The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  “Don’t worry,” she added. “So far, my record of coming back alive is one hundred percent.”

  “Ha.” The look Doc shot her said he wasn’t amused.

  The parking garage was aboveground, with open sides, and she and Doc were on the sixth floor, a viewpoint that allowed them to see much of the downtown area. Surrounded on three sides by hazy blue mountains, San Jose was a charming juxtaposition of Spanish colonial-style buildings, mid-nineteenth-century Italianate architecture and the contemporary skyscrapers that announced to visitors that they had indeed arrived in the heart of Silicon Valley, tech capital of the world.

  Today being a Saturday, and a beautiful sunshiny day in the upper sixties at that, there were lots of people out and about on the palm-tree-lined streets below. They were shopping in the funky little shops, eating at the sidewalk cafés with their colorful umbrellas that were plentiful in the area or browsing the art show that had been set up in the nearby Plaza de César Chávez Park.

  What was pertinent about the parking garage was that it was directly opposite the Thurber/Wilkes Building, a sleek high-rise tower that was part boutique hotel (on the lower eight levels) and part office complex (on the upper eight.) The locator beacon had brought them here and pinpointed the briefcase’s location as the sixteenth floor.

  A little research had done the rest.

  A building directory had identified the sixteenth floor as being part of the four floors occupied by the executive offices of Allied Industries, Sturgeon’s company. The top four floors were stacked like a wedding cake, with the sixteenth being the smallest. Floor plans coupled with the locator beacon had yielded the information that the briefcase was inside a wall in a room in the southwest corner of that floor. Building permits issued when Allied Industries had modified the sixteenth floor indicated significant reinforcing of that interior wall, the removal of exterior windows from the entire floor and the installation of a state-of-the-art motion detection system along with a barrier containment unit that descended to seal that particular southwest corner room if security was breached.

  Oh, yeah, and once the containment unit was in place, all the oxygen was sucked out of it by a vacuum system, leaving the intruder to suffocate if not rescued with sufficient speed.

  In other words, nothing but fun on the agenda today.

  Credit card records for Allied Industries indicated that a Fallon 230Z-series fire-rated safe with a six-digit combination lock had been purchased at the time of the renovations.

  Bianca considered it very likely that the safe had been installed in the reinforced wall, and that the prototype was now resting inside it.

  She could get into a Fallon 230Z in under a minute. That left her thirty seconds to get to the safe, and thirty seconds to get out.

  She was ready. Doc was ready. Everything was ready. All they were waiting for now was the “go” signal.

  Which would be a phone call from Allied Industries to their preferred plumber, identified by phone records as Hagan Brothers on Senter Road.

  The thing is, some things in life are universal. We all need to eat, we all need to sleep and we all need to go to the bathroom. For that last necessity, every floor of Allied Industries had two gender-neutral, single-user units.

  When Sturgeon renovated his office space, he equipped it with all the latest features, including smart toilets. Smart toilets, as it turned out, were hackable. All it required was a Bluetooth connection and the code 0000, and a competent hacker (lookin’ at you, Doc) could turn a bathroom into a house of horrors (or a fun house, depending on which side of the hacking you were on). Toilets could be made to scream, to snap their lids open and closed like the shark in Jaws or to spray you with water when you sat down on them, among many other disconcerting things.

  While he was setting the hack up, Doc had chuckled and said, “Man, I bet we could win a bundle on America’s Funniest Home Videos with this.”

  Bianca gave him a pointed look—don’t try this at home, kiddo—and replied, “Yes, and while we’re picking up the winner’s check, we could also get arrested and go to jail.”

  Forty-three minutes after everything was in place, one of the presumed security guards on the sixteenth floor went into a room identified on the floor plan as a bathroom. They waited a moment as from the look of the image he relieved himself. When he turned away from the toilet, after having presumably flushed, Doc did his thing.

  They couldn’t see the water in the toilet shoot up like it was coming out of a fire hose, but they could hear the guard’s startled yell and the blurry green image of his frenzied reaction.

  “He shoots, he scores,” Doc chortled in self-congratulation as they watched the guard try to contain the water, watched as he bent over, presumably looking behind the toilet for a way to shut the water off, watched as he burst out of the bathroom. Over the transmitter they heard a muffled shout of “Marco! Help! The damned toilet broke!”

  “What are you—” the second guard said as he moved toward the first, then broke off as apparently the problem became clear. “What the hell did you do?”

  “Nothing! I took a leak and it exploded!”

  A string of curses followed as the second guard joined the first in frantic darts in and out of the bathroom. Listening, watching, even Bianca succumbed to a smile.

  The easy fix—turn off the water to the malfunctioning fixture, the bathroom, the floor—wasn’t possible. All that was computerized, too. And Doc had blocked the signal that allowed it to work.

  Two more images joined the original two. More security, from the panic-stricken exchange that ensued. From the sound of things, that toilet was gushing like Old Faithful.

  Then they called building maintenance.

  Bottom line: building maintenance couldn’t fix it, either.

  Bummer.

