The Magpie Trap: A Novel (7 page)

‘I’m
sure that you’ve heard of internet security companies which now employ hackers.
That works on the same principle; they hack into a business’s network, just to
show how easily it’s done, and then they give them their solution.’

‘And
some of your clients will pay you to do this?’

‘Not
as such,’ admitted Danny. ‘It has to be unexpected, you see…’

‘But
isn’t that illegal?’

‘Probably,
but if your company had its computer network breached, how much sensitive
information would they lose? How much of your client’s private information
would be
jeopardised
? You would hardly
want the publicity of a police investigation. Washing your dirty linen in
public is just about the worst thing you can do… business works on trust.’

‘I
don’t buy it; this all sounds like trouble to me…’

‘That’s
the beauty of it, Chris; I wouldn’t have to get my hands dirty at all,’ said
Danny, with a satisfied smile.

‘So
you won’t be donning a balaclava and attempting to break into a site then?’

‘Nope;
all I have to do is provide the plans. You see, for each and every security
system installation EyeSpy conduct, we have to produce fully marked-up plans of
the buildings, the security solutions
utilised
and where all of the cameras are located. They’re a bloody treasure
map mate. We keep them in a locked cabinet at work, but I have access to it
because I sold some of the jobs.’

‘So,
this little scheme of yours is not EyeSpy approved?’

‘No;
I’ll be working on behalf of a consultant. Foreign-based, but believe me, they
are good.’

‘And
what do you need the money for exactly?” said Chris, nervously drumming his
fingers on the table.

‘It’s
a little complicated mate, but basically they require the money up-front to buy
my way in… a grand is the minimum amount I can invest. It will make me, and
you, members of this
organisation
.
We’ll share the profits when they start to roll in; believe me, it will
take-off, big-style.’

Chris
slowly shook his head. ‘I’m still not convinced by this; it sounds like one of
those email hoaxes which go round claiming to be from some exiled African
prince. You give him a few grand up-front, or perhaps your bank account
details, and then he’s supposed to transfer a few million over to you, for
safe-keeping. Only he doesn’t; there’s no Quick Fix. Instead he robs you blind.
You’re not desperate enough to fall for a scam like that are you?’

Danny
drained the last of his pint and winked at Chris. ‘I’ve already done it; that’s
how I know that it’s not a scam.’

‘What?’
shouted Chris, too loudly. The barman looked up from his crossword and gave
them an icy stare.

‘Keep
your voice down,’ whispered Danny, and waited until the barman returned to
sticking his pen in his ear, perhaps trying to retrieve a stray piece of
ear-wax.

‘They
gave me a trial-run a few weeks back; a call-centre in the North East. I
provided them with copies of the plans, and hey-presto, three hundred ding
arrived in my account this morning.’

‘And
that’s what you lost at the bookies? You idiot.’

Danny
waved away Chris’s interruption. ‘I know I’m an idiot, but there was some
method in my madness you see; I had to give them account details in which to
transfer the payment, and I couldn’t very well give them my real bank account.
For one; at that stage, it could have been one of your African prince scams;
and for two, the police monitor suspicious payments. Nobody gets suspicious of
payments into gambling accounts though, do they? All it would have looked like
was my winnings…’

This
part of Danny’s speech was a lie. He hardly even noticed that it had slipped
out before it was there, on the table, waiting to be consumed by Chris. But
Chris, it seemed, bought the lie.

‘So
what happened to the call-centre?’

Danny
shrugged. ‘All I know is that last week they called up EyeSpy and asked for me
to come and survey their premises for a new, upgraded security system. No
expense spared. Believe it or not, a few hundred quid commission should be
coming my way as well.’

‘Is
there any way that you might be found out?’ said Chris, excited now; you could
almost see the fishing hook caught in the side of his mouth, reeling him in to
an inevitable conclusion. For all of his flaws, Danny appeared to be a pretty
adept salesman.

‘It’s
not totally risk-free,’ said Danny. ‘But I am ninety-nine point nine percent
sure that we will not only get away with this, but that we will also make a
shed-load of cash.’

‘And
where’s the next one that you are supposed to be providing the information on?’

‘There’s
a couple in the pipeline; one of them is a brewery, and I have a bit of work to
do on that one, because they aren’t even an existing client. The second site is
Edison
’s Printers.’

