Chapter 19 – The Itch
Erin Cooper is a master thief.
She didn't even think that it would be in that profession almost all the way through school. It was Alex's dream she thought, why should she spoil it for him by being better? In any case, stealing didn't appeal to her as much as it did to Alex, as Alex knows all too well. However, it became clear that, as she was approaching the end of her schooling, there was an itch, an itch that could not be ignored or avoided. There was a burning desire within that raged within her that she could not quell with all of her mental control or intelligence. There was only one cure to even get close to getting some relief; she had to steal.
She wondered whether she was a kleptomaniac. Perhaps it's a genetic trait that has been passed down from the generations, a very dominant gene present in every Cooper offspring. It made logical sense to her, the only sense she understands. The feeling, she thought, was comparable from that of withdrawal symptoms except she hadn't even started yet. It took a lot of self-discipline and self-control to not just stick her hands into the pockets of other students to relieve them of their mobile phones, wallets or anything else she could easily hide on her. It was tempting, very tempting, to give in to the itch that became greater every day she knew it was there. But Erin was strong and managed to stave it off for a considerable amount of time until she was out of school and could not harm people she didn't want to steal from.
The break between school and University was painful. The growing need to steal was going to spill over uncontrollably soon if it wasn't relieved somehow. So, she had a brilliant idea that both satisfied her need to increase her knowledge and to quell the itch. It was going to be a simple heist, nothing tangible, just information. The information being the exam results from her A-Levels. To get at this information, she would either need someone who could hack into the system remotely or to go in there herself and find a computer which could access it. The first option was one she wasn't going to do, who would even trust that she could pull it off apart from Alex, who was thousands of kilometres away in Accra, Ghana. She knew which building it was, a government controlled building in Central London which didn't look to her like much trouble to get into.
Upon some casing of the entrance of the building, it was soon apparent that the task was a bit more difficult that she imagined. They didn't want anyone to leak that data; in the lobby there was a biometric scanner that was always under supervision by a security guard who also monitored the security cameras for that area. Even when the guards changed over, they would both overlap so no there was no weak time where it could be exposed. Of course, she knew that the front entrance would be the most difficult but also the easiest way in. Therefore, Erin knew that she needed to consider the more unconventional entrance; unconventional for the general population, almost necessary for a master thief. She had no equipment she could use to get her way in, so she needed to rediscover the climbing ability that was still lingering in her. She told Tim that she was going out for the night, and that was what she did.
Using a nearby and less secure building, she got to the top of the building and onto the roof in the dark of the night. She walked amongst the air conditioning and heating vents which obscured her vision of where the entrance into the uppermost floor of the building. She made her way along the rooftop but she heard something, the foot of footsteps and hush chatter. She begins to sneak down low and move silently behind a heating unit.
"Come on, hurry." Erin overhears, also hearing the sound of metal against metal. More specifically, someone's trying to pick a lock.
"Here, you try it."
Erin takes a look around the unit to see what happening. She sees a group of four dressed in dark clothing huddled around the door, watching as they each try their hand at picking the lock. Erin weighs up the chances of exposing herself with the time wasted due to their incompetence.
"Come on, just one more try."
"No, we can't stay for much longer before they send a drone past here and spots us."
"Here, I'll get it this time." Passing the lockpicking implements to someone else in the group. Erin decided that this is her time to enter, but how exactly to get them to not turn on her in an instant is what the difficult part was.
"Pssst." She hisses from behind. Some of them turn around.
"Who are you?" A short squirrel asks quickly, worrying that they're about to be found out by a rival. "You here to break in?"
"Yeah." She replies instinctively.
"Can you pick the lock?" A dark brown furred cat asks.
"What do you have?" Asks the cat who shows the metal pointed implement in her hand. It could be mistaken for a screwdriver but it doesn't undo screws, it's meant to be used to pick locks, so right now it's not fulfilling it's purpose.
