THE INESTIMABLE TROPHY

THE INESTIMABLE TROPHY (short story)

Inside the boardroom, every employee was seated on his seat. No one else apart from the boss was talking. Everyone but the boss was deadly silent. At least no one dared pronounce a word. Who would have agreed to take that risk?

The boss, Mr Jefferson, though he rarely gets hungry, when he does no one can stand his wrath. He was now fuming with fury. “I am asking again, how can a trophy disappear from the office and no one has an idea of what happened? How can it happen that the security division has not managed to get even a clue of when, where, how the incidence happened and who did it?” Mr Jefferson asked while his voice was rising every second.

The employees of the national sports archive used to call him the lion. Everyone in the whole organization respected the man. He always meant whatever he said, he never believed in over explaining anything for he believed in simplicity of everything that he explained. When he gave instructions, the seriousness he did so with was enough to make anyone do the required with high degree of seriousness and devotion. This day however, everything in the boardroom seemed to be hostile to each of the archive workers.

Having got no reply since he had started his anger guided speech, the lion then started giving instructions. He instructed the security department of the archive to give a detailed report of all log ins and outs of people in the facility throughout the past weekend, to submit the CCTV footage of the whole facility for the same duration and also gave a directive to the security team to give a report of audit of the security roles of every security officer in the organisation. All those tasks were laid on the hands of the security head of the facility, Stephen Kiptoo, simply known as Steve.  

Having worked in the sports archive for over twenty years, Steve had never heard of a day when anything went missing from the facility. He knew his work very well. His routine job included; assigning duties of the officers to be supervising the activities of the day which was usually ensuring no one could leave the building with anything belonging to the facility. That had never been an issue since everything in that line was done systematically. There were minimum chances of disappearance of items as the computer would always monitor and report movements of items within and out of the building using the codes on each item.

Today, the computer control system did not do the work of reporting the movement of the trophy as while Steve was analysing the records of the actions of the facility from the system, he saw at least no evidence that the trophy was even missing. The system however had been reporting about everything else but nothing was in the record about the disappearance of the trophy.

Audit of the CCTV system too, did not yield to anything as it was also showing everything else but no any funny movement within the building beyond Saturday afternoon when the facility was shut down as required by the archive routine.  

At the end of the day, Steve handed the report and the footage to his boss. The lion just took the files from the head of the security division and signalled him to exit the room without any word escaping his mouth.

When he was left alone in his house, the lion lit his cigarette, something which he rarely did and was believed to smoke only when faced by a tough challenge like this one. He then called Mr Jackson, a private investigator who was believed to be the best investigator in the world. No any single investigation had he investigated without finalizing on it and giving fine details of the case. He was the most rated investigator. Jack had worked with the most famous investigating agencies on the globe. Talk of the DEA CIA, FBI, and many others before finally deciding to form his investigating agency. This gave the lion the surety of getting tangible evidence and getting to the final end of the story.

Although Jack was an expensive deal, the lion was ready to take the risk. $2000000 was the price of the service he had just requested to given. He had no issue with the charge. His determination to know everything even directed him to give Jack a down payment halve the amount. Jack assured his client that every stone will finally be overturned and told him that he only needed to access the security details and a duration of 72 hours to give his full report. What else would Jeff require from Jack?   

Looking at the footage from the CCTV and the system report from the automated log system, jack was convinced that the two were compromised. The case was to be simple as a single call to Alex the IT department head was enough to give the uncorrupted footage and the real log on the computer log system. The people who store the thing must have been organized but as usual no one can be ever sharper than my team.

In minutes, Alex had already retrieved the original footage and the computer log system as instructed by his boss Mr jack. Jack as usual, with the two from the IT team, was able to come up with solutions to the missing pieces of the puzzle. He was also able to get the names of the people who had robbed the national sports archive of the county together with their location. ‘

The remaining part was to unearth the person behind the whole plan. The force squad, usually composed of only ten most skilled and sophisticated fighters was send to ‘take’ the three men who according to the report that jack had come up with were physically present in the archive and took the trophy. The ‘taking process’ as the agency usually called it was simple; bring the suspect alive and pre-unarmed. In two hours the three men were being loaded in a car trunk, each of them unconscious but alive.

Jacks report also revealed that the three had communicated with someone via a highly fortified cell phone line. A further probe by the team to know who the person who was called was bore no effort. An attempt to hack into the network by the IT department of the agency only resulted to a call from the inspector general to Alex warning him that he was risking arrest if he continued to illegally penetrate into the network.

“Just leave it for now we will mine information from the three people we have in our safe house once they regain conscience. Thank you for continuing to be a good boy.” Jack told Alex while holding his long dreaded hair.

A story by Sam Richie