Aggressor

the night.

I breathed out, breathed in, kept my mouth open, and strained to pick up even the slightest vibration. Still nothing. Had it come from the window? Impossible to tell.

I waited another thirty seconds or so. If someone upstairs had spotted us, surely they would have done something by now.

I started to edge forward. We had no option but to treat this like an advance to contact. If you stopped every time you heard a gunshot, you’d never close in on the enemy. If there was someone in the house, or we’d been seen, we’d know about it soon enough.

2

My head eventually drew level with the bottom step. I resisted the temptation to take a shortcut and rush the last few feet. That’s always the time you get caught.

Charlie was on my right, the side the door opened. He’d pulled up enough of his mask to be able to press his ear against the wood.

I finally made it inside the porch, and sat against the rotting brickwork. I didn’t know which felt worse: the sweat on my back or the residue of rain-soaked concrete on my front. Charlie’s left knee was on the doormat. He would have checked underneath it for a key — well, you never knew your luck — and that it didn’t conceal a pressure pad. He moved his knee off the mat, pointed down at it as he kept listening.

I pulled the rubber up and saw that one of the four-inch-square tiles had no cement around it. I lifted it, and it appeared Baz had scraped out enough concrete to hide a set of keys very nicely. But of course they weren’t there. Maybe Baz had switched on a bit since coming up with that one. Why do people think no-one else would ever think of looking just by the door?

I slid the CO2 canister from my bomber-jacket pocket and slipped it up my left sleeve. The elastic cuff would hold it in place. Having it up the right sleeve, ready to drop into your hand when required, was just film stuff. You rarely got a good grip on the thing, even if it did fall conveniently through your fingers.

The two keyholes were a third of the way down the door, and a third of the way up it. The handle in the middle wasn’t attached to either of them.

There was no need for any discussion about what came next; we’d both done this enough times, from Northern Ireland to Waco. Charlie shone his key-ring torch inside the lower of the two locks and had a good look at what he was up against. I hoped his hands had calmed down. I didn’t want to have to take over again.

I pulled his mask back down over his ear, then leaned over above him and pushed slowly but firmly against the top of the door to test for give. If it didn’t budge, chances were it was bolted, and that would be a nightmare because we wouldn’t be able to make entry covertly. Worse still, it would mean that Baz was inside, or that he’d left by another exit, and we would have to run the gauntlet of the motion detectors to find it.

It gave. No problem.

Charlie turned his attention to the top lock, and I gave the bottom of the door the same treatment. It, too, yielded. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t a bolt midway, but we’d find out soon enough.

A helicopter rattled across the sky on the far side of the river and the band sparked up with a jazz number to send it happily on its way. Charlie pointed to the top lock and gave me the non-disco-dancing version of the thumbs-up. That was a bonus. Then he pointed at the lower one and did the thumbs-down, and got busy with the wrench.

I left him to it and sat back, knees against my chest, wet denim stinging my thighs and sweat going cold on my back. It was always better for the one working on a lock to do everything himself. If I held the torch, I’d be throwing shadows in all the wrong places, and we’d just get in each other’s way.

The only problem was, it gave me a little bit too much time to think. Why did Baz use just one of the locks? Had he decided to have a quiet night in? Had he just nipped out for a swift half at the Primorski? Or was he just a lazy fucker, and in a rush? It wouldn’t be the first time. I’d carried out CTRs on houses and factories protected by some of the most sophisticated alarm systems in existence — or they would have been if anyone had bothered to switch them on. Whatever, the quarry tiles were starting to numb my arse. Charlie was taking far too long.

I leaned forward. Even in the gloom, I could see his fingers were going nineteen to the dozen. Fuck that. I slipped across and put my hands over his, to stop him going any further.

Charlie held the tools out like chopsticks to try and convince me everything was fine. I took the torch and shone it on his right hand. It was trembling like an alcoholic with the DTs.

He sat wearily back against the wall and put five fingers in the torch beam, opening and closing them twice.

I nodded. I’d give him ten minutes, maybe fifteen. He wanted to do this, he had to; not just because it was what he was being paid to do, but because we both knew it was his very last time out of the paddock.

I understood that, but we didn’t have that much time to fuck about. It would be first light just after 6.30, and we needed to have filled the DLB by then.

I decided to make the most of it. At least it gave us a chance to listen out for anything that might be happening the other side of the door.

Time well spent tuning in, I kept telling myself. It didn’t sound any more convincing this time than it had the first.

3

I waited for the full fifteen, but by the end of it Charlie had defeated the bottom lock. Still on all fours, he packed the picks and wrenches away before easing the door open a few inches, so it didn’t creak or bang tight against a security chain. He waited a moment to see if any alarms kicked off, then poked his head through the gap to have a quick look and a listen.

It was time for me to get my boots off, ready to do my bit. The ski mask was clammy round my mouth, the back of my neck was soaked with sweat, and the rest of me didn’t feel much tastier, but fuck it, we’d be done with this by first light, and knocking back a couple of beers on the plane by midday.

I shoved my boots down the front of my bomber jacket and zipped them in, then liberated my Maglite and the CO2 canister.

Charlie crawled back to where I’d been sitting. He’d get his own boots off, prepare the camcorder and wipe the porch dry with one of the towels I’d nicked from the hotel. When Baz got home, there mustn’t be the slightest trace of our visit. The subconscious takes in everything; when the mat isn’t at exactly the same angle, when the dust on the table has been inexplicably disturbed, little alarm bells start to ring. Most of us don’t hear them because we’re not smart enough to listen to all the things our brains are trying to tell us. But some people do, and Baz might just be one of them.

I peered round the door. The place reeked like every auntie’s house I’d ever gone into as a kid, of over- stewed tea, old newspapers and stale margarine.

I held my breath, opened my mouth, and cocked my ear. The only sound was the gentle ticking of a clock, off to my right. The opening of a door at night changes the atmospheric pressure in a house ever so slightly, but sometimes just enough for even a sleeping person’s senses to pick up.

I let go of the door and, keeping control of it with my left shoulder, stepped inside. I hooded the lens of the Maglite with my fingers, leaving just enough light to see there was a staircase rising steeply along the external wall to my left and a longish hallway dead ahead with two doors on either side of it.

A strip of flowery carpet ran down the centre of what looked like a parquet floor. The parquet was the first piece of good news I’d had since we made it through the front gate; it wouldn’t creak. The walls were bare, apart from a couple of framed pictures above a wooden chair with some coats thrown over it.

Baz didn’t seem like much of a homemaker, at first glance, but he was certainly keen on security. As I flicked the Maglite to my right, a floor-to-ceiling, steel-barred gate glinted in the beam, hinged to swing across the main