15th July
Jenny watched from the window of her new flat as Wycombe got into his car and drove away.
Duck had also watched his departure from the far side of the street and five minutes later, he knocked on Jenny’s door.
‘Where shat I put the tool bag?’ said Duck, pointing at a holdall he had carried into the room.
Jenny nodded towards a small bookshelf. ‘That’s the adjoining wall with Wycombe’s flat,’ she replied. ‘We’ll drill there.’
‘Why can’t we just break into his flat, search it and place a listening device?’ Duck asked.
‘That’s not easy to do when the target is probably a trained agent,’ said Jenny. ‘He’ll very probably have security devices in the flat to detect intruders. Those can be almost impossible to find, and even if we did, he would know if one had been disturbed.’
‘We pretended to be burglars at Northchester Cathedral,’ Duck recalled.
‘Wycombe’s not stupid. A burglary would put him on his guard, and he would put his new tenant at the top of his list of possible suspects. Also, planting surveillance devices won’t work. We have to assume he does a regular electronic bug sweep.’
Jenny removed the drill from the holdall and placed it on the floor. She then selected a meter from the remaining tools.
‘What’s that for?’ asked Duck.
‘It will allow us to detect where the electricity sockets are located on the other side of the wall,’ Jenny replied. ‘We can then carefully drill through into them and fit cameras and microphones that can monitor the room via cables that come into this room. A bug sweep won’t detect those because the primary electronics will be several feet away.’
One hour later, Duck and Jenny were watching an image of Fred Wycombe’s front room on Jenny’s television.
‘We’re lucky that his sockets are quite high up the wall,’ said Jenny. ‘We’ve got an uninterrupted view of the whole room. Let’s hope that something happens in there that points to the remaining unknown WAR agents and their plans.’