Confusion

Robin Wright Full Manuscript: 132,000 words

CONFUSION

Adult

Romance/Technothriller

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence
The life o’ th’ building.

William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

Chapter 1

“Leave no trace you were ever there. That is most important.”

With this injunction ever in mind, the black-clad figure slid noiselessly across the cantilever roof of Marsh Engineering. Six or seven ski-jumps of factory skylights stretched away in front of him, frosty white in the December dusk. Looking down at the electronic map on his wrist screen, he saw he had two more to go. Down below, lights were being extinguished as the workforce went home for the Christmas break. Reaching his target skylight line, he moved along until he was above the black square of the offices below. Removing a small, blackened tool and a piece of foil from his belt, he extended a small blade and slid it along under the skylight window, looking for the alarm contacts to bridge with the foil. Finding no contact block, he took a quick look with a bright penlight, and saw that the alarm was an old-style wire connector. When he found it, another rummage in the belt brought out a black wire with a powerful crocodile clip at either end. Two minutes careful work with the knife saw the wire isolated and the centre cut through, allowing a loop a little over a metre across. In case there were additional sensors not on the plans, he used a longer rubber blade on the tool, taking a deep breath and holding it as he slid the tool in and along the gap between the window and frame, millimetre by millimetre. He let the breath out in a soft hiss as he felt his way back to the window catch, and flicked it open. No sound. He manoeuvred himself into the loop, and opened the skylight window.

A series of twisting contortions over the next thirty seconds brought him inside the window, holding an auto reel attached to a carabiner, which he secured to the girder he was standing on with a wire cable. The auto reel made a low whining noise as it lowered him down to the interior roof of the office section, but there was no obvious sign of anyone about now, with no light shining through the loosely-supported suspended roof tiles below. From a clip on his belt, he drew his new toy. This would be his first time using it, and the insertion depended entirely on it for success. It looked like a water pistol with an iPhone glued to the top upright, like a giant sight. The HHLDEW was its cumbersome name at the even more cumbersome United States Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center in nearby Picatinny, where this one had been until a week ago. A ‘Hand-Held Laser Directed Energy Weapon’, it could shoot a laser from a nanoparticle beam array powerful enough to fry the innards of virtually any small electronic device. His target tonight was the video camera believed to be covering the corridor underneath him, a corridor used only for the Data and X-ray film storage rooms. He put a sophisticated listening device to the panel just ahead of him, and was briefly alarmed to hear someone whistling, albeit their relationship with the tune was a remote one. He thought he could recognise ‘Senorita’ by …Camilla Cabello, was it? But only just. The ghastly noise was retreating down the corridor, and after another minute, had gone.

Pulling down his balaclava, he used a suction pad from a bag over his shoulder to remove the silver-metal roof panel from the corridor roof. With a dental mirror, he ascertained the location of the video camera. It was about four metres behind him, and to the right – a tiny green LED gave it away in the darkness of the corridor. Rearranging his position on the roof panel frames to spread any of his weight not taken by the auto reel, he picked up the HHLDEW and extended his arm underneath the panels into the corridor in the approximate direction of the video camera. Getting comfortable, he popped his head through the hole, sighted quickly at the camera, pulled the trigger and held it tight. The green LED went out immediately, although there was no noise or flash from the weapon. Clipping the weapon to his belt, he gripped the grid supporting the roof panels, unhooked himself from the auto reel and forward-rolled through the hole to land cat-like on the corridor floor below.

