Locked Down

by Ed Kovacs

  He looked at her for a long moment. “Fair enough.”

  Hernandez rapped twice, paused, and then knocked three more times in quick succession on the back door of the box truck. The door opened almost immediately. Jaffir Kahn, a tall, rail thin, forty-year-old Pakistani-American stood there in a perfectly tailored single-breasted Brooks Brother’s suit and tie. He flashed a toothy, sincere smile as he pushed up the wire-rimmed glasses on his large nose. His dark brown skin was wrinkle-free, and nicely styled thick black hair made him look like some kind of pampered executive.

  “Miss Grant, it's a pleasure to meet you. Please, can you quickly step in to my laboratory?” Jaffir's Pakistani accent was greatly softened by almost fifteen years of living in the States. He held out his hand; his fingers were long and graceful like they belonged to an artist.

  Cool air escaping from the refrigerated truck enveloped her as she masked her surprise at his proper appearance. He didn't look like some kind of spook support geek. Not knowing why, she took an instant liking to Jaffir, so she took his hand and climbed up into the inner sanctum of the box truck.

  “I'll be back in a few minutes,” said Hernandez, standing on the pavement as he started to close the door behind Nicole.

  She flashed him a look. “Don't be late this time.”

  ###

  Since neither the sommelier nor any waitstaff had seen her confrontation with Nicole Grant, Rena Musaad simply took over the table in the private area of Riedel Room @ Q88, and took over the bottle of Bordeaux, too. And she had Grant's $200 to pay for it.

  Rena composed a detailed, encrypted message to the London WikiLeaks office, insisting she was on to something BIG. She requested they provide funding to pay for at least two more nights in Hong Kong. She'd already confirmed Grant was a hotel guest and had called her room, but there was no answer.

  Ron Hernandez was the key. So she went back to work, using the Internet to do what she did best: dig deep down for information, forgotten facts, and secrets that sometimes stood right out in the open.

  ###

  Special Projects Director Tang Jie stood surrounded by the entire MSS team in the CP at the Marriott. Tang intently watched security video from both the Marriott and the Conrad that his hackers had finally obtained. Footage from the Conrad showed what looked like a Muslim woman holding three shopping bags as she got into an elevator two floors below Nicole Grant's floor at 15:51. Footage from the Marriott clearly showed Nicole Grant at 16:03 holding a purse and the same three shopping bags as she crossed through the Marriott lobby and entered the Q88 wine bar.

  Tang glanced around making sure that neither General Ma’s aide Li Shan nor any other officers from the Second Department were within earshot, as MSS team members pressed in closer.

  “Our main problem remains, that we have access to very little of the CCTV footage here at Pacific Place. But from what we do have, we pieced together the following. Grant left her room just before four o'clock disguised as a Muslim with three shopping bags and a purse. She must have taken the stairs down two floors, and then took an elevator,” said Tang, filling in the gaps of events that the video didn't show. “She gets rid of her disguise somewhere as she walked to the Marriott, but she kept the three shopping bags. Put out the description to all agents. Have the rovers show photos to clerks in all the shops, waitresses in the cafes. Key on the three shopping bags. Make sure you get the colors correct of the clothing. And find out what she was doing at the wine bar.”

  “And if we see her?” asked one of the men.

  “Close surveillance until we can make a clean snatch.”

  “Ma's orders are shoot-on-sight,” said Tang's aide Choi, a sharp-eyed thirty-five year-old man with a round face.

  “Forget about that, or we'll be shooting every amah in Hong Kong,” said Tang, softly, so only his MSS agents could hear. “And somebody check to see if Grant or Hernandez has any old friends or contacts here. Perhaps they've reached out for help.”

  ###

  The digital countdown clock in the computer room at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou read: 03:01:37. It was a median estimate. Oi Lam's team might break the encrypted files from Nicole Grant's laptop computer a bit sooner or a bit later, but the Chinese hacker's estimates in the past had always been accurate. She'd finally been able to push aside the fears regarding her pregnancy and lose herself in the technical puzzle of how Grant constructed a program that caused the laptop to randomly, but frequently, send out requests for information. What information? What was so precious that this data was continually being requested, but not downloaded?

