Chapter 6: Chapter Six
Chapter Text
The journey to the coast had proved uneventful. Otto had travelled down on the train and had checked into the hotel room that he had booked over the internet. It was a basic room but that hardly mattered given that he had no intention of spending the night there. He just needed somewhere private to set up his equipment for later in the day. Once he had set everything up and double checked that it was working properly, he set off down the seafront to reconnoitre the target.
Otto had found the conference centre with ease. The security was so tight that it would have been difficult to miss it. Otto had seen the commander of the security forces on the television a couple of days beforehand and he had boasted at great length about the ‘ring of steel’ that had been placed around the conference hall.
He had claimed that it would be impossible for someone without the proper clearance to get anywhere near the conference and that he was entirely confident in the systems and procedures that they had put in place.
This was, of course, like a red rag to a bull for Otto. He knew full well that the larger and more complicated the security operation the more likely it was that a tiny gap existed somewhere that he could exploit.
But Otto had no intention of actually trying to get into the building himself – he knew that would be next to impossible. No, he just needed to find a good place to leave the device and the rest should be easy. He strolled along the sea front, just outside the first ring of security checks, looking for the right spot. Then he saw it, a drain cover a couple of hundred yards from the conference centre that looked ideal. As he walked towards the drain he reached into his backpack and found the small pocket that contained the device.
He pulled out a silver metallic sphere, about the size of a ping-pong ball, and smiled to himself. This was going to be too easy. He knelt down beside the drain cover, as if tying his shoe lace and, checking that no one was watching him, he dropped the ball down the drain.
Slowly he retied the laces on his trainers, just in case anyone was watching. When he was satisfied that no one had seen what he’d done he stood up and headed back down the seafront, away from the conference venue. The Prime Minister’s speech would start in about an hour. That would give him plenty of time to get back to his hotel room and get ready – the fun was about to begin.
Otto checked there was nobody coming along the corridor of the hotel and then let himself into his room. He walked over and dumped his backpack on the bed, relieved to see that everything was exactly as he’d left it. He powered up his laptop computer which sat on the desk linked by a short length of cable to what looked like a tiny silver satellite dish. The machine started up and finally a window appeared with the two words AWAITING DEPLOYMENT flashing in its centre. Otto ran a couple of quick diagnostics and was pleased to see that the control interface to the device appeared to be working exactly as intended. He helped himself to a Coke from the minibar and settled down in front of the computer. Otto keyed in a new command and the status window changed, a new message appearing: DEPLOYING AMBULATORY PROPULSION SYSTEM.
Half a mile away along the seafront, in the bottom of the drain that Otto had found earlier, the sphere appeared to split in half, a gap a few millimetres wide appearing around its circumference.
Eight tiny jointed metal limbs then slid out of the gap, twisting and locking into position, turning the sphere into something that looked like a cross between a pinball and a spider.
Back in his room Otto couldn’t help but feel pleased with himself. The device was extremely complicated he’d had to cram an enormous amount of technology into a tiny object – and yet everything appeared to be functioning properly. He had conducted tests in the attic at St Sebastian’s, of course, but it was still a relief to see that the device was working as intended in the field. He issued a command and another window opened on his computer. This window showed a grainy picture of what the device could see, transmitted from a pinhole camera on its surface. Otto slowly rotated the device through all four points of the compass, trying to get a better idea of its immediate surroundings. He knew that the conference centre was a couple of hundred yards to the north-east of the drain, and he soon spotted a pipe that led away from the drain in that approximate direction.
Pushing forward on the control stick attached to his computer, he sent the device scurrying down the pipe through the drains towards the conference centre, occasionally taking a pipe that branched off from the one that the device was currently in, trying to keep it on the correct course.
Otto spent several minutes manoeuvring the device carefully through the subterranean network of pipes and drains towards its destination.
The layout of the system had seemed quite straightforward on the plans that Otto had acquired, but actually steering the right course through the murky maze of tunnels was proving to be slightly trickier than he had expected.
He was just starting to worry that he might have taken a wrong turn somewhere when he spotted his target. A faint light could be seen coming from a small opening up ahead, and Otto knew that this meant that he was in exactly the right place. He guided the device carefully through this new opening, the light getting stronger as it approached the gap at the far end of the path.
Otto pushed on the control stick again and the device started to climb the slippery walls of the pipe, heading up towards the opening.
‘Incey, wincey spider climbed the waterspout . . .’
