Suzie and the Monsters (7 page)

‘What? No. Just wave my ID card and duty card, and enter my PIN number.’

‘Duty card? What’s that?’

‘The guard in charge of the site always keeps an extra card.’ He’s starting to sound confused.

‘So you have that when you’re on duty, and then hand it over when your shift finishes?’

There’s a long pause. ‘Yes,’ he says eventually. ‘Your mum... I haven’t spoken to her. A long time.’

‘Mum’s fine,’ I say, looking for somewhere to pull over.

‘It’s just, I don’t remember, why... why you’re staying with me. Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s great to see you, but I don’t have any food, and how long are you staying?’

I turn into a side street and park. Looking into his eyes, I try to calm him. ‘It’s just for one night, Dad.’ I reach over and hold his hand, and let him sink into my eyes gradually. ‘Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about Mum. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry about all my questions. We’re having an adventure tonight. I’m your daughter. It’s natural for me to want to know about your work. You’re making me very happy. Now, just relax.’

He’s deep in a trance now. ‘Now, Daddy, I would love to know what your PIN number is.’ He looks upset and doesn’t answer. ‘Shh,’ I say, ‘it’s okay. Is it my birthday?’ It’s a stab in the dark, but he smiles and nods. I’m on a roll tonight. ‘Eight digits?’ He nods again. ‘Day, month, year?’ Another nod. ‘When is my birthday, Daddy?’

‘March 22nd, honey,’ he says.

‘1995?’ He nods. ‘What did you get me this year?’

He looks suddenly so sad. ‘I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t get you anything.’

‘When was the last time you saw me?’

‘Five years ago.’

‘You must miss me a lot.’

He nods.

I think for a minute, then wake him up again. ‘Dad, I’m really grateful. This is the best birthday present you could have given me.’ I give him a hug before starting the car and returning to the main road.

He’s happy again, excited about our father-and-daughter trip, and I don’t question him any further about Alex’s fortress. Instead, he chatters away about some family holiday when I was just a child.

At the Dodgeson office he takes me to Reception. The uniformed guard behind the desk doesn’t want to let me in. Dominic, Daddy, has a long conversation over the phone with someone more senior, and I’m aware of all the cameras here and outside that have seen me. I’m doing my best to look like a teenager, innocent, ignorant and bored. The guard takes the phone back and listens briefly before shrugging. He puts the phone down and calls me over to fill in the visitor book. I write down my name, Sandra Wright, in neat capitals, and the time of entry, eleven o’clock give or take five minutes, and he tears this out and puts it in a plastic cover with a bright red strip, and a lace strap for me to hang the visitor ID around my neck.

‘I can only show you the main control room,’ Dominic tells me in the lift on the way up to third floor, which is also the top floor. ‘And you have to promise not to touch anything.’

‘I promise.’

The door to the control room is immediately opposite the lift. The corridor stretching left and right is dark and quiet, although there is a light on in one of the offices. ‘Someone’s in,’ I say, pointing.

‘Probably one of the computer guys,’ he says without interest, and ushers me into the control room. I am faced with a huge wall of flat-screen displays, most showing multiple black-and-white images with annotation. There are two guards in uniform sitting at the desk in the centre of the room. This has a computer that presumably lets them control the wall displays, and presumably they can manually control camera direction and reset some of the security systems. There’s a radio communication system, which is currently quiet, and several colour-coded telephones.

‘Hi Dom,’ one says, and the other nods greeting. Both look at me curiously, and I give them a friendly smile.

‘Hi Bill, Tony,’ Dom replies. ‘This is my daughter Sandra. She’s doing a school project on security stuff and wanted to see this place.’

‘This place is amazing,’ I enthuse. ‘It looks like daytime. Are you using night-vision cameras or something?’

‘All our cameras are dual mode with daytime and nighttime settings,’ Bill answers.

Looking through the images on the wall, I eventually identify Alex Graham’s garden, the little security hut by the main gate brightly lit within, but the rest of the garden and the wall clearly visible. If I was there now, standing on the wall like I was this morning, I would certainly be spotted if anyone looked at the display. Of course, it’s a much clearer brighter night tonight, moon and stars, no mist.

‘What happens if you spot someone trying to break in?’

