It’s different, rationality told him. There’s a wall there, no hole. You can’t fall.
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t in control. At least, not enough to stave off the panic attack and move his body. Only enough to argue with rationality.
You’re stuck in the middle, jerk. You want to be here forever?
Stupid question. He wanted out of here more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He could race down the steps and through that door in seconds. But he flinched when his imagination supplied black-clad attackers coming through before he reached the door. He should go up. A few seconds, and he’d be out and where he needed to be. But he couldn’t make himself move.
Asshole. Too much at stake for this. Go. Up. Now.
Still frozen.
Do I need to start parading the names of everyone counting on you?
He dragged his left foot up a step and pushed. This would go faster if he closed his eyes. Maybe. He tried it, turning to run up the steps, and his hand smacked into the doorknob on the landing. He grabbed it and twisted. Locked.
His back crawling about all the possible things that could be coming up behind him, he crouched to pick the lock. Normally it would only take him a couple of minutes, but his hands shook. A few forced deep breaths later, equally forced concentration to block out everything but the lock, and it snicked. He eased the door open and peered through the crack. As soon as he could see something other than stairwell, the panic eased.
A gray industrial-grade carpet lined a hallway with windows along one side and cubicle walls on the other. No voices carried to him, and only one bank of overhead lights was on.
Kemmerling wasn’t this much of an idiot.
Jason checked the inside of the doorway for evidence of an alarm, but saw nothing. His angle was bad to look for motion detectors, but at least one had to be aimed at this door. He counted on two things. First that Kemmerling, like many security services, saw little need to invest in big ticket systems for their own offices because no one would invade, expecting them to be impenetrable. Second, that he would also make the mistake of assuming an intruder would walk in like a normal person.
As Jason had said to Lark just yesterday, he wasn’t normal.
Luckily the building was an older one, with a vent over the door. He removed the screwdriver from his pick kit and climbed on the handrail next to the stairs, balancing on his toes and using one hand to grip the top of the doorframe while he unscrewed the vent. He pulled it out into the stairwell and lowered it to the landing, then stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket to leave both hands free to pull himself through the space. Piece of cake.
He’d been right. One motion sensor was aimed at the base of the door. It was possible, but improbable given the state of the external security, that Isaac had infrared beams crisscrossing the cubicle farm filling the entire floor.
The metal frame of the opening cut into Jason’s midriff. He gauged the distance between the door and the corner of the cubicle, but it was too far. He couldn’t get the leverage to leap it. The motion sensor sat at the left of the corner of the cubicle, and the corridor ahead of him was clear. If he could pull himself through, flip over and fling his body forward, he might make it. Impossible seven months ago, but now…
It was ugly, but he did it. The new muscle tissue in his arms, abs and legs gave him more strength and control than a gymnast. He did a slow roll through the vent, holding his legs up above the field of the sensor and gripping the edge above him with hands screaming in pain. He tensed his abs, arched and tumbled the two feet he needed, landing in a heap on the rough rug. Man, he was glad Lark hadn’t seen that. He must have looked like a cat tossed through the air, flailing and twisting.
Jason scrambled up and over the top of one of the cubicles to avoid any other sensors. Dropping into the rolling desk chair, he tapped the keyboard of the cube’s computer, activating it. After a bit of searching the network, he found the controls for the security system.
Huh. Maybe he was wrong about Isaac’s brains. He used software Hummingbird technicians had designed—and abandoned because it was too easy to compromise. Jason inserted a few commands to make the system think it was still on, then deactivated it. Now he could move around without Isaac being alerted.
“Hello?”
Unless, of course, there was someone else in the room. Damn, he was an idiot.
Jason froze, listening. There were no footsteps, no rustle of fabric or shoe leather on carpet. No one called out again. He waited. They waited. Finally, the guy sighed, muttered something about “stupid supernatural TV show,” and closed a door.
Jason’s mind raced. The closing door had to belong to an office. From his look around at ceiling height, he thought the only two offices were near the main entrance. The voice hadn’t been Kemmerling’s, so probably hadn’t come from Kemmerling’s office. Searching it while someone was in the room next door was stretching the definition of acceptable risk, but at this point, doing nothing was worse.
He didn’t have many options. He could sit right here and hope the guy left soon. But he might not, and every minute Jason was here was a minute he left Lark alone. Other people might come in, including the occupant of this cubicle.
Maybe he could access what he needed from here. He dug into the network, finding the central server and plenty of client files protected by passwords, but nothing of Isaac’s. It had been worth a try, but it stood to reason the boss would have a stand-alone unit not connected to the server or the outside world. Jason had to get into his office, and he had to do it now.