Otto sang softly to himself as the device approached the top of the pipe. He pushed another key and the pinhole camera extended out from the body of the sphere on a long flexible rod. Otto rotated the camera around, peeking out over the top of what he could now see was the plughole in a white-tiled shower cubicle. Thankfully the cubicle appeared to be empty and, retracting the camera again, he eased the spider up out of the plughole. He looked at the printouts of the conference centre’s blueprints, which were spread out on the desk next to his computer. The plans had not been easy to get hold of, especially without arousing suspicion, and Otto suspected that they may even be slightly out of date but he hoped they would still serve his purposes adequately.
Scanning the plans Otto realised that the device must have come up in the showers attached to the swimming pool changing rooms. The nearest access to the air conditioning system was in the changing room itself and so Otto sent the device scurrying across the shower cubicle floor, towards his target.
There were several men getting changed in the room and Otto tried hard not to look at their semi-naked, wobbly bodies as he steered the device through the shadows beneath the benches. He rotated the spider, using its camera to look around the walls for the vent cover that had to be there somewhere. He eventually spotted it high on the far wall – he would have to wait for the men in the room to finish getting changed. After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a couple of minutes, the men finished getting dressed and left the room, finally giving Otto his opportunity. The device would be exposed as it climbed the wall in order to reach the vent, so he’d have to move quickly. Pushing the control stick as far forward as it would go he sent the device dashing across the floor and up the wall towards the vent.
Suddenly the microphone on the device picked up the sound of approaching voices. Someone was coming into the room! The tiny metallic spider still had a couple of feet to go before it reached the vent and it was climbing the smooth vertical surface of the wall as quickly as it could. Otto watched the vent getting larger and larger on his screen, willing the device to climb faster as it advanced inch by inch towards it.
Otto rotated the camera to point back into the room and saw, to his horror, that two policemen had walked into the room, one of them holding a large dog on a leash that was sniffing the air in the room curiously.
The microphone Otto had installed on the device picked up their conversation.
‘We only checked in here a couple of hours ago. I can’t believe he’s making us repeat the search already,’ one said to the other, looking fed up.
‘Oh, you know what the chief’s like,’ the other replied. ‘Everything by the book.’
Otto noticed that the dog was sniffing curiously around the door of the shower cubicle that the device had come up through. He couldn’t understand it. The device shouldn’t have any scent – it was just metal and plastic – so why should the dog be so interested in that particular cubicle? The dog turned, following the scent across the floor, tracking the precise trail that the device had followed. Suddenly it struck Otto.
He was such an idiot, he told himself. The device itself might not smell of anything that the dog would be able to track, but he’d just sent it crawling several hundred yards through the drains and you could bet that would leave a scent trail that the animal would be able to trace.
The device had now reached the vent on the wall, and Otto very carefully manoeuvred its two front legs under the edge of the hinged grille, trying to lever open a space wide enough to squeeze itself through. He hoped that the hinge on the cover wouldn’t be too stiff for the tiny machine to lift, and so was relieved to see that the gap that was being forced open was increasing steadily. He swivelled the camera again and saw the dog still sniffing the floor, advancing between the benches towards the vent with its handler in tow.
‘Looks like Rex has got something here,’ the handler remarked, kneeling down beside the dog. ‘What you got, boy? Smell something? Go get it.’ He unclipped the dog from its lead and it padded across the room, getting closer and closer to the device, which had almost finished dragging itself through the narrow gap at the base of the grille. Otto nudged the device forward again, and it finally pulled itself fully into the vent, its last leg vanishing through the gap. It was now fully inside the shaft, which sloped gently downwards into the darkness.
Unfortunately, this tiny movement caught the dog’s attention and it started to bark repeatedly, scraping at the wall with its front paws as it tried in vain to get closer to the vent by the ceiling.
The two policeman walked across the room towards the agitated dog, the man with the leash looked curiously at his canine companion.
‘Well, he can definitely smell something up there. We’d better check that vent.’
Otto’s blood ran cold. He edged the device away from the grille – if he could just get it a few more feet into the shaft he knew that the darkness would conceal it, but he only had a couple of seconds. Suddenly the face of one of the policemen appeared on the other side of the grille, peering curiously into the gloom within the shaft.
‘I can’t see much in there,’ he informed his unseen colleague.
‘You can open the grille.
Look, it’s just on a hinge,’ replied the other policeman.
If he opened that grille, there was no way that he’d miss Otto’s device sitting there. Equally, if Otto tried to move the device quickly the policeman would undoubtedly hear it walking on the metal-lined surface of the ventilation shaft. Otto thought frantically. Of course! He hit a key on his keyboard and the status window changed again, displaying DEVICE DEACTIVATED.