‘
Edison
’s Printers; shit mate; that could be worth a bomb…’

Danny
regarded his old mate with care, knowing that he was surely about to seal the
deal. ‘Remember what we used to talk about at uni?’

‘That
a shark would beat a bear in a fight?’ laughed Chris, seemingly unflustered by
the illegality of their previous conversation.

‘Ha…
no; how we wanted to get out of this rat-infested shit-hole of a country; get
out of the rat race…’

‘You
may win the rat-race, but you are still a rat,’ interrupted Chris,
irrelevantly.

‘That’s
right; so we talked about fleeing the place while we still could, while we were
still relatively uninfected.’

‘It’s
a genetic disorder with me though,’ said Chris. ‘My dad is the King Rat.’

‘But
if we make enough money from these deals, we can just up-and-leave; you only
rent your flat, there’s nothing tying you down…’

‘All
right, but what about Cheryl?’ asked Chris.

‘Leave
that to me,’ said Danny, dismissively. ‘So, are you in, or are you out?’

Chris
sparked up yet another cigarette, weighing up his response. His hand was
shaking a little.

‘Number
one; I won’t lend you the money… no, hear me out… I will give you that money.
But consider it a business deal on my part. I expect a return on my investment.
I’m also expecting that absolutely no blame can be placed at my door, should
the worst happen, mate. This deal is all about trust.’

He
took a long, measured draw on his cigarette and eyed his friend. ‘Number two;
you are to never, ever set foot in a bookies, a casino, or even so much a
bloody penny-arcade in
Blackpool
again. Stay away from temptation. Number three;
get me a whisky to wash down this fucking awful-tasting bitter.’

The
handover of the money was conducted under the table. Chris took an envelope
from the inside pocket of his suit, and dropped it at Danny’s feet.

‘Is
there a grand in there?’ said Danny, already knowing the answer. His friend had
come to the pub knowing that he would have to give him money, had come
prepared. Hell, Danny almost felt guilty.

‘I
feel just like my dad; doing business like this,’ sighed Chris as Danny
crouched to pick up the envelope. He glanced quickly over to the barman, and
noted that he still had the pen sticking out of his ear and was now reading a
newspaper. The tabloid had blocked his view of any of the transaction under the
table, unless he’d cut two eye-holes in the paper like in comedy spy movies.

‘And
like my dad, I’ll seal the deal with a whisky,’ said Chris.

‘I
heard you the first time,’ said Danny, who head-bowed, made his way back to the
bar.

Startled,
the sleepy barman tried to pretend that there was not a biro in his ear; he
tried to carry on as though there was, in fact, nothing out of the ordinary
going on at all.

‘Another
couple of pints mate?’ he asked.

‘Two
whiskies this time, squire,’ replied Danny, who’d picked up enough barroom
etiquette not to question why the barman was trying to either write inside his
own head, or use his ear to manipulate the writing instrument. ‘We’re
celebrating; I’ve just given up betting; as of tomorrow, I’m going down to Gamblers
Anonymous. I will never bet again.’

‘Never
is a hell of a long time,’ said the barman, sagely. For an uncomfortable
moment, he reminded Danny of Jackie at the bookies. But Danny had moved on to a
far more risky form of gambling now, hadn’t he? One in which the rewards were
far greater but if he were to lose…

He
wouldn’t lose. He couldn’t lose. Nobody could afford the price he’d have to pay
if he did.

The
Mission

Sausaged-in between his meaty-thick fingers, Callum
Burr’s phone felt poxy and insignificant. But that really wasn’t the case, was
it? The phone was significant all right. It was his only connection with the
mysterious man on the other side of the world that had somehow become his
life-line.

Callum could feel the
heat of the phone burning against his ear and could understand why all of those
folk said that mobile phones were dangerous and could cause cancer. Hell, the
way that it was
throbbing
, he could
have sworn that he was developing a
tumour
right there and then.

‘So everything has been
taken care of?’ asked the voice on the other end of the line; that sickly-sweet
voice that was now morbidly familiar to him.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Burr,
allowing the slight
colouring
of impatience to taint his voice. He’d heard the same question, asked in a
variety of different ways, on four or five separate occasions now. Familiarity
breeds contempt.

‘It is unwise to be
contemptuous of me or be condescending of me,’ said the man on the other side
of the world rather coldly. There was a
slightly foreign tint to the voice; certain words
were pronounced and used differently.

