Ugh. I’m tempted to ditch the bra, but now that the disposable tablet is out there’s a little less pressure.
Inside the plastic bag with the pocket tablet is a self-adhesive square picture of me perfectly sized to Myers badge—fancy that.
Less than thirty seconds later, I have a brand new badge with my picture on it in a plastic sleeve. It’s not perfect, but someone would have to physically remove it and stare at it to see the ridges of my picture layered over top.
I text Puo, The cat threw up this morning. I put her in her crate before leaving. Can you call the vet?
Puo texts back, Ok. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll call the vet.
Thanks, I text back. I need to get back to work now.
I exhale through my nose and study the interactive map Puo loaded on the tablet. The high-security room isn’t too far from here, right, straight, right, left to a stairwell. Then down two floors into the basement and finally a left, straight, straight, left, right, left.
Once I’m confident I have the route memorized I pocket the device and get ready to leave. Puo should’ve had enough time by now to set the alarm off again and call into the high-security room to tell anyone that might be working in there to get out while one of their own security people, à la me, comes to take a look at it.
I step out of the stall, flush and wash up. As I leave, an older woman with short, unhealthy-looking curly hair and narrow cheeks is walking in.
“Toilets aren’t working,” I say as I pass by her. Her perfume has an aquatic note that doesn’t mix well with her body chemistry.
She deflates a little, but then turns around.
Whew. Hopefully, that will buy me some more time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THESE HALLWAYS are a maze. And this deep in the building, even when there is a door open (seems to be against policy) there are no windows to help possibly orient yourself.
Good thing I don’t need to orient myself.
Memorization is key to games and cons. Remembering cover stories, escape routes, patrol patterns, who knows what, is kind of important. I’ve often wondered if I’m good at it, or if the prospect of failure which results in jail or a bullet to the head gives me focus that others simply haven’t had to have to survive.
I’ve kinda wanted to take a real college class to find out. I mean, I’ve watched lectures on introductory-level college art classes as background for our work but, again, I had a huge incentive to pay attention: a big payday at the end of the tunnel. And I didn’t do any of the homework or take any tests.
But I am good at memorization—so I’ve wondered.
After a left, I find the slate-stone colored stairwell door and push down on the metal bar handle to enter the empty stairwell and head downstairs.
But such thoughts of college are pointless—they were even detrimental in an earlier time of my life when I was bitter at the hand life had dealt me ... or at least, had been pointless. I resist the urge to whip up my left hand and look at the spot my modified citizen chip rests under. These things open a whole new world of possibilities.
The tiled hallways have been sparsely populated with people. The maze-like tendency of the building, with short hallways and a lot of right angles, has the nice benefit of breaking up sight lines. So once someone sees me, I’m often past and out of sight before they can start to question it too much. I do have a badge, after all, and this is a large building.
The basement hallways look almost like the ones above, except the hallway is squashed down and covered in an inoffensive thin purplish-gray carpet. The ceiling must only be seven or eight feet high, noticeably different than the hallways above.
It may be the short ceilings or carpet, but it also smells stuffier in here—like the air is stale, and they don’t ever let these poor people leave to shower.
As I continue down the hallway, the reason for that particular stink becomes apparent. The men’s bathroom near the stairwell doubles as a gym locker of some kind.
It’s bad enough to have to work down here with no windows and fluorescent lighting, but we’re also going to make it smell like feet. Enjoy!
A balding man with a wet sheen to his forehead and a patchy five o’clock shadow turns the corner out the men’s gym-locker-bathroom abruptly, almost barreling into me.
“Sorry about that,” the man says in a light Canadian accent.
I smile wordlessly at him and keep moving, mindful of his Canadian accent and my American one.
As I move down the hallway, the silence of him standing in place screams at me from behind. He should have moved on and pushed open the stairwell door by now.
“Excuse me, miss,” the man calls.
Damn it. I turn around and smile politely, “Yes?”
He starts walking toward me. “Are you lost down here?”
I smile again uncertainly at him. His words may be polite, but his eyes are not. His pale blue eyes have crows feet that look entrenched and are full of suspicion. I cast my gaze around, careful to keep him in my view as he approaches. “I’m looking for the women’s locker room.”
“Ah,” he says. “It’s around the corner. I can show ya if you like. Sound good, eh?”
I don’t have time for this, and I don’t even know if the women’s locker room is around the corner. I smile and gesture for him to lead the way.
The bastard’s quick. As he draws level, his left hand lashes out in a sucker punch.
There’s nothing I can do, except try to blunt it with a headbutt.
Four very hard knuckles smack into my forehead over my right eye. Pain explodes through my skull; my vision swims and pulses with the pain.
But my forehead’s momentum manages to blunt the worst of the sucker punch.
Before he can recover, I raise my right leg up and bring it down as hard as I can on the side of his knee.
His right fist comes flying out of nowhere and clocks me in the center of my chest right above my digi-scrambler. Oof!
He screams as his knee bends sideways and he buckles.
