Vanished (25 page)

68.

M
y apartment was dusty and had that closed-up smell, since—between travel and staying at Lauren’s house—I had barely been there in weeks. But it made for a convenient command center. Merlin took the afternoon off—his boss didn’t mind, since the work had been slow—and this time I’d insisted he accept payment. We devised a plan, came up with a shopping list, then split up. It was a little like a scavenger hunt. A handful of disposable cell phones. A laser pointer from an office-supply store. From a hardware store, a couple of chandelier bulbs, a few bags of plaster of paris, some bell wire. From an auto-parts store, aluminum powder, which is used to stop leaks in radiators. From a supermarket, a couple of five-pound bags of granulated sugar and some vegetable oil. Three ski masks from a sporting-goods store. A Super Soaker pressurized water gun from a toy store.

The rest of the equipment was stuff Merlin had in his garage at home.

He was easily able to find white smoke grenades at a gun shop. By far the hardest item to find was potassium chlorate. It’s one of those chemicals that the U.S. government tries to control, particularly since 9/11, but Merlin was able to turn up a couple of dusty bags at a garden center, where it was sold as weed killer.

AT FIFTEEN
minutes after midnight I was back at the office building on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church.

The ten-story building was mostly dark, but not completely. Lights were on in a few windows here and there, though none on the seventh floor. Paladin Worldwide’s Virginia office was a nine-to-five business.

I positioned myself at the back of the west wing of the building—the western leg of the inverted V—in the location I’d picked out earlier in the day. From there, behind a row of perfectly spaced trees that had been planted to provide an illusion of woods for the building’s tenants, I knew I wouldn’t be spotted if anyone happened to be looking out the window. Though at that time of night, there wasn’t likely to be anyone.

The mirrored blue glass skin of the building looked black and opaque in the moonlight. There was a little ambient light from the distant streetlights. The wind howled, gusting a few drops of rain. I looked up. The sky was black and murky and threatening. It appeared that it might really start coming down at any moment.

Much quieter here at midnight than it had been during the day, when the traffic on the Leesburg Pike was a constant high roar. Instead there was only the occasional
blat
of a motorcycle, the full-throated growl of a truck.

I looked at my watch, unzipped the nylon Under Armour duffel, and pulled out a small black sphere, soft and squishy.

A stress ball, roughly the size of a baseball. Lycra over a semisolid gel. Apparently squeezing this little ball helped office workers relieve the tensions of their workday.

I lobbed it at a second-floor window. It was dense enough to make a
thud
as it struck the glass, but not hard enough to break it.

Then I hurled a second one, and a third, and a fourth. All at the same window.

A few seconds later, I heard the rapid whooping klaxon, an alarm that was broadcast over a couple of sirens inside and out. The exterior windows were wired to glass-break detectors. That meant they’d detect the specific shock frequencies generated by breaking glass—or simply by the vibration caused by a good hard impact that didn’t actually break the glass.

I checked my watch again, then strolled over to the Defender, parked on a side street in direct view of the building’s main entrance. I got in and waited.

The security guard showed up nine minutes later.

He got out of his company vehicle, a Hyundai Sonata, the logo painted on the side. Middle-aged, a comb-over, gin-blossom face. A blue uniform. Armed only with a walkie-talkie. A retired cop, by the look of him, which meant that he’d do everything by the book.

He did.

He switched on a flashlight and walked around the perimeter of the building, shining his light up and down the glass exterior, looking for a broken window, for evidence of any intruders. Most office buildings don’t have glass-break sensors above the third floor, on the theory that no one’s going to break a window and try to enter that high up.

So he only had to check out the windows on the first two stories, which wouldn’t take long. Once he realized there weren’t any broken windows, he’d relax. He’d know he wasn’t dealing with a burglary or even an accident but a technical glitch of some sort. Something had set off the glass-break sensor, he’d figure. A stray gust of wind. Or a defective window frame. Maybe he’d investigate further inside, but his heart wouldn’t be in it.

