“Hand it over to Gerald’s team.  They must have some kind of technical support service, and if they don’t get any joy there, they should go direct to the CEO.  We need to know what we’re up against and what we can do to get round his defences.”

Farsi nodded his understanding, and Harvey stood up and grabbed his jacket.  “Let’s go rattle some cages.”

* * *

The constant beeping of the motion sensor panel heralded the arrival of the authorities.  Gray looked at the sensor’s designation and it told him the area was covered by camera twelve, so he switched to the bank of monitors and maximised the view for that camera.

There had been several false alarms earlier in the day, caused by local wildlife, but what he saw on the screen was no bunny rabbit:  two figures dressed in black were snaking through the grass two hundred and seventy yards from the side of the building, heading towards the cover of a pile of rubble left by the demolition of an old outbuilding.  The remaining wall, which stood barely three feet high, offered the best cover available around the main building, and it was for this reason that Gray had deployed a couple of microphones.  One was hidden in the rubble to the side of the wall, and the other was embedded in the wall itself.  Gray had drilled through the mortar from the side facing the building using a drill bit measured to the thickness of the wall, minus three millimetres, and so it hadn’t broken through the other side of the mortar.

In about twenty minutes the two figures would arrive at the wall and he would see if the microphones functioned as well in the rain as they did in the dry conditions when he had tested them.

Sergeant Dave Williams of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, better known as SO15, reached the wall moments before Officer Ben Knightly. He used his binoculars to scan the area between his location and the building and didn’t like what he saw.

“It’s just like they said, this guy knows how to set a perimeter.  We’ve got shorter grass for about seventy yards, then open ground for another forty.  I say open, but I can see barbed wire and mounds everywhere.  There’s no way we get across there in a hurry.” Williams scanned the front of the building.  “We’ve got three cameras, sweeping in a hundred and sixty degree arc...wait... Shit.  One is static, looking straight at us.  He knows we’re here.”

“Do we try another approach?” Knightly asked.

“Hang on.”  Williams reached for his thermal imaging camera to see if he could detect any heat sources in the building, but he was met with a wall of white blobs, dancing around like some kind of psychedelic waltz.

“He’s got some kind of disruption system heating every wall.  I can’t see a thing in there.”

“Now what?”

“We report in and wait for instructions.”