Moving silently along the corridor to the door marked ‘X-ray Storage’, he checked the door handle. It was unlocked. It was probably therefore not alarmed. Taking the chance, he turned the handle and slid inside the room. With a penlight, he quickly scanned the tubes of X-rays neatly stacked on shelves in front of him. Hundreds of long, white paper-wrapped cardboard tubes about a metre long and four centimetres in diameter, all with red plastic caps and almost identical labels carrying details of the circumstances of the X-rays within. The nearer shelves carried empty tubes, caps and a label printing machine. Two units back, he found the latest ones, marked “20 December LCFV – WV scan KEV 11006 - 2”. Moving two further units down, he found another tube labelled “16 March LCFV – WV scan KEV 4128 - 1”. This one didn’t matter specifically, according to his briefing – it just needed to be any older one with an X-Ray that had a flaw in it, any flaw. Sliding the film out of the older tube, he placed it on the shelf while he drew the new one out of its tube. He then slid the older film into the new film’s tube, and replaced the empty 16 March tube back exactly where he found it. He folded the new film into a small square, and placed it in his shoulder bag, drawing the string tight. Taking the newer tube back to the exact spot he had found it, he replaced it and then moved to the door again. The listening device confirmed no threat from the phantom tuneless whistler, and the dental mirror confirmed no one was in the corridor.

Trying not to make a sound, he stepped back to the hole in the panels above and checking everything was secure on his person, leaped for the edge of the metal grid. His gloved hands caught the edge, and he pulled himself nimbly up and over on to the panel frame. Replacing the missing panel, he clipped himself back onto the auto reel and ascended gently into the sky, getting off at the girder. Detaching the auto reel and replacing it in its bag with the cable, he climbed back out through the skylight window and closed it firmly. His last action was to tap the window just above the catch with the heel of his gloved hand. He had to repeat the tap twice before the catch helpfully fell back into the closed position. He looked at the crocodile clips, thinking, and then smeared them with dirt and pushed them under the skylight’s frame where they might never be noticed, or might be mistaken for an alarm technician’s repair.

Crawling to the edge of the rooftop, he looked down for his truck. He had parked it in the lot of the next building along, fifty yards from the security fence patrolled by Marsh Engineering Security every forty minutes or so. The wooden back panel bolted to the rear of the cabin stood out pale in the watery moonlight. From the shoulder panel, he drew out a powerful folded crossbow, which he assembled with practised ease. A reel of fine line led to an eyehole on the back of one of the four bolts he drew from the bag. Tying the end of the line to the thin cord rope wrapped around his shoulder, he aimed at the back panel and pulled the trigger.

The bolt sped fast and true, almost two hundred and fifty pounds of tension giving it more than enough impetus to punch through the two centimetre board about fifteen centimetres from the top, dragging the line with it. The flanges on the bolt spread as he tugged it gently, securing the bolt head snugly against the back of the board. He pulled all hundred or so yards of fine line through the eyehole and allowed the cord to follow it. With both ends of the cord back in his hand, he tied them together around the support stanchion for a large air conditioning unit five metres back from the roof edge. He then rewound the fine line neatly on its release reel and packed everything away in the bag. Connecting the bag to the twin cord with a carabiner that would allow it to slide down the cord easily, he lowered it over the roof edge and guided it down to the truck bed. Finally, he used a tension lever to pull the cord as tight as he dared. Too loose, and he would not make it over the fence. Too tight, and he could not recover the cord. Finally he was set. He looked at his watch. 17:13. He had been on this side of the fence for only twenty-two minutes.

Clipping another slide carabiner on the cords, he attached it to his harness, and slid over the side of the roof. Remembering to lift his feet into the air to avoid the fence, he landed hard in the truck bed a few seconds later. Unclipping his carabiner, he was able to pull the cord so that the knot came down from above and the other side rose back up in one long continuous line. With the knot in his hands, he cut the cord and pulled the whole length down into the truck bed. His instructions had been very specific – there could be no sign that he had ever been there. This was, apparently, essential to the client. Pushing the cord into the bag, he pushed the bolt right through the back panel and added that to the bag. Removing his gloves and balaclava, he stepped down and got into the truck’s cab. Driving slowly, he pulled out of the lot and on to the service road, and he was away. Twenty minutes later, the X-ray film, liberally doused with lighter fuel, was burning on an instant barbecue he had brought along for the purpose, the whole process filmed on his phone for his employer as instructed. Once the film was ashes, he blew the ashes away from the barbecue and poured a bottle of Fiji water on the barbecue before dropping both bottle and barbecue into the strip mall dumpster in the shadow of which he had lit it.