  Oi Lam sat lost in deep thought when her cell phone rang. She recognized the caller ID and her stomach muscles tensed. “Wei?” She didn't put the phone on speaker so at least his end of the conversation was masked from her co-workers.

  “I trust you are well and the university is giving your team all it needs,” said Ma.

  “Yes, everything's fine.” She wanted to say more, but the room was too quiet, her co-workers could hear. She had to speak in some kind of code to give him the results of the ultrasound check she had this morning. “We are all here working hard and on schedule,” she said, sounding formal.

  “Good. Tomorrow morning, you, and you alone must return to Beijing for a special assignment. Someone will contact you with the arrangements.”

  She paused, surprised, wondering if this would be a real work assignment or an assignation of a different type. “Yes sir. Where shall I report?”

  “Return to your apartment. You'll be contacted there with further instructions. And don't mention this to anyone, this is a secret assignment. You'll have to tell your comrades something, so say you're being evaluated for a possible transfer to another unit.”

  “Yes, sir. Oh, and General, do you recall the special test you wanted me to research?” She paused, waiting to see if he understood her code for the ultrasound test.

  “It's a girl, right?” asked Ma, unenthused. He already had five daughters, with four different women, but no sons.

  “No sir, just the opposite. But the situation is quite normal.”

  There was a long pause, and then Ma stammered, “We'll talk later.”

  The General rang off. Oi Lam struggled to hide her fears. Why hadn't he responded positively? Every Chinese father wants to have a son, first and foremost, whether they admit it or not. And since Ma didn't have any male heirs, Oi Lam had gambled by getting pregnant while she was supposed to be on the pill. Being pregnant with a girl would have guaranteed her nothing except the end of her relationship with Ma. If the ultrasound this morning had revealed a girl, she would have aborted.

  She'd spent a year carrying on with the man, carefully shunning his gifts of cash and gold jewelry in an effort not to appear greedy. Her cultivated lack of interest in his money was crafted to win a much larger prize. After a year during which he'd made no substantial effort to secure her financial future, she made her move by taking the pregnancy route. The research she'd done had convinced her that having a boy would make all the difference to him. So why did he hang up? She frowned. She'd give Ma one month. If he didn't step forward with massive financial assistance and an ironclad commitment by then, she'd abort the boy and claim she miscarried. That scenario would leave her with nothing to show for her year spent with the general except for the breast implants he'd paid for. But she could use those breasts and her youth to land another big fish; she already had two candidates in her sights, men who she simply thought of as “wallets.”

  ###

  General Ma sat alone in his parked Mercedes where he'd gone to make the call to Oi Lam. He didn't bother masking his exhilaration. A son! He long ago gave up hope of producing a male offspring. He loved all of his daughters, but in China, the cold truth was that boys were more highly favored than girls.

  A son! What a blessing! Zhao's order to kill Oi Lam had just become terribly problematic. He'd been given a definitive, direct order from the soon-to-be president of China to kill Oi Lam
. Ma swore silently to himself. If he disobeyed Zhao he'd get a bullet to the back of his head, yet how could he obey? He needed to think of something, and fast, because there was now no way in hell he'd let anything happen to Oi Lam.

  ###

  Central Services was the name of the cleaning company that had cleaned the CIA front company at Pacific Place five years ago when Ron Hernandez spent over a month working out of the facility as he and a small team tracked down and assassinated a Muslim terrorist and his support cell hiding out in a Kowloon tenement. He remembered the company name because he often found himself present at 18:30 when the cleaner arrived. The man was a CIA sub-contractor who held a SECRET clearance. Sensitive facilities needed their toilets scrubbed, too, and the spooks themselves aren't going to do it. Hernandez and the man named Ping had joked about it.

  But that was five years ago. Hernandez was in the system then and used a magnetic keycard, a fingerprint scan, and facial recognition to gain access. All old technology that had been replaced. Mr. Ping was going to have to explain a few of the current security details, whether he wanted to or not.