Embarrassed, Burr busied himself with plucking some of the grass in
front of him and then casting it away into the breeze. He
loved
the feel of grass; he grew up with it on his father’s farm,
only the army had got in the way, hadn’t it, and there hadn’t been much grass
out there in the desert. Even
Edison
’s, which was surrounded by countryside,
was too carefully manicured, too
humanised
.
Sometimes he wished he
had chosen a different life for himself; one in which he was his own boss and
didn’t have to follow the barked orders of his superiors, or
apologise
to pansy-sounding foreigners like the guy on the other end of the line.

‘Sorry ‘bout that,’ he breathed. ‘I just wanted to let you know that
everything was carried out to the letter, sir. But I’ve told you that about six
times now.’

‘Not to worry, Callum. I’m sure you’ll make up for your lapse one day,’
said the voice.

Burr froze; although the threat wasn’t obvious, it was still a threat.
What did he mean by
one day?
He
glanced back at the printworks over the fence and wondered whether he was being
watched. He certainly felt like he was being watched. Or maybe, he thought,
that prickly feeling at the back of his great thick neck was actually something
else entirely; maybe it was guilt.

‘So, run through it again please Callum. And this time tell me
exactly
what occurred today. Thus far,
you are only telling me the minor issues. Who was this security man that came
to site? Danny Morris, you say?’

Callum looked confused; his lamb-chop forehead wrinkled in
incomprehension: ‘No; I don’t know where you got that name from. No, it was a
man called Mark something. Hold on, it’ll come to me…’

He stared at the freckles on his hands as though they’d give him
inspiration. Surely something would come back to him.

What was that name? It
was something simple; something typically English; a little boring.

 
‘He was a Geordie,’ said Burr,
slowly, training himself. ‘Whistled some tune off the Billy Connolly show…’

‘What is a Geordie?’ asked the foreign voice.

Callum felt like saying that Geordies were the unluckiest people on the
planet; but for a cruel twist of fate, a quirk of historical circumstance, they
could have been Scottish. Of course, he said nothing of the sort. To have been
so flippant again would have been to invite more threats, more insecurity.

‘From the North East,’ he said instead. ‘He was a stocky guy; very
determined. The quiet-type…’

The foreigner seemed to sense that he was playing for time however, and
interrupted: ‘Name, please?’

Sweat started to seep out of the pores on Burr’s face. His back already
felt damp. He knew that on his return to the Security Lodge, he’d look as
though he’d been for a quick swim. Profuse sweating had been a side-effect of
his new rotundity that he hadn’t really considered, and in the tight-fitting
polyester uniforms of
Edison
’s Printers, that was a real mistake.
Daily, his uniform became a wet-suit.

He stared at the little private road which ran up to the main gate for
inspiration now. A large, lumbering
Edison
’s truck was creeping
up to the main gate and the Security Lodge. He tried to pick out the driver,
but the afternoon sun reflected too brightly off the windscreen.

‘Burr? You still there?’ asked the voice.

What was the engineer’s
name? What was his name? Something to do with a tree… Mark Oak-tree? Mark
Appletree? Mark Pussy-willow? Mark Pussy, more like…

Suddenly a blue transit van which had been coming from the other
direction pulled into the ditch in order to allow the larger lorry to pass.
Callum picked out the livery on the vehicle: EyeSpy Security. It took him a
little longer to then realise that the engineer
must
have been driving the van. He peered into the windscreen and
finally saw his man. The engineer was giving him a breezy little wave. Finally,
Burr remembered.

‘Mark Birch,’ he said, with some finality. ‘His name was Mark Birch.’

Callum turned away from the road. He didn’t want Mark to become suspicious
about his motives for making a phone call so far outside the fences. Maybe Mark
had not seen him? But no; the wave had confirmed that he had… Inwardly, Callum
cursed.

‘Mark Birch,’ repeated the man on the other side of the world; tasting the
name as though it was a strange fruit. ‘And did Mr. Mark Birch have the
paperwork to back-up his claim that he was who he said he was.’

‘Oh yes,’ confirmed Callum. ‘Although he was a little shifty; a bit of a
weirdo, like. You remember I told you ‘bout that Mick Stephenson up the Main
Monitoring Centre? The two of them would be like peas in a pod. Both of them
act like they have something to hide. Maybe this Birch has some kind of
deformity like Stephenson does…’

‘What is “peas in a pod”, please?’

‘You know, like
the same
,’
said Callum. If they were now discussing the bizarre phrases and sayings of the
English language then maybe the worst was over for now. Maybe the interrogation
had ended.