He finished his survey of the building’s exterior in six minutes, which was longer than I expected. He was more thorough than he had to be. Definitely a retired cop. A lot of rent-a-cops who haven’t been in law enforcement will do the bare minimum. This guy was going beyond that. He was doing his job. I liked that.

Plus, it helped me out considerably. If he limited his inspection to a cursory walk around the building, I’d be screwed.

But he didn’t. He came around to the front of the building again, casting a cone of light in front of him. He took a key from a large ring on his belt and unlocked a door to the left of the revolving doors.

I watched him disappear into the lobby. He was probably going up to the second floor to investigate further, whether by the stairs or the elevator. But I could tell from his body language that he’d already decided there was no crime in progress.

He didn’t lock the door behind him.

I didn’t think he would—it’s the sort of detail most people, even security guards, don’t think about—but if he had locked the door, then I would have gone to Plan B. Which was to wait until he’d left, gone back to the monitoring station, and then lob some more stress balls at the window.

And he’d come back again, annoyed at being pulled away from his book or his newspaper or his TV show, and he’d investigate again, but this time it would be more perfunctory. He’d be convinced that there was some mechanical glitch in the system. Eventually, after two or three callbacks, he’d leave the door open behind him. They always did.

But he’d just saved me a half hour or more.

I moved the Defender to the back of the building, then got out and crossed the narrow strip of lawn that I figured wasn’t covered by the CCTV cameras mounted on this side of the building. There are always blind spots.

I reached the southwest corner of the building, then risked a quick appearance on a security monitor—I had no choice—by sidling close to the building and slipping in through the unlocked door.

Of course, if it had been daytime, the Paladin keycard I’d filched from Don Taylor—swapped, really—would have gotten me in to both the building and the Paladin office suite on the seventh floor. But then the Paladin office suite wouldn’t have been unoccupied. And that wouldn’t have worked at all.

So I had another plan, one that required the help of my friends and a shopping list of supplies and some carefully coordinated execution.

And the one thing that you can’t buy or plan on or wheedle. The one thing you can never count on.

Luck.

69.

F
ortunately, I only had to hide in the utility closet off the lobby for fourteen minutes. The space was small and close, the smell of rancid wet mops and strong cleaning fluids overpowering. I heard the elevator doors
ping,
then open. The squawk of the guard’s walkie-talkie.

The
click
of his heels against the marble tile as he walked to the exit.

I waited another ten minutes. I wasn’t able to hear his car start up, not at this distance. But by the time I emerged, his car was gone.

He’d found nothing. He would blame it on errant technology, the bane of our existence. He’d done his job, and he’d served my purpose, and he wouldn’t be back.

Then I hit a preprogrammed number on my cell.

Three minutes later I unlocked the side door for Dorothy and Merlin.

“It’s the A-Team,” I said.

“I guess that makes me Mr. T,” Dorothy said.

“Wasn’t that show a little before your time, Dorothy?” I said.

“Honey, I watched it in reruns, come on.”

“Never seen it,” Merlin said, sounding cranky. He was carrying a couple of green clothlike recyclable shopping bags from Whole Foods, which held the improvised devices we’d assembled.

I placed one of them outside the lobby men’s room, where it couldn’t be seen through the glass doors at the front of the building. Then I led them through the lobby to the fire stairs at the back. The door was unlocked.

Each floor was accessible from inside the stairwells, of course—it’s a fire-safety law—so I was able to make a quick stop on the second floor to drop off the second device. When I returned to the stairwell, I noticed that Merlin was looking even more sullen, and I decided to say something.

“You’re having second thoughts.”

He nodded.

“It’s too late.” I gave him a steely stare, and he returned it.

Then I half smiled, and said, “Look, Merlin. There are no guarantees. We have a solid plan of action and a fallback, and at a certain point we just have to rely on luck.”

“Never believed in luck,” he said. The stairwell was dark and empty, and his words echoed hollowly.

“I think luck is essential. You can never count on it, I agree. But we don’t have much choice. Bail if you want to. I’ll understand.”

We stood there in silence for almost a minute. Dorothy looked from Merlin to me and waited.

