The resulting cloud of dust tickled his nostrils as he studied the line of fluorescent tubes above his head.
‘Cut them off, Shak.’
Shak leaned across and flipped the light switch. James reached into the fitting and pulled the starter plug from one of the fluorescent tubes before jumping down. He rummaged briefly inside his rucksack, emerging with an apparently identical plastic fitting. But whereas the starter unit James had removed cost less than a pound, the replacement cost three thousand. It was a listening device, consisting of a pinhead-sized microphone, a transmitter and a chip that could store five hours of sound.
Light fittings are perfect for locating listening devices. First because they’re usually located in open space high above a room, where it’s easy to pick up sound. Second because the device can easily be wired up to source electricity from the mains.
As James went up at full stretch to replace the grille, he heard the ripping noise he’d been dreading all morning. His trousers had cracked open around the crotch seam, revealing a garish set of boxers.
Shak couldn’t help smiling as he flipped the lights back on. ‘Nice shorts, J.’
‘Man, that feels good,’ James gasped. ‘I might be able to have children after all. What’s next?’
‘Keys,’ Shak reminded him.
‘Assuming he’s left them in here,’ James said, as he walked towards the jacket hanging up by the door.
He fished a bunch of keys from Stein’s pocket, then grabbed a packet of wax tablets from his rucksack. Meanwhile, Shak had found some interesting documents in one of the filing cabinets and was copying the pages with a handheld scanner.
The wax tablets separated into two biscuit-sized pieces. James sandwiched each of Stein’s keys between a tablet, creating impressions that could be used to make duplicates. By the time James had worked his way through the whole bunch, the laptop had chimed, indicating that it had finished cloning.
James sat back in front of the laptop and used the hacking suite to install spyware on Stein’s machine. The spyware program would record every keystroke Stein typed and then transmit it covertly over the Internet to the MI5 monitoring station at Caversham.
Shak had finished rummaging through the filing cabinets. He grabbed a small metal box out of his backpack. It was held together with bits of insulating tape and looked like the creation of a mad professor. In fact, it had been built specifically to capture and replicate the radio signal from the plipper that worked Stein’s car alarm.
Shak turned the device on by taping a wire to the top of an AA battery. He flipped a switch on the front of the box to the receive position and asked James to press the plipper on Stein’s car key. It took a couple of attempts before a green LED on the front of the gadget flickered, indicating that the signal had been successfully recorded.
‘Is that everything?’ James asked.
Shak nodded as he checked the time. ‘In the bag with six minutes to spare.’
James and Shak did a final check, making sure they’d picked up their equipment and repositioned everything exactly the way they’d found it. When the claxon sounded for the lesson change, the boys darted outside and began heading down to the ground floor. James was conscious of the growing split in his trousers, but none of the Trinity pupils seemed to notice.
At the main entrance of the school building the boys stepped outdoors and turned left, heading down a gentle ramp towards a recently built sports complex that had a teachers’ car park beneath it.
The boys caught a whiff of sweat as they passed the entrance to a changing area where a group of Year Ten boys were getting ready for PE. They headed down a corridor lined with historic photos of Trinity rugby teams. After reaching the door leading into the teachers’ car park, James did a full three-sixty check before they passed under the Staff Only sign and down a flight of bare concrete steps. Everything looked new, with scarcely a tyre mark on the yellow lines dividing up the parking bays.
The boys quickly identified Stein’s silver hatchback. Shak pulled the metal box out of his blazer and flipped the switch across to transmit mode. James slotted a dealer’s key in the driver’s side door. This key was designed to open any car of this model, but it didn’t contain the embedded microchip necessary to silence the alarm.
‘Ready?’ James asked, waiting for Shak to nod. ‘Three, two, one – turn.’