The darkness that Bradlee had been waiting for arrived at ten thirty precisely. All the streetlights,
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the white globe lights in the industrial estate car parks, and the lights inside the buildings and on their walls, went out. The clouds reflected streetlights of towns in the Thames Valley, with bright spots for nearby Windsor and Datchet, red, as if they were on fire, but shedding so little light that nothing showed around the Audi except the ghostly silhouettes of fence-posts by the field and outlines of the four buildings. Tiny white dots moved below the high cloud base, airliners with their powerful lights on, joining the queue in the air for Heathrow.
"Nice one, Frank," said Bradlee.
"They'll have emergency batteries," said Ronnie, "maybe even a generator."
"Yeah, for the computers inside," said Eric, "but it doesn't look like they've got them for the lights and cameras."
Bradlee started the car and drove the two hundred yards to the Moorhen building, the Audi was purring very quietly, like its namesake stalking prey. He turned the car around and parked near the glass entrance doors. His elbow came over the back of his seat as he addressed Danny and Eric. "Right, in case the cameras still work, I got some masks. Disguise, like Ron's shirt, but for yer boat-race. I got Bush, Clinton, Nixon and Reagan. What you up for?"
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"Clinton," said Ronnie, from the passenger seat.
"You're Nixon," said Bradlee, without looking at him.
Danny and Eric said nothing.
"It's a fucking joke!" said Bradlee, turning sullen at their lack of reaction. He got out of the car and they followed his lead. At the back, he opened the boot a few inches. Danny could see a petrol container, maybe more than one. Eric placed a hand on the boot-lid to open it further and Bradlee slapped it like a child's. "Oi, dick-head! Not your property."
Eric's body tensed as he moved his hand away, then relaxed again. He repeated Ronnie's claim. "Well, it's hardly yours either, is it?"
"Yeah, but what's in there might be. Eh?"
Bradlee's hand went inside the partially open boot-lid and he groped where he couldn't see. He pulled out a long sledgehammer with an unusually small head.
"Meet Percy." He left the boot slightly open. Ronnie moved up to it. "Later," said Bradlee, and Ronnie moved away.
There was a huge difference in the stature of the pair. Ronnie's stoop was even more pronounced now he was standing up. He was a big man, as tall as Danny but a lot wider, with
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shoulders still impressive even though they weren't properly presented by his pose of aggressive dejection. Bradlee was much shorter and rounder, yet far more erect and purposeful.
As they walked away from the car, Danny amused himself by thinking how much the man looked like a belligerent duck, at least from behind.
Ronnie knelt in front of the central lock between the plate glass doors. "No, it's one of those Swiss pressure jobs. Could take ten minutes."
"Move out the way, then." Bradlee approached and placed his back to one of the doors, then swung the long hammer down into the bottom left corner, very close to the hinge. A diagonal crack about two feet long appeared in the glass. At the same time an alarm went off, shrill, but not obscenely loud from outside. Inside was a small lobby lit by emergency lights and green exit signs, and now by a flashing blue strobe.
"Hold on! Hold on!" shouted Danny.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting inside. What's it look like?"
"But haven't you got a key?"
"Yeah, sure." Bradlee held up the hammer. "Percy."
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"But…"
Bradlee grinned. "Didn't Dan tell you? I'd
'ave thought he'd let you know about all this, what with you creating him and everything." He hammered at the glass in the corner until it caved in, then attacked the top hinge. Eventually the glass gave up the battle and a large section fell away. "Mind yourself. Don't want no blood. Can't stand the sight of blood." He walked inside, still grinning. "Electric cameras, phone alarms, glass doors. What a fucking bunch of amateurs."
Danny found himself in a double state of shock. He hadn't anticipated that they were going to break down the door to get, and he certainly hadn't imagined that once the door had been broken down the inside of the building would smell like home. Not the Islington home, but the Egham home, where he'd lived as a child. The strange familiarity dispelled his doubts about going inside.
Ronnie nervously shot his watch every few seconds, transforming his arm into a timepiece in its own right.
The alarm was much louder inside. The strobe lit up Bradlee as he kicked broken glass to one side, making him appear less of a belligerent duck and more like a middle-aged dancer in a techno club. When he was satisfied that his
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break-in was sufficiently tidy, he stopped kicking and looked expectantly at Danny and Eric.
"Well? We're inside."
"We need to find the CEO's office,"
announced Eric.
"Second floor, far left hand corner," said Danny.
"How do you know?"
"I haven't a clue, but I bet you it's there."
He led them up the wide stairway to the second floor and into a long computer room beyond a glass door, lit only by emergency lights.
There had to be a million pounds of hardware in this one room - white, grey and black boxes of electronics stacked in angle-frame racks from floor to eye level. There were barely any screens and keyboards and everything was oversized with extra lights and dials, like a Hollywood version of computing. He recognised most of the equipment - mainly servers, RAID arrays and routers. Hundreds of tiny red LEDs showed it was all switched on, powered by a back-up generator or batteries, but only a handful twinkled with activity.
The air-conditioning appeared to have lost power. It wasn't easy to tell because the alarm was too loud to hear much beneath it, but the mass of electronics gave off a powerful smell.