Finally, he said, “I just want to be clear about something. This isn’t for you, or your brother, or whatever kind of revenge thing you’ve got going on. This is because I hate everything that Paladin stands for.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just to be clear,” he said. He turned and started climbing the stairs, and Dorothy and I followed.

She flashed me a furtive smile. “How many floors?”

“We’re going to seven,” I said.

“Why the hell couldn’t we take the elevator?”

She was just complaining for the sake of complaining. She knew that the stairs were at the end of the lobby farthest from the Paladin surveillance camera, which was trained on the elevators.

Neither Merlin nor I said anything as we climbed.

“I’m not doing the elliptical trainer for a week,” she muttered, breathing hard.

Then Merlin said, “The problem is, we’re all relying on your observations from one quick walk-through. You didn’t have a chance to get in there and really look around. We really don’t know what their full security setup is like.”

He was right: All we knew was what I’d seen. No keypad access at the door to Paladin’s offices. That was so the cleaning people could get in at night. Don Taylor’s keycard would get us right in, I expected.

That was assuming, naturally, that Carl Koblenz hadn’t gone into some state of
DEFCON
1 alert after discovering that three of his professionals had been dispatched by a guy whose field skills he’d probably expected were pretty damned rusty. I hoped, and assumed, that he’d thought it through and decided that my response had been mere, understandable, self-preservation: I didn’t want to be taken in and questioned by three bad guys. Who could blame me?

He wouldn’t think to check his guys’ keycards to see whether they’d been tampered with. He wasn’t going to deactivate any of them. That I was sure of. He’d never expect me to come back in the middle of the night.

At least, I didn’t think so, and one way or the other, we were about to find out soon.

In terms of surveillance, there appeared to be a single CCTV camera in the lobby outside their main office door, fixed and not pan-tilt-zoom. Another camera inside, in the receptionist’s area. No other visible surveillance cameras. It was possible that they were monitored live somewhere, but that wasn’t likely. That would be overkill for an office that mostly handled administrative stuff. I’ve done jobs at corporation headquarters that had more than two hundred security cameras and maybe three monitors. Live monitoring at night, for a small office like this, was almost unheard of.

We stood at the door to the seventh floor. I pushed the crash bar, opening the door an inch or so. Enough to confirm that it wasn’t locked from inside.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” I said. “It’s a crapshoot. You’re just going to have to rely on me.”

Merlin sighed, long and loud.

Dorothy made a sarcastic
mmm-hmmm
sound. “Then we’re all screwed,” she said.

70.

M
erlin was the first through the door. He wore a black ski mask, which made him look like a small-town bank robber. He quickly found the surveillance camera, mounted on the wall outside the Paladin office, then carefully aimed a laser pointer at its lens. The tiny laser beam would dazzle the camera’s sensor, temporarily blinding it so that it would see only a white blur.

He held it steady, aimed at the lens, while walking slowly toward Paladin’s mahogany front doors. Dorothy and I followed. I pulled out the Super Soaker water gun from my duffel bag, pumped it twenty times or so to build up pressure, then pointed it at the camera lens. A thin stream of fluid jetted out: a mix of vegetable oil and water. This coated the lens with a cloudy film of grease, which would fuzz out the image for as long as the grease film remained. Even if someone were monitoring the feed live, unlikely though that was, they’d blame the camera. Merlin lowered the laser pointer and kept on going.

I passed the Paladin keycard over the reader and heard a click. The door was unlocked. Merlin readied the laser pointer in his right hand and switched on his LED flashlight in the other. Then I pulled the door open a few inches.

“Where the hell—?” he said.

“Ten o’clock,” I said.

“How high?”

I closed my eyes, called the memory of Paladin’s lobby to mind. “Roughly eight feet.”

“ ‘Roughly’ doesn’t help.”

“You’re wearing a mask.”

He shrugged, stepped into the dark office. He planted his feet and directed a beam of light into the reception area. Then he raised the laser pointer and waited a few seconds. “Okay.”

We entered behind him, and I squirted that camera with the Super Soaker as well.