Keeping low, he hurried up the aisle on the far side of the room from the offices. The main entrance area held a reception desk and a few chairs and plants. A couple of landscape prints hung on the walls. The glass-fronted entryway gave view to the elevators across a narrow foyer. A red light blinked on an alarm box next to the door. The system thought it was on.
Jason couldn’t see the offices from here. He belly-crawled as quietly as possible to the corner, balancing speed and stealth. The second door had a strip of light under it and a small placard with “Hector Ramirez, Vice President” on it. The first door was Isaac’s. Good.
Jason lingered for a few minutes, listening and looking. He heard a few murmurs, and the click of a phone being hung up. Some papers rustling, then low music.
Isaac’s door didn’t appear to be wired, but he did have more than a standard office handle and keyed lock. The keypad above the handle wasn’t too sophisticated, though. No fingerprint pad or retinal scanner. He probably had a two-code failsafe. One to allow for typing error, and a cutoff after the second “mistake.” Jason thought for a while, trying to remember Isaac’s habits. Jason had access to all the agents’ passwords and codes, but could hardly memorize all of them.
Still, Isaac had been a special case.
He took a deep breath, checked behind him and down the hall, readied his lockpicks and moved.
One second to the door. Three seconds to key in Isaac’s birthday in reverse plus the numbers corresponding to the first three letters of his first name. The red light flicked to green, and he started picking the lock. Thirty long seconds later, the tumblers fell. And the light turned red. Dammit.
“For God’s sake, I’m coming home now!”
Jason jerked, adrenaline flooding him at the sudden loud voice in the office next door. The phone slammed down, and Hector muttered as he moved around his office. “Try…work…shrew…wonder why…” The light shining under the door went out.
Closing his mouth around another curse, Jason keyed the numbers again, as fast as he could without making a mistake. The light flashed green. He twisted the handle and eased the door open, cursing again when it creaked.
He barely got inside and eased the door closed before Hector’s opened. Jason didn’t want to click the latch and alert Hector. He held his breath, his heart pounding, and watched through the crack as the man stalked by.
Jason waited while Hector “disarmed”
the alarm, opened the door with a whoosh of air, armed it again, and locked the door behind him. The alarm reset would have overridden the commands Jason put in, but at least he was inside the system now. He’d worry about getting out when the time came. He eased the door closed and turned to survey the room he stood in. He made out the shape of a desk in the center of the room, a tall shelf or something in one corner. Darkness hid the details.
The office had one window, but the metal blinds covering it kept out any light. Jason didn’t want to turn on the light, because if someone came in they’d see it under the door. But opening the blinds would be obvious from the street to someone who knew they should be closed. He compromised by fiddling with a few of the slats on the bottom, letting in just enough light to see.
The desk held two computers, one a match to the kind on all the cubicle desks, and one a higher-end model, stand-alone, as he’d expected. Being careful what he touched—he hadn’t had any gloves or the time to buy some—Jason sat and powered up the stand-alone. He kept his senses tuned to the silence outside the office and his focus on the hard drive.
After an hour and a half of hunting and pecking with the very tips of his fingers, he still had nothing. He’d managed to partially break into the files, but they were all client based and had nothing to do with Matt, the RT-24, or Hummingbird in any way. There was a double-protected section Jason couldn’t get into, no matter what he did. And he was afraid to try harder and get closed out of the system.
He cursed and shoved the chair back as he got to his feet and skimmed the room for files or safes. Isaac apparently didn’t keep many paper files on the premises, if any. He had no filing cabinets or shelves, and the modern-style desk had no drawers. But there was a freestanding dry bar. Jason circled behind it. The top shelf held the usual glasses and liquor bottles as well as a pile of bar cloths. The second shelf was for swizzle sticks and napkins, but the base of the bar, from the second shelf down, was solid.
Jason crouched and started lifting piles of napkins and plastic-bagged packages. In the back right corner, under a large box of toothpicks, he found an indent in the resin the entire bar was made of. He pressed it, and a small cover popped up, exposing a keypad.
He sighed. More codes. He tried the one that had gotten him into the room, with no luck. He reversed it, then tried each part of it. Luckily, this keypad didn’t have an attempt limit. Finally, using the numbers for all of the letters of Isaac’s first name—919113—worked. The bottom of the bar clicked open. Jason lifted the cover off and set it aside. There was another lock, this one pickable, though it took long enough for sweat to bead on his upper lip. He worried about Lark being alone for too long at the museum.
The space filled the bottom of the bar. Isaac stored the usual things in here—money, weapons, ID both real and fake. Some contracts, papers relating to the business loan that had gotten Kemmerling Security started and the property the company owned. And a flash drive.