An hour later, he was back in Manhattan, taking a shower.

Chapter 2

Penny Jones looked through the glass panel in the classroom door and saw the three friends huddled round a computer screen. She opened the door very quietly, and slid in behind them.

“This one talks about James Bond.” Tyler nudged James so hard his elbow fell off the desk, and it was probably all he could do to stop his chin hitting the keyboard.

“Where? Let me see.” Tyler moved the screen slightly so James could see better:

“It’s not rocket science. This has to work first time, and it has to look right. Get one of the people who designed James Bond sets from Pinewood Studios, or one of the Star Wars people. Hell, get James Cameron if you have to, but it needs to be done pretty fast and it must look perfect. Whatever their budget is, it’s fine. It only has to last a week at most. And make sure Thea Barton has enough seats on a shuttle for her insurers’ syndicate – that’s crucial.

DM@Clytton.com”

“Who’s DM?” Caitlyn asked. “Is he one of Lytton’s people?” Caitlyn was their ‘particular friend’, a girl in their class who Penny suspected had quite a thing for Tyler, but who seemed to be fun and entertaining anyway to James. Caitlyn was dressed as ever in cut-off shorts, a crop top and boots of a type most often described as ‘kinky’. It was the depth of winter, but Caitlyn would usually be in shorts. Penny knew that fashion, and especially girls’ fashion, was and always would be a closed book to James and Tyler. Caitlyn was extremely pretty, with blue-black hair like a glossy raven’s wing and a smile that could take anyone’s breath away. Her grandmother, with whom she lived, was an orthodontist, and perhaps consequently Caitlyn had the most perfect teeth Penny had ever seen. Penny had once overheard James tell another classmate that if she hadn’t had a thing for Tyler, who was the class clown for both good and bad reasons, he would have asked her out himself by now. Not that ‘out’ meant anything much to twelve year olds. But Tyler was his friend, so she was off limits romantically, according to their ‘bro code’. Tyler spent his time alternating between being genuinely funny and being so obtuse that that was funny too. Part of that obtuseness seemed to Penny to be that he could not see how Caitlyn looked at him sometimes.

“Who indeed, Mr Marsh?” Her calm voice asked from directly behind them. They all jumped. Turning slowly around on his swivel chair, probably hoping he wouldn’t see what he did in fact see, James came face to face with Penny Jones. Penny was in her usual crisp white shirt and grey pencil skirt. Brunette, slim, with hair they thought they secretly referred to as ‘the helmet’ because it never changed – always shoulder length bangs, dead straight – Penny was the secret crush of all the boys. When she smiled, she showed equally perfect teeth, but she only ever seemed to smile when someone had been caught and was in deep trouble. She was smiling now.

“We’re, uh, practicing internet access protocols, Miss”, croaked James, always the first of the trio to recover from a shock. Tyler nodded acquiescence.

“Practising internet access protocols? You mean hacking? I haven’t taught any of you what you would need to know how to hack – er, to practise internet access protocols,” she said, still deathly calm. “You had better not be doing anything illegal, or you are going to get a long time in which to practise internet access protocols when you are no longer at this school. Show me what you have been doing.”

Caitlyn had already pressed clear screen, before James had turned round. When they were trying to hack, they always stood ready to clear everything.

“Oh dear, Miss, it’s gone. Sorry” said Tyler, clearly realising what Caitlyn had done.

“Out of the way, Miss Fenn.” Penny pushed Caitlyn’s swivel chair to one side without giving her time to move, and began typing astonishingly fast. A keystroke file came up and she scanned it for what James thought must be a microsecond, before typing again. James and Tyler could only gasp in amazement as everything they had been doing reappeared on the screen in multiple windows. Penny paused as one window came up and stayed on top.