  Two minutes later, a Central Services van pulled into a dimly lit slot near the service elevator. The uniformed Asian driver came around to open the back doors and was jumped from behind by Hernandez and put into a bar arm choke hold. He choked the driver unconscious, opened the back door and laid the body inside face down. He was about to climb in, when he got a look at the face. It wasn't Mr. Ping.

  An Asian female lay unconscious on the floor of the van. Hernandez frowned. How in hell was he going to impersonate an Asian female?

  CHAPTER 14

  18:52

  Trans-National Corporation took up the entire 23rd floor of One Pacific Place. After stepping out of one of the eight elevator cars, a visitor had only one choice, and that was to approach the secure front entrance to the suite of offices. A push-to-talk intercom was positioned above a smart card reader next to the door. Tasteful couches and coffee tables comprised a small waiting area. Multiple security cameras covered the entire space, including the elevator bank.

  Nicole Grant wore the black wig and sunglasses as she used her left hand to wave the smart card taken from the Central Services cleaning lady over the card reader. The real cleaning lady was bound and gagged in her van down in the parking structure. The cleaning uniform was a little small on Nicole, so Jaffir had made some quick alterations. All she appeared to be carrying was a new mop head in her right hand.

  And then there was the Smith & Wesson Governor, a large, six-shot revolver that chambered .410 shotshell rounds, the smallest shotgun round, that she had stashed in a nylon shoulder bag. Each .410 cartridge in the pistol was less-than-lethal and contained rubber buckshot, since Nicole had refused to carry a gun that would kill someone.

  In addition to providing Nicole with the gun, Jaffir had attached a Taser Axon wearable camera to her belt, so he was watching a video feed of her progress from his box truck/work lab. Hernandez was watching the feed, too, on his tablet computer while standing in the stairwell on the 22nd floor, exactly one floor below Nicole.

  Mr. Ping, the janitor Hernandez had known, retired from Central Services and forty-seven year old Rose Chin, who'd been very cooperative once she regained consciousness, had taken his place a year ago. Chin cleaned Trans-National five days a week, so there was no way that the hulking figure of Ron Hernandez could have impersonated her. And there wasn't even time to think about it, there was only Nicole's insistence that she would take point on getting them into the super secure office.

  Half the people in Hong Kong walked the streets with earbuds in their ears, and Nicole also now wore a pair. But she wasn't listening to classic rock or a best-selling audio book; she was in radio contact with Jaffir and Hernandez. What am I doing, what the hell was I thinking? Nicole kept her head down as her chest muscles tightened. She had experience testing physical security at companies that hired her as a penetration tester, and so had deluded herself into thinking that impersonating Rose Chin wouldn't be much different. But really, this was all about trying to prove her worth to Hernandez. She'd let herself fall into competition with the man, and now she felt like a fool.

  Just as she was about to chicken out, a buzzer buzzed—the smart card had worked—so she forced herself to open the heavy door using her left hand and stepped into a small anteroom that held no furniture. She focused on the biometric scanners recessed into the wall as the outer door clicked closed and locked behind her, sealing her into a kind of no-man's-land and infusing her with a sense of dread.

  ###

  Hernandez shook his head. Special operators like himself generally oozed confidence and instilled it in others, but as he looked at the video feed of Grant approaching the biometric scanners, he had a bad feeling. Unless she froze, she'd pass the iris scan. But Jaffir had confided that the finger vein scan was a fifty-fifty shot.

  It had only taken Jaffir minutes to photograph Rose Chin's eyes and generate the contact lens that Nicole now wore. Then he'd scanned Chin's right index finger with his own finger vein scanner and fed the data into a computer. Special software created a 3D digital model of Chin's finger, including the veins, and that digitized information was sent to a 3D printer that was only 12” X 12” in size. Jaffir could manufacture solid objects of any shape with the printer, using materials of his choosing. Hobbyists could buy such printers for as little as $200 and with the right software do exactly what Jaffir could do.

