Christopher Brookmyre (45 page)

However, they needed to hit the roof today, because this was work they couldn't carry out until the penthouse suites' exhibition occupants had taken up residency, which would only happen after their own security people swept their respective accommodations for bugs.

They had figured that the biggest players would take the biggest suites, and Lex's leeched booking information bore that out. Some of the major firms would be off-site, basing themselves at rented villas or harboured yachts for the duration of the exhibition, but there was little they could do about that; they had to settle for what was local, initially at least. The good news was that the main lead they had at this stage, Ordinance Systems Europe, was taking a suite in the penthouse. Bett's exhaustive contacts had led him to identify the firm from merely the two names Lex had picked up in Scotland: Lucien and Parrier. OSE had a Pascal Parrier in senior management and their deputy head of security was named Lucien Dirlos, a former cop, reputedly as brutal as he was corrupt. He and OSE were a good match, it appeared. The company, which made short-range anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as assault rifles and tripod-mounted field guns through a wholly owned subsidiary, had been at various times indicted for - or at least implicated in - just about every form of corporate intimidation and corruption there was a law against. Naturally, they had a bigger legal budget than most courts could muster against them, especially when OSE had sufficient politicos in their pockets to hamstring the prosecutions from above. They were, in that respect, 'just your typical arms firm,' according to Bett, who had therefore surmised that under a threat such as Fleming posed, they'd have few reservations about unleashing the jackals, even if that entailed child abduction and murder.

The stand-out question at the briefing was why OSE, more than anyone else, had such a hard-on for Fleming and his device. The most plausible explanation was simply that they knew earliest, and thus got saddled up quickest to do what they felt was needed. This thought had prompted a return of that tight, cold, this-is-it feeling in Lex's gut. Whoever knew about this first knew about it through her nameless conspirator, and thus through her. She thought of her meetings, the phone calls, talk of contacts and influence. For all she was aware, it could well have been this Lucien guy. She'd have to keep her eyes open real wide in case the pair of them ended up face to face in some hotel corridor.

With OSE already having gone to great and ruthless lengths to acquire Fleming, it was a shoe-in that they'd be in the forefront of the bidding when whoever had him made his position known. The plan was to spread their surveillance as wide as was practical, but initially the closest eye had to be kept on the OSE principals, to see who came a-hawking. Once they knew who was holding the geek, it would be a different game, the game Bett played best. The Hotel Reine d'Azur was an Eighties-built high-rise in black, chrome and glass, abutted on three sides by two-storey extensions housing the exhibition and function halls. It was intended to look high-tech and ultra-modem in its time, thus rendering it swiftly dated when culture and architecture both inconveniently failed to stop in their tracks. According to Armand, it was a fitting, iconic landmark for Cap Andreus, a harbour resort forever in the shadow and in envy of its coastal neighbours such as Cannes, San Tropez and Monte Carlo. In its attempts to compete with their status and prestige in attracting the tourism and conference dollars, its burghers and investors had attempted to outdo its rivals in terms of opulence and ostentatious expenditure. The result was a sink of flash-trash vulgarity, a kind of Vegas-sur-la-Riviera, its illstarred excesses crowned by this graceless, three-toed monolith. To Armand, it was no surprise that this so-called 'defence exhibition' was taking place in this town and in this building, as the more self-respecting resorts and hotels would have told them to fuck off. Up the coast, they didn't need the business any more than they needed the hassle that went along with it, such as having their premises predictably picketed by protesters, as was going on down at ground level right then.

The helicopter barely came to a halt on the landing pad, its wheels touching down for less than ten seconds, and not quite coming to a stop even then. Armand, Som and Lex bailed out, backpacks strapped to their fetching red overalls, and quickly scurried for cover as Rebekah lifted the chopper clear and away again.

Lex scanned the flat rooftop. There was no one around. Landings on the H-pad were supposed to be prearranged, so there was no official greeting party, and nor, she hoped, would there be an investigating party, given that any observers would only have seen their chopper cursorily buzz the building then whiz off again.

