05.04: Another School - Noah and Danny (Joint Post)

It was a fine day and this part of Cambridge had the whiff of serious money.
The immaculate lawns were coiffured by professional gardeners and Danny drooled
over the expensive lumps of German metal parked on the driveways. He was walking with Noah and both boys felt self-conscious in the summer uniform of the Montessori school. It consisted of a white shirt, a tie, grey trousers with orange piping, an orange and grey blazer
and matching felt cap.
“I'm telling you,” Danny moaned, “even if you sat down and tried really hard, I don't think you
Could come up with a way to make this uniform look any dumber.”
‘I dunno, Danny. Maybe we could hef partridge feathers sticking out of the hats or something.”
“And these trousers were meant for someone as skinny as you. They're killing my balls.”
Noah couldn't help seeing the funny side of Danny's discomfort.
'Hey you asked to come on this op when you heard Jamie pulled out at the last minute. It's that stomach bug that's going around campus.'
Danny nodded. “I had it last week. I was barely off the can for two whole days.”
‘Ugh, too much information,’ Noah looked at his watch for the millionth time. 'We need to up the pace.'
“What's the big deal?” Danny asked.
'This isn't some scabby state school full up with scummy little deadbeats like you and me,' Noah explained. 'The Cambridge Montresor Day is one of the top fee-paying schools in the country and the pupils aren't allowed to wander around the corridors whenever it suits them. Our
arrival's got to coincide with the changeover between third and fourth periods, when there's hundreds of other kids moving around.'
Danny nodded. “Gotcha.”
Noah looked at his watch for the millionth and first time as they cut into a cobbled alleyway that was barely wide enough for a single car. 'Come on, Danny.'
“I'm trying,” Danny said. “But I'm seriously gonna rip the butt out of these trousers if I'm not careful.”
Once they had cut between two large houses, the alleyway opened out into a run-down park with knee-high grass and a set of tangled swings. To the boys' left stood a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, behind which lay the grounds of Montresor Day. The main gates were carefully monitored during school hours, so this was their only way in.
Noah wandered through the long grass next to the fence, placing his shoe carefully to avoid dog turds and litter, as he searched for an entry point made by him the previous night. He found the flap cut in the wire behind the trunk of a large tree. Noah lifted it, doffed his cap and attempted a snooty accent. 'After you Danny, my good man.'
“You sound as Downton as Jamie.” Danny fed his backpack and hat through the gap,
before sliding under. He stood with his back against the tree and brushed dirt off his uniform, while Noah followed.
“All set?” Danny asked, as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. It weighed a ton and the equipment inside clattered around.
'Cap,' Noah reminded him.
Danny let out a little gasp as he leaned forward and picked the cap out of the grass. A claxon sounded inside the school building a couple of hundred metres away, indicating a lesson change.
'OK, let's shift,' Noah said.
The boys broke out from behind the tree and began jogging across a football pitch towards the school building. As they did, they noticed a groundskeeper striding purposefully towards them from the opposite end of the field.
“You two,” he bellowed.
Because Danny had been pulled on to the mission at the last minute to replace Jamie, he'd only had time to skim through the mission briefing. He looked uneasily at Noah for guidance.
'Don't sweat it,' Noah whispered. I've got it covered.'
If Jamie had been here he would have just told the guy to ignore their presence, but now Noah had to improvise.
The groundskeeper intercepted the boys near a set of goal posts. He was a fit looking fellow with thinning grey hair, dressed in workman's boots and a grubby overall.
“Exactly what do you think you're doing out here?” he demanded pompously.
'I was reading under the tree at lunchtime,' Noah explained, pointing backwards with his thumb. 'I left my cap behind.'
“You know the rules of the school, don't you?”
Noah and Danny both looked confused.
“Don't try playing the fool with me, you know as well as I do. If you're not attending a lesson, a match, or an official practice, you do not set foot on the games pitches because it causes unnecessary wear and tear.”
'Yes,' Noah nodded. 'Sorry, sir. I was in a hurry to get to my lesson, that's all.'
“Sorry,” Danny added, even though he thought this guy was a snobby prick. “But it's not like the pitches are muddy or anything. We're not really tearing them up.”
The groundskeeper took Danny's comment as a threat to his authority. He swooped down and showered Danny with spit as he spoke. “I make the rules here, young man. You don't decide when you can and can't set foot on my pitches. Got that?”
“The gardner makes the rules,” Danny laughed.
'Shut it,' Noah said stepping in front of Danny. “Sorry sir.”
"What's your name and house?'
'Joseph Mail, King Henry House,' Noah lied.
“Faisal Asmal, same house,” Danny said, recalling one of the few elements of his background story he had managed to remember from the mission briefing.
“Right,” the groundskeeper said, bouncing smugly on the balls of his feet. “I'll be reporting both of you to your housemaster and expect your cheek will have earned you both a detention. Now, you'd better get yourselves to your next lesson.”
'Why'd you answer back?' Noah asked irritably, as they walked towards the back entrance of the school.