She passes the pick to Erin and she goes up to the lock and looks at it and sticks the pick inside the lock itself and begins to work away quickly, holding the lock in one hand and the pick in the other. In less than 5 seconds she hears the lock open and quickly opens the door for them all to get inside. But they've become stunned as to her technique and how she did it so quickly.
"Here." Erin says, offering back the pick to the cat.
"How'd you do that?" A possum asks.
"You guys go in first." Erin instructs. "You were here first anyway so you should do the honour."
"You're here to change your results too?" The final member of the group, a ferret with dark red fur who is only a tad shorter than she is.
"No, I want to see my results. Whatever, I get I'll live with it." Erin replies.
"Not even if you do bad?"
"I deserve whatever score I get." Erin replies, she watches the ferret go inside and she goes in last, shutting the door behind her. They walk down the set of stairs and the first three have stopped when they see the light entering in from the open archway that leads into a set of offices.
"Where to next?" The squirrel whispers.
"In those offices, one of those computers has got to have access to the database."
"Who's going in there?"
"We agreed it's S." The cat iterates.
"S?" Erin asks.
"First name initials so no one know who we are in case we're caught." The cat answers.
"That doesn't work." Erin whispers back. "They'll figure who you are, you're not wearing gloves so you're finger prints are everywhere."
"Are some kind of expert on thievery? If you're so good then you go find us a computer that can access us into the database." The ferret asks.
"First answer, reluctantly yes and secondly, yes." Erin replies. The other four they feel that they are not as out of their depth as they were before she arrived.
"Are you a thief? Like, professionally?" The squirrel answers as Erin moves from the back of the group to the front.
"No, but you could say it's in my blood." Erin replies as she backs herself against the side of the wall that's right next to the archway. She takes a small peak at what's inside, a very organised and exactly layout of cubicles, trying to cram as many people into a tiny amount of prime London office space. The multiple block coloured partition walls provide plenty of cover.
"Then why are you helping us?" The ferret asks.
"Coincidence." Erin replies before poking her head around the corner to check for security cameras. She spots one in each of the corners of the room and retracts her head before she gets found out.
"Can anyone turn off the security cameras?" Erin whispers back to the group.
"Cameras? I told you." The cat replies back to the ferret.
"Hey, hey, hey." He responds quickly to quieten them down. "There would have to be like a security room somewhere here where we could disable them."
"No chance, only the lobby cameras a monitored internally, these will be monitored by an external company." Erin answers.
"Then why did you ask if we could stop them?" The squirrel asks.
"Because, maybe one of you can hack into them and replace it with a movie on repeat." Erin replies. Judging from their silence, she thinks the answer is no. "Okay, plan B. Follow me."
Erin moves down the staircase crouched low so no one can see her walk past from their cubicles. She turns her head and sees that the others are following, but less confidently and more nervously then her. The floor below is similar to the previous floor, a lot of cubicles in a small amount of space, but the lights are off and no one is inside. Erin checks around the corner again and finds the same camera layout as before.
"This will be easier, but the light from the computers will be noticed immediately by the cameras." Erin quickly whispers. "So we have to take one of the computers underneath one of the desks to do this so we don't get seen."
She takes their silence this time as acceptance.
"Follow exactly where I go, and when we stop you all have to hide under the desks to not be seen. And stay low and quiet." Erin instructs. She moves away from the staircase and up next to the wall before darting into the office space moving behind a cubicle wall. She quickly moves along the length to the corner of the room under the security camera's blind spot. She double checks that everyone is behind her before moving quickly around the corner and halfway along the side before entering into the maze of cubicles. She goes right into the centre, where the cameras will have the least chance of seeing her, and stops. Erin checks that everyone has caught up before pointing to under a desk. They all oblige willingly and each of them takes refuge under a desk. They each peak their heads out enough to just see what this stranger is doing.