  As the clone of Rose Chin's finger had begun taking shape, the computer directed an additive process of construction—successive layers of resin and other material were “printed.” So as the printer manufactured the faux finger it incorporated the system of “veins” below what became the “skin.” The skin was created from a translucent resin compound while the veins were printed from a slightly metallic material.

  Hernandez and Jaffir knew the CIA's vein scanners utilized an infrared camera to read a thermal image of the tip of the finger, so using an amputated digit to spoof the system wouldn't work, due to blood/heat loss. Years earlier, Jaffir had solved this problem by connecting a tiny microprocessor powered by a single CR2325 coin-type battery to the metallic material of the printed vein system. The microprocessor provided the correct amount of heat to fool the infra-red capacity of a vein scanner. Amazingly, it had taken only nine minutes to print the finger that Nicole Grant now had protruding from the fringes of the mop head, with her right hand concealed below. Hernandez knew that Jaffir had previously cloned many fingers and even palms to successfully get past vein scanners, but typically such work took several painstaking hours. Tonight was so rushed, Jaffir had confided to the veteran field agent that using the finger was a crap shoot.

  Time was so tight and Grant had been so insistent, that, short of aborting, there simply hadn't been another option. So here he stood, one floor below the action, watching on video as the amateur Nicole Grant disappeared into the bowels of the beast. He fully expected he'd have to come running at any moment and pull off some kind of rescue—he had a small quantity of C-4 plastic explosive stashed in his pocket—but how to blow the exterior door safely with Grant standing just on the other side?

  ###

  Nicole Grant leaned forward and pressed her eye socket against the padding of the iris scanner. She trembled because she knew she was on CCTV being watched by armed security on the other side of the door. And she was locked up tight in the anteroom—anyone leaving had to be buzzed out by security or they weren't going anywhere. Just as she'd broken out into a cold sweat, a recorded, monotone female voice said, “Thank you, Rose Chin.”

  Okay, so she passed the iris scan.

  Now came the tricky part. While trying not to be conspicuous about it, she kept her head angled away from the CCTV camera as she extended her hidden right hand toward the finger vein scanner. She maneuvered the fake finger into the glass trough and waited. Hopefully, it wouldn't look odd on camera that she was holding the mop head as she scanned t
he finger.

  Nicole stood there and unconsciously released a large exhale as she waited. But nothing happened. She gently moved the finger in the scanning trough. Still nothing. Her clammy hand tightened its grip of the fake finger.

  ###

  An African-American security guard sat at the reception console of the CIA field office that masqueraded as a real estate development company at One Pacific Place. Due to his expanding belly he always took off his heavy duty belt to feel more comfortable. The stiff black leather duty belt held gear like a Glock 21 in a Bianchi holster, handcuffs, pepper spray, collapsible steel baton, folding knife, and a radio telephone that connected with the communications room at CIA station in the U.S. Consulate on 26 Garden Road. The guard only removed the belt if no one was present. Like right now. He'd have plenty of time to put it back on if one of the CIA spooks showed up.

  The spooks came and went, but all he had to do was buzz them out. There were other small duties: communication checks, alarm checks, and he had to make rounds every two hours.

  Four security monitors were mounted below the reception counter. Each monitor showed four different camera views. A small console allowed an operator to switch camera views, zoom, pan, or tilt. There were 34 cameras total in the facility, but only the 16 most important ones were displayed on the four monitors in front of the guard.

  Right now one of those camera views showed the Asian cleaning lady who came every day at this time standing in the anteroom with her finger on the vein scanner. He'd already glanced at her when a soft chiming alarm alerted him to someone approaching the exterior door out in the hallway. He hadn't bothered to look up from the TV show streaming on his laptop, but he heard her enter the anteroom and then heard the computerized voice say “Thank you, Rose Chin,” when she'd done her iris scan. She'd be entering the reception area any second, but there was no need to put on his duty belt for the cleaning lady. He had the sign-in sheet right in front of him ready for her to sign.