Agent of the State by Roger Pearce Page A

improve his line of sight. ‘Will the neighbours let us in to do some tech?’
    ‘Mind your back, John.’ Kerr caught a whiff of old sweat as Fargo squeezed past. ‘This has been a no-go area for years.’
    ‘Let’s phone them anyway, if you can find anyone who’s still using a landline. Where’s Justin?’
    ‘Already in,’ said Melanie, tapping a small video screen. ‘Probably up to his ankles in used condoms and hypodermics by now.’
    ‘Assault teams?’
    ‘Flexing their muscles,’ said Fargo, wiping his headphones. He waved a disinfectant swab in the direction of the rear window. Since catching an ear infection from headphones a decade ago, he had been fastidious. ‘RV point for the firearms teams is in Miller Road, supermarket car park.’
    ‘How the hell will they get in unseen?’
    ‘They’ll make the approach from the car park at the back – 608 only looks onto the front. Unless the targets leave the flat to check from the landing window, they have no visibility. And there’s no way they’ll risk that.’
    ‘There’ll be another entrance direct from the car park?’
    ‘Sure, but the Trojans are planning to snake round the front because it gives direct access to the stairs. Their leader wants a word, by the way.’ Fargo gestured for silence and spoke into his radio mike. ‘Go ahead, Justin.’
     
    Justin Hine, Kerr’s technical whiz kid who had joined them at Pepe’s, was lying prone on the floor of the living room in flat 708, directly above the target address. He lay completely still, stretched out on his stomach with his eyes closed.
    The occupier, a Somali mother in hijab and veil, looked on from the doorway with her young son, trespassers in their own home. Justin had talked his way in less than three minutes earlier. The little boy, no more than five years old, crept up and tentatively prodded his thigh. Justin opened his eyes, removed one earpiece of the stethoscope he was using to detect signs of life in the flat below, and murmured into his throat mike, ‘At least three, possibly four males.’
    The little boy seemed to think Justin was speaking to him and looked up to his mother in bewilderment. Justin held a finger to his lips then carried on murmuring, confusing the kid even more. ‘Plus the TV on Al Jazeera, and they sound pretty worked up.’ He frowned and shook his head, as if disagreeing with someone, but this time the little boy retreated and clung to his mother’s knees. ‘No, I can do something here. Switch on your screen and stand by.’
    Justin stood up, stretched, tucked his T-shirt into his jeans and made a tired face at Mum and her little boy. He knew she spoke hardly any English. At the front door a few minutes earlier she had simply stared at his woollen hat and rucksack as he had flashed his ID, winked at the little boy and eased himself into the hallway. Now he took their coats and gently ushered them from the flat to the lift lobby. Pressing the button for the ground floor, he listened to check that the lift was working. ‘You can come back in one hour,’ he said, holding up his index finger for the mother. He gave her elbow a reassuring squeeze, chucked the little boy under the chin, loped back to the flat and quietly shut their front door on them.
    Back in the living room, he took from his bag a fibre-optic cable, a tiny TV screen and specially adapted drill. He pulled back the threadbare rug and calculated the exact central point of the room. Within thirty seconds, lying flat, he had silently drilled down five centimetres into the concrete floor. He replaced the bit and worked at the hole again, drilling until he reached the ten-centimetre marker. For the final stretch he used a device equipped with suction to prevent the tiniest fragment falling to the floor below.
    Justin took his time but was inserting the fibre-optic cable inside three minutes of pulling back the rug. Within another forty seconds he was refining colour digital images on the