The Magpie Trap: A Novel (15 page)

As well as his reliability, Mark was also very
adept at his job. He fixed security systems as if it was a
labour
of love. Some people love to tinker around inside car engines in their
spare time; Danny had the suspicion that Mark would have be elbow deep in
control panels, or camera circuit boards even on the rare Saturdays he wasn’t
working or on call or fishing. But he wasn’t looked at as some kind of freak
for his dedication; he was, after all, a likeable young man.

It was Mark’s approachability, and his ability to
convey technical expertise in simple, layman’s terms, which had prompted Danny
Morris to call in the engineer to assist him with a sales presentation that
morning to a group of potential customers. Mark would be able to hold a
straight bat to any curve-ball questions lobbed in by the group, and would also
be a shining beacon of the honesty and reliability of the company. And maybe,
just maybe, between them they’d be able to cover up the monstrous reality of the
new day.

Security

Already, it seemed that
Charlie Wade, the managing director of
Edison
’s Printers, believed he had found a kindred spirit in Jim Hunter.

           
‘You have to get up early in the morning to get past us,
eh?’ said Wade, attempting, in the smarmy boss-like way of his to ingratiate
himself with some of the lower echelons of his staff. Hunter noticed that
behind Wade’s back, Callum Burr was actually sneering. He’d been the one
penciled in to work the early shift, not Hunter and now Wade. What were they
doing invading his privacy?

           
‘No honestly; I’m very pleased that you alerted us to the
problem with the printer,’ continued Wade, as though someone had actually
objected to his point. ‘Time was when some people might have thought about
not
reporting the fault.’

           
If it were possible, Burr sneered even more obviously
now; he was obviously taking Wade’s comment about ‘some people’ as a personal
criticism.

           
‘Thank you, sir. Wasn’t really anything else I could have
done,’ said Hunter. ‘And anyway, it was Mick Stephenson that made the call.’

           
‘Ah,’ said Wade, wheeling round to face the men. ‘But it
was you that chose to come up to my office in the panopticon and inform me of
that fact. Otherwise it would have simply got brushed under the carpet like
everything else seems to around here.’

This
time he gave Burr a meaningful glance which Burr refused to return. There was
obviously some ‘previous’ between the two of them. Already, Hunter had noticed
that most of the other employees on site were petrified to even trade a ‘good
morning’ with Mr. Wade, but Jim was a different matter; he bowed to nobody.

That
windswept Friday morning, Jim could tell that something else was weighing
heavily on his boss’s mind, but he knew that he could not ask Mr. Wade
outright; he knew he had to let him steer the conversation in his own way.

‘What
is security?” Wade ruminated, as if chewing on a particularly interesting piece
of meat. ‘By definition, it is
being free from danger; free from worry about attack,
intrusion or burglary.’

Burr raised his eyes to
the ceiling in an exaggerated show of his true feelings towards Wade. Hunter
chose to try to engage the man in conversation: ‘I’d agree, sir, that security
could be defined in such a way; however it is such a wide-ranging term that
there’s a lot more in there too.’

‘I asked you to call me
Charlie, didn’t I?’ asked Wade, looking a little confused. Like most people in
powerful positions, he seemed to have a tendency to forget exactly which of his
underlings he’d said what to. ‘Anyway, what with the debates over the situation
in the
Middle East
, terrorist attacks, and
all of the atrocities which we’re threatened with on a daily basis today,
security has become a question of national interest and global importance.’

Burr slid further down
into his seat and started to steal surreptitious glances at the pack pages of
his
Daily Record.
He still took a
Scottish newspaper after - what? – twenty-odd years of living across the
border.

‘But Jim,’ continued Wade,
‘I read a pamphlet I was handed in
Leeds
at the weekend
when I took the wife shopping. A bloke with dreadlocks handed it to me right
outside Harvey Nicholls: I can’t believe they didn’t move him on. Anyway, sorry
Jim, that’s beside the point. His leaflet really piqued my interest. There was
one sentence in particular that has stuck with me. It read: “
security is always an excuse for the worst moral
crimes…’”

Mr.
Wade crossed his arms and looked directly at Jim, in expectation of an informed
response from the ex-policeman.

‘Very
interesting sir. I believe that, to some extent, such an argument is correct.
Look at any country in some kind of crisis. The government always brings in
tough measures which look as though they are to counter-act a threat from
outside, when in reality, the fact is that they are also looking to assert some
more control
within
.’

Jim
stroked his chin nervously; what he had just said was almost blasphemous; it
was against the security guard or policeman’s credo of
control.

‘Exactly;
you’ve hit the nail on the head there. The current political climate is making
me incredibly nervous. I used to be a
Labour
man in my youth. Security is supposed to be about allowing the people freedom,
however the state is not interested in
freedoms
,
it’s interested in restriction. The concept of security is in fact a
contradictory idea. One person’s security is another’s restriction.’

