Schwartz’s brow smoothed. “And?” He opened a hand, as though still in control.
“Well, I work on the tenth floor, in general accounting, and I’ve noticed that the elevator button for the ninth floor is framed by a red square. Is there a reason for that?”
“There’s a very good reason for that,” Schwartz answered with a knowing smile. “Our special accounting division is on the ninth floor.”
“Special accounting?”
Sensing his reluctance to divulge too much, Margaret exerted more power until his eyes began to glaze. Schwartz chuckled at the pleasant sensation. He swirled his wine glass and took another sip.
“Maybe I was too hard on the waiter’s selection. Not bad at all.” He lowered his voice. “Listen, almost everything in development at Viper is classified, as you’re well aware. Prying eyes everywhere: Hostile countries. Friendly countries. Domestic competitors.” He circled his hand as though to say, You get the drift. “We need to keep those projects under tight wraps, down to the expenses. You’d be surprised what a competitor can glean from a simple budget projection. We can’t afford to let anything slip out.”
He was confirming what Margaret had suspected. The ninth floor would have the modem, the one that would allow an outsider to access transactions between Viper and the lobbying firms.
“Interesting,” she said. “Sounds like a floor I’d like to work on.”
With some effort, Schwartz shook his head. “I’m afraid you’d need to have been with Viper for at least two years.” He showed his palms. “Security protocol.”
Schwartz’s resistance to that particular suggestion was deep rooted, Margaret felt. With persistence, she could probably make him yield, but there was the question of how long the suggestion would hold. Especially when accountants began asking him how a fresh hire had gone from general to special in the space of a week. She decided it wasn’t worth it.
“Then we’ll talk in two years,” she said with a hint of flirtation.
“That we will,” he agreed, taking another sip of wine. “That we will. So, tell me—”
“I imagine there are a ton of security procedures to even access the floor,” Margaret interrupted, commanding Schwartz’s gaze once more. “Sophisticated, James Bond-type stuff.”
He grinned broadly, basking in her apparent admiration. “It begins with the vetting process. Making sure those we bring into the family are loyal to Viper, that they understand the seriousness of their work and such. As far as accessing the floor, you’ve probably seen the scanners in the elevator. Those little metal plates?” Schwartz pulled an identification card from his shirt pocket. “These are fitted with chips. The chips open the elevator door at the ninth floor, and then a series of two doors to access special accounting.”
“Wow, can I see that?” Margaret asked, holding out her hand.
One of Schwartz’s fingers caressed the ridge of her knuckles as he set his identification into her palm. Her skin squirmed from his touch, but Margaret noted that he had relinquished his badge without hesitation.
A good sign.
“What’s to stop someone from stealing a badge?” she asked. “Getting in that way?” Without releasing his gaze, she brought the badge to her side and let it fall into her purse, hanging from the back of her chair.
“I had a thumb scan installed on the final door,” Schwartz said, ignorant of what she was doing. “And beyond that door, there’s a security desk, manned day and night. If someone were to get past the locked doors and thumb scan, they would have an armed guard to contend with.” He chuckled through his grinning teeth. “The human fail-safe, we call it.”
“Indeed.” Margaret eyed his wine glass next.
Their dinners arrived, and for the next thirty minutes they chatted over rosemary chicken and seafood pasta. Every time Schwartz tried to steer conversation to Margaret’s background and personal life, she guided it back to Viper and the security aspects of the ninth floor. She needed to know for certain whether they could access the crypto-modem Scott had spoken of, whether it would bring them one step closer to the Scale’s kingpin. When she was confident she had those answers, she dabbed her mouth with a cloth napkin and deposited it on the table to gesture she was done.
“Thank you, that was lovely,” she said.
“It was, wasn’t it?” He smiled with both rows of teeth, clearly pleased with himself.
When he turned to motion to the waiter for the check, Margaret pinched his empty wine glass by its stem and placed it in her large purse beside his identification badge. Before she could snap the purse closed, Schwartz let out a noise.
“My ID!”
Margaret tensed. She had gotten careless, darn it. Not just by relaxing her powers over him, but by how she had angled her purse. She raised her eyes, hoping they wouldn’t appear as large and startled as they felt. But Schwartz wasn’t looking at her or her purse. He was patting his shirt pockets, then the pockets in the front and back of his pants. She let out her breath. He must have noticed his badge was AWOL when he’d reached into his coat jacket for his wallet and his hand had brushed the empty pocket.
“You left it at the office,” Margaret said.
Schwartz stopped searching and stared at her in a way that could not be described as friendly. “Say that again.”
“Your badge.” Margaret couldn’t tell whether he remained under her spell or his missing ID had shocked him from it. He continued to stare at her, as though waiting for her to make sense. She pressed on. “Didn’t you mention leaving it at the office?”
Would he remember showing it to her, or had she succeeded in clouding the memory?
He patted his breast pocket once more, as though to be sure of its emptiness, before letting out a sigh.
“I’m sure you’ll find it in your desk tomorrow,” she suggested.
“I better,” he answered.
13
Viper Industries
Five hours later
“Burning the midnight oil, Mr. Schwartz?”
