CHRISTMAS
DAY
MIDNIGHT
THE Kremlin looked like something from a fairy tale, with snow falling thickly around its floodlit roofs and towers. As the van with "Hibernian Telecom" on its side approached the main gate, Kit had a momentary fancy that he was the Black Knight riding up to besiege the place.
He felt relieved to get here. The storm was turning into a full-scale blizzard, contrary to the forecast, and the journey from the airfield had taken longer than expected. The delay made him fearful. Every minute that passed made it more likely that snags would threaten his elaborate plan.
The phone call from Toni Gallo worried him. He had put her through to Steve Tremlett, fearing that if he played her a fault message she might drive to the Kremlin to find out what was going on. But, having listened in to the conversation, Kit thought she might do that anyway. It was lousy bad luck that she was in Inverburn, instead of at a spa fifty miles away.
The first of the two barriers lifted, and Elton moved the van forward and drew level with the gatehouse. There were two guards in the booth, as Kit expected. Elton wound down the window. A guard leaned out and said, "We're glad to see you laddies."
Kit did not know the man but, recalling his conversation with Hamish, he realized it must be Willie Crawford. Looking past him, Kit saw Hamish himself.
Willie said, "It's good of you to come out at Christmas."
"All part of the job," Elton said.
"Three of you, is it?"
"Plus Goldilocks in the back."
A low snarl came from behind. "Watch your mouth, shitface."
Kit suppressed a groan. How could they squabble at such a crucial moment?
Nigel murmured, "Knock it off, you two."
Willie did not appear to have heard the exchange. He said, "I need to see identification for everyone, please."
They all took out their faked cards. Elton had based them on Kit's recollection of what the Hibernian Telecom pass looked like. The phone system rarely broke down, so Kit had figured no guard was likely to remember what a genuine pass looked like. Now, with a security guard scrutinizing the cards as if they were dubious fifty-pound notes, Kit held his breath.
Willie wrote down the name from each card. Then he handed them all back without comment. Kit looked away and allowed himself to breathe again.
"Drive to the main entrance," Willie said. "You'll be all right if you stay between the lampposts." The road ahead was invisible, covered with snow. "At reception you'll find a Mr. Tremlett who can tell you where to go."
The second barrier lifted, and Elton pulled forward.
They were inside.
Kit felt sick with fear. He had broken the law before, with the scam that got him fired, but that had not felt like crime, it was more like cheating at cards, something he had done since he was eleven years old. This was a straightforward burglary, and he could go to jail. He swallowed hard and tried to concentrate. He thought of the enormous sum he owed Harry Mac. He remembered the blind terror he had felt this morning, when Daisy held his head under water and he thought he was dying. He had to go through with this.
Nigel said quietly to Elton, "Try not to aggravate Daisy."
"It was just a joke," Elton said defensivcly.
"She's got no sense of humor."
If Daisy heard, she did not respond.
Elton parked at the main entrance and they got out. Kit carried his laptop. Nigel and Daisy took tool boxes from the back of the van. Elton had an expensive-looking burgundy leather briefcase, very slim with a brass catch—typical of his taste, but a bit odd for a telephone repairman, Kit thought.
They passed between the stone lions of the porch and entered the Great Hall. Low security lights intensified the churchlike look of the Victorian architecture: the mullioned windows, the pointed arches, and the serried timbers of the roof. The dimness made no difference to the security cameras, which—Kit knew—worked by infrared light.
At the modern reception desk in the middle of the hall were two more guards. One was an attractive young woman Kit did not recognize, and the other was Steve Tremlett. Kit hung back, not wanting Steve to look at him too closely. "You'll want to access the central processing unit," Steve said.
Nigel answered. "That's the place to start."
Steve raised his eyebrows at the London accent, but made no comment. "Susan will show you the way—I need to stay by the phone."
Susan had short hair and a pierced eyebrow. She wore a shirt with epaulettes, a tie, dark serge uniform trousers, and black lace-up shoes. She gave them a friendly smile and led them along a corridor paneled in dark wood.
