inside the safe. I leaned over him. There was a shelf in the middle, and it held just two items: an open box of antique jewellery, maybe his mother’s, and a blue plastic folder.
Charlie didn’t need the camcorder to remind him how the folder lay; he lifted it straight out and handed it over. A quick sweep of the Maglite revealed about twenty pages of handwritten Paperclip.
It didn’t look much, but it was obviously worth two hundred thousand US to someone.
He hardly had time to shrug before the door burst open and the lights came on.