Free The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown by Vaseem Khan

couldnae be sure the ones he knew were the real McCoy, if you get my meaning. But then along comes this wee lassie he likes the look of. So he decides to put her to the test. Sticks a pea under her mattress. Twenty mattresses, actually. And guess what? That pea kept her up all night. That’s me, right there.’
    Chopra was bewildered. ‘Are you saying you are a princess?’
    â€˜What?’ McTavish coloured. ‘No, man, I’m saying that little things like that pea bother me. That’s what we have here. Lots of little peas.’
    Chopra considered this. Aside from the matter of the plastic explosive there were other things bothering him too. ‘How did the thieves avoid the effects of the gas?’ he asked, eventually.
    â€˜Nose filters would be my guess. Either they brought them along or they were also inside that hidey-hole in the Kali statue.’
    â€˜What about prints? Did they leave them on the canisters? Or anywhere else?’
    â€˜You think they’d be so sloppy?’ McTavish waggled his finger as if at a child who has got an answer wrong in class. ‘They wore latex gloves, I’ll wager. Either had them waiting in the statue or smuggled them in on the day of the heist. You can roll them up to practically nothing. Stick them in the heel of a shoe, or the lining of a jacket. Easy enough for those Force One ninnies to miss.’
    Chopra suddenly noticed the fish-eye camera peering down at him from above McTavish’s shoulder. ‘What does the CCTV footage show?’
    â€˜I wondered when you’d get around to that,’ said McTavish. ‘The answer is: not a damned thing. It cuts out seconds before the heist. The CCTV was only installed a few weeks before the exhibition. The museum has never traditionally gone in for that sort of thing, you understand. They picked one of these modern, fully digitised systems, everything controlled by computers. As best as we can figure it, a day before the heist some sort of computer algorithm – let’s call it a virus – was installed on the system. This virus was designed to kick in at a pre-planned time and shut the system down. Which is precisely what it did. We havenae any footage of the thieves before, during or after the heist.’
    Chopra was not, by nature, technologically inclined. ‘Is that sort of thing even possible?’
    â€˜Ever hear of the Stuxnet virus?’ replied McTavish. ‘Made headlines a wee while back. A virus so canny it took a year to work out what it did. And what it did was infect computerised networks running industrial programmable logic controllers – specifically those that ran Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. It made the centrifuges tear themselves apart. Did a damned good job of it, too.’
    â€˜How did the thieves install this virus?’
    â€˜I’m guessing the same way they put those gas canisters inside the statue.’
    Chopra arrived at the inescapable conclusion. ‘They had someone on the inside.’
    â€˜For a wee long while, would be my guess. It must have taken time to scrape out that cavity.’ McTavish absentmindedly tapped the sides of his thighs. ‘I hate to say it, Chopra, but these guys were good. We’re looking at a gang that is patient, sophisticated and well financed.’
    An urgent thought that had been beckoning for attention now forced itself to the front of Chopra’s mind. ‘Why didn’t the Force One guards stationed outside the gallery stop them?’
    â€˜Because as soon as they got inside the gallery our thieves locked the doors – from the
inside
. Those wee doors were specially installed for the exhibition. Six-inch plated steel. Once the thieves locked them our Force One friends couldnae break in. And the powers that be always assumed that any attack would come from the front of the gallery, so that even if the Force One buffoons were overpowered, the Beefeaters could batten