A weird calm seemed to descend on Kit. He was inside, being escorted by a security guard, about to rob the place. He felt fatalistic. The cards had been dealt, he had placed his bet, there was nothing to do now but play out his h?nd, win or lose.
They entered the control room.
The place was cleaner and tidier than Kit remembered, with all cables neatly stowed and logbooks in a row on a shelf. He presumed that was loni's influence. Here also there were two guards instead of one. They sat at the long desk, watching the monitors. Susan introduced them as Don and Stu. Don was a dark-skinned south Indian with a thick Glasgow accent, and Stu was a freckled redhead. Kit did not recognize either one. An extra guard was no big deal, Kit told himself: just another pair of eyes to shield things from, another brain to be distracted, another person to be lulled into apathy.
Susan opened the door to the equipment room. "The CPU is in there."
A moment later Kit was inside the inner sanctum. Just like that! he thought, although it had taken weeks of preparation. Here were the computers and other devices that ran not just the phone system but also the lighting, the security cameras, and the alarms. Even to get this far was a triumph.
He said to Susan, "Thanks very much—well take it from here."
"If there's anything you need, come to reception," she said, and she left.
Kit put his laptop on a shelf and connected it to the security computer. He pulled over a chair and turned his laptop so that the screen could not be seen by someone standing in the doorway. He felt Daisy's eyes on him, suspicious and malevolent. "Go into the next room," he said to her. "Keep an eye on the guards,"
She glared resentfully at him for a moment, then did as he said.
Kit took a deep breath. He knew exactly what he had to do. He needed to work fast, but carefully.
First, he accessed the program that controlled the video feed from thirty-seven closed-circuit television cameras. He looked at the entrance to BSL4, which appeared normal. He checked the reception desk and saw Steve there, but not Susan. Scanning the input from other cameras, he located Susan patrolling elsewhere in the building. He noted the time.
The computers massive memory stored the camera images for four weeks before overwriting them. Kit knew his way around the program, for he had installed it. He located the video from the cameras in BSL4 this time last night. He checked the feed, random sampling footage, to make sure no crazy scientist had been working in the lab in the middle of the night; but all the images showed empty rooms. Good.
Nigel and Elton watched him in tense silence.
He then fed last night's images into the monitors the guards were currently watching.
Now someone could walk around BSL4 doing anything he liked without their knowing.
The monitors were fitted with biased switches that would detect equipment substitution, for example if the feed came from a separate videotape deck. However, this footage was not coming from an outside source, but direct from the computer's memory—so it did not trigger the alarm.
Kit stepped into the main control room. Daisy was slumped in a chair, wearing her leather jacket over the Hibernian Telecom overalls. Kit studied the bank of screens. All appeared normal. The dark-skinned guard, Don, looked at him with an inquiring expression. As a cover, Kit said, "Are any of the phones in here working?"
"None," said Don.
Along the bottom edge of each screen was a line of text giving the time and date. The time was the same on the screens that showed yesterday's footage—Kit had made sure of that. But yesterday's footage showed yesterday's date.
Kit was betting that no one ever looked at that date. The guards scanned the screens for activity; they did not read text that told them what they already knew.
He hoped he was right.
Don was wondering why the telephone repairman was so interested in the television monitors. "Something we can do for you?" he said in a challenging tone.
Daisy grunted and stirred in her chair, like a dog sensing tension among the humans.
Kit's mobile phone rang.
He stepped back into the equipment room. The message on the screen of his laptop said: "Kremlin calling Toni." He guessed that Steve wanted to let Toni know that the repair team had arrived. He decided to put the call through: it might reassure Toni and discourage her from coming here. He touched a key, then listened in on his mobile.
"This is Toni Gallo." She was in her car; Kit could hear the engine.
"Steve here, at the Kremlin. The maintenance team from Hibernian Telecom have arrived."
"Have they fixed the problem?"