  Out went the call to Hagan Brothers. Bianca listened to the one-sided, desperate plea for immediate help but didn’t even try to intercept the call. No way were the plumbers getting there in under fifteen minutes, which was the outside amount of time she would need to get in, do what she’d come to do and get out.

  “Let’s go,” she said. Doc gave her a look.

  Then he put the van in gear and drove her down to the front of the building.

  “Be careful,” he said as she got out, her orange metal toolbox in one hand and a large canvas tote with tools in multiple outside pockets hanging cross-body from her shoulder. He added, “Two minutes,” as an obvious reminder of the dangers of the most crucial part of the operation, and she gave him a thumbs-up.

  He drove away, to wait in the underground parking garage for her to rejoin him.

  Bianca looked at her watch, taking note of the time.

  Then Brenda Smolski, master plumber, strode through the door of the Thurber/Wilkes Building into the busy lobby. Brenda was the same height as Bianca, but poor posture and flat black work boots made her appear inches shorter. Thanks to the figure-enhancing qualities of a layer of foam padding duct-taped around her torso, she looked pleasantly plump. From beneath a blue baseball cap, dull brown hair straggled to her shoulders. She wore a loose blue coverall-style uniform that zipped up in front and had a name tag fastened to it just above her heart, and brown leather work gloves. Brown-framed glasses that were too large for her face gave her a slightly bug-eyed look. Her makeup was colorless and bland.

  Bianca’s goal was to make it impossible for Mickey to recognize her at a casual glance, or from any distance farther away than, say, ten feet. If he got a close-up look at her face, all bets were off, she knew. But she hoped to keep that from happening.

  Actually, she hoped he wasn’t in the building. But she had to assume that he was.

  There was a dedicated elevator that bypassed the hotel portion of the building. It stopped on the ninth floor, where she had to be cleared by security before she co
uld proceed to the sixteenth.

  The reception desk faced the elevator so that when the door opened anyone inside it was immediately in full view of whoever was on duty at the desk. Right at the moment, that was two men and a woman dressed in black suits with name badges attached to the breast pockets of their jackets.

  Shades of Mickey. Getting a load of their outfits, it was all Bianca could do not to grimace. Except for security, which these three clearly were and which appeared to be present at full capacity, the rest of the floor seemed to be empty, and Bianca was reminded that it was Saturday.

  “Hear they’ve got a toilet emergency up on sixteen,” she said with hearty good cheer to the woman behind the reception desk, who was the first to greet her as she approached.

  “Allied Industries. They’ve already called down,” the woman replied. “Last elevator on the left. Just hit sixteen. I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

  “Thanks.” Bianca proceeded to the elevator, hit sixteen and went up.

  20

  When the elevator stopped on the sixteenth floor, Bianca was careful to keep her head down in case Mickey should be standing there on the other side of the door when it opened. Her heart rate was up; her muscles were tensed for action.

  Go time.

  “Thank all that’s holy you’re here.” The guy who greeted her as she stepped off the elevator was maybe fifty, balding, average height, stocky. Black suit, white shirt, name tag: security. He was all but hopping up and down with distress as he made a come-on gesture to her and turned to lead the way to the problem. “Hurry. We got to get this fixed.”

  He was walking so fast the sides of his jacket flapped. Bianca fell in behind him.

  “What happened?” In case Mickey was somewhere where he could hear her, she changed her voice, making it deeper and rougher.

  “The toilet—damnedest thing I ever saw. It just...”

  While he described the erupting toilet to her, Bianca shot quick glances around, getting her bearings, scoping out the terrain. The entire sixteenth floor was about four thousand square feet, all of it open except for the back area, which was where the bathrooms were located and where she was being taken. That back part was walled off from the rest and took the form of a long corridor housing various utility-type rooms, including the bathrooms.

  There were walls dividing the remainder of the floor into sections, but no section had more than three walls, which made it possible to see the entire floor just by looking around. That was what she did as she walked from the elevator bank, which was located in the center, toward the back hall. Then she realized that the sections did have four walls, the fourth wall in each case being Plexiglas. She could see right through it. The Plexiglas walls were part of the security system. She’d seen them on the plans without realizing they were Plexiglas. They could be raised during business hours and lowered when the office was closed, to keep intruders out. They were down now. Inside the closed-off sections, motion detector sensors would be monitoring the space.

  The solid walls were different lengths and widths. Their colors—purple, red, fuchsia, orange—were vibrant and eye-catching. The ceiling was navy blue. The floor was polished concrete. There were no windows, but the recessed lighting in the ceiling made the space plenty bright. Large, abstract canvas-on-frame oil paintings adorned the walls, adding more color. Bright poured concrete pedestals held objets d’art. Plexiglas desks, some with work on them, some without, were in a number of the room spaces. Several seating groups—couches with chairs opposite them—were scattered around.

  Bianca found the southwest corner. About twenty feet in, running perpendicular to the front wall of the building, an orange wall protruded from the adjacent outside wall, twenty feet long, six feet thick. A large pink-and-gold painting took pride of place in the center of the wall.