“I know I shouldn't have,” Danny said, raising his palms defensively. “But he was so full of himself.”
They passed through a set of double doors into the main school building, then up a short flight of steps and into the busy thoroughfare that ran the length of the ground floor. There was plenty of noise, but the Montresor boys walked purposefully, nodding politely to the teachers standing in the doorways as they entered
their classrooms.
“What a bunch of geeks,” Danny whispered. “I bet these dudes don't even fart.”
Noah explained the situation as they headed up the stairs to the second floor. 'Every kid has to pass special exams and an interview to get into Montresor. There's always a humongous waiting list, so they can afford to boot out anyone who doesn't toe the line.'
“Bet I wouldn't last long,” Danny grinned.
‘Lose the chip, at least until this job is over Danny,’ Noah told him. ‘Save the class war for your own time, not when we are working.’
By the time they reached the second floor, most kids had found their way to lessons and the classroom doors had been pulled shut. Noah pulled a lock gun from the pocket of his blazer as they passed by a couple of classroom doors. He stopped at the door of an office with a nameplate on it: Dr Cameron Hodge BSc, PhD, Head of Economics and Politics.
Noah told Danny to cover him as he pushed the tip of the lock gun into the key hole. Danny stood close by, blocking the view of a bunch of kids waiting outside a classroom fifteen metres away.
The lock had a simple single-lever mechanism, meaning Noah only had to give the lock gun a brief wiggle and pull on the trigger to open the door. The pair hurriedly stepped into the office and put the latch down so that nobody could burst in on them, even with a key.
“How’d you know Hodge wasn’t in here?”
‘Because I read the briefing. Hodge is teaching two floors up,' Noah said. ‘We've got until the next lesson change in thirty-six minutes; let's get to work.'
While Noah stepped behind Hodge's desk and dropped the Venetian blind, Danny surveyed the office. It contained nothing exciting: basic desk and chairs, two filing cabinets and a coat rack.
Noah used the lock gun to undo the metal cabinets, then began sifting through
the files. He was looking for any papers relating to Cameron Hodge's personal life, especially anything to do with his campaigning for mutant hate groups.
‘Photograph the room so we can put everything we move back in place.’
Danny did as instructed sat at the desk and switched on Hodge's PC. While the computer booted up, he pulled a miniature notebook from his backpack and ran a network lead between the two computers. “Password Noah?”
‘Run the hacking suite,’ Noh replied unflustered.
Danny started up a suite of hacking tools on the computer and used it to run system diagnostics on Hodge's machine. Once the software had gleaned basic information about Hodge's hard drive and operating system, Danny opened another module of the hacking software, which allowed him to view all of Hodge's files.
“Candy from a baby,” Danny smiled confidently.
Noah smirked, they both needed that software that Sage had so carefully crafted, neither was a computer geek.
Now he could see the files, Danny clicked the Clone icon and the notebook began copying the entire contents of Hodge's PC onto his machine’s hard drive.
'How much data's he got?' Noah asked, as he pulled out the second drawer of the cabinet.
“Eight-point-two gigabytes. The progress bar says it'll take six minutes to copy it all across.”
While the computers went about their business, Danny shifted some papers and stood on the desk. He reached up and pulled out the metal reflector covering the ceiling-mounted light fitting. The resulting cloud of dust tickled his nostrils as he studied the line of fluorescent tubes above his head.
“Cut them off, Noah.”
Noah leaned across and flipped the light switch.
Danny reached into the fitting and pulled the starter plug from one of the fluorescent tubes before jumping down. “Is this it?”
Noah glanced and nodded.
Danny rummaged briefly inside his rucksack, emerging with an apparently identical plastic fitting. He compared the two. But whereas the starter unit Danny had removed cost about a buck, the replacement cost three thousand. It was a listening device, consisting of a pinhead sized microphone, a transmitter and a chip that could store five days of sound.
‘Light fittings are perfect for locating listening devices. First because they're usually located in open space high above a room, where it's easy to pick up sound. Second because the device can easily be wired up to source electricity from the mains.’
“You get trained in all of this sh… stuff.”
‘We hef to operate in the real world Danny, covertly. So, we cannot go around waving our arms about and using our powers. Val is a specialist at intelligence work and Jim, Colonel Rhodes, knows more about training people for combat than anyone.’
Danny thought about that. “You call the Colonel Jim? I cannot imagine ever being comfortable enough to call him Jim.”
As Danny went up at full stretch to replace the grille, he heard the ripping noise he'd been dreading all day. His trousers had torn open from the crotch seam to the waistband at the back, revealing a garish set of boxers.
Noah couldn't help smiling as he flipped the lights back on. 'Nice shorts, Danny.'
“Man, that feels good,” Danny gasped. “I might be able to have children after all. What's next?”
'Keys,' Noah reminded him.
“Assuming he's left them in here,” Danny said, as he walked towards the jacket hanging up by the door. He fished a bunch of keys from Hodge's pocket, then grabbed a packet of wax tablets from his rucksack.