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The air was warm and ionised, making it feel synthetic.
"You know what electronics smell of?"
said Eric. "A human barbecue. That smell's from dust burning, and most dust is human skin and hair. If you barbecued someone, they'd smell like electronics."
Yet this was part of the smell that Danny recognised from home. There'd been no home computers back then, and no human barbecues, at least none that he could remember, and surely they'd be memorable. His nose had to be leading him astray.
"You can’t," said Bradlee, approvingly, to Eric. He gestured at the racks. "What's all this shit, then? Don't look like regular computers."
"Internet hardware," replied Danny. "It looks like the phones are down, so it's resting.
They must have a hell of a connection."
Eric yelped like a dog with a trodden-on tail. He'd been poking around in the racks and now he reached between two servers and brought out a strange metallic object about four inches long, like the space-frame chassis of an elaborate model car. He held it gingerly, like a dead snake.
"What is it?" asked Danny.
"I think," said Eric, "it's the middle section of an artificial foot."
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"It's a bit of Airfix model, that's what it is," said Bradlee, standing next to him. "Stop fucking about. You ain't got all day."
"Look, these are the flexors, this is where the toes would go, and the ball of the foot..."
Before Eric could finish, Bradlee grabbed the item from his hand and sent it flying to a far corner of the room. "See? It was a plane. Now stop talking shit and let's find what we're here for."
Danny led the party to where his intuition said the CEO's office would be, at the far end of the server farm, through another glass door. He was right. Here was an office with four desks, each with a keyboard and flat monitor.
Eric went from one to the next. He stopped at the biggest desk with the plushest chair. "This is the one. Angela Maybury."
Her name was etched into a small triangular name-board lying on the desk. There was also a photo of her on the wall, it showed a preppy woman in her early forties with an elaborate side-parted hairstyle. Beneath the photo were the words - Angela Maybury, Chief Executive Officer.
"American," observed Danny. And it wasn't a guess. The face was familiar and he
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knew she was American, though he couldn't say why he was so sure.
"Right, get to it," demanded Bradlee.
"You got less than seven left. Alarm going off in Windsor, some fucker's bound to phone the Old Bill. But they ain't too nippy round these parts.
We always used to reckon ten minutes."
Danny took a CD from the small pack of goodies he'd prepared at home and inserted it in the computer tower beneath the desk, then switched on. He was pleased to see that back-up power reached this computer too. In every other way it was an isolated machine, with no network of phone connections. That's why Frank hadn't been able to hack into it himself, why he'd needed Danny to get inside the building. Frank was a brilliant hacker, but even he couldn't get inside a computer that had no connections to the outside world.
While he waited for the screen to go through its boot sequence, Danny decided to ask Bradlee a question that had been bugging him for a while. This would be his one opportunity, during these few minutes when his role in the night's business was of some consequence.
"Unusual name you've got. Any story behind it?"
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Bradlee sat with his feet up on a nearby desk, inspecting his nails and cleaning them with a pocket-knife, totally ignoring the alarm. "I used to fence. Had so much gear in the house it looked like a store. Everybody called it Harrods’s, including the Old Bill. I didn't mind being called Harrods, till that singer came along and I found it was a Queers name. So I put an 'e' in it, and took the teeth out of any fucker what spelled it without. Still sounds the same, mind."
Ronnie was nowhere to be seen. In fact, when Danny came to think about it, he'd been missing for a while.
The flat screen came up with a username and password box.
Eric looked at Danny. "What's on the CD, a password cracker?"
Danny shook his head. Cracking the password by brute force, trying every possible permutation of letters and numbers, was out of the question. He had the software tools but it could take weeks, even years. He followed the computer power cable to a mains socket in the floor, and rocked the switch a few times so the screen flickered and the machine crashed and restarted again.
"What are you trying to do?" asked Eric.
"We haven't got much time."
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"Put the computer in a different mood, get it confused so it reads what's on the CD."
"Since when did computers have moods?"
"Sure they do. Have you ever tried to do something on a computer one day, and it works, and the next day it doesn't?"
Eric didn't answer.
"They're the same as us," explained Danny. "They have moods. They get awkward when they've had a bad day, when there's data debris sitting around inside, or too many programs were open and they ran out of memory.
And they're vulnerable when they wake up suddenly or get confused."
"Yeah. Like nickin' somebody's wallet while they're having an asthma attack," said Bradlee.
"Something like that," said Danny, frowning.
The boot sequence took a little longer than before, but this time it finished with a directory listing of the computer's contents, rather than a login screen.
"Shit!" exclaimed Eric.
Danny began hunting through the directories for the right type of file, the kind Frank had asked him to look for. "They get old and feeble too. After a few years they're full of
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crash debris and tired system files and they don't work as well as when they first came out of the box. You must have noticed that."
Ten possible files. Five were too small.
Danny would need to look at the code in the others.
Eric watched Danny like he'd just witnessed Jesus rising from the dead, then turned his attention to the mass of code whizzing down the screen. "You can't read this stuff at that speed, can you?"