Erin goes to one of the desk crouched right down, balancing on her toes, and reaches up to grab the 4 spherical projectors, that like look live very old webcams, off the top of the four corners of the cubicles, whose partition walls are shaped in an upside down U. She puts them all on the ground underneath the desk before grabbing the motion sensor off the back wall. The workers in here only have screen for a workspace because all of the computer grunt power is done below. It's cheaper to buy the one big computer to power all the workstation rather than an individual computer per workstation due to how reliable the Internet is and how cheap powerful computers are. Erin begins to set the same thing up, instead underneath the desk. She places the 4 tiny projectors by their suction cup mountings underneath the wood laminate desk. She puts the black, thin rectangular motion sensor onto the centre of the back on the underside of the desk and rotates it to face at a 45-degree angle to the ground so it will pick up her hand gestures. Once that's done, she turns one the projectors one by one and waits a few seconds for them to warm up and become bright enough to see an image.
The beams of light all aimed at each other bring hope to the other that they are only a mere amount of time away from changing their futures for the better.
"She's actually doing it." The cat whispers to the ferret. Erin picks it up but doesn't react as she waits for the images to sharpen and focus automatically. It takes another 10 seconds for this happen. What she sees, or is almost literally in the middle of, is a login screen requiring a username, password and voice recognition. The others can see this as well; the squirrel grabs something from his pocket.
"Here." He offers his mobile phone to her.
"Do you have the login?" Erin whispers.
"Yeah, use it." He insists. She reads the note displayed on the phone, the first line is the username and the bottom line a password that would have been near impossible to guess with all of the symbols it contained. Using the only other piece of hardware on the workstation, a wireless keyboard, she slowly types in the username and password, which to her surprise, it accepts.
"I need the voice recognition." Erin whispers back.
"It's on there, go into the voice recorder." The squirrel whispers. "I know someone who knows someone's father who works here. That's how I got it if you were wondering."
If he was trying to impress Erin, he didn't receive any gratification from the raccoon. She plays the voice recording at a very low volume which the system somehow picks up despite her not seeing a microphone, in any case, she is in. She finds the list of everyone's scores, only identifiable by their ID number. Erin finds her number and checks her score with anticipation. She sees her score and can't help but smile at the relief of all of the hard work she has done to yield such a positive result.
"Here, your turn." Erin says, shuffling along the floor away to under the opposite cubicle in a musical chairs like act as everyone shifts positions to get their turn.
"What'd you get?" The cat asks.
"What I wanted." Erin answers.
"Which was…"
"What I wanted." She repeats.
"Don't want to say, huh." She replies.
"You go, try and do this quickly so we can get out." Erin instructs quietly. She got straight A+'s but she doesn't want to act self righteous in getting the highest score to people whom she guess aren't quite as smart, otherwise they wouldn't be here trying to change that.
"Which university does that get you into?" The cat asks as she tries to find her scores.
"I don't want to say." Erin repeats again.
"Just say." She urges casually. Erin catches onto what she's thinking.
"You want to go to university with me?" Erin asks.
"Which one is it?" She inquires again.
"Let me be the first to urge not to do that, your education should be about you not about me." Erin whispers back. "You've only met me for 5 minutes and you're going to change your path based on what I do?"
"Not the same course of course but… yeah, I'll admit it. I'm blown away, we'd all like to have a friend like you." The cat answers back. Erin is really torn between cruelly rejecting them and going into her shell like usual or allowing them to join her at her first preference Oxford.
"This is not because I can pick a lock, is it?" Erin asks.
"Hurry up, just say where you're going, I want to be able to change my results as well." The ferret replies.
"Oxford." Erin replies succinctly. "There, change your applications."
The cat looks at her after hearing the snide toned comment, but she slowly turns back to the screen and begins to changer results from A's, B's and C's into a high enough score to get into a course at Oxford, but not suspiciously high so she won't have too much expected of her.
"Here, go." The cat says as she leaves the under-the-desk workstation. She swaps with the ferret who begins his turn at artificially inflating his results. As he's changing his scores, Erin catches a small glimpse of a flashlight being switched on and flashed at the roof, which paralyses the others.
"Time's up." The squirrel whispers, but Erin doesn't see it that way.
