‘You boys better pick up the pace,’ Monty noted, as he opened up to let in a smartly dressed service engineer.

Ryan worked along the edge of the partition separating the desked area from the print room and watched as the engineer stripped down the giant printer.

‘They’re not designed to have water thrown on them,’ the engineer told Monty. ‘This machine is a wreck. You’ll be better off buying a new or reconditioned machine.’

‘No,’ Monty said. ‘We have a big job for early next week. The machine has to be up and running.’

The engineer nodded sympathetically. ‘We have a demonstration unit in our showroom, which we’ll be more than happy to make available to you for your printing needs. Then we can have the new 950L model shipped in by the end of next week.’

Monty sighed and thumped the machine. ‘We need this machine working by Tuesday. I’ll pay you cash to work through the weekend.’

‘You’ll also get fluorescent printing and full two-year warranty on a 950L,’ the engineer continued.

Monty looked panicked as he pointed at the door. ‘My boss wants this place cleaned up and running smooth when his boss comes through that door on Tuesday afternoon.’

The engineer stepped back, wiping toner dust from his fingertips on to a rag. ‘I’d love to help, but I could work on this machine for a week with no guarantee it’ll run again. These things just aren’t designed to have water poured inside them.’

The boys kept ripping carpet as Monty showed the engineer out of the building.

‘So the mysterious Uncle’s gonna show his face here on Tuesday,’ Daniel whispered.

‘Sounds that way,’ Ryan agreed.

Like most things, there was a knack to pulling carpet tiles and by nine the boys had cleared more than half the floor. Monty worked at the back of the room using the Mac Pro to design new menus for a local restaurant.

As the boys worked, they placed listening devices under all the desks, including specially designed low-frequency microphones that were ideal for recording keystrokes. Although tapping any key on a keyboard sounds the same to a human ear, sophisticated listening software can detect a slightly different sonic signature for every key and then use simple decoding techniques to work out what is being typed.

It was past ten and the Sharma brothers had done three-quarters of the carpet tiles when Monty sent them to the shop downstairs.

‘Are we getting off soon?’ Leon whinged. ‘My knees are screwed from crawling around.’

The answer was no. A caged flatbed truck had reversed on to the pavement out front. An overalled man had unlocked the shop’s metal shutters, and the boys were shocked by the mess as they stepped inside.