Mr.
Wade grinned at Jim, as though he was taking a father’s pride at the idea he
had just produced.

‘But
we obviously have to have security,’ he continued. ‘Because human nature is
flawed; take this place; we obviously have to protect against opportunist
robbery, planned heists and staff theft. We put in new technologies to make
things better, more
controlled
; we
manage physical and logical security. We don’t allow people that opportunity;
that temptation.’

‘You’re
right; absolutely, but what we’re all creating is a vicious circle where we’re
all petrified that the other is plotting to rob us, to bomb us, or whatever.
Look at the gated communities in
America
.
Britain
’s going to be like that soon; we’ve lost that
trust in human nature. We’ve all become cynical,’ said Hunter.

Mr.
Wade shook his head in disappointment at the conclusion his argument had
reached, before continuing: ‘Security’s really playing on my mind at the moment
Jim, as you’ve probably guessed. The audits of our procedures are due to start
soon, and they are probably going to recommend even more stringent measures. I
know the technological advances are great, but what are we losing? What have we
already lost?’

‘I
can’t really answer that, sir. What I can do is try to set your mind at rest.
We have no choice in the matter. What we can do is ensure that we use
technology to serve our needs, and not simply install it for technology’s sake.
Look at what we already have; Stephenson told me about the new Digital
Recording software which provides us with instant access to images and
recordings. Technology helps us with these systems; the security guard no longer
has to physically visit the scene, risking assault. We can also prove
innocence. Our door entry systems can produce audit trails, roll call lists and
timekeeping records; if you’re innocent you have nothing to hide,’ he said,
only half-believing what was coming out of his own mouth.

‘Ah,
but are you only saying all that because you’re talking to me? Yes there’s the
argument that modern business would be back in the Stone Age without mobile
phones, computers and internet access. But isn’t it all a self-fulfilling
prophecy? The more intruder-proof a website becomes, for example, don’t the
hackers see it as a target: a challenge? Aren’t we just setting up hoops which
they can jump through?’

‘Yes,
I suppose you’re right, sir,’ Jim agreed, as if on cue.

‘What
I’m worried about with all of these audits coming up is that we will be relying
too much on technology, and not upon people like you, Jim; people who have
experience, who know human nature and who can interpret and
analyse
situations with heart as well as your head.’

Mr.
Ward flashed a smile at Jim Hunter and began ambling back to the panopticon,
followed by Callum Burr, who was required to provide the secondary
identification at each of the doors en route.

Returning
to the Security Lodge, Callum Burr flashed a mean little smile at Hunter. ‘He’s
a rare one, that Wade, isn’t he? A regular philosopher when you get him
wound-up.’

‘He
seems all right,’ muttered Hunter. He could do without getting into another
argument with Callum Burr before the end of his first day.

‘Why
did you tell him about the problem with the printer?’ asked Burr.

Hunter
narrowed his eyes. ‘I had no choice. From now, everything security-related that
happens on site is
my
responsibility.’

‘Well;
what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m
going to start making some polite enquiries. Starting with you, Callum, if
that’s all right? From what I’ve heard from the specialist engineer, altering
the codes on the Precisioner is not something that just anybody can do. Nor can
it be done by mistake.’

‘You
think someone inside the plant might have something to do with it?’

‘Who
else could it be?’ asked Hunter. ‘Usually, the simplest explanation turns out
to be the correct one.’

‘But
why? Why would someone mess about with the code?’ said Burr. His face was
turning red again and he seemed slightly out of breath. ‘What would they
possibly hope to achieve by doing that?’

‘That’s
exactly what I intend to find out,’ said Hunter.

Presentation Skills

Mark sat waiting outside
the EyeSpy offices in his faithful van. The offices were situated in an
unpretentious industrial estate in Beeston. The almost too-bright red-brick and
sandstone of the place looked almost incongruous alongside the other buildings
in situ, which were typically roller-shutter door units whose frontages looked
like gaping mouths. The EyeSpy car park was surrounded by the ubiquitous CCTV
cameras, standing like sentries upon their many poles. Granted, Beeston had a
reputation as a rough area, but the cameras here looked like overkill; like
using a steamroller to crack a nut.

A
sleek black company car screeched into the car park and narrowly avoided Mark’s
wing-mirror as it pulled haphazardly into the next space. Danny Morris poured
himself out of the car door; tie askew, bed-head hair, clearly worse for wear.

Mark
sighed deeply. He liked Danny, but knew that he walked a fine-line between
brilliance and unreliability; he had an uncanny knack of digging himself into
holes from which he would then have to ever-more-creatively scramble out. Mark
also noted the twitched blinds of boss Martin Thomas’s eyrie-like office. Danny
was being watched, and closely.