"No it's not. I'll distract the security guard whilst you guys finish off. Leave the way you came, and meet me at Kensington tube station in an hour." Erin quickly plans out.
"What if you're caught?"
Erin doesn't answer that question but instead stands up in full view of the security guard to catch his attention. She shields her eyes from the blinding torchlight with her gloved hands.
"You there!" The guard shouts. "You're trespassing on government property!"
Erin is silent as she moves away from the centre of the cubicles and out into the side isle so that she is not confronted in the vicinity of the more helpless group stuck underneath the desk.
"You're under arrest for trespassing inside a secure government building." The guard announces. "You have the right to remain silent, but I must warn you that anything you say or do may be used later as evidence, do you understand?"
"Wait, you're a cop?" Erin asks in false surprise.
"This is a government building ma'am." The policeman says as he shows his badge and gets out a set of handcuffs, which are willingly put on the young female raccoon. The policeman then escorts her out of the room side by side and down the stairs. Everything is as they both wanted. Erin looks straight in front of her and walks down slowly, acting completely subdued to comfort the police officer that she won't run away. They get down to the ground floor with everything calm and peaceful in the night. She catches a glimpse of the police car outside with the flashing lights on, and realises that she has to make her move now. The handcuffs fly off her wrists and she quickly tries to lock them onto the escorting officer. She locks it around the left wrist easily before he can react, but the right one required a lot more power to restrain the stronger officer for just a brief split second to lock up his hand from behind his back. Erin kicks out at his legs to bring him to the ground and to prevent him from getting up easily. Erin turns in the opposite direction to go back up the stairs and away from the two officers standing outside with their car. She barely sees them back it through the door before she's gone out of their sight.
Erin races up the stairs two at a time; the natural adrenaline rush flowing through her but in a controlled way so that instinct does override logical thought process. She goes up to the very top to the roof, checking along the way to see that they can't be seen as the police inevitably pass straight by. She waits at the top for the police to catch up a little, she can't let them return to where they found her.
"Up here!" She taunts unnaturally, she never thought she'd be in a position to taunt the police but right now it's the right time to do so.
"There she is!" One of them shouts as they get near. When they are only a flight of stairs away, she bursts open the door leading to the roof. She double checks the contents of the ground and moves onto the edge, picking her landing spot. She is going to jump from 4 stories high. As soon as she hears them bust open the door, she jumps; in order for them to see her but not enough time to stun her. She lets gravity take over, staying in the air for over a second before she grabs onto the top of a lamppost shaft and cleanly uses it to slow down her fall and slide to the bottom all in one go. Her legs compress as they land to completely arrest her fall before she lets go and walks off along with the population as if no one around her saw anything. The police look over the edge, but they are trapped from up there since none of them can go close to replicating her efforts.
Erin walks calmly but also quickly to the nearest tube station so she can get off the street level and takes the next train so she can get out of the immediate area. She rides it before changing lines twice in order to get back to the closest station to her home, Kensington. As she rides the train, she realises that the itch she has been waiting so long to scratch has finally gone away for now. In the place of desperate need, deep intrinsic gratification and satisfaction along with feeling proud fill the void it left behind; the by-products of a heist. She arrives exactly 58 minutes after she said she would be here. She steps off the train and instantly sees them all leaning against the wall and chatting together. When one of them turns around and sees her, they all quieten down and watch her walk so casually towards them that it makes the group of 4 rather uneasy about how remorseless she looks.
"You made it." The squirrel remarks.
"Yeah. I'm here."
"How'd you do it?" Asks the ferret, Erin gives a brief 1 minute description of what happened which blows their minds.
"You jumped off the top of the building?" The cat asks in surprise.
"Yes.
"And you didn't get injured."
"Yeah."
The cat begins to involuntarily chuckle to herself to try and relax herself.
"You expect us to believe that?"
"It doesn't matter, you're all here. I'm here. We're not in custody, that's what matters." Erin reminds them.
"Sam." The squirrel says out of the blue.
"What?"
