6: Archive

Hungover, George lay in bed until way past lunchtime on New Year's Day. When the sun outside his window and the sound of the TV coming through the thin wall was finally too much for him, he peeled himself off his bedsheets and, picking glue out of his eye and groaning at the thumping in his head, went across to the bathroom.

"Good afternoon," Ewart said sarcastically as he did. "Feeling fresh?"

George didn't even have the energy to pretend. "Awful," he admitted. "Felt like I was going to be sick half the night and when that settled down, the headache started."

Ewart snickered. "Maybe you'll learn your lesson this time, but I doubt it."

After a fifteen-minute hot shower and clean clothes, George was feeling more human. He slumped on the sofa, watching the 24-hour English-language news channel Ewart had on and sipping coffee until Ewart took pity on him and handed him a glass of water and two aspirin.

"How's Jemima?" George asked as he swallowed the pills and drained the glass of water.

"Somehow, worse than you," Ewart told him. "I left her in her room with a sick bucket and I was hearing some dreadful noises at about four in the morning."

George made a face. "Ouch," he said, sympathetically.

"In any case," Ewart said, "Jules and the others' flight took off on time this morning, so their part of the mission is over. Did you find out anything interesting at the party?"

Taking a deep breath to fight off a wave of nausea, George took another sip of coffee. "Nothing specific," he said, carefully, not wanting to give the impression to Ewart that it had been a waste of time. "Natalie's mum had gone away somewhere, so I imagine Natalie will be in the biggest trouble of her life today when she gets back."

"Enough to get her withdrawn from TSIS?" Ewart asked, sharply.

George shook his head. "Nothing illegal was going on, except for the underage drinking," he lied. "She'll probably get grounded for about five years, but unless Natalie's mum changes jobs, I don't see what good taking Natalie out of school would do."

"Private tutoring is big business over here," Ewart remarked. "She could splash out on a full-time home tutor for Natalie, keep her out of trouble."

George shrugged. "I doubt it, but who knows," he said. "Anyway, Natalie's mum had made no effort to lock her office or anything, so it doesn't feel like she's stashing top secret documents in there."

Ewart nodded, rubbing a hand over his stubble. "I'll pull up the recordings from the bugs you planted and we can listen later to her reaction when she gets back home. If she's acting shifty or strange about the office, that might tell us something."

An involuntary smirk came to George's face when he thought about listening in on Natalie getting the telling-off of her life.

"The plans Jules brought with him are our last chance on this mission, I think," Ewart said as the TV news started showing highlights of fireworks from around the world. George got a pang of homesickness when he saw the London Eye and Big Ben.

"Natalie's mum and Will's dad have all but been eliminated from suspicion by you and Jemima, and now that we've searched the business consul's office and found nothing, we've more or less followed all the leads we have," Ewart went on.

George nodded. "Are you planning to wind up and head back to campus?" he asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

"There's a bit of tidying up to do first: we need to remove the bugs from Natalie's and Will's houses and there are some loose ends at the Embassy, but basically, yes," Ewart said. "Sorry it hasn't worked out."

"Still, Jules' stuff might lead somewhere," George said, optimistically, but the prospect of not having to spend another term at school was making him feel a lot better.

"It might," Ewart said. "I'll need you to do a final search of Natalie's mum's office next week just in case."

"Got it," George said, hauling himself up off the sofa. "I think some food might do me good, now."

"There's cereal or toast," Ewart said plainly. "Don't use up all the bread, half the shops are shut for the holidays."

As expected, Natalie had been grounded for the excesses of the party, so George spent the rest of the holidays lounging around the apartment, playing on the PlayStation. He even managed to get through some of the class assignments he'd been sent from campus, after Ewart threatened to report him to his teachers if he spent another entire day lying on the sofa with a controller in his hands.

"Two Shakespeare essays," George said happily, slapping them down on the coffee table in front of Jemima and Ewart. "Plus I have done all my maths and science workbooks."

"What about that notorious history essay on Victorian sewerage?" Ewart asked.

"Half-done," George said, untruthfully. In reality, he knew Rex had done it last year and had emailed him begging for it so he could copy and reword it.