“So, here we see some of the ‘protocols’ you’ve been practising. You’ve been finding passwords – you’ve been accessing an email account belonging to ‘clytton’.” She looked them both in the eyes. “Who’s Clytton? One of your friends or some sort of enemy? This had better not be a major company or a government account, or you could find yourselves in extremely hot water.”

“Clytton?” James was confused for the moment, before realisation dawned across his face. “It’s not Clytton, Miss, it’s C. Lytton – as in Cat Lytton”

“I have no idea who that is – or is that the new batting coach?”

“No, Miss, that’s Mr Langton,” Caitlyn supplied. The others looked at her, amazed. She stared back defiantly. “So? He’s wicked cute.”

“I don’t even know what language you are speaking, Miss Fenn. Who is Cat Lytton, James?”

“She’s the world’s richest woman, Miss. She’s inherited from the guy who’s leased that land on the Moon, who died a couple of years ago. The energy guy? Billionaire? Duh. I mean,” he added hastily, as frost started to colour Penny’s expression, “she’s quite well known, in the news a lot because she is building a power plant on the Moon.” Tyler decided to help. “We were just seeing what a lady like that sends email about, Miss. Just fooling around, and this account came up,” he added. “We tried a few things we read about on Wikileaks, and they worked. We were in the email account before we realised.”

“Well. We are going to turn this off right now and I will consider what to do about this next week when I have spoken to the Principal. You are very lucky that the police are not here arresting the three of you right now. Some of these corporate accounts have trigger traps to catch the unwary or stupid hacker, and you three certainly qualify under both.”

As she spoke, a police siren sounded. Caitlyn looked out of the window. She saw a caravan of vehicles pull into the car lot in front of the main hall. Three black Chevy Suburbans and a police cruiser – all with blue lights flashing.

She hissed at the others, temporarily forgetting one was a teacher. “Guys, quick – cops! They may be coming here.” The Computer block was some distance from the main entrance. As Caitlyn watched, a cop ran into the main building.

Penny responded very quickly. “Right, Caitlyn, James, Tyler, go quickly into the last classroom on the other side of the corridor, not the next one but the one after that. Don’t argue – go. Sit in the front row, and take all your stuff with you. Open a notebook, and try to look bored, whatever you do. I’m going to sanitise this room. Tyler, make sure all the computers in that room are off, and unplugged from the wall. Quick, Go.” They ran, bewildered but obedient.

Penny quickly took a screen wipe from the tub next to the adjacent monitor, and wiped down the keyboards and screens of all three computers they had been using. As she did so, she shut down the computers themselves, and unplugged them. Moving quickly but without fuss, she trotted to the back door of the complex, beside the classroom into which she had directed the three youths. Ignoring the big green warning sign, she pushed the lever and opened it wide, setting off the alarm. She then moved to the classroom and stood in the doorway looking out.

She had been waiting perhaps twenty seconds when an armed police officer ran in, gun up. Behind him, but more slowly, came half a dozen men in black suits, no guns, but holsters visible as they jogged along and their suit jackets swung. Penny put her hands up immediately.

“Whoa, what’s going on?” She asked the officer – a sergeant, she noticed, now he was closer. He immediately approached her down the length of the corridor and patted her down for a firearm.

“What you doing here, lady?” asked the first suit.

“It’s my block. I’m Head of Computer Sciences at this school. I’m running a detention. What are you doing here?”

“Lady, we’re asking the questions...” the suit began, but she cut right across him with a voice like ice.

“Not in my block, you’re not. I didn’t ask you here, there is no emergency – unless it is some child going through that alarmed door down there, and unless you are psychic, you didn’t come here for that. There is no crime here, so you have no business here, unless you have a warrant?”

“Uh, we got probable cause...” began the sergeant.