  Beneath that painting, if her calculations were correct, was the safe.

  A Plexiglas wall sealed it off.

  The southwest corner space was approximately twenty by twenty, four hundred square feet.

  Bianca stepped in water and her attention refocused in a hurry. They were just reaching the back hall, she discovered. Water rolled out of the doorway that led into it, spreading out as it moved into the main part of the sixteenth floor. She could smell the dampness, hear the slosh of it.

  “...floods the entire floor.” Splashing into the hall through the inches-deep water that was flowing down it at a terrifying clip even as he spoke, her guide, who’d been talking the entire time she’d been looking around, gestured toward the open bathroom door in front of them. Alarming gurgling sounds and the continual rush of water could be heard through it. Two more black-suited security guards, one with a mop and one with a large plastic trash can, were in the hall trying to contain the deluge that was rolling out of the bathroom. The guy with the mop was sweeping waves of water into the trash can, which the guy with the trash can ran to empty in, presumably because Bianca couldn’t actually see it, the bathroom sink.

  They were big, solid ex-military types. They were not Mickey.

  “Plumber’s here,” her guide called.

  “Thank God.” Trash Can Man was back in action. He was, she saw, soaking wet.

  Looking up at Bianca beseechingly, Mop Guy said, “All I did was flush the damned toilet. I didn’t put nothing down it. Nothing, I swear.” All the while he was frantically pushing more water into the can. He was soaking wet, too.

  “You had to have done something,” her guide said. He wasn’t soaking wet. He must have had the good sense to stay back. “You can’t tell me you—”

  “I can fix it,” Bianca interrupted. The water rolling out of the bathroom was six inches deep; she was thankful for her boots. Splashing up behind the men, she saw that the fourth guard was inside the bathroom trying to put a lid—literally—on the fountain of water shooting up from the open toilet. He was bent over the toilet trying to force the lid shut in the teeth of the blasting geyser, with the result that water was spraying all over the room.

  The good news was, he wasn’t Mickey, either.

  “Sir, stop,” Bianca said sharply, because she really didn’t want to end up as wet as three of the four. They all looked at her. She gestured at Mr. Toilet Lid. “You. Let go. That’s not helping.”

  He let go. The lid flew up and hit him in the chin. He squealed and fell back. Literally. Landing on his ass in the lake on the floor. Looking dazed and confused.

  The toilet fountain shot toward the ceiling again.

  Her guide clapped both hands to his cheeks Home Alone kid-style.

  Mr. Toilet Lid swore and clapped a hand to his chin.

  Trash Can Man bounded into the bathroom with his water-filled trash can, dumping its contents in the sink, which was too small to hold all that water, which meant that about half of it ended up back on the floor.

  Bianca sighed and took charge.

  “I’m going to need you two in there,” she said to her guide and Mop Guy, who were still outside the bathroom, and pointed inside.

  Putting her toolbox down on the elegant console table that stood, legs awash, in the hall right outside the bathroom, she followed them in.

  “We’re going to try something,” she said when they were all inside the bathroom. In there, the water was deep. It was creeping up toward the top of her boots. “If it’s going to do the trick, we need to work together.”

  “For God’s sake, make it stop.” Her guide was wringing his hands as he stared at the gusher shooting out of the toilet. “It’s going to flood the entire floor.”

  “I’m going to make it stop,” she promised, which had the advantage of being the truth. “You’re going to help.” Which wasn’t the truth, but oh well.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Toilet Lid moaned, “My chin’s bleeding,” from his spot on the floor.

  “Yo
u—” Bianca pointed at Trash Can Man “—put the trash can down.” He did. “Come over here.” She pointed to the toilet, where the white column of water was spouting six feet high and throwing off droplets like a wet dog. “When I tell you to, I want you to push the flush button on the toilet. Keep pushing it until I tell you to stop. But don’t start until I say so.”

  As he got into position, she pointed at Mop Guy. “See that vent on the side of the toilet?” She pointed to the small grate in the white porcelain base. “I want you to press the head of the mop against it as hard as you can. When I tell you to.”

  Mop Guy nodded and splashed toward the toilet.

  “You—” Bianca pointed at her guide “—are going to turn on the taps and keep the water pouring out of them at full blast. Don’t let the sink overflow, though.”

  She looked down at Mr. Toilet Lid, whose chin now dripped blood, pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and handed it to him.

  “You’re going to sit there and hold this to your chin,” she told him. Accepting the paper towel gratefully, he complied.

  “Get ready,” she told her troops and splashed toward the door.

  “What’s the purpose of this?” her guide asked. He was standing ready by the sink.

  “We’re going to try to equalize the pressure in the toilet,” Bianca said. She had no idea if there was such a thing as pressure in a toilet, but it sounded good. By then she had reached the door. “Everybody ready? We need to work together on this. One, two, three—go.”

  They jumped to do her bidding. Water poured from the taps. The toilet flushed. The mop hit the vent. Oh, and Mr. Toilet Lid applied direct pressure to his chin.