Shit! Someone’s going to hear that.
He starts yelling on the ground.
Nothing to do for it. No choice. I stomp the edge of his face, snapping his head downward into the floor.
He stops yelling. And moving. Oh, man, I hope I didn’t kill him.
I run deeper into the hallway maze without looking back. There is no time to try and hide him, and he probably won’t be out for long. I need to get lost down here and into the closed room.
Within seconds, I’m in a different hallway—empty. I stop running, but keep a quick pace, listening for any sounds of pursuit.
All the doors down here have a red fingertip-sized light bulb on the outside, lit up to indicate the rooms are alarmed. What all is down here?
After a left turn, I’m suddenly in front of a nondescript wooden door with a clipboard hanging on the front for people to sign in and out. There’s nothing to distinguish it from all the other doors except the little black plastic plaque above it that says B124. The little red light is lit up kindly telling me the room is empty. A white-noise maker on the outside of the door streams white noise down at me.
The badge reader is a holoscreen attached to the wall below the red light. I take out the disposable pocket tablet Puo loaded up for me and bring up the emitter coded with Rose’s riffed RFID.
The reader beeps green at me and the holoscreen morphs into keypad: Please enter personal pin.
Don’t mind if I do. I tap in the numbers our tracker picked up from Rose entering.
Authentication failed. Please enter personal pin. Two attempts remaining.
I actually have a list of three combinations. The ones with the highest probability based on our recordings.
Our tracker doesn’t have a video feed, so we couldn’t see what she entered, and it’s not like the holoscreen helpfully announces what numbers you’re pressing. But, according to Puo, when you press a holoscreen it emits little bits of electromagnet
ic radiation, which can be recorded. Apparently, they’re different enough you can map them to where someone pushed.
I enter the second combination on the list.
Authentication verified. This is soon replaced by: Select menu.
The door has not audibly unlocked. These are Rose’s credentials, she probably doesn’t have unescorted access. Puo warned me this might happen.
The white-noise maker masks any noise in the hallway, making me uneasy; a growing feeling of anxiousness is creeping up my back, as if someone is watching me, closing in unseen.
I rip through the menus following Puo’s instructions. First thing: make the time a user has to deactivate the alarm the maximum possible. I find the setting and set it to 9:59. I also set the alarm to be silent, as in not beep at me or alert others walking by. The alarm will still send a distress call to the guards, but only after ten minutes now.
Next, I actually try to deactivate the alarm. Authentication required.
I enter Rose’s pin.
Authentication required.
Well, poo. I cancel out of that, and breathe a sigh of relief that the alarm didn’t automatically sound.
Fortunately, I have Puo. I take out a silver wire and connect the holoscreen to my disposable tablet. Puo has prepared self-writing code that should scan the security system and write the necessary commands I need, like turning off the alarm and force-feeding the security system a new user with door unlocking access.
Puo’s little app shows it’s working with a flying rhinoceros going in loops. I shake my head at Puo’s sense of humor.
It takes a few agonizing seconds where I swear I can start to hear the search party looking for me, but then the flying rhinoceros morphs into a menu with several options. I push Disarm alarm.
Nothing happens. The little red light still blares on at me.
Freaking Puo.
Let’s try Unlock door.
Click.
Hmm .... I try Disarm alarm again. Nothing.
So, ten minutes it is then.
I push the handle down and have to use my shoulder to push the heavy door open. I unhook the silver wire from the tablet and do not sign in on the door—silly, archaic practice that’s redundant with having to badge into the room.
The lights are off in the room; only the blue glow of a holosceeen on the opposite side of the door glows in the room, asking for authentication to shut off the alarm.
I close the heavy door behind me, shutting out most of the white noise.
I try Rose’s credentials: Authentication failed. I try the new user’s credentials: Authentication failed.
Fine. Ten minutes it really is then.
I flip on the light and get to work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE ALARM MIGHT have ten minutes, but I most certainly do not. I need to be well clear of here before then, and everything that needs to happen needs to happen before anyone else comes in here.
The room is small—smaller than a bedroom, larger than a closet. Three desks and chairs are pushed up against the wall with float monitors on them, all of them with their back to the door. I would hate working here. A multi-drawer safe and a printer round out the rest of the soul-sucking equipment in the room. The walls are a bland cream, chosen, I’m sure, to optimize productivity without offending anyone. The white-noise maker outside the room adds a dull background to what I’m sure is an exciting, lively work space—suckers.
I could never work in an office, spending eight hours on mind-numbing crap at the direction of others, all in a windowless room to help line the pockets of everyone but myself. Fuck that. Suddenly the thought of jail doesn’t seem so scary.
Although it’s probably unusual for office workers to get a throbbing headache from being punched in the head. Damn that hurts. And my chest is tight from where the nosy prick punched me—a mega-bruise is busy forming. Still, I’ll take it over productivity meetings and performance evaluations under fluorescent lighting and hallways lined with meaningless motivational posters.