‘Morning Sparky,’
grinned Danny, the brave face he was putting on the events of the last
twenty-four hours looking more like a grimace. ‘Ready to do battle with some
new unsuspecting victims, cock?’

A waft of stale booze
and mints assaulted Mark’s senses as Danny moved closer.

‘Erm, Danny, before our
guests arrive, don’t you think you should do something about that breath of yours.
Had a few last night eh? And what’s with the fake tan?’

Danny pulled a catering
size pack of Uncle Joe’s mintballs from his briefcase and stuffed a couple into
his mouth.

‘Look mate, I’ll be at
the front of the room, giving them a PowerPoint presentation, they’re not going
to smell my breath from there are they? And I’ve done this so many times before
I could do it drunk anyway, you know how it is Mark, these security industry
people; no brain-cells between them.’

The meeting room was
set up in the nick of time before the arrival of their guests; a six-pack of
executives from a local brewery who were looking to improve their on-site
security and also staff productivity levels by introducing an integrated
surveillance and access control solution. They all looked as though they may
have sampled just a little bit too much of their own produce.

After initial meeting
and greeting, Danny moved to the front of the meeting room, his stage for his
performance, and Mark waited in the wings to prompt. Mark could see that Danny
had undergone a Superman-style transformation in the work toilets, and there
was now no sign of his disheveled earlier state; he now dripped confidence from
every pore.

‘Blue-chip businesses
like yourselves which choose EyeSpy today, know that they are future-proofing
their business by bringing us in as the solution provider,’ Danny began, his
voice betraying none of the abuse he had inflicted upon it the previous night.

With each passing slide
on the projector, he confidently upped the jargon-ante in order to both impress
and confuse his prey. Mark struggled to recognize the company he worked for in
the one described by Danny.

‘EyeSpy was formed in
1984; that seminal year (ha, ha, ha). We rode on the crest of the wave of the
huge developments in the burglar alarm industry for most of that decade. As you
probably know, the eighties were when burglar alarms went global - for houses,
small businesses, everywhere. Then came the proliferation of CCTV. These are
now product areas which have nowhere else to develop in this country; look
around you, there’s almost too many cameras. That is why a few years back,
senior management within our company began to look at some of the extras, the
added-value services which we could add to our systems. We looked at the rise
of cameras systems which were capable of being run across networks, instead of
having to do the usual costly and disruptive cabling of a site. We trained up
our engineers to be as IT literate as they were security experts, well before other
companies in the industry did this.’

Mark was woken from his
near-comatose condition as he realised that Danny was gesticulating across at
him as if to prove his point about the engineering staff. Although he was
hunched in the shadows, Mark nervously shifted in his seat, aware all eyes had
turned to him.

Danny, thankfully put
him out of his misery by continuing.

‘We installed the first
such system at the major money manufacturing plant,
Edison
’s Printers. Their system works by relaying and storing camera images
across their existing computer network, allowing management access to images as
and when they are needed by simply visiting a secure website; it’s as simple as
an email!

 
The reason why such configurations, working
in conjunction with intruder alarm and access control systems, are so important
to the overall running of your business is twofold. Our security
system will
secure your premises, protecting stock and assets, but it will also benefit you
because it can control employee behaviour. The system can affect productivity
and output because it can record the movement of said employees, where they are
at certain times, what time they access the building for work in the morning,
and when they leave at night.
 
It takes
away the worry about the human-element of your business; clocking in and out,
being watched everywhere they go, and even what parts of a building they enter
becomes so second nature to them that they become a more compliant workforce.’
  
           

Mark glanced across at the audience. Danny had them in the palm of his
hand; Mark noted real interest in their faces. Instead of being slumped in
their chairs, they were now leaning forward and hanging on the speaker’s every
word.

‘Of course, we need to stress to the employees that we are doing this
for their benefit. We need to stress personal safety, care and respect for
their rights, whilst at the same time we are taking away their freedom and
choice. That might sound all very ‘big brother’ to you, but the amount of
managers I see that want more control over their employees is unbelievable, and
in the present climate, we can justify such tight surveillance and restrictions
on personal freedom with the argument that security is of paramount importance.
I see you nodding your heads in agreement. Well, let me show you what I propose
for your site…’

Mark was almost overwhelmed by this master-class in the art of selling
by Danny. He had instantly transformed his audience into ‘nodding dogs’ who agreed
with each stage of his argument. What they didn’t know was that they were being
railroaded to a junction at which point there was no way they could refuse.
Danny had dulled the lights and therefore his fake tan gave off a radioactive
glow, but that seemed to hypnotise his prey even deeper into his thrall. Mark
watched in admiration as Danny outlined the benefits and inner-workings of an
incredibly expensive system for the men’s site.