Armand went straight for the door leading to the main roof-access stairwell, for which he had a cloned swipe card, fruit of early reconnaissance work. He'd be riding the elevator all the way to the sub-basement, a destination only accessible by punching in the aforementioned plastic. His work lay with the hotel's internal telephone exchange, all lines of which were routed through a junction housed in the bowels of the building. Once he accessed it, he had two tasks. The first was to run relay taps on the voice lines serving the topfloor suites, the second to clone-phreak the data lines serving the same rooms. The first part he'd done a thousand times before. A few minutes with cablestrippers and miniature croc-clips, some cosmetic work with electrical tape and plastic sleeving, and it would be over, the resulting evidence indistinct from routine maintenance. The clone-phreaking was a bit trickier, involving the installation and concealment of some Som-spawned hardware. This particular box of goodies intercepted the traffic in both directions and duplicated it, restoring the original signal to its particular line, while sending the cloned data out on another. From there it got bounced around a few servers - so that the cloners couldn't be traced in the event that the hardware hack was discovered - and ultimately sent chez Bett, where Lex would analyse it later. Meantime, she and Som were preparing to pursue a matter of conscience, protesting demonstrably about the evils of the arms trade and the amorality of the Reine d'Azur in playing host. Before that, however, they had to site two receiver/converters on the roof, attaching one to each of the hotel's twin mobile-phone masts. The devices were identical, duplicating each other's work in case of malfunction. They picked up the short-range transmissions of the many bugs and cameras they had secreted - and were about to secrete -

around the premises, and converted the signals from analogue to digital before sending them to base across a raft of mid-band cellular connections. That was priority number one. The task completed, they moved on to the reason for their ridiculously conspicuous garb.

There were no balconies on the building, just sheer faces of glass and steel, but there was a ring of aluminium balustrades around the penthouse level, which was inset from the rest of the building by about three feet. It was also fifty per cent taller than any of the lower storeys, with its ten-foot windows slanted at about fifteen degrees, an architectural conceit that was supposed to represent a crown atop the hotel.

Lex and Som stood close to the edge, near an emergency-access stair leading down to the narrow platform between window and balustrade, and began removing materials from their backpacks which they had laid down on the concrete. There were four suites, each with dual aspects, and they had a decoration for all of them. With Lex holding his legs in case he leaned out too far, Som reached down to the window below and attached the top end of a red paper banner to the glass, the remainder tightly rolled up on the roof. The banner was held in place by two black rubber suckers, each of which contained a video camera and transmitter, now pointing straight into the suite, with infrared capability for when the blinds were closed. They placed all eight before unfurling any, as the moment the first one was spotted, they were on injury time to complete the rest of their work: the old unseen clock that could stop any second. The banners displayed a selection of slogans copied from a website set up by the genuine protesters who were downstairs on the sidewalk. They would be torn down by hotel staff within minutes of being unveiled, hopefully with maximum haste and minimum care. They were fragile, designed to rip free easily in order to leave the cameras in place. No doubt a few of the suckers would come loose, hence the superabundance, but it was unlikely busy and harassed staff would go to the bother of removing these. Their orders would be principally to tear the banners down - some window cleaner or janitor could worry about the rest.

All eight banners attached, Som clambered hurriedly down the access stair on to the platform, clutching his backpack, while Lex stood with her foot on the first roll. Upon his signal, she kicked it loose. It uncoiled, buffeting slightly in the breeze, covering a four-foot width of penthouse window and dangling a further twenty feet over the side. On the platform, Som pressed home two more suckers at waist-height to further secure the banner to the window, then got busy - now hidden from any occupants - replacing a halfmetre stretch of plastic bird-spikes at the foot of the balustrade with ones of his own. His were near-identical in appearance and would work just as well to prevent pigeons or seagulls from roosting, but were an improvement on the originals in that every alternate spike was in fact a supersensitive directional microphone pointed at a different angle into the suite. Som worked fast. The longest part of the operation was the journey along the narrow platform to the site of the next banner, Som understandably not hurtling flat-out and quite definitely not looking down. He was just completing the final stretch of spikes when they got word in their earpieces from Nuno, down in the lobby, to warn that there was much running and pointing going on among staff. Time to wrap it.

