Four minutes later, he was at the gate. Up in the trees he could see a small platform with three mounted cameras, one overlooking the gate and the other two aimed at the ten foot hurricane fencing that headed off in both directions. Crawling a few feet closer, he stopped below the big signboard and looked up. There was a company name he didn’t recognise, but down the bottom there was one he did. The small black letters said the company was part of the Munchen Dag AG Groupen.
Retracing his steps for forty yards, he moved back into the darkness of the trees, searching for a place to cross the fence. From its structure it didn’t look electrified – but there was enough trace wiring to suggest touch alarms. He was watching one sector when something moved in the trees above him and he saw the familiar shape of a squirrel scrabbling noisily in the branches. He smiled. If there was one, there were more – and that meant the alarms were constantly being set off.
He crossed a grassy strip, very close to the limit of what he thought was the cameras’ focus distance – and, praying that whoever manned the security monitors was asleep, he quickly but carefully climbed the fence and dropped onto the inside. Then he moved straight into the trees to meet the road a few hundred yards in.
The complex sat half a kilometre back from the main road. In the security lights it looked like a converted farm, with some newer prefabricated structures off to one side. As he watched, a four-wheel-drive with three men arrived at what was once the main house. From his hiding, Quayle saw them walk within, every last one of them dressed in the uniforms of security officers, with high peaked caps, side arms in holsters and big torches in their hands.
He moved closer.
There it was: the thing he’d come here for.
Alongside the main building, standing stark against the darkness, was the cream coloured Mercedes.
CHAPTER TEN
Quayle pulled the front of the balaclava down over his face and, still lying on the cold ground, began to shuffle forward on his elbows towards the side of the building. Muted strains of laughter carried across the gravel parking area from one of the low buildings and a bright shaft of light swept a short rectangular beam from an opened door. He paused, waiting for a set of crunching footsteps to pass on, and moved forward to the wall. Above him was a window. As he slid his left hand up, he could feel the dampness of the old bricks and the moss in the cracks.
Standing up slowly, he looked through the dirt streaked window.
Inside, a figure was walking down a hallway of some kind, carrying a huge tray on which sat covered dishes and bottles of beer. Quayle tried the window. It was locked. Moving backward, he looked toward the upper floor and the roof eaves above. There, a little further along, one of the windows was hanging open.
Like a burglar, he moved towards a drainpipe and began to climb. This was too good an opportunity to miss. The window opened into what had once been a bedroom, but was now being used to store boxes. After hauling himself through the window, he threaded his way to the door and stood listening for a full minute. The floor seemed quiet enough. Walking back toward the window, he undid the screws around the lock before closing it and then moving back toward the door.
Outside was a passage narrower than the hall below, the stairs at its far end. He slipped the small pack from his back and delved into it, producing a coil of what looked, on first impression, to be black rubber hose. Stretching it out, he lay it on the floor. It was a modified fibre optical device normally used for obstetric examinations by doctors, but intelligence operators had long ago discovered that it had other uses. Coupled to a re-chargeable battery pack, it threw full colour pictures onto a tiny two inch monitor. He connected the battery pack and plugged in both the endoscope and the listening device he had used in the apartment complex in Frankfurt, then moved back toward the door. Here he settled on his knees, the microphone on the floor, to listen to whatever was taking place below.
It was quiet, so he picked up the gear and moved carefully out into the corridor, the thick carpet soft beneath his feet. Bypassing the first door, holding the microphone out towards the second and hearing only silence in return, he slipped through the door of an office. Inside, a newish desk dominated the centre of the room and, against one wall, there was a second work station with a computer screen.
Quayle didn’t know much about computers – but he knew this was part of a bigger system. Somewhere on the complex was the hardware. What could they need a machine like this for? he wondered. Scooping up a sheaf of papers from the desk, and walking to the window to get the best out of the carpark lights below, he held them up. All that he saw were rows of figures and some business German about pork prices. Commodity by the kilo. Maybe this place really did produce pigs.
But pigs weren’t guarded by uniformed armed security.
Dropping the papers back where he had found them, he crossed to the wall, where the floor was bare, and once again went on his knees to listen. This time he heard voices. Pressing the record button, he put the system down and crossed to the door with the endoscope, pushing the fine head under the door so that he could see the comings and goings in the passage. When things went quiet, he