‘You did well,’ said the voice finally, after another long silence.
Absently, Callum wondered just how much these phone calls were costing his
mysterious foreigner. How much, for example, had it cost him to stay quiet on
the line for the past twenty seconds? Probably more than an hour of Callum’s
meagre
pay; that’s how much.

‘Why thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘Tell me; what’s the weather like in
Mauritius
at the moment?’

A snort of laughter from the other end of the phone: ‘Sunny, believe me
or not to believe me. Just like when you were over here.’

‘I should very much like to come over again… Maybe meet you this time,’
said Callum.

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.
Nobody
really gets to meet me, Burr,’ answered the foreigner. Burr thought he
could trace regret in the man’s voice, as though he’d have liked to have bent
his own rules
just this once
in order
that he could spend some time with the remarkable human being that was Callum
Burr. And quite right too; everybody should have to spend time with him. It
would be an
education.

‘No worries,’ he said, and immediately hated himself for sounding like
an Australian. ‘All right then? Everything tickety-boo? Well, I’d better get
off then. Must crack-on; I’ve got all sorts that I need to do on site.’

‘Hold on, Burr,’ said the voice, suddenly sounding chilling again. ‘So
when you told me that you managed to access the chip at the back of the
printer; you did type in the right code, yes?’

Callum sighed.
Seven
times
he’d been asked now. He wasn’t some rookie, was he? Sure he was a bit rusty
when it came to this new technology and stuff, but he was still
clued-up
up-top, wasn’t he? He’d got
through twenty years in the forces, for Christ’s sake. He’d handled weapons
which could have blown most of
Mauritius
to smithereens in his
time. He wasn’t some common or garden imbecile.

‘I typed in your code while the engineer busied himself with the
cameras,’ he said, wearily. ‘I even got one of the Main Monitoring Centre guys
to buzz my walkie-talkie so that it looked as though I was going off to talk to
someone. I walked up to the machine and I tapped in the code. I even printed
out a few new notes just to make sure. The Precisioner’s set on Mauritian
Rupees now. Or at least it will be until someone can break your code.’

‘Good.’

Callum thought he’d ask that killer question; the one that the foreigner
had refused to answer until now. ‘But
why?
Why do you want it set on those notes? What are you…’

‘Does not matter to you any more. Your part in this is almost at an end.
Soon the monies will be transferred into your account and all will be – how you
say – tickety-boo?’

Callum grinned in spite of that nagging doubt in the back of his mind.
It was a
good job
that the ‘monies’
were about to be transferred. He’d already spent most of it…

‘Keep your telephone switched on at all times though, please,’ continued
the voice. ‘It always pays to be vigilant. You should know that, being a
security guard.’

‘Guar
supervisor,
’ corrected
Callum, but it was already too late. He was talking into a dead line.

From the starting-position on his haunches, he creaked back to half-height,
feeling his belt buckle complaining at the shift in his great weight. He then
craned himself upward using a concrete post in the security fence as a
counter-weight. Luckily, most of it was buried like an iceberg under the
surface so it could handle his bulk being pressed against it. Finally, Burr
attained full-height and red-faced from the effort, he stole a quick glance
about him to discern whether there had been any witnesses to his ungainly show.
But there were few eyes
outside
the
Edison
’s fences and too many
inside. He was safe. He felt the relief coursing through his veins.

Your part in this is
almost over… The monies are about to be transferred into your account…

On his way back up to the Security Lodge, Callum whistled. His whistling
was far more effective; far more practiced than Mark Birch’s had been. He could
trill like a bird in the trees; he could imply a cask-matured
splendour
in his tune. It was the whistle of a man that believes all is well – or
at least
will soon
be well – in the
world.

He was whistling
Flower of
Scotland,
and the armies that he was imagining sending homeward tae think
again were those in the upper echelons of
Edison
’s Printers; those that
had passed him over for promotion time and time again. Oh, and not forgetting
his new boss, Jim Hunter. He was a man that Burr would certainly have to deal
with. But that would be later. For now, he was free to spend money in his head.

This was money that Andrena would never know about and therefore
couldn’t sting him for her fucking fifty percent. This was money that would buy
him a brighter future; retirement maybe. And while she wasted away in that
glorified council estate that passed for her area of west
Leeds
, he’d be off sunning
himself somewhere hot. Somewhere like
Mauritius
.