Merlin washed the walls with the LED beam, his eyes scanning the room quickly. “Motion detectors?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure.”

“No.”

“Great,” Dorothy said.

“Not likely,” I said. “Building cleaners probably come in here at night.”

“Not likely,”
Merlin echoed.
“Probably.”
He lowered the flashlight beam to the floor.

“Life’s a risk,” I said.

“Especially around you,” Dorothy said. “Are we cool here? I’m going to get to work.”

I nodded, handed her an LED flashlight, and shined mine along the floor to the next room, illuminating a path to the windows. The Paladin offices seemed a lot smaller in the dark. Starting at the leftmost window, I tugged the venetian blinds closed. Then I directed Dorothy to the desk where Koblenz’s admin, Eleanor Appleby, normally sat.

Meanwhile, Merlin busied himself with his equipment, looking for stray micro waves that might indicate a microwave-based motion detector, and an RF detector to search for hidden cameras.

“Clear?” I said.

“So far.”

Dorothy made a
pssst
sound, and I came over, shining my flashlight. She was sitting at Eleanor Appleby’s computer, looking frustrated. “They do take precautions here,” she said. “It’s logged out.”

“Did you check the usual place?” Merlin asked.

“You mean, the Post-it pad in the middle drawer? Yeah, I checked it, but there’s nothing there. What’s
wrong
with these people?”

“Can you crack the password?” I asked her.

“If you don’t mind me sitting here until morning, I might be able to. I’ll need a pot of coffee, though.”

“Maybe not such a good idea,” I said.

“That means I can’t install any spyware. But maybe that’s just as well. Place like this, they probably have antivirus software that’d pick it up.”

“Now what?”

“I’m stumped.”

This was a disappointment. If we wanted to capture any of Eleanor Appleby’s passwords, we needed to put some kind of eavesdropping device on her computer.

“How about a piece of hardware?” Merlin said. He’d brought a couple of different keyloggers—plastic devices that looked like one of those barrel connectors you might—or might not—notice in the rat’s nest of cables behind your computer.

“Uh-uh,” Dorothy said. She pointed at the back of the admin’s computer. “They’re making life hard for us. Check it out.”

I trained my flashlight at the back of the computer, saw only smooth wood. “What am I looking at?”

“All the computer cables are routed through the desk so no one can tamper with them.”

“That rules out the hardware keylogger, too,” I said.

“No,” said Merlin. “It just means Plan C. The keyboard module.”

That was another little electronic component he’d brought along, which you installed inside the keyboard. Even harder to detect than the barrel connector, but time-consuming to put in. He put his messenger bag on Eleanor Appleby’s desk.

“Dorothy, can you put it in?” I asked.

“I can figure it out, yeah,” she said. “Though Walter might be faster at it.”

“Faster and better,” Merlin said, “but I’ve got another job to do.”

“Then you’ll just have to settle,” Dorothy snapped. She reached into his messenger bag and took out a crimping tool, a screwdriver, and a tube of Superglue. She flipped the keyboard over, began loosening the miniature screws.

“You realize,” Merlin said, “that this means you’re going to have to get back in here and retrieve this thing in a day or two, right?”

“
We
are,” I said.

He grunted. “Then you really better hope nothing goes south tonight.”

I nodded. “Let’s get lucky.”

I approached Koblenz’s office door, turned the knob slowly, pushed it open. Merlin followed right behind, carrying a second messenger bag full of equipment.

I looked back at Merlin. “You didn’t detect any motion detectors in here, right?”

“Not microwave-based,” he said. “Passive infrared I’m not going to pick up.”

“You think he might have passive infrared?”

Merlin shined the light quickly around the office, saw the immaculate desk, the perfectly squared piles on the credenza behind it. “Nah. He’s too orderly.”

Unless the cleaning people had been given instructions not to clean his office, Koblenz wouldn’t have a motion detector of any kind inside his office. I agreed with Merlin: Koblenz seemed the fastidious type, the sort of guy who’d want his office carpet vacuumed every night, the wastebaskets emptied. And, although it was possible, I doubted his admin cleaned his office for him.