Within the air conditioning shaft the device’s legs immediately retracted back into its spherical body and gravity did the rest. The sphere rolled silently away from the grate down the gently sloping shaft into the darkness, just as the policeman swung the grille upwards. Otto could still hear their voices as they checked the shaft.
‘There’s nothing in here. I don’t know what Rex is getting so wound up about.’
‘He probably just smelled something coming through the air conditioning from the kitchens. You know what he’s like. Greedy old thing.’
The voices slowly faded away as the two policemen completed their search of the changing rooms and moved on. Back in his hotel room, Otto willed himself to relax, gradually feeling his heart rate slow. That had been too close, but he couldn’t afford to lose his nerve now. He had about thirty minutes to get the device to its target position, and an unfamiliar system of ventilation shafts to navigate. There was no time to lose.
The tiny mechanical spider skittered through the ventilation shafts on its spindly metal legs. Just round this corner, Otto thought to himself as he gently nudged the control stick, steering the device towards its target.
The device rounded the corner and descended from the opening in the shaft into a small, dark space, just a couple of feet high. Otto knew that this area was actually directly beneath the stage from which the Prime Minister would be making his speech in approximately five minutes’ time. He rotated the device’s camera, scanning its surroundings carefully, looking for his target. There it was, a few yards away – a bundle of cables dropping through a hole in the floor of the stage into the cramped space below. He manoeuvred the device so that it sat right next to the cables, quickly identifying the one he wanted. He pressed another key on his laptop: INTERFACE MANDIBLES DEPLOYED, read the display.
Under the stage a pair of tiny metal pincers slid out from the device. Otto steered the pincers carefully towards the right cable and hit another key, making them clamp down hard on the wire.
INTERFACE ESTABLISHED, the display reported.
Otto ran a couple of quick diagnostics and was pleased to find that everything was working exactly as planned. OK, that’s the hard part over with, Otto thought to himself, turning towards the television that sat on a table in the corner of his room. He thumbed the remote, turning the television on, and quickly flicked through the channels on offer. He soon found the one he wanted – a journalist talking to camera, while in the background was the stage under which Otto’s device was secretly positioned. Otto sat waiting for a couple of minutes, half listening to the journalist pontificating on the importance of the speech for the Prime Minister. Otto also felt sure the Prime Minister would remember today as a pivotal moment in his career.
The journalist finished speaking just as the Prime Minister took the stage.
‘Showtime,’ Otto said softly to himself, turning back towards his computer.
Otto sat watching as the Prime Minister began his speech, not listening to what he was saying. He found politicians unspeakably boring and this speech was unlikely to be any exception. Let’s give him a couple of minutes to get warmed up, he thought to himself.
He waited for a couple of minutes, the occasional stage-managed applause being the only break from the Prime Minister’s interminable rambling. OK, enough, Otto thought to himself, and hit a key on the laptop. A window popped up, filled with slowly scrolling text. The words displayed were precisely the same as those being spoken by the Prime Minister, as this was a direct feed from his teleprompter. Between the blocks of text were instructions in brackets like (PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE) or (STRONG EMOTION). His finger hovering over the return key, Otto paused for a second, looking at the television.
‘Goodbye, Prime Minister,’ he said softly, bringing his finger down on the key.
It had taken Otto several days to perfect the program that was now running on his computer. Simply put, it transmitted a signal lasting no more than a couple of seconds directly to the angled glass screen of the Prime Minister’s autocue.
This wasn’t any ordinary signal, though; it was designed to produce a very specific response. Otto knew that on the teleprompter screen on stage the text of the Prime Minister’s speech had been replaced by a brief burst of white noise.
The apparently random pattern of black and white pixels looked like a TV that was receiving no signal. But this was no random burst of static; this was a carefully calculated pattern that had taken Otto some time to perfect. This signal had the unique property of placing whoever viewed it immediately under Otto’s total hypnotic control. He had already tested the program on Mrs McReedy, and after several minutes of her crawling around the floor on all fours barking like a dog he had been satisfied that it would work as intended.
Conveniently, modern teleprompters were designed so that if they were viewed by anyone other than the speaker they looked like a clear sheet of angled glass, which meant that the only two people in the world who knew what had happened were Otto and the Prime Minister.
Otto glanced at the television and was pleased to see that the Prime Minister had stopped dead, in the middle of a sentence, and was now staring blankly at the teleprompter. A few of the cabinet ministers seated behind him on the stage looked slightly confused, unsure what had silenced their leader like this. Amusing as it might be just to leave him standing there like a statue for a few minutes, Otto had other plans. He pressed another key on his computer and the hypnotic signal was replaced by more scrolling text. This wasn’t the original speech, though – this was Otto’s version.