Reginald sized up the security guard. He was as large as a lineman but well into middle age, his dark, bristling hair going white, a healthy paunch pushing out over his duty belt. Reginald smiled as he flashed Schwartz’s ID badge and returned it to the breast pocket beneath his blazer. He had handled plenty of front desk security in his lifetime and this one looked pretty straightforward.
“You know what they say about Viper never sleeping?” Reginald-as-Mr. Schwartz asked. “Well, that’s never more true than when an accounting error pops up. Two million or two cents, it doesn’t matter.”
The guard chuckled back. “Don’t I know it.”
“Any of the other brass up there?” Reginald raised his eyes.
“Just my men and the cleaning crews.”
“Troopers,” Reginald said, clapping his shoulder. “We wouldn’t be what we are without you.”
In his week at Viper, he had eavesdropped on all of Viper’s officers to catch their mannerisms and particular turns of phrase. Schwartz was a shark to outsiders, but to members of the Viper team—family, he liked to call them—he brimmed with the corporate pump-’em-up B.S.
“Thank you, sir,” the guard said.
He reached under his desk and pressed a button. One of the chrome-brushed elevator doors in the immaculate lobby slid quietly open. Reginald stepped inside and eyed the control panel as the door slid closed again. Holding Schwartz’s badge to the metal plate, he pressed the button for the ninth floor. A light above the plate switched from red to green, and the elevator lifted off.
The operation had only come together in the last few hours, but Reginald was ready. Besides observing the top brass, he had spent his first week of employ at Viper learning who worked where, noting their schedules, memorizing the building’s layout, observing the type of security that was employed. The real high-tech stuff was reserved for the engineering divisions. From the way Margaret had described special accounting, getting in there would be less of a proces
s.
All one needed was a badge, thumb print, and disguise. Reginald studied the last in the elevator door’s reflection. He leaned in to make sure he had the eyes just right before sharpening his widow’s peak.
The door slid open. Reginald stepped out into the ninth-floor lobby. Across from the elevators stood a set of large steel doors, a swipe-scanner beside the lock. Drawing Schwartz’s badge through it, Reginald looked up at the closed-circuit camera peering down on him.
A click sounded and the crash bar yielded to his push.
Reginald repeated the process at a second set of doors. But this time the door didn’t budge. He shot an impatient look at the security camera and was about to swipe his badge a second time when he noticed the small black square.
Thumb scanner, Reggie. You’re thinking too many steps ahead.
Reginald studied his right thumb for a brief moment. He had reshaped the whorls and ridges on the pad to match the print Steel’s team had lifted from Schwartz’s wine glass. Now, thumb against the black square, Reginald hoped the pattern had held. He watched the red light above the pad and imagined the hidden computer studying his print, crunching patterns and spacing variables to determine whether or not it matched the one on file.
A green light blazed and the door unlocked. Reginald exhaled and stepped into a large room of cubicle work stations. Fluorescent lights, only a quarter of them on, reflected over the opaque window that constituted the far wall. Afraid that his blunder with the thumb scanner had aroused suspicion, Reginald was relieved to receive only a cursory glancing-over by a young black security guard.
“Mr. Schwartz,” the man said in greeting.
“Evening,” Reginald said. “Or I guess I should say, morning.”
The guard nodded, more interested in whatever he had on his desk—a muscle magazine, it looked like. Good, because Reginald had never been up here before and, as CFO, he had no excuse for appearing lost.
He skirted the cubicle farm and found a doorway that led down a corridor of what appeared management-level offices. As he strode down the carpeted hallway, he noted the closed-circuit cameras at ceiling level. Mr. Schwartz didn’t have an office on this floor—his was upstairs with Fred Friedman and the rest of the top guns—but Scott had provided Reginald with a name whose office was supposed to have a backdoor to the data closet.
Reginald spotted the name on a doorplate—Heidi Shih—and stopped before it, hoping to hell Scott was right. He positioned his body to block the nearest camera and removed a lock rake from his pocket. Inserting it into the keyhole at hip level, he applied a little tension and jiggled. When he felt the pins trap, he turned the lever handle and pushed the door open.
Inside, Reginald flipped on a light switch. Fluorescent bars flickered over an administrative-level office that held a large desk, bookshelves, a wall of certificates, and two potted plants. Reginald left the door slightly ajar so he could hear out and then activated his earpiece.
“I’m in the office,” he whispered.
A team in a hotel room two blocks away was plugging his communications through to Scott down in Florida.
“Copy that,” Scott replied. “Go ahead and open the door to the data closet.”
The door between the potted plants was unlocked, and Reginald opened it to find a good-sized closet, the walls ahead and to his right lined with blinking modems and bundles of cables. A closed door to the left led back to the hallway. Heat from the hardware breathed over him.
“What am I looking for exactly?” he asked.
“The crypto-modem. It will be about the size of a Kleenex box, black, probably. If you can’t find it, follow the data cords from the wall. It should be the first piece of hardware they enter.”
“I see it,” Reginald said, spying the device on a shelf about chest level.