"Only if people are quiet."
Two programs down. The third looked promising.
"Got it!"
"That it?" asked Bradlee.
"Will be in a couple of seconds, when I've written this to CD."
"You're a fucking genius, my son. Your Uncle Bradlee loves you."
Danny took the CD from its slot. "Let's go."
At speed they went back through the glass door into the server farm. The air didn't smell of ions and burning human debris any more. It was dominated by something far more overpowering.
"Petrol?" wondered Eric, out loud.
"Paraffin, you dick-head."
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"But where from?"
On cue to answer the question, Ronnie appeared through the glass door at the other end of the room, carrying a mixture of plastic cider flagons and petrol canisters, two in each hand. He put them on the floor and unscrewed the tops, then kicked them over. Blue liquid poured out.
Danny wasn't sure where to begin.
"Electricity, power sockets in the floor. They'll short and spark."
"That'll save us a match, then, won't it?"
said Bradlee, grinning.
"What's going on?" said Eric. "We got what we came for. This wasn't part of the plan."
"Not part of your plan," said Bradlee.
One of the floor sockets near Ronnie popped. Lights in the rack next to him went out, but there was no flame.
"See?" said Bradlee. "There's paraffin for you. Petrol - that's for your bleedin' amateurs.
One big flame-ball. Paraffin's the business. Got your industrial safety in mind, ain't we? Lot safer.
Burns longer. Plenty of soot."
Right now, Danny's top priority was to get past all this machinery to the other side of Ronnie and out through the exit door. Eric followed close behind. Sections of carpet squelched beneath their feet.
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Another floor-socket popped. This time there was a lick of blue flame, tipped with yellow. It burned low and dirty, giving off thin black smoke. The iridescent haze spread slowly across the wick of the carpet, yet slightly above it. Danny and Eric raced the last few yards to the door. Bradlee strolled along casually behind, the low flames toasting his turn-ups, his long hammer staying vertical below his left hand, not swinging. Ronnie sniggered and slipped out of the room in front of Danny.
"I don't want any part of this," said Eric, angrily. He waited for Bradlee to come through, then shut the glass door behind them, stopping oxygen getting in and smoke getting out. A cloud of it swirled above their heads on its way to escape up the stairwell.
"Leave it open," ordered Bradlee.
Eric let go of the door-handle, leaving the door shut.
Bradlee moved towards it, but stopped when he reached Eric. He leaned into Eric's face.
"Open the door. I ain't gonna do it myself."
"This is out of order, Bradlee. We don't need to burn the place down."
Bradlee slapped Eric hard on the cheek, then raised a single forefinger. "Stay a dick-head, don't become a fucker." He took hold of Percy
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with both hands and with great violence swung the metal head against the glass door, close to the hinges, until it went the way of the door downstairs. Smoke once again drifted out across the ceiling and swirled up the stairwell to the floor above. "You can do what you fucking like with it now."
Still the alarm shrilled to itself. Eric was bent double, holding his cheek and wailing in pain.
"Fingerprints," explained Bradlee. "All over the keyboard. Bet Danny 'ere wants the place burned, same as Frank does."
This wasn't entirely true. Danny would have preferred to wipe the keyboard with a tissue rather than set fire to the building, but he stayed quiet rather than feeding the argument. It wouldn't be possible to stop the fire, and Ronnie must have disabled any automatic system. The evening was a disaster, a write off. More than anything else he wanted to get home and out of the company of these maniacs. He had plenty he wanted to say to Frank.
"'Ere," said Bradlee, noticing that Eric was still in pain, "what's all the song and dance? I only gave you a slap."
Eric came upright, holding his jaw. His eyes were glistening. "I've got a dodgy wisdom
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tooth, you asshole." The words were distorted by his hand on his jaw.
"Good job I can't hear you properly, son."
"I'm having the bastard out next week.
Last thing I need is some idiot jiggling it around."
"Don't be so fucking cheeky."
Eric glared poisonously at Bradlee, who had no trouble with eye contact. Eric was the same modest height as Bradlee but much slimmer and with an entirely different bearing, far more wiry and athletic. Their eyes were exactly level.
All sense of urgency disappeared as the pair concentrated on out-glaring each other.
Black smoke flowed above them and out to the stairwell, getting thicker and lower, like descending cloud. Bradlee still held Percy in both hands. Eric's fists rhythmically clenched and unfurled. Danny knew the stand-off had to be broken, if only for Eric's sake.
"Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven't got the heart to poke poor
Billy."
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"Wassat?" asked Bradlee, grinning as he unlocked from Eric and turned to Danny.
"Wassat you just said?"
"It's a poem," said Danny, "by Harry Daniels. I can always remember his name because it's a bit like mine. It's called Tender-Heartedness. That's the whole piece."
"You can’t," said Bradlee, in his complimentary fashion. He let Percy dangle from his left hand.
Eric continued to glare, but it no longer mattered now that Bradlee was looking elsewhere. Eventually Eric broke off too, turning to make his way downstairs. "This didn't need to happen," he said, loud enough for his voice to carry behind him. "This wasn't thought through.
Come on. Let's get out of here."