"They've just started work. I hope I didn't wake you."
"No, I'm not in bed, I'm on my way to you."
Kit cursed. It was what he had been afraid of.
"There's really no need," Steve told Toni.
Kit thought: That's right!
"Probably not," she replied. "But I'll feel more comfbrtable."
Kit thought: When will you get here?
Steve had the same thought. "Where are you now?"
"I'm only a few miles away, but the roads are terrible, and I can't go faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour."
"Are you in your Porsche?" Yes.
"This is Scotland, you should have bought a Land Rover."
"I should have bought a bloody tank."
Come on, Kit thought, how long?
Toni answered his question. "It's going to take me at least half an hour, maybe an hour."
They hung up, and Kit cursed under his breath.
He told himself that a visit by Toni would not be fatal. There would be nothing to warn her that a robbery was going on. Nothing should seem amiss for several days. It would appear only that there had been a problem with the phone system, and a repair team had fixed it. Not until the scientists returned to work would anyone realize that BSL4 had been burgled.
The main danger was that Toni might see through Kit's disguise. He looked completely different, he had removed his distinctive jewelry, and he could easily alter his voice, making it more Scots; but she was a sharp-nosed bitch and he could not afford to take any chances. If she showed up, he would keep out of her way as much as possible, and let Nigel do the talking. All the same, the risk of something going wrong would increase tenfold.
But there was nothing he could do about it, except hurry.
His next task was to get Nigel into the lab without any of the guards seeing. The main problem here was the patrols. Once an hour, a guard from reception made a tour of the building. The patrol followed a prescribed route, and took twenty minutes. Having passed the entrance to BSL4, the guard would not come back for an hour.
Kit had seen Susan patrolling a few minutes ago, when he connected his laptop to the surveillance program. Now he checked the feed from reception and saw her sitting with Steve at the desk, her circuit done. Kit checked his watch. He had a comfortable thirty minutes before she went on patrol again.
Kit had dealt with the cameras in the high-security lab, but there was still one outside the door, showing the entrance to BSL4. He called up yesterday's feed and ran the footage at double fast-forward. He needed a clear half hour, with no one passing across the screen. He stopped at the point where the patrolling guard appeared. Beginning when the guard left the picture, he fed yesterday's images into the monitor in the next room. Don and Stu should see nothing but an empty corridor for the next hour, or until Kit returned the system to normal. The screen would show the wrong time as well as the wrong date, but once again Kit was gambling that the guards would not notice.
He looked at Nigel. "Let's go."
Elton stayed in the equipment room to make sure no one interfered with the laptop.
Passing through the control room, Kit said to Daisy, "We're going to get the nanometer from the van. You stay here." There was no such thing as a nanometer, but Don and Stu would not know that.
Daisy grunted and looked away. She was not much good at acting the part. Kit hoped the guards would simply assume she was bad-tempered.
Kit and Nigel walked quickly to BSL4. Kit waved his father's smart card in front of the scanner then pressed the forefinger of his left h?nd to the screen. He waited while the central computer compared the information from the screen with that on the card. He noticed that Nigel was carrying Elton's smart burgundy leather briefcase.
The light over the door remained stubbornly red. Nigel looked at Kit anxiously. Kit told himself this had to work. The chip contained the encoded details of his own fingerprint—he had checked. What could go wrong?
Then a woman's voice behind them said, "I'm afraid you can't go in there."
Kit and Nigel turned. Susan was standing behind them. She appeared friendly but anxious. She should have been at reception, Kit thought in a panic. She was not due to patrol for another thirty minutes. . .
Unless Toni Gallo had doubled the patrols as well as doubling the guard.
There was a chime like a doorbell. All three of them looked at the light over the door. It turned green, and the heavy door swung slowly open on motorized hinges.
Susan said, "How did you open the door?" Her voice betrayed fear now.
Involuntarily, Kit looked down at the stolen card in his h?nd.
Susan followed his gaze. "You're not supposed to have a pass!" she said incredulously.