Merlin sighed. “That’s a TL-30X6.”

“I thought it was a Diebold.”

“That’s the rating. The most secure safe they make. And an electronic lock. Oh, man.”

“Like I told you.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Right?”

“You said electronic lock. I didn’t know it was a TL-30X6.”

“I don’t like your tone, Merlin. You sound very pessimistic. Maybe even defeatist.”

“Heller, listen to me. I brought my StrongArm safe cracker diamond-core drill bits, okay? But drilling through one of these, that’s a five-hour job at least. That mother’s made from inch-and-a-half-thick steel and cobalt-carbide matrix hardplate, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“Then they’ve got sheets of tempered glass mounted inside, rigged to break when a drill hits it. Triggers a relocking mechanism that even the right combination won’t open.”

“Merlin,” I said. “I get you. I think we’re going to have to change your name to Eeyore. Now, why don’t we try the keypad? I’d prefer nondestructive means.”

He gave me a look, telling me that was his plan anyway.

The safe had an electronic keypad on the front: nine numbers, on black keys, inset in a round black dial with a red LED light at the top. Instead of turning a dial, you punched in the combination.

He knelt before the safe, took out a small jar and brush, and began dusting the keypad with white fingerprint powder. When he shined the flashlight beam at it, I could see distinct fingerprints on only four of the keys: 3, 5, 9, and
ENTER.

“That’s a start,” I said. “That limits us to three numbers.”

“It’s a six-digit combination of 3, 5, and 9,” Merlin said. “How many possible permutations does that make? Like a million?”

“Less than that, Eeyore.”

“Not a lot less. Anyway, we get four tries before we go into penalty mode.”

“And then?”

“Then a five-minute lockout before we can try again.”

“So let’s hope we guess right. What about the manufacturer’s tryout combo?”

“It’s 1-2-3-4-5-6.”

“That’s not it, then. You’re just going to have to try randomly.”

As far as I knew, there were no six-digit numbers that Koblenz had any obvious connection to—his house number had four digits, the number of the office building had five, the suite number had three.

“Right. Great.” He hissed in a breath. “All right, here goes.” He punched in one sequence.

And nothing happened.

“Try again,” I said.

He punched in another sequence.

Nothing.

And a third time. Nothing.

Merlin gritted his teeth and entered another sequence.

Then something happened. But not what we wanted. The red LED light flashed. On, then off, with a ten-second delay between flashes.

“Crap,” he said. “Now we have to wait five minutes.”

“No. Try spiking the solenoid.”

He shrugged, gave me a dyspeptic scowl, and twisted the keypad off the safe door. It’s meant to be easily removed, so you can change the battery. He pushed on a couple of clips, releasing a plastic cover, then pulled out the black rubber membrane. This exposed a circuit board and a row of eight tiny metal posts.

Then he took a nine-volt battery from his bag and clipped on a pair of leads. One end he held against the leftmost post. When he touched the other lead to the top right post, there was a crackling sound and the smell of electronic components burning.

And nothing else. It didn’t unlock.

“That’s it,” he said. “We’re screwed now.”

“Try the drill.”

“I thought you wanted nondestructive.”

“I want the card,” I said. “At this point I want it any way we can get it.”

“If you told me in the first place, I could have brought in a thermic lance.”

“What, from the
Ocean’s Eleven
prop room?”

“No, man, it’s for real. Cuts through concrete and rebar steel and everything. But it’s huge, and you need an oxygen tank.”

I was about to tell him to try the drill anyway, despite the long odds, when, out of the murky darkness of Koblenz’s inner sanctum, a tiny red light winked at me from high on the wall near the ceiling.

“You see that flashing light?” I said.

“Yeah,” Merlin said impatiently. “Told you, that’s the penalty mode light. Means we gotta wait five minutes.”

“No. Up there.” I pointed.

He looked up.

Saw the blinking red light.

“
Damn
it, Heller.”

“What?”

“PIR. Passive infrared.”

A motion detector.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, his voice rising.

“What’s going on?” Dorothy called from the desk right outside.

“We just set off an alarm,” I said.