‘We send a helicopter. We have three helicopters on-site here. If there’s an actual break-in we call the police. For some clients we will send an immediate response unit to the scene.’

‘Do you go in armed with tasers and stuff?’

‘No, we leave armed response to the police.’

I’ve seen and learned enough, so I thank Bill and Tony, give them another cheerful smile, and leave them to their surveillance. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I say in the corridor, ‘that was just what I needed, but, you know, I’d love to have a word with the computer guy.’ He frowns unhappily. I know he’s not supposed to be taking me all over the place. ‘Please,’ I add in a sweet girl-begging-daddy way.

He sighs. ‘Come on, then.’

We open the door to the only office with a light on. Inside is a young man who is startled by our intrusion. I get the sense that he was doing something that he didn’t want anyone else to see. He is mid-twenties, short blonde hair and glasses, quite fit and handsome, uniformed but not as tough as all the other guards I’ve seen working for Dodgeson.

‘Hi!’ I say cheerfully, giving him a sweet smile. ‘I’m Sandra,’ I tell him, walking over to his desk and sticking my hand out.

‘Er, hi. Chris.’ He shakes my hand, looking down to scan my visitor pass, then looking over at Dom who is still hovering in the doorway.

‘Come in, Daddy,’ I order him gently, my eyes dazzling him, and I close the door as he obeys. ‘Why don’t you sit down for a while, over there, close your eyes, while I talk to Chris?’ He’s very confused, but his resistance to me is very weak now. He nods agreement and goes to sit in the chair I indicated. The office has several desks, with lots of computers and electronics. Also pizza boxes and mugs of half-drunk coffee.

‘I’d love a coffee, Chris.’

He hesitates, still wanting to tell me that I shouldn’t be here talking to him, but then there’s a hint of humour in his eyes as he gets up and walks over to the kettle in the corner. ‘We don’t have any milk.’ The kettle roars in a way that suggests it was boiled recently.

‘No milk is perfect. Four sugars, please.’ While he measures the coffee, I undo a couple of buttons of my white school shirt, not enough to expose my breasts, but enough to make him stare at the opening when he turns round to look at me. I pretend not to notice, studying the pictures on the walls, most of which are print-outs of humorous drawings with captions that I don’t really understand. One drawing is a girl sleeping in a double bed, next to her in bed is a laptop computer. I check on Dom. He’s fast asleep. It’s been a long day for him, what with guard duty, an evening in the pub, and me messing with his head for the past couple of hours.

‘Thanks,’ I say as Chris hands me a mug of scaldingly hot sweet black coffee. I breathe in the aroma. ‘Mmm.’ I give him a speculative look. He blushes a little. ‘Well, Chris, I’m doing a school project on security systems and techniques for making software systems more resilient.’

‘That sounds awfully advanced for school.’

‘I guess, but my dad works here, and I like computers. I’d be really grateful if you could help me understand a little about how it works here.’

‘I’m not supposed to talk about that stuff.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble, but surely it won’t hurt to show me some basic stuff.’

‘I guess not,’ he says after a few seconds. He sits down at his computer and taps the keyboard to wake it up, and I see he’s using a Mac Pro although the two displays aren’t Apple displays. I have an iMac at home which I’ve got to know rather well over the past two years. I’m reminded of the time I made love to my Maths professor surrounded by whirring tape drives and a humming 7000 series IBM computer back in the sixties.

I pull up a chair, close so that Chris and I are almost touching. ‘Tell me about the cameras. Is everything recorded?’

‘Yes. We keep everything for seven days, then it gets run through a filter which deletes all the boring bits, and written to DVDs.’

‘Boring bits? Like a camera watching an empty room all day?’

‘Yes. It’s not always easy because light levels are changing all the time, and the position of the sun also, so the filters need to be quite intelligent. We also have filters that can cope with random movements caused by the wind. The important thing is to make sure that movements of people aren’t accidentally deleted.’

‘If someone wanted to destroy all camera recordings made tonight, could they do it?’

‘No.’

‘Could you do it?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘How?’

He thinks for a moment then opens a terminal window, establishes a secure shell connection to a remote computer, and lists the filesystems. ‘Each of these lines,’ he says, pointing, ‘is an external hard drive used for storing camera feeds. If you wiped these then it would destroy the recordings from tonight.’