The Prime Minister seemed to snap out of his trance and continued speaking as if nothing had happened.
‘People of Britain, you are surely aware that I and the other members of my cabinet hold you and your families in nothing but the deepest contempt. Ruling over a bunch of drooling morons like you has been a ceaseless burden and, quite frankly, I don’t think that we get enough credit for having to put up with your constant whining.’
The Prime Minister’s expression gave no hint that this new speech was in any way unusual. Behind him, his cabinet sat looking astonished, mouths hanging open in disbelief.
‘The fact of the matter is that we’re not public servants – you’re our servants, you bunch of half-witted oiks, and the sooner you learn your proper place on your knees before us, the better. Let’s face it – none of you have a fraction of the intelligence that we do,’ he indicated the people sitting behind him, ‘and half of you can barely read and write, and with the way the education system’s going that’s not going to change any time soon.’
There was now a general murmur of anger from the audience in the conference centre and a couple of the cabinet members were whispering urgently to one another. The Prime Minister continued, his familiar grin plastered across his face.
‘So my message to you is really quite simple – we don’t care. Never have done, never will do. You might as well shut your mouths and cut the moaning, because we don’t give a monkey’s. All that we care about is power and money; your dull, pathetic little problems are irrelevant.’
The Prime Minister’s grin broadened.
‘Quite frankly, you can take your problems and shove them. Thank you.’
Otto watched as the final instruction that would for ever destroy the Prime Minister’s career in politics scrolled up the window on his computer. . (AS LONG AS YOU LIVE, YOU WILL NEVER TELL ANOTHER LIE).
The Prime Minister stood there grinning at the audience, clearly believing that he had given the speech of a lifetime, which Otto supposed was true, from a certain point of view. An evil idea suddenly formed in his head. He knew he shouldn’t, but what the hell – when would he ever have another opportunity like this? Grinning, he typed one last command into the window. . (MOON THE AUDIENCE).
The Prime Minister dutifully turned around, bent over and dropped his trousers.
The TV picture quickly changed from a shot of the PM’s pale white bottom to one showing the horrified, open-mouthed expressions of the audience. Otto could no longer suppress a fit of giggles. Now that was an abject lesson in the true use of power.
He watched the television for a couple more minutes, amused by the bewildered reactions of the seasoned political journalists, who were desperately trying to make some kind of sense of what they had just seen. This one was going to run and run.
Otto forced himself to turn back to his computer; it was time to cover his tracks. He typed a command into the machine and a window popped up..
SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIALISED.
Beneath the stage the tiny silver spider dissolved into a pool of molten slag, leaving no identifiable trace of Otto’s involvement. That was it – he was home and dry, and without the personal backing of the Prime Minister he doubted very much that the programme of orphanage closures would continue as planned. He felt uncharacteristically pleased with himself and as far as he was concerned he had every reason to.
One of the journalists on the television caught his attention.
‘August 29th, a date that will live in political infamy for ever . . .’
Was that the date? Otto had quite lost track of time while he’d been planning all of this. It was his birthday, or, more accurately, the anniversary of his arrival at St Sebastian’s, which was the nearest thing he had to a proper birthday. Well, what better way to celebrate, he thought, toasting the Prime Minister with his can of Coke.
He watched the coverage of the unfolding political chaos for a few more minutes and then started to gather up his stuff and put it into his backpack. There was no reason now to stick around here any longer than he had to. Besides which, knowing Mrs McReedy there’d be a rather large birthday cake waiting for him back in London. The thought made him suddenly hungry.
Otto looked carefully around the room, making sure that he had left no trace of his activities that afternoon. Satisfied that the room was clean of evidence, he opened the door and cried out in surprise. Standing there in the doorway was a woman with short dark hair, dressed completely in black and with a curved scar on one cheek.
All of these details, however, were secondary to the fact that she had a very large gun pointed directly at Otto’s chest.
‘Very impressive work today, Mr Malpense.’ She had a slight foreign accent.
‘But I’m afraid that playtime is over.’ She raised the gun.
‘I’m unarmed!’ Otto blurted out. ‘You’re a policewoman, you can’t shoot an unarmed child!’ He raised his hands to emphasise his point.
She smiled in a way that made Otto’s blood run cold.
‘Who said I was from the police?’
Otto’s eyes widened in horror.
ZAP! .