She deliberately demoted him “Officer, if you are going to lie to me, this is going to get very ugly, very quickly, and not for me.” The frost was in full flow, now. Another black suit stepped forward, presumably the more senior of the agents.

“Excuse me ma’am. James Staton, FBI Special Agent. We are responding to a call from this building that an IP address registered to this school is being used to access a computer remotely, a computer which happens to be in a Government building. That is what this ....officer is referring to. As you are aware, this is a significant crime, and we are required to respond immediately to neutralise the threat of a security breach. I am sure you would like to cooperate with...”

“Mr Staton.” Her voice brought him up short, a flash of surprise leading a similar show of annoyance across his features before he could compose his face. “Excuse me for interrupting your, ah, explanation,” she said, “but let me point out some of the issues that occur to me as you go along. First, it is impossible for anyone here to have called you. For you to identify this building, it would have to have been a landline, as the building is shielded for various sorts of interference, including cell phone signals, to enable some of the physical experiments we demonstrate here to take place. Those landlines are down this weekend, and this you would know if you had bothered to read that sign over there.” She indicated a sign on a stand, just inside the door through which Staton’s team had entered. “It is clearly impossible that that part of your explanation is true. In addition, this is a high school computer facility. This school complex is responsible for information technology teaching, and no one at this school, myself included, has the skills to hack into the local cinema schedules, let alone a government facility computer system. In addition, none of our computers are powered up at present, to my certain knowledge. I turn them off personally for the weekend.”

Staton turned to the sergeant. “Cinema schedules?” he whispered.

“She must be a Brit,” said his agent.

“You don’t say.” Staton answered dryly. He stepped into the detention room. “Which of these computers has this IP address?” He showed her a small piece of paper with an IP address written on it in a small clear print.

Penny didn’t even bother to read it. “None of these machines is connected to the internet,” she replied tartly. “All our internet machines are down the hall. No particular machine has that address – they are allocated by the server at the time of logging on.”

“Could you show me the internet machines?” Staton said.

“Certainly, once you show me some ID and your warrant.” Penny replied sweetly.

“Here you are,” he said, handing over a newly laminated card. She took it and went over to her purse, from which she removed a cell phone.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Calling your field office, as we are advised to do by the Government” she said, and turned her back to him.

Staton looked at the three young faces who were staring at him, spellbound by the exchanges. He couldn’t risk a scene here, with this fool of a policeman. That gave him an idea, however. “But I’m here in the pursuit of my duties with a uniformed police officer.”

She turned to look him straight in the eye, the phone held ready. “You are here in a schoolroom in front of children, with a man with an unholstered gun who has already lied about his reason for being here and has failed to produce any ID whatever, and who has already assaulted me without cause. Now be quiet, please. I can’t hear what they are saying.” She put the phone back to her ear.

“Shit.” Staton muttered, and turned to his agent. “Find that damned computer.” he snarled in a whisper. He conferred quickly with his colleagues and turned back to Penny, just as she put the phone away. “Your ID, Special Agent Staton,” she said sweetly. “Your field office have confirmed your position with them.”

“Good, then we can....” he began

“Unfortunately,” she added “they are under the impression that you are off-duty today, and they are unaware of any attempt to compromise a government facility in the last three months from any source, let alone this school, or indeed any call-out at all today. They would very much like you to drop in and give them some, ah, information.”

Staton managed a smile, taking his ID from her outstretched hand. With as much charm as he could muster, he began “We’ll just finish up down the hall...”

“No, you won’t. If you have a legitimate reason to be here, you can return whenever you like with the relevant paperwork properly completed. Nothing will change while you’re gone, but as you are clearly here on false pretences you may not continue to do whatever it is you thought you were going to do by deception.”

(TEN PAGES to this point - chapter continues for completeness.)

A black suit appeared down the hall, arms spread wide in a shrug. “Can I leave a man here to ensure that nothing changes?”