Som ascended to the roof again and they both stripped off the overalls. They stuffed them quickly into the backpacks, which they stowed out of sight between ventilation ducts before briskly heading below. Three men in hotel security uniforms came bursting from one of the lifts as Lex and Som made it to the foot of the access stairwell. The new arrivals took in their uniforms and breathless, hurried faces and came to precisely the conclusion intended.

'
L'autre ascenseur, l'autre ascenseur
,' Lex shouted angrily at them, indicating the closed doors of the other lift. '
Allez, allez
,' she demanded. The three of them didn't stop to confer, just barged back into the lift and descended in hasty pursuit of their quarry. Lex and Som meanwhile waited calmly for the other elevator to return from the twelfth floor, where it had by this time stopped. Lex got the okay from Armand in her earpiece and looked at her watch. It read 11:34. They were due to be complete by 11:35, which meant that any second now . . .

She and Som shared a smile as her mobile began to ring. She pressed the talk button and Bett's voice was instantly audible to both of them in the confined seclusion of the lift.

'Status?' he asked, all small talk and solicitousness as usual.

'Status is we own the building,' she reported.

'Damn, you people are good,' Bett replied.

Som looked at the phone, like it might be malfunctioning.

'[ don't say that enough,' Bett went on. 'I think it a lot, though.'

'Thank you, sir,' Lex said, trying not to giggle at Som's bewildered expression. Bett hung up.

'What's wrong with him?' he asked.

'I think you'll find the answer somewhere on the ground floor right now.'

[?] [?] [?]

Jane found herself glad of the intensive training she'd been put through, as much for the small things as the more major, such as not starting at the sounds of disembodied voices in her ears, and suppressing her instinct to reply whenever anyone could see her. She had simply walked the floor at first, around the lobbies, the stalls, the exhibition halls, to see and be seen, her 'bodyguard'

a deliberately ostentatious adornment. She was supposed to look bored, tediously underwhelmed, which would have been difficult in her state of nervousness and excitement, but found disapproval a close and easy substitute as she perused the exhibits and displays. It was all extremely tacky; expensively so, but tacky nonetheless. The problem was the unresolved tension between the need to glamorise the products while maintaining the facade of a moral sobriety that could never,
I say never
, consider these
tragically necessary
devices glamorous. Thus there were several nubile models in business attire dotted around many of the stands, retained in a meet-and-greet capacity, handing out leaflets and catalogues, as opposed to draped over field guns, wearing bikinis, as the exhibitors would doubtless have ideally preferred. They all looked young and, as she had suggested it to Rebekah,
uncomplicated
. Great pick-up potential for Bett, she thought. Miaow.

And yet there had been as many gazes alighting on her as on the professional eye-candy, starting with her exit from the Diablo and the unseemly scrum of valets competing for the keys. It was slightly disconcerting, slightly flattering and slightly laughable. She was turning heads because people saw money and were fascinated by who owned it. Sure, she looked good in her professionally selected finery, but who wouldn't? She'd have been embarrassed by her own affectation if it wasn't for another thing Bett was right about (she was learning it was true what the girls said, that he was right irritatingly often): she was merely playing a part. She was enjoying it too, though she had to guard against the Brechtian technique of passing comment on the character through one's performance.

She had just about relaxed enough to start thinking this spying carry-on was a doddle when, at eleven thirty and thus right on schedule, Bett announced that the transceivers were in place. This meant he could now see what all of their hidden cameras were showing, including the view from her pendant. That was when the running commentary had really begun in earnest: brief CVs of the men she was standing near - names, companies, positions, history -