18: Breakthrough
George had passed on the details of the Malaysians he was working with, but ASIS's email the next day said they weren't hopeful of making any arrests with the limited information he had. There were a few suggestions of things George could find out if he could, but the focus of the mission was back on Zach and the Syndicate so George didn't spend very long thinking about it.
It took a week for ASIS to get everything into position for the operation, which George was at the centre of. After arriving back from Sydney George's voice was hoarse and Alice thought he might have picked up a virus on the plane, but after a few squeaks and occasional voice cracks, Katie and Alice worked it out.
"Sounds as if your voice is finally breaking," Katie said, patting his head. "Nice to know that puberty is finally happening for you."
"It'll work itself out in a week or so," Alice said, more helpfully. "Take a while for you to get used to your macho voice, I expect."
George liked the way he sounded, but the occasional squeak made him sound stupid and Katie made the most of it, bursting into laughter every time it happened.
It was a minor operation by the usual standards of both CHERUB and ASIS, but George rehearsed it in his head on the way back to Riley's house after school. Every Cherub was told that even the smallest thing going wrong can throw the whole operation out, so George was conscious that it hinged on him.
The plan was for George to send Riley downstairs to grab drinks at the same moment as a ASIS operative wearing a police uniform rang the doorbell. Riley and his mum would be held up at the door by the operative who was going to claim to be making enquiries about a fictional crime that happened in the local area. Meanwhile, George would be sneaking into Zach's office and cloning his computer's hard drive, followed by searching the filing cabinets for some specific documents he had memorised. The tricky part was the timing; if Riley got bored and came back upstairs, or George took too long in the office, it could blow George's cover. As insurance, Katie would be sitting in a car on the other side of the street and was going to be in contact with George by an earpiece he'd wear once the doorbell went. Any movement by Riley and she'd tell George to abort.
George had some high-tech equipment to clone hard drives in his bag, but he had to be careful not to knock it, so he put his bag down carefully in Riley's room as his friend booted up the PlayStation.
"Want a drink?" he asked, pushing the Virtua Tennis 4 disc into the slot.
George shook his head. "Maybe later," he replied, checking his watch to make sure everything was on time.
"Cool," Riley said, sitting on his bed and navigating through the menus to find multiplayer mode. George was no fan of tennis and just picked the best-ranked player he could find, but Riley spent a couple of minutes making up his mind before selecting Rafael Nadal.
They spent ten minutes playing, which was long enough for it to become obvious that Riley was much better at the game. George wasn't entirely sure of the controls, but even when he remembered enough to maintain a rally, Riley would use spin or something that George hadn't mastered. George's mind was elsewhere and so he celebrated as if he'd just won Wimbledon every time he scored a point.
"Ah, thrashing you has made me thirsty," George said after scoring two points in a row but still losing the match. "Can you get me a drink?"
"Is Coke alright?" Riley said, pausing the game and getting up. "Actually, only winners get to choose."
George lobbed his controller at Riley, but he dodged and it fell harmlessly on the bed. Once Riley had left the room and George was sure he was downstairs, he grabbed everything he needed out of his bag and set off for Zach's office, pausing quickly to repeat his toilet trick in case of emergency. He heard the doorbell as he wiggled his lock gun, sleeve wrapped around his hand, unlocked Zach's office, and after a momentary pause to ensure it was definitely a police officer at the door and not some random parcel delivery, he shut the door behind him and slid the earpiece on.
"Testing?" he whispered, striding over to Zach's desk as he pulled on gloves and opened the drawer, hoping Zach hadn't decided to move the keys.
"Loud and clear," Katie's voice replied. "Keep the channel open and I'll let you know the moment someone moves."
The keys were were they should be and George put them on the desk before groping around underneath it to find the case of Zach's PC. It wasn't state-of-the-art and it only took George a couple of seconds lying on his back to unscrew the side of the case and locate the hard drive. The cloning device linked to the hard drive by a couple of wires, but to avoid leaving traces on the computer, George had to plug the device in at the wall. As soon as he had, a tiny screen lit up and let him know it was working on cloning the drive and had three minutes to go.
The next thing was to search the filing cabinets, so George unlocked them both and began searching from the bottom upwards. He had a document scanner in his pocket in case he found anything, but he wasn't too hopeful. Most of what he was seeing was unlabelled and when he pulled it out, it was just home insurance bills or old receipts for international flights. He skimmed through everything quickly, looking for anything that resembled the financial documents he was looking for, but there was nothing in the first cabinet and the hard drive cloner beeped to let him know it was finished.
"What's the situation?" George said nervously, pressing down the button on his earpiece.
"All clear at the moment. I'd guess you have another two minutes," Katie replied.
George removed the cloner and screwed the PC back together, making sure everything was connected as he'd found it. Once it was safely in his pocket, he went over to the second cabinet and began working through it. He could feel his back getting sweaty and it was itching, but he didn't want to pause even for a second to scratch. He half-expected to hear Katie's voice any second, but he knew ASIS were desperate for the documents and he leaving empty-handed would seem like another failure.
He finally struck gold with a grin of triumph when he got to the middle drawer, finding a pile of documents identical to the ones ASIS was asking for. He began scanning them as quickly as possible, and he'd completed the entire stack when Katie's voice came through the earpiece.