“Of course, Special Agent. He can stand outside the door while I finish our meeting.”

“Meeting? I thought you were in detention?”

“I am a teacher, Mr Staton,” she chided. “We do not believe that overlaying negative connotations on a detention is necessary, so we call them meetings. Goodbye.”

Staton turned away, and saw the police sergeant, gun still in both hands. “Put that away, you idiot. We’re going.” He turned back to Penny. “Thank you, Miss Jones, we will be back later.”

“I doubt I shall still be here, Mr Staton. The registrar can let you in, if I am not.”

They trooped out, the policeman showing total confusion. Penny breathed out sharply.

“Miss, that was radical!” said a wide-eyed James.

As the police car and Suburbans pulled out of the car park, Penny called to Tyler and Caitlyn. “Tyler, go down the hall to the restroom. Wait however long you would normally wait, and then come back. Make sure you’re seen by the man standing at the door. If he doesn’t turn round, bang something so that he does.” Tyler opened his mouth to speak, but she just pointed at the restroom door. He started walking down the corridor. She turned to Caitlyn. “Caitlyn, I need you to go to the water machine in the Redkern building and get three bottles of water. Try to engage the man at the door for a couple of minutes.” She reached into her purse and handed Caitlyn a few dollars. “This is for the water. And I want the change.”

“How do I engage the guy at the door?” Caitlyn asked, frowning.

“You’re a pretty girl. Imagine he’s a… Mr Langton. Tell him you want to join the FBI after college - I don’t know. You’ll think of something. Go. James, you’re with me.” She watched Caitlyn move down the corridor as well, and as soon as she saw the sentry agent turn, slipped out of the door with James and walked briskly to the original computer room where she had interrupted the trio. “James, take the keyboard from your computer and swap it with one further down the bench.”

“Why-“ James, began, but she held up a hand.

“Do it – I’ll explain later.”

While James watched in mystified silence, she swapped various cables and keyboards with other keyboards, and typed in a command to each computer. A black screen appeared which James recognised as an MSDOS input screen. Her fingers began flying across the keyboard, typing in a series of commands so fast that he could only catch the occasional word as they scrolled up the screen. She hit enter for a final time, and a white box appeared on the screen containing a statement he didn’t have time to read before she hit a box labelled “Yes”. The entire screen went black, except for a blinking white cursor.

Penny repeated the procedure with each computer in the row. Indicating silently to James to follow, she slipped back along the hall into the detention room. They noticed that Caitlyn was talking to the sentry agent again, her arms full of bottles. Tyler was already back in his seat. She silenced their questions with a hand, pointing to the open window.

Caitlyn entered a few minutes later. “You’re right, Miss.” she whispered a little loudly. “It was soooo easy. He was practically drooling. Here’s your change – I’m afraid Inspector Gadget out there wanted a soda as well, so I got him one.”

“Now what, Miss?” whispered Tyler.

“Now we wait until noon.” She replied.

“What? But they might be back.” he whispered urgently.

“Indeed they might, and probably will be, but it is a central point of our defence that we are meant to be here, in a detention, and it would look strange if a detention ended at twenty five of the hour, wouldn’t it?” She regarded him sadly as he clearly struggled to understand this, and James pulled him away.

“I’ll explain it to him, Miss.”

*

As the school clock rang for twelve, the police cars and Suburban pulled back into the car park. Staton and the sergeant got out and strode across to the computer block directly. They could hear Staton address the sentry agent. “They still in there?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the agent.

“Any funny business? “

“No, sir. One of the kids went to the can, and the girl went to get some sodas, but nothing.”

“Sodas? What in hell for? Was she smuggling something out, eh? Did you think to check?”

“Sir, with what she was wearing, she wasn’t smuggling anything. Wasn’t hiding a sheet of paper, let alone a flash drive or anything.” Caitlyn blushed bright red, and Penny smiled widely at this, and gave her a...