And then Danny’s phone rang. Embarrassed, he fished the offending item
out of his pocket and quickly glanced at the screen. Then he froze. His face
drained of all colour; even his fake tan, it seemed was shocked by the number
which came up on screen.

‘I’m sorry guys,’ he breathed, ‘I’m going to have to take this call.
Mark’ll look after you…’

With that he dashed out of the room, scattering his pile of meeting
notes onto the floor. The door slammed behind him with some finality. All eyes
turned to Mark once more as though asking him:
What is the meaning of this rude interruption?

He heard the sly comments from a couple of the suited men.

‘Who are these people to treat us like this?’

‘You can’t behave like that in a business meeting.’

‘Never seen owt like it in all me years.’

‘This lot couldn’t arrange a piss-up in our brewery.’

‘Where’s he gone, the little twat? Are we not important enough for him?’

‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ muttered Mark, sensing the atmosphere in
the room starting to become decidedly gloomy. Without the presence of a
ringmaster, the place was becoming a real circus. It seemed that Danny’s
impromptu bad behaviour had uncorked the bad behaviour in all of them.

Mark’s feet described the same route through the room and to the door
where he stared through the semi-frosted glass and tried to locate his
colleague. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the reception area.

Oh shit! Where’s he gone?
It would be too much like the Danny of recent weeks to just up and leave in the
middle of a meeting like this and leave me to pick up the pieces. It would be
too much like him to behave so crazily!

‘So where is he then?’ asked the brewery boss, who sounded as though he
was running out of patience. His meaty arms were crossed against his bulging
belly and he leaned back into his seat, oozing arrogance.

‘I’ll try his mobile,’ stuttered Mark.

‘He’s
on
his mobile,’ shouted
back a couple of the men in unison.

‘Okay then, he’s gone to get the sandwiches,’ said Mark, thinking on his
feet.

‘Ah. In the middle of his presentation, he decided to high-tail it out
of here and get the sandwich order. Is that what passes for normal behaviour
here, is it? Could you not have done that? Or are you here to be the scenery?’

‘I’m… I’m,’ Mark stuttered. In truth, he couldn’t think
why
he was there. He would have been
better off trying to discover why a
system
had behaved in such a way. He would have been better off working on a camera.
He tried to play for time. He picked up the phone and called through to Paula,
the receptionist.

‘Are the bacon sandwiches here for the meeting yet?’ he asked. He nodded
and listened to Paula’s answer, then spoke in a harsh whisper. ‘We need the
sandwiches in here as quickly as possible. Danny’s… Something’s happened.’

Evidently, Paula had grasped the urgency in Mark’s voice for within
seconds, she breezed into the room. She was good looking in an unconventional
kind of way; all short-cropped dark hair and angled features. She seemed to
radiate calmness; she shot Mark a brief encouraging smile and then walked to
the front of the room. The guests got a good look at her bottom in the
extra-tight trousers as she walked past.

‘Hello there everybody; I’m Paula and I’m here to take your sandwich
order in this brief intermission,’ she said confidently.

Immediately, the fat brewery men started to rearrange their great guts
in their seats when she arrived. They smelled the scent of the feminine;
something so sadly lacking in so much of the security industry. They wanted
more of it.

‘Hello there darling,’ piped up one of the men. ‘You can make a sandwich
with me any day.’

‘EyeSpy with my little eye a nice tidy piece,’ said another, before
shouting to another man: ‘Eh, Cliff; at least the scenery’s got better!’

Paula shrugged off the man’s comment and produced a spiral-bound
notepad. ‘What do you fancy? Bacon? A big sausage?’

A couple of the men were wise enough to look embarrassed.

‘We’re not interested in sandwiches,’ said the brewery boss to groans of
disappointment from the rest of his staff. ‘We’re interested in where that
salesman has shot off to. He was telling us all about how we can get more blood
out of the stone that is our staff. Would you like to continue this
presentation for us, love?’

‘Present your tits to us,’ shouted one of the men.

Paula fixed them with an icy glare; evidently she’d had enough.

‘I don’t know the first thing about security,’ she said. ‘I’m working
here as a receptionist while I try to earn enough money to do something more
interesting with my life. Do you want sandwiches or not? If not, then I’ll
leave you in peace.’

The men looked at each other in confusion. They wanted sandwiches.
Sandwiches were the most important aspect of any meeting.

‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life,’ said the brewery man,
climbing up from his seat. ‘Your boss will get to hear of this. We’ll never do
business with a company that’s run like this!’

‘And I’ll tell him about the sexual harassment,’ said Paula, flouncing
out of the room.
Touché.