"Get out of there immediately, looking like Riley's headed upstairs with drinks," she said quickly. George had been focused on the scanning and jumped a mile when he heard her.
Regaining his composure, he replaced all of the documents as he'd found them and locked both cabinets as quietly as possible. He knew Riley was upstairs and was probably wondering where he was, so his only hope was that the toilet trick had worked. With everything safely in his pockets, he headed for the door and listened for a second. There was no sound, so he opened the door with his sleeve again and stepped out, relieved the landing was empty. He took two giant steps towards the bathroom and had his hand on the door handle when Riley's head appeared out of his room.
"You coming back or what?" he asked, jiggling a controller in George's direction.
"Uh, yeah, just forgot to switch the light off," George said, reaching inside and pulling the cord before wiping his hands on his trousers as if they were wet.
"Did you flush? I didn't hear anything," Riley asked as George following him back into his room. It was a harmless question, but George was on the spot and his heart raced as he tried to come up with a plausible response.
"I flushed while you were downstairs," he said quickly, before remembering a key detail. "Just took my time finishing an article in one of the magazines in there."
Riley just grunted and George slumped onto a beanbag, desperately thanking whichever god was watching over him.
The information in George's bag was highly sensitive and every moment he spent in Riley's house was a moment something could go wrong, so Katie sent him a text telling him Alice wanted him home. He made his apologies to Riley and less than an hour after being inside Zach's office he was sitting with Katie, sending the contents of Zach's hard drive to ASIS.
The only thing left that could go wrong would be for Zach to discover that something in his office had moved and become suspicious, but George was confident he'd left everything exactly as it was, and even obsessing over everything a million times in his head didn't sow any doubts. ASIS emailed him telling him that they were working on decrypting Zach's hard drive, but that the documents were extremely good. Well pleased, he chilled out by the pool until it got dark and then swam lengths until dinner, using the last of his nervous energy to set a new best time.
"Good job, Brian," Katie said, slapping him on the back as he towelled himself off. "Looks like the boffins are beside themselves with the stuff you've given them."
"All in a day's work," George replied modestly. "Anyway, it's all to the good if it shortens the mission a bit, I'm missing some serious campus gossip."
Katie laughed. "Keep it down a bit, I don't know where Alice is."
"She's in the kitchen, I passed her on the way in," George replied, but he took her point and strolled back to his room, having reminded himself to check his email and see if there was anything from his friends on campus. His laptop was on standby and only took ten seconds to start up, so he was downloading the new emails before he'd had a chance to dry his hair. The only email from the UK was a short one from Letty, asking him how he was and telling him the result of a campus 5-a-side tournament, but as he typed up a reply the computer suddenly started beeping madly as two emails arrived in short succession. It only took a cursory glance at the titles to realise that something good was going on at ASIS headquarters.
From: Linda Falmouth, Subject: BREAKTHRU!
From: Pete Graham, Subject: Well done!
As he read them, Katie knocked on the door and let herself in, phone glued to her ear.
"ASIS rang; looks like they've decrypted the hard drive and it's got all kind of goodies on it," Katie grinned, giving him a thumbs-up. "By the sounds of it they're having a second Christmas over there."
George just smiled, but he could feel his cheeks burning.
It took ASIS a few days to go through everything they'd found, but it seemed to mostly be solid gold. Linda and Dawn drove over one afternoon to go over the bulk of what they thought was going on, but George found most of it difficult to follow and the fact that it was all new information meant that it kept changing, so by the time they arrived he didn't know much except that it was to do with drugs, ASIS were happy and they thought they were close to arresting Zach.
"Some of the best lawyers in Australia are working on the case as we speak," Linda said. "We need you to keep collecting as much information as you can until we're sure it's watertight, but it looks good so far."
Dawn nodded. "There's enough there to prosecute him, but we want the maximum sentence so we've got to keep searching. The only key thing we're missing is a definite link between Zach and known drug suppliers on a personal level, but we're not hopeful for this. He's always kept business at arm's length, so it doesn't seem like he'll be sitting down for a long chat with any known criminals soon."
"We'll keep our eyes peeled," Katie said, nudging George who was cleaning his fingernails instead of listening.
"It's too risky to have Zach followed, so we're looking for major trips; anything overnight, perhaps abroad, could be at a hotel or a resort of some kind," Linda told them.
George wasn't enthusiastic. "Zach goes on overnight business trips all the time, maybe once or twice a week. Unless you're planning on following him to each one, I doubt if we'll be able to get anything worthwhile."
"That's good to know. Just listen out for anything you can, but this might be a dead end," Dawn said, giving George a smile.
"Sorry to rush off, but I've got a training session at the university in an hour," Katie said, getting to her feet.
"No problem, we'll get going too," Linda replied, brushing biscuit crumbs off her trousers. "Thanks for seeing us."
"How's the athletics going?" Dawn asked Katie.
Katie nodded. "Pretty good. Feeling confident for the season back in England."
"We'll look out for you on TV when it's the Olympics this summer," Linda chuckled.
"I won't make the 2012 Olympics, but I'm hopeful for 2016," Katie told her, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. "But I won't be competing anywhere if I don't get to the university on time and my coach kills me."