“Yes!” Scott hissed. “All right, I’m going to access it. Even though my call-in number is on file, the crypto-modem has an added fail-safe: manual clearance required for a first-time call. There should be a button on top of the device. Do you see it?”
Reginald did.
“Okay, when the small display beside it starts to blink—”
“Hold on,” Reginald whispered, his gaze shooting around to the cracked-open office door.
“What is it?”
“Thought I heard something. Quiet a minute.”
He left the closet and crept through the office. Beyond the door, he heard a voice back in the cubicle room. Reginald opened the door wider. The voice, which Reginald recognized as the young guard’s, grew more adamant.
“I’m telling you, the man’s already up here. Passed through both doors, cleared the print scan. I talked to him myself.” He went quiet as though listening to the other end of a phone call. “Well, whoever you got down there is not Mr. Schwartz. I’ll guarantee you that much.”
Shit.
Reginald flashed back to his attempted infiltration of the Soviet embassy in D.C., twenty-five years earlier. Hell of a bad time for history to repeat itself. He backed away from the door.
“Listen, Scott,” he whispered. “We’re going to have to get through this quick. The real McCoy showed up for some reason, and it’s only a matter of time before this place goes on lockdown.”
“Oh, man,” Scott said, then seemed to gather himself. “All right. In about a minute, the display on the crypto-modem will start to blink with my number. You’ll need to press the button and hold it for five seconds.
“Standing by,” Reginald answered.
He wasn’t sure they had a minute, much less a minute five, but he didn’t say so. Better to let Scott focus on what he was doing. Reginald crept back to the door to listen. The floor had gone stiffly silent. Cool air sighed from the air conditioning vents. Back in the data closet, he watched the blacked-out display on the modem, his neck a tightening bundle of cords.
C’mon, kid, he thought. This is taking too long.
The display began to flash red. The crypto-modem was awaiting manual confirmation that the outside caller—Scott—was authorized to access the accounts. Otherwise, it would send him down a rabbit’s hole.
“I see you,” Reginald whispered. “I’m hitting the button … now.”
In his head, he began a slow count. At two, the entire closet, as well as the office behind him, went dark. The blinking display beside his finger blacked out. Someone had cut the power. Seconds later, the emergency lighting activated, casting the skin of Reginald’s hands in dark red.
One by one, the hardware in the closet began booting back up. Reginald mashed the button on the crypto-modem several times, but the display was no longer showing Scott’s number.
“Mission’s busted,” he whispered to Scott. “Gonna have to clear out.”
He turned off his earpiece and pulled the data closet door shut. He hunkered around the desk. Halfway to the office door, he heard several sets of footsteps entering the far end of the corridor at a run.
“You, in the office!” one of them called.
Too late, Reginald realized he was casting a shadow over the doorjamb. He backed away.
“Remain where you are!”
14
Command and control
Janis watched the aura around Scott shift suddenly, from an excited, steely red to the fog-like gray of dread. He pressed the padded headphones against his ears as though trying to hear better.
“Reginald, you still there?” he asked into a microphone.
“What’s going on?” Janis whispered, in growing disquiet herself.
Scott frowned as he rotated from the computer screen. “He got my request, but then something happened. He said the mission was a bust, he had to clear out. Then our connection went dead.”
“Did he confirm your number?”
“Don’t know. I lost my connection to the Viper network.”
As Scott typed, attempting to restore the connection, Janis focused toward Reginald. In an electric rush, she took on her astral form and streaked through the
night. A part of her gloried in the power surging through her. But just north of the Carolinas, the power became too much. She felt the familiar pain of a knife between her brain lobes. Felt the psychic circuit breakers trembling, threatening to trip. In a mini implosion, she returned to her body.
Dammit.
“Too distant?” Scott asked.
“Yeah.” She massaged her aching brow. “I can’t reach him.”
“And I’m locked out of their system.” Scott sighed, then rotated in his chair and took her hands in his. “But don’t worry about Reginald. Steel has a team up there, and the guy’s not exactly helpless.” He tapped the padded cup over his right ear. “I’ll keep monitoring.”
Janis nodded, hoping they would hear something soon. Though she hadn’t been able to reach Reginald, her intuition was whispering again, telling her something was off. Way off. The feeling reminded her of what she’d picked up while probing the last generation of Champions the summer before. She hated to even acknowledge the current feeling for fear of it becoming reality. But there it was again, like a twisting in the pit of her gut—a feeling of betrayal.
Someone had tipped Viper off to the planned intrusion.
15
Viper Industries
More than anything else, Reginald needed time. He pulled the office door closed and turned the bolt just as the team of men came to a thudding stop on the door’s opposite side.
“Hey!” someone yelled.
The lever handle jiggled, followed by a brief bout of pounding.
“Open up!”
Reginald backed toward the data closet. Through narrow panes of frosted glass on either side of the office door, he could make out four silhouettes. One moved to the fore and began trying different keys from what sounded like a ring of them, while another moved off to guard the door between the data closet and hallway, also locked. Reginald looked around. The ceiling was solid, not paneled. No large duct system, either. And the window that took up one wall, a view of Georgetown University across the river, didn’t open.
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