"Did you actually read Much Ado About Nothing?" Jemima asked, eyeing the title of the essay.

"Most of it," George said, meaning that he'd read ten pages and then watched two-thirds of the film version. "The essay is only about the beginning anyway."

"I'm pleased you're mostly caught up," Ewart said. "Jemima, how about you?"

"I spend so much time studying with Will lately that doing my campus work is actually a break from the schoolwork," Jemima said, sighing. "I finished it ages ago."

"Good," Ewart said, leaping to his feet. "Because I actually have some mission work for you two to do."

George's ears pricked up. "Oh?" he said, following Ewart as he walked over to the kitchen and pulled some papers out of his briefcase.

"Ever heard of someone called Kentaro Oshima?" Ewart asked, cryptically. Both George and Jemima shook their heads.

"He's sort of a cross between a powerful businessman and a crime lord," the mission controller explained. "I've got reasons to suspect that the plans Jules brought might have crossed his desk, so I need you two to search his offices."

"That beats a Victorian sewerage essay," George grinned. "I'm in."

The night was bitterly cold and George could see frost glittering on the pavement as he walked briskly up the main thoroughfare from the railway station. The ten-minute walk would warm him up, he told himself, as he pulled his jacket tighter over his hoodie, but he still felt himself shivering a little. The street was quiet, but there were still lights on in some of the restaurants and bars and occasionally George passed a group of drunk businessmen winding their way back to the station, eyeing him warily. Although he was only fourteen, nearly fifteen, George was taller than a lot of the Japanese, and with his close-shaved hairstyle and bulky jacket, he knew he looked like a threat to the middle-aged businessmen in baggy suits.

When he reached the corner with a brightly-lit convenience store on it, George turned left, leaving the reassuring lights of the street and ducking down a back alley lined with rubbish and draped with telephone and power cables above his head. After walking for five more minutes, he cautiously emerged onto another street. This one was deserted and the main light came from a flashing neon sign advertising a karaoke parlour on the next corner. George knelt down and pretended to tie his shoelace, pausing to blow his hot breath on his cold gloved hands. When he looked up again, Jemima was standing on the other side of the street, hands jammed deep into her coat pockets. She didn't acknowledge him, instead looking over at the karaoke sign, but George took his cue. He stood up and took a few steps up the street to a doorway and ducked inside. There were a few steps up to a chiropractor's office, but George went past and climbed a dark set of tiled stairs to the first floor. There was a small plastic sign which was written in traditional calligraphic style, but in the dim light from the neon sign George could see that it had the characters he'd memorised that meant Oshima. He pulled out his lock gun, inserted it into the door's lock and after twenty seconds of wiggling, heard a click. He glanced down at the stairs one more time before letting himself in.

The entrance to the office was dark except for the green glow of a Fire Exit sign. When George was sure there was nobody there, he reached into his jacket and pulled out an earpiece.

"Testing, Jemima, can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," came the reply in his ear, crackling slightly at first but then settling down.

"Nobody here so I'm going in."

"All clear out here, but I'm freezing my bum off so hurry up."

The main office didn't seem large, but George knew from the footprint of the building that there must be more through another door. There were a handful of desks with computers sitting on them, plus a big printer-scanner-copier in one corner. All the computers were switched off, so after swapping his outdoor gloves for a latex pair, he cautiously knelt down next to one and plugged the lead from a mini laptop into it, balancing the laptop on his knee and reading the screen as it started outputting blue text on a black background.

DRIVE CLONER v3.19 BOOT SUCCESSFUL

HARD DRIVE DETECTED

7.889 GB TOTAL DATA

ESTIMATED CLONE TIME 84 SECONDS

CLONE Y/N

George felt relieved. Even with six or seven computers to do, a minute and a half each wouldn't take him too long. He'd feared thousands of gigabytes of data which could take hours. He typed 'Y' on the keyboard and watched nervously as a little bar on the bottom of the screen moved from 0% to 100%, then said 'COMPLETE'. He unplugged the mini laptop and moved on to the next one.