“Bingo.” Jason strode to the computer and connected the drive, clicking fast to access it. His phone buzzed in his pocket, so he straightened to pull it out and check the text from Lark.
Hurry.
What the fuck did that mean? Did he need to abandon what he was doing and rush recklessly to Lark’s side? Hurry could mean she was bored, or in danger. Matt would kill him if he let anything happen to her, but there was a bigger picture. Jason could race up the street and still not get there fast enough, and then he’d have abandoned his only chance at a lead. He checked the computer screen. The flash drive contained one folder, labeled “untitled.” They’d be better off if he could check it here and leave the drive where he’d found it, but if it was protected, it could take him a while to crack.
He backed out of the file and yanked the drive from the port, shutting down the computer and wiping away his prints as simultaneously as possible. He set the chair right and relocked the bar safe, putting everything back and cleaning up after himself. Then he deactivated the power saver on the other computer—the one connected to the network—accessed the alarm, shut it down, and set it to reactivate in one minute. That gave him enough time to get out of the office. He couldn’t lock the door behind him, but hopefully Hector would think he’d forgotten in his rush.
Elevators had memory of what floors they went to when, but Jason couldn’t handle the stairwell again. The guard didn’t even notice him leaving.
He flipped his cell phone open as he walked as fast as he could toward Sixteenth Street. He speed-dialed Lark’s phone, but she didn’t answer it. And when he got to National Geographic, he saw why.
* * *
Gabby sat in her car in the Hummingbird garage for half an hour, trying to coach herself through what she had to do. She wasn’t afraid she’d been followed. She was no Hummingbird agent, but it’s easy to spot a tail on an empty road. Nor was she afraid someone would attack her in the lab. Hummingbird’s security was as impenetrable as possible, especially for the lab almost no one in the company knew about.
No, she was nervous about her ability to act normal. She was high-strung at the best of times, and knowing Matthew was missing… Not that anyone had confirmed he was missing. She’d inferred it from their behavior and questions, but they hadn’t come right out and said it. She supposed it was better she not have any information, then she couldn’t inadvertently reveal it to anyone. Certainly they’d want to keep Matthew’s disappearance a secret.
Her breath hitched at the thought. Things happened so fast. Options you thought you had could disappear in an instant. She could have made a move with him last night, let him know she liked him. Even if he’d rebuffed her, he’d have known he didn’t have to be alone.
Maybe he wasn’t, her freaking-out brain whispered. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to go out because he was meeting someone. Maybe he’d been in bed with her when—
“Arrrgh!” She slammed the flat of her hand on the steering wheel. “You’re such an idiot, Abigail.” She yanked her keys out of the ignition and flung herself from the car. Her frustration and self-annoyance propelled her past the security desk and two politely smiling operatives she passed on her way to the special elevator that took her, with the swipe of her ID card and fingerprint, down into the lab. When the doors opened she wiped the print pad clean and stepped out into the corridor.
The doors soughed closed behind her, and the engine of the machine whirred as the car returned to the lobby. She waited, listening, feeling. But it was as quiet as it should be on a Saturday, and felt normal. Except it didn’t, really. It was only in the last two days that “alone” was normal. Jason had always been here, and a variable number of medical personnel. Now the quiet was sinister, frightening.
She moved toward her office, the tap of her shoes echoing softly. She wasn’t stupid. She understood why Jason hadn’t wanted to talk to her here, why it was so important to protect the data.
Hummingbird was compromised.
She wished now she’d asked more questions. How much Jason knew about Matthew’s disappearance. Who might be the traitor within the company. It could be someone she worked with every day, trusted to keep Jason’s secrets safe. The idea made her sick to her stomach.
She reached her office and stood in the doorway, looking for anything out of place. She’d only been gone an hour, maybe a little more, but now everything was different. Had she left that file drawer open an inch? The files on her desk were stacked neatly, but she could have done that. She just didn’t remember.
She crossed to the file cabinet and pulled the open drawer out with one finger. The files appeared as usual. One stuck up slightly, but it was the last one she’d put in, and the drawer was pretty full. It would have taken extra effort to shove down all the way.
When she nudged her mouse, her dark computer screen flashed onto the document she’d been working on when Jason called her. It was an outline of a plan for continuing their research, but she hadn’t yet included any details that would benefit anyone outside the team. The recent doc
uments list didn’t show anything it shouldn’t, but she didn’t know how to determine if anyone had accessed other files, such as downloading them to a flash drive without opening them or something. But then, there wasn’t any reason for anyone to be here on a Saturday, and they’d have to log in…
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