"My name's Sam. She's Karen, he's Toby and the quiet one's Elena." The squirrel introduces.
"I'm not quiet." The possum replies in a rare outburst of fury, but she retreats to being timid in a few seconds to turn to Erin. "But, socially not that great so… I don't like to talk much."
"It's nice to meet you all." Erin says as she heads for the stairs to go home.
"See you at Oxford." Sam replies back. Erin turns around and stops.
"Did you all decide to go to Oxford?" Erin asks exasperatingly, it makes them all go quiet. It takes a few seconds for one of them to decide to cut the silence.
"Yes, okay. We did and, please, do not take this the wrong way but… you're… amazing. And I'm not just taking for myself here…" Toby begins to explain.
"Are you thieves, or, do you want to be thieves? Because…" Erin tries to warn, but they are hooked, forget line and sinker.
"With you at the top we could, I mean we're not much." Toby answers.
"Listen, as good as you think I am, that doesn't mean that I necessarily want to be a thief full time. I value my education, that's why I went to break in tonight and I'm sure that's the reason you came as well since you were probably not doing it for kicks." Erin replies. She thinks about herself and the immensely pleasurable feeling of completing a heist she felt. She briefly wonders about whether this feeling will turn into an addiction, and reveal herself to be a kleptomaniac as she first thought when she felt that itch.
"Yeah… well. See you at Oxford." Karen says.
"Yeah…" Erin pauses, thinking about what she said and wondering how it might have hurt their feelings. To dowse the still burning flames of amateurs hooked on her talent. "I'll see you then."
She walks out of the station, checking over her shoulder every now and then to see if she is being followed either by the group or by any police operation, in which case it would have been a very long night. It didn't turn out that way, she walked along the streets she knows too well and entered into the small, attached house. She gets in the doorway before checking her surroundings again. When she completes her check, she knew that she would be hearing from them very soon. From that, they caught up again at university to Erin's surprise and slight reluctance to meet them again. By that time, going out on the weekend for Erin meant pulling a heist. She'd leave as the sun was going down and be home by the morning having smuggled something inside if it was successful.
She quickly realised that, even though the group she met that night didn't even know each other that much or kept in very close contact, they had the same idea. They all had accumulated knowledge of the wrong kind, the same ideas and knowledge used by Erin. She didn't like this at all, they were becoming clingy like a piece of gum that can't be removed from the sole of a shoe. However, if they were going to hang around her, even if it was from a distance she found out, she probably needed to put them to use. She had 4 clean slates to work with; 2 guys, 2 girls. At first they went for a better view, doing nothing apart from watching Erin as she instructed. Gradually, and as they became closer, they'd perform the menial and small tasks like reconnaissance with Erin still handling the bulk of it all. When they realised that there was an abandoned shop on the outskirts of town, Toby decided to establish some sort of hide out there. Erin deduced that he was the smartest out of the four but that isn't to say that he's a genius. He had an eye for the details in the plans but was less so when it came to the bigger picture; so Erin was surprised and yet not at the same time when he suggested it. Upon a quick inspection by the group they decided to furnish it with anything that they could find. Later, this was upgraded with a portion of their scores to buy equipment to make more specialised and customised equipment, which in it self became a secondary more legitimate operation.
Over time, the loot began to pile up, she didn't have anything to spend it on and it was becoming cluttered in her tiny apartment, so she had a brilliant idea. She would hide everything in plain sight, not directly in view but easy to access. She first stored it all inside a cereal box; cash, products, anything of value. But even a large pack wasn't enough to contain it. The cereal box became cash only and anything metallic was stored in a plastic ice-cream tub inside the freezer. She knew that this is not the best hiding spots for either of these things, but in order to counter this she made sure that she wouldn't be stolen from in the first place. Firstly, a block of student accommodation flats isn't the first place a thief would think items of excessive value would be and secondly, everything was always locked when possible.
Yet these small security measures could not do enough to protect the result of all of her hard work. But with Alex with her now, perhaps they might be able to get back, with a lot of interest.