Meanwhile, Noah had found some interesting documents in one of the filing cabinets and was copying the pages with his phone.
The wax tablets separated into two biscuit-sized pieces. Danny sandwiched each of Hodge's keys between a tablet, creating impressions that could be used to make duplicates. By the time Danny had worked hisway through the whole bunch, the laptop had pinged, indicating that it had finished cloning.
Danny sat back in front of the laptop and used the hacking suite to install spyware on Hodge's machine. The spyware program would record every keystroke Hodge typed and then transmit it covertly over the internet to the Institute monitoring systems.
Noah had finished rummaging through the filing cabinets. He took his own phone and called up a specially crafted app to capture and replicate the radio signal from the plipper that worked Hodge's car alarm. He activated the app and pressed the plipper on the car key. It took a couple of attempts before a green icon popped up on screen indicating that the signal had been successfully recorded.
“Is that everything Noah?” Danny asked.
Noah nodded as he checked the time. 'In the bag with six minutes to spare.'
They did a final check, making sure they had picked up their equipment and repositioned
everything exactly the way they'd found it. When the claxon sounded for the lesson change, the boys darted outside and began heading down to the ground floor.
Danny was conscious of the growing split in his trousers, but none of the Montresor Day pupils seemed to notice.
At the main entrance of the school building the boys stepped outdoors and turned left, heading down a gentle ramp towards a recently built sports complex that had a teachers' car park beneath it. The boys caught a whiff of sweat as they passed the entrance to a changing area where a group of Year Ten boys were getting ready for PE. They headed down a corridor lined with historic photos of Montresor Day sports teams. After reaching the door leading into the teachers' car park, Danny did a full three-sixty check before they passed under the Staff Only sign and down a flight of bare concrete steps. Everything looked new, with scarcely a tyre mark on the yellow lines dividing up the parking bays. The boys quickly identified Hodge's silver hatchback. Noah took out his phone and prepared to activate the app. The lights flashed, the lock disengaged and the alarm deactivated.
Danny dived into the driver's seat and reached across to open the passenger door. By the time Noah climbed in, Danny had reclined his seat. He pulled the clear cover off the vanity light and unscrewed the tiny bulb and the silver plastic fitting in which it was mounted. Noah reached up and pushed in a specially constructed replacement that contained a listening device. Once it was clipped into place, Danny replaced the bulb and the outer cover.
Noah briefly rummaged inside the glove box, checking out the various receipts and scraps of paper for anything interesting. He laid a couple of bits out flat on the glove-box lid and copied them with the phone.
Danny searched over in the rear seats and in the driver's door cubby, but all he found was an ancient road atlas and a mass of crumpled paper cups. “Is that it?” he asked as he hit the recline lever, making his seat spring back up.
Noah nodded. 'Now we just hef to make it out of here without getting busted.'
Danny opened the car door, but as he stepped out, he noticed a reedy female outline emerging at the bottom of the staircase.
“Shit,” Danny whispered, as he quietly pulled shut the car door.
Noah sneaked a glance at the beanpole woman as she lit up a cigarette and puffed as though her life depended on it. They had no option but to crouch down low in their seats until she went back upstairs.
They gave it a couple of minutes before following after her. The mission plan called for the boys to hide in a desolate area behind the sports centre for the remaining half-hour of the school day, when they'd be able to walk out of the front gates alongside the real pupils.
As they passed the changing rooms again, Danny noticed that the PE teacher hadn't locked the door when the kids had gone into the gym. Tantalisingly, more than a dozen pairs of the orange-piped Montresor Day trousers were scattered about the room.
“Keep an eye out,' Danny said. 'I'm gonna whip me some trousers.”
Noah wasn't exactly happy about Danny taking an unnecessary risk, but realised that he wouldn't have wanted to travel back to campus with his ass hanging out of his trousers either.
Danny passed by the first few pairs. He was a good size for seventeen, there may be someone in these Year Ten kids was his size. Danny eventually found a pair that
looked right. He ripped off his shoes and quickly slipped into them. Realising that there wasn't time to transfer everything between the two pairs of trousers, he balled up the ripped pair and crammed them into his backpack on top of everything else.
Danny stepped out of the changing room and Noah started walking back the way they'd come.
“Wait,” Danny said.
Noah turned back. 'What's up?'
“Nothing. It's just, while I was changing, I looked through the window and realised what's on the other side of that door. Instead of walking out the front and all the way around the edge of the building, we can go out through there.”
Noah stepped across the corridor and peered through the frosted glass in the door. It clearly led directly to the back of the building.
“Come on,” Danny said, he pushed down on the handle and nudged the door open with his shoulder.
‘Wait,’ said Noah, too late.
A loud buzzing sound broke out from a plastic box above their heads.
Noah and Danny exchanged a shocked look, as a burly PE teacher came steaming out of the gymnasium towards them.
“What the hell are you two playing at?”
“Run?” Danny asked.
Noah didn't answer; Danny just heard a squeal of shoes as his friend set off towards the entrance at full pelt.