Nigel moved toward her.
She turned on her heel and ran.
Nigel went after her, but he was twice her age. He'll never catch her, Kit thought. He let out a shout of rage: how could everything go so wrong, so quickly?
Then Daisy emerged from the passage leading to the control room.
Kit would not have thought he would ever be glad to see her ugly face.
She seemed unsurprised at the scene that confronted her: the guard running toward her, Nigel following, Kit frozen to the spot. Kit realized that she must have been watching the monitors in the control room. She would have seen Susan leave the reception desk and walk toward BSL4. She had realized the danger and moved to deal with it.
Susan saw Daisy and hesitated, then ran on, apparently determined to push past.
The hint of a smile touched Daisy's lips. She drew back her arm and smashed her gloved fist into Susan's face. The blow made a sickening sound, like a melon dropped on a tiled floor. Susan collapsed as if she had run into a wall. Daisy rubbed her knuckles, looking pleased.
Susan got to her knees. Sobs bubbled through the blood covering her nose and mouth. Daisy took from the pocket of her jacket a flexible blackjack about nine inches long and made, Kit guessed, of steel ball bearings in a leather case. She raised her arm.
Kit shouted: "No!"
Daisy hit Susan over the head with the blackjack. The guard collapsed soundlessly.
Kit yelled: "Leave her!"
Daisy raised her arm to hit Susan again, but Nigel stepped forward and grabbed Daisy's wrist. "No need to kill her," he said.
Daisy stepped back reluctantly.
"You mad cow!" Kit cried. "We'll all be guilty of murder!"
Daisy looked at the light brown glove on her right hand. There was blood on the knuckles. She licked it off thoughtfully.
Kit stared at the unconscious woman on the floor. The sight of her crumpled body was sickening. "This wasn't supposed to happen!" he said in alarm. "Now what are we going to do with her?"
Daisy straightened her blond wig. "Tie her up and hide her somewhere."
Kit's brain began to come back on line after the shock of sudden violence. "Right," he said. "We'll put her inside BSL4. The guards aren't allowed in there."
Nigel said to Daisy, "Drag her inside. I'll find something to tie her up with." He stepped into a side office.
Kit's mobile phone rang. He ignored it.
Kit used his card to reopen the door, which had closed automatically. Daisy picked up a red fire extinguisher and used it to prop the door open. Kit said, "You can't do that, it will set off the alarm." He removed the extinguisher.
Daisy looked skeptical. "The alarm goes off if you prop a door open?"
"Yes!" Kit said impatiently. "There are air management systems here. I know, I put the alarms in myself. Now shut up and do as you're told!"
Daisy got her arms around Susan's chest and pulled her along the carpet. Nigel emerged from the office with a long power lead. They all passed into BSL4. The door closed behind them.
They were in a small lobby leading ro the changing rooms. Daisy propped Susan against the wall underneath a pass-through autoclave that permitted sterilized items to be removed from the lab. Nigel tied her h?nds and feet with the electrical lead.
Kit's phone stopped ringing.
The three of them went outside. No pass was needed to exit: the door opened at the push of a green button set into the wall.
Kit was trying desperately to think ahead. His entire plan was ruined. There was no possibility now that the theft would remain undiscovered. "Susan will be missed quite soon," he said, making himself keep calm. "Don and Stuart will notice that she's disappeared off the monitors. And even if they don't, Steve will be alerted when she fails to return from her patrol. Either way, we don't have time to get into the laboratory and out again before they raise the alarm. Shit, it's all gone wrong!"
"Calrn down," Nigel said. "We can handle this, so long as you don't panic. We just have to deal with the other guards, like we dealt with her."
Kit's phone rang again. He could not tell who was calling without his computer. "It's probably Toni Gallo," he said. "What do we do if she shows up? We can't pretend nothing's wrong if all the guards are tied up!"
"We'll just deal with her as and when she arrives."
Kit's phone kept ringing.