With the computers copied, George used the mini laptop to clone the printer's memory: lots of printers kept copies of the last things they printed or scanned in case you wanted it again. Then with that done, he tucked the mini laptop into his jacket again and swapped it for a high-tech speed scanner that, even in low light, took ultra-high-definition video of documents which could be paused later and dissected. His Japanese wasn't good enough to definitely know what was suspicious, so he just copied everything around the desks that looked interesting.

With the room complete, he checked the bathrooms, then climbed on a toilet seat, removed a ceiling tile and used a torch to check the roof cavity for anything hidden. The only thing he could find was old rat droppings, though, so he replaced the tile and headed back through to the office. The final door went through to the next room, and it was trivial to use his lock gun to unlock it. He'd expected to go into a bigger office, maybe belonging to just one person, but as he stepped inside his heart sank. The room was full of row after row of metal shelving systems, all laden with document boxes. There were hundreds and when George carefully opened the nearest one, he saw it was stuffed with papers.

"Main office has been searched, but the other room is a big kind of archive," George said into his earpiece. "Even with the high-speed scanner it'll take me hours to get through all of this."

"Prioritise anything that looks like it's been moved or looked at recently," Jemima reminded him. "Just do as much as you can."

"I'll let you know how I get on."

Firstly, George checked the rest of the room for anything interesting, but there wasn't even a computer and none of the boxes were locked. Searching behind a faded painting of Mt. Fuji he found an old-fashioned mechanical safe with a big dial on the front. Groaning to himself, he tried to remember how his safe-cracking class back on campus had gone. There was something about turning the dial anti-clockwise until you heard a different kind of noise, or there was pressure on the dial or something. He gave the dial a cautious turn, making a note of what position it had been left in, but the only time he thought he heard a different kind of click he couldn't remember what to do next, whether it was clockwise or what. Annoyed with himself, he realised he should have been prepared and brought safe-cracking tools with him. Examining the rest of the safe, he realised there was a tiny crevice under the dial with a squashed-rectangle-shaped opening. With a gasp of relief he remembered that most safes of this kind came with a special reset key in case you forgot the combination. He pulled out his lock gun and, selecting the smallest attachment, set to work, half-expecting it to fail. After five minutes of minute movements and no luck George remembered that you had to insert the key and turn the dial until you felt pressure on the key. He felt like an idiot as he started turning it, quickly picking up the numbers 68, 23, 55 and 34 which he entered and felt the lock mechanism open.

There was a yellow folder in the safe, along with several neatly-wrapped bundles of notes and what looked like contracts and deeds. George used the scanner to copy all the contracts before putting them back, then flicked through the folder too. When he was satisfied that everything was exactly as he'd left it, he shut the safe, reset it to its original position, and put the painting back, relieved that he had at least found something worthwhile. Now he turned to the document boxes. Some of them were covered in dust and didn't look like they'd been disturbed in ages, whilst others looked newer. He'd never be able to get through them all, so he just focused on any of the newer ones which caught his eye. There was a rhythm to the work: take a box off the shelf, open the lid, take the documents out, scan them in eight handful-sized piles, replace them, lid back on, box back on the shelf. The only problem was that kneeling on the thin carpet hurt his knees after a while.

His earpiece came to life suddenly, almost making him jump as he was halfway through a box.

"There's a man on your side of the street," Jemima warned him. "Looks like he means business, not a drunk or anything."

"Thanks," George said quietly. Although there were any number of reasons for someone to be walking down the street, even in the middle of the night, he still felt on edge and, after completing the box he was working on, he replaced it but didn't start another until Jemima gave him the all-clear.

"He's turned into your doorway," Jemima warned. "Can you get out the back?"

George's minor anxiety about the man approaching turned into true fear. Nobody went to a chiropractor's in the small hours of the morning so he could only be coming to the Oshima office. Had he been detected, somehow?

"There's a fire escape at the back; didn't look alarmed when I checked it earlier," George said, jamming the scanner back into his jacket and running, hunched over, towards the fire escape door.

"He's definitely going upstairs," Jemima warned. "I'll try and stall but get out right now."