‘That seems rather too easy. Isn’t there an off-site back-up?’

‘Yes. We synchronise twice a day, at six o’clock, morning and evening, with the servers downtown. So tonight’s recordings won’t be backed up yet, but if you wanted to destroy last night’s recordings you would need to access the back-up servers as well, which I can’t.’

‘But you can access the server here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Wouldn’t you need root access to do any real damage?’

‘Modern systems don’t have a root user, as such, but I’m an administrator so I can do what I like.’

I frown. ‘How does that work?’

He shows me, using the ‘sudo’ command to get a harmless listing of a hidden directory. He has to type his password to do this. If I’m lucky, and this has been a very lucky day for me, the system won’t ask for his password again for another five minutes.

I unbutton my shirt, revealing my naked breasts. ‘I told you I love computers,’ I say. ‘I’m getting seriously hot.’

He looks at me like a cornered mouse, and glances nervously over at the sleeping figure in the corner.

‘He won’t wake up if we’re quiet,’ I say. ‘Put your hands on my breasts, Christopher.’ When he still doesn’t move, I take his left hand and fold it around my right breast, and when I let go it stays there. I slide his thumb across my nipple, and sigh with pleasure. Chris moves his chair round a bit so that he’s facing me, and takes one of my breasts in each hand, playing with my nipples, which are getting very hard. ‘Look at me, Christopher. Yes, like that. Keep looking. I want you to concentrate on my breasts with your hands, their soft weight, the smooth skin, the sensation of my nipples brushing your fingertips, but keep your eyes, your beautiful eyes, looking deep, deep, into my eyes, yes. Nothing else matters, just my breasts, my perfect breasts, yours and yours alone, perfect... now, just relax, yes, sit back, close your eyes...’

He’s lost. I pull the keyboard over to me quickly and use sudo to start a shell with admin rights. A quick exploration confirms that the remote server is running Linux, although it’s some variant I’m not familiar with. It has been a few years since I was last playing seriously with computers. I write a shell script which will, I hope, stop the secure shell server, unmount the external hard drives, and erase all the data using a handy little command called shred. Finally I set the script to run at five a.m., exit the admin shell and close the terminal window. I wipe the keyboard and my coffee mug to get rid of any finger prints.

I put Chris’s hands back into position and wake him up so that he’s unaware that his attentions were interrupted. ‘You know,’ I whisper, ‘I’m not wearing any knickers. Why don’t you get on your knees and take a look?’

He grins excitedly, and it’s not long before I’m also grinning excitedly.

Swings And Roundabouts (Friday)

Four o’clock in the morning and I’m back outside Alex’s place, again wearing the black running suit, hood up, and some thin, black leather gloves, but no bird seed today. The night is still clear and I can see quite clearly. Unfortunately the cameras can also see quite clearly. I’m just going to have to move quickly and hope no one is watching. I climb up onto the wall and walk round to the gate, jump down on to the path outside the guard hut and step inside even as the guard, the one who looks like Bruce Willis, is reaching for his radio. I kick this out of his hands and he leaps at me. We crash to the ground with him on top of me, trying to lock me in position, but not before I manage to jab my K95 taser in his side and send electricity shocking through his system. He’s still conscious, but he’s twitching, not really in control and I am able to escape from underneath him.

The radio is quiet, and there aren’t any lights that look like warning lights, so I guess I haven’t been seen. I tie Bruce Willis up with handcuffs, blindfold and a ball gag from a bondage shop in the city, rifling through his pockets, finding his ID, a second chipped card that must be the duty card, and a couple of sets of keys, one of which is carefully labelled. One key says ‘Front Door (Outer)’ and another says ‘Front Door (Inner)’ and a third one that says ‘Gate’, which doesn’t make sense, unless it means the guard hut rather than the gate itself.

I let myself in through Alex’s front door, closing it behind me. There’s a computer display in the entryway showing floor plans of the whole house in green, except for the front door which is blinking green-amber-red. To the right of the display is a card reader with a number pad, with a small screen that says ‘Insert ID’. I insert Dominic Wright’s ID and enter his daughter’s birthday. Next the screen says ‘Insert Duty Card’, which I do, and the front door stops flashing on the floor plans.