Robert Young - Gatecrasher

‘Miss Knowles. Thank you very much for waiting for me,’ he said as she took his hand and he found that he had no words to say momentarily as their fingers slid together, squeezed gently and then slipped apart.

‘That’s OK. I had a few things to tidy up anyway,’ Sarah said and smiled at him with her eyes. She held an envelope in one hand and was tucking a lock of her dark hair behind her ear with the other. Her eyes were locked onto his and for a brief second neither of them said anything.

‘I take it that’s what I came for,’ Campbell stuttered and dropped his eyes to the envelope at her side. Moving his eyes down allowed him a chance to appraise her more fully and he leaned back as he noticed that they were still standing close from the handshake.

She wore black leather shoes with a small heel and he guessed that she must be about five nine in her socks. She wore tights and he noted the smooth curve of her calves as they disappeared into the knee length black skirt she wore which sat delicately on the sweep of her hips. A white blouse was buttoned one off the top suggesting at a cleavage where his eyes lingered a moment longer than they should.

He noticed that she hadn’t answered and he looked her in the face again, realising that he was staring now and rather obviously. He cursed his hormones. When he looked up though he noticed that she too had glanced down over his shoulders and chest before she met his gaze from beneath her eyelashes.

‘Oh. Yes. Couple of brochures like you said. I didn’t really know what else to give you. It would help if I knew what you were trying to find out,’ she said.

Be good if I knew too, he thought to himself and then said ‘Oh just a bit of background on the company, you know.’

She nodded but it was obvious that she didn’t know. ‘Might I ask what kind of article are you writing Mr Michaels?’

The pause was obvious, as was the slight raise of the eyebrows that made it clear that he hadn’t thought about that particular point. He was thinking fast of a lie to tell and they both knew it.

‘Not too sure yet. I mean the editor told me to look into the burglary, thinks we should cover that sort of thing, you know, local interest and all that. Depends what I find out really.’ He talked fast to try to cover up the pause but it did nothing to help. And then he found himself saying something that was against his better judgement but the words just sprang right out of his mouth. ‘Would it be alright if I contact you again Miss Knowles? If I need to. You’ve been very helpful.’

In fact she had not yet even given him the envelope. But it was the question that caught her off guard. Him too.

She handed him the envelope and then laughed nervously. ‘Its nothing really.’

‘Well I’m grateful anyway. I have your number so perhaps I’ll call again.’

‘Sure. No trouble at all.’ Sarah said backing toward the door. ‘Please do.’

Tuesday. 6pm.

George Gresham was sweating profusely and his face burned scarlet with exertion. Pumping his legs he pedalled hard on the exercise bike and stared off into nowhere, his mind working as hard as his body.

He was waiting to hear from Slater. It was over a day now since they had spoken about what they were going to do next and Gresham was anxious. Anxious because if this turned out to be a dead end, he had no idea where to go next.

Gresham could hardly believe that they were in this mess and wondered with a shake of the head how on earth they’d got here. Of course he knew how they’d got here; a combination of bizarre meetings, circumstances and, if he had to be frank, fuck-ups.

He’d been introduced to a man named Drennan by Julius Warren — whom he trusted and who vouched for the man — saying that he’d known him years. Drennan had been a bit of a flash bastard; plenty of talk, and he seemed always to have a smirk on his face for some reason. Like he knew something. Warren didn’t have many friends like that and it struck Gresham as odd at the very least. Gresham had him pegged as a bit of an actor. He was always cagey with information, reluctant to say too much. It was a way of seeming important, of having the power. Gresham wasn’t taken in though.

But the man had offered him money and quite a lot of it for what sounded to him like a pretty easy job. Normally that would have got Gresham’s radar screeching for all sorts of reasons. Nobody just gave you cash for nothing. If you got offered ten times what the job seemed worth to do it, it was almost certainly worth ten times more than they were offering you. If they told you it was no big deal, then it probably was.

Despite the fact that he knew that there was more to it than Drennan was letting on (and he seemed often unable to resist alluding to how much more to it there really was) he needed the money badly. He decided that the risk was small enough in this instance. Do the job, grab the cash and get shot of Drennan.

So the previous Friday Gresham had sent the four of them in; Keith Slater, Julius Warren, Stuart Keane and Tony Cooper. They had gone in late at night, dodged the alarms the way Drennan had told them, pulled off the data from the computer system as Drennan had specified and then trotted back out the door. Drennan seemed to know so much about it that Gresham had been tempted to suggest that he might be better doing it himself but that, of course, would not have been so lucrative.

It had been fine until the last minute. Buoyed and euphoric at the smooth ease of the job Gresham’s four men had been making quietly for the exit in the subdued night-lights of the office they had ghosted into only fifteen minutes before when Cooper — who had been the one at the terminal, tapping the keyboard, downloading the data — had peeled off the black balaclava obscuring his face at the very moment that he passed a security camera. He was looking full into the lens before he even realised it.

Slater, glancing back over his shoulder, had seen it and had called Gresham almost immediately. They had first considered ripping out the camera but knew that was as futile as killing the bee that had already stung you. They had discussed somehow getting into the security system to delete Cooper’s image from the record but they didn’t know if it was tape-based or digital, or even what other kind of system it could be or how to do it. Every second they stood there debating how little they knew about this and what to do and whether Drennan had said anything about such an eventuality was a second closer to getting caught in the bright glare of police headlights and Gresham had made the snap decision to get out of there.

Perhaps Drennan could come up with something, perhaps they could go back the next night and this time steal the incriminating evidence and perhaps this time keep their masks on too.

But Drennan had not been able to come up with anything like that. In fact Drennan had sounded both horrified and angry, cursing their incompetence and threatening not to pay the cash, the smooth facade of control and assurance dropped completely for a moment.

Still he wouldn’t say what the data was and why it was being stolen but he had gone to some length to convince Gresham that the implications of this were grave indeed, that Drennan’s employer would not view such a mistake kindly. Though he would not be drawn on exactly how unkindly he would view such a mistake, Gresham had been threatened often enough to see it when it was looking him in the eyes.

Finally Drennan had let Gresham talk himself back into favour so that Drennan’s employer would not involve himself in the matter any further than necessary and that, provided the USB was delivered as arranged, the cash would also be forthcoming. There was a condition though that Gresham could not duck out of.