I hurry over to a door with no locks at the back of the room. The door isn’t as heavy as the front one, and the whir of computer fans greets me as soon as I crack open the door: the server room. Thanks to living with Puo for almost twenty years now, I know my way around these things.
The hard drives are easy to spot, there’s a bank of them in the front of the topmost server. They’re stacked vertically next to each other, each about as thick as a pack of cards and with a little green light to let me know all is well with them.
I pop them out one at a time, pushing the little button that ejects a little handle and then using that to pull them out. Soon I have six hard drives cradled against my body with my left hand, and a series of red lights and warning messages from the server. Heh, sorry little server.
A quick search reveals a last server tucked in the back with only half of the hard drive slots used. Those pop out just as easily, and I’m greeted by “Backups 12-02-2112” written in gold marker on the front of the drives.
I rip the hard drives out of their chassis, stripping the little screws that secured them in place. Free of their chassis, the hard drives are half as thick as a deck of cards and the size of my palm. All nine drives slip into my various jacket pockets and hiding spots on me.
Back in the soul-sucking room with float monitors where passion and ambition go to die, I verify that the float screens are not attached to any standalone systems before walking over to the black multi-drawer safe.
Puo was right. The safe’s a digi-spin model blah, blah, blah. Safe cracking has never been my forte; that’s Puo’s shtick. So he had to prep me for this job.
I quickly find some stabby-looking office scissors and use the pointy end to dent and twist a small hole into the outer covering of the digital spin lock near the drawer. Once that’s done, it takes what feels like another few frantic minutes (only one though in reality) twisting, turning and pulling to finally be able to peel the outer cover off enough. Nothing like an adrenaline filled panic and leveraging your whole weight to deform hard plastic.
I bring up Puo’s safe-cracking app on the tablet and plug in the leads where he described, through the hole I made. Now the tablet instructs me to turn the dial counter-clockwise five times. Then to slowly turn it clockwise until the program tells me to stop. I do this several times in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions until the program spits out six different combinations to try.
The second one’s the charm. Ha!
Three of the safe’s five drawers are empty. The other two hold reports, solid-state drives, disposable media, etc. I empty them as quickly as I can, shoving everything into a metal trash bin and placing it in the middle of the room.
I text Puo: I’ve been thinking we need to put the cat down.
Puo sends a frowny face followed by, when?
I glance at the digital readout of the time on the security holoscreen on the back of the door. There’s six minutes left until the alarm notifies the guards. I do some quick math and type, Friday. Friday is four days from now, so Puo should suppress the fire alarms for four minutes. Hopefully, Puo can do that math.
Ok.
And with that, I bring up the app whose icon is a white unicorn riding a rainbow wave, set the timer for thirty seconds, and place it in the garbage can with all the materials from the safe. Time to get the hell out of here.
In twenty-seven seconds the disposable tablet is going to go poof, emitting an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to wipe out the electronics in a ten-foot radius—or so Puo says. There’s no debate that an electromagnetic pulse will result, but there seems to be some question on its strength, as well as its effectiveness. Which is why, after that, it’s going to combust into a very hot fire, burning away anything that’s left in the metal trash bin.
The white noise maker blanks out the noise on the other side of the door, and there’s no peephole in the door to make sure its clear on the other side. But time is ticking down, and I’
d rather not be here when the tablet goes poof.
I open the door and step out confidently like I belong there.
The hallway is empty. Whew.
The little red light is still on above the security holopad—an unintended benefit that now makes the door look like every other one in the hallway.
I move down the hallway opposite the way I came to avoid the nosy prick I had to deal with and any fallout from that direction.
At the end of the hallway I turn right, and I’m rewarded with a stairwell leading back upstairs. But suddenly the gray metal door swings open to reveal a guard exiting into the hallway.
Regular patrol? Detected alarm in the room? Called because of Nosy Prick? “Hi,” I say in a rushed tone, “have you seen anything unusual—?”
The guard pulls his gun and points it at me. “Don’t move!”
Why, yes, I think, you have seen something unusual.
Shit.
* * *
Have I mentioned I hate guns? Not only do I hate them, they’re infinitely worse when the person pointing them at you has their finger on the trigger, which the guard keeps his there the entire time he’s escorting me to the interrogation room.
There’s a little over three minutes until Puo stops suppressing the fire alarm and I may have an opening to escape. The tablet should’ve already gone poof, and Nix’s evidence is now melting into an ash-metal mess.
I keep my pace slow, under the semi-truthful guise of not wanting to get shot. I find it’s helpful to echo the gun holder’s instructions back to them and add things like, “Please don’t shoot me.”
Once we get to the third floor, a second guard is waiting off to the side in the hallway, his weapon drawn.
I smile pleasantly at him. “Hi. My name is Lisa. What is your name?”
The guard’s face falls into confusion and mumbles, “Jack.”
“Hi, Jack,” I continue in a pleasant conversational tone, while I move forward into the hallway. “There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding—”
Leverage (Sunken City Capers Book 3) Page 17