Seven Grams of Lead (30 page)

Lamont also learned that when Firstbrook’s budget precluded a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—SCIF—the base chief assembled one himself. An SCIF was essentially a windowless steel room that blocked electromagnetic eavesdropping and prohibited signals from escaping, allowing for the most sensitive conversations inside. Firstbrook even devised a way to filter the electrical current.

Seated across the homemade SCIF’s conference table, Firstbrook sighed. “Unfortunately, Colonel Marston is deep-sea fishing on his yacht, unreachable. He likes to go with his sons, usually for a day or two. Without him, there’s not much we can do.”

Lamont’s disappointment gave way to curiosity. “The colonel has a yacht?”

Firstbrook rolled his eyes. “A thirty-seven-foot cabin cruiser that normally would have cost three hundred eighty grand, but the broker gave him the standard government discount, a hundred percent off. That’s Barbados. But all in all, Willie Marston’s one of the good guys. He’ll help us. We just need to sit tight for a day or so.”

Lamont asked, “How about any judge? All we need is a basic search warrant.”

“Yes, and there is a judge we can call. And you should see
his
yacht. Which is the problem. It may well have been paid for by another company that we think is fronting a massive Eastern European money-laundering operation, so bringing the court in on your case is a risk the Agency can’t afford to take. In the meantime, I’ve set the wheels in motion. Marston should be back tonight or tomorrow morning. Windward Actuarial isn’t going anywhere. There are worse things than spending a day at one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, right?”

Entering a business
during off-hours, a man wearing a service or technician’s uniform—Verizon, for example—is 30 percent less likely to arouse neighbors’ suspicions than a man in plain clothes. And a man in such a uniform entering a business accompanied by a female colleague is a full two-thirds less likely to arouse suspicion. Thornton and Mallery incorporated both of these National Crime Database statistics into their plan to access Windward Actuarial.

At ten that night Bridgetown was packed with diners and clubbers, none of whom looked twice at the royal blue jumpsuits he and Mallery wore, along with matching Raytheon ball caps. Probably the company’s name was both sufficiently recognizable and
nebulous. Thornton would have preferred a telco but felt lucky to have come across these at the same secondhand store where he bought the nineteen-inch color TV that had also been on the shopping list for tonight.

Mallery’s cap concealed most of her hair. Her severe, black-rimmed, prescriptionless eyeglasses along with pasty makeup went a long way to blunt her looks. No masking her nerves, however. As the two of them turned onto Pine Street, Thornton broke cover, placing a hand on her arm to steady her. He was strangely calm. Not a single butterfly. Probably because he had to juggle so many elements of the break-in, he thought.

Challenge number one came now, as they climbed the steps to the Windward building’s entrance: the external security camera—or cameras. If a facial recognition system saw through their disguises, Thornton and Mallery were in big trouble. Provided they were fortunate enough to break in.

He tapped the numeric keys on the pad above the front door handle. 5-1-9-4-7. The deadbolt disengaged with a thunk, giving them thirty seconds to enter the vestibule and disengage the alarm system.

While Mallery stood guard on the stoop—to all appearances filling out a form on her clipboard—he stepped into the cool vestibule and turned right, finding a red alarm bell icon flashing under the heading
ZONE 1
on the control box. This symbol indicated a
breach in the security zone that encompassed the vestibule and the front door. In twenty-seven or twenty-eight seconds, the symbol would be given voice in the form of a klaxon. He could turn the entire security system off, a simple matter of entering a second code. Three digits, four digits, five. He didn’t know. He didn’t know the code.

What he did know was that, throughout history, every time someone invented a security system, someone else found a means of vanquishing it. Take the near-indestructible U-shaped metal Kryptonite lock, a staple of bicycle rack security for fifty years. One day in 2004, a guy figured out that by wedging in the somewhat malleable plastic barrel of a Bic pen, anybody could pop the lock. The next day his discovery was all over the news. More recently, a home security expert took to the Internet and boasted that he could thwart most burglar alarm systems by finding remote controls from other types of systems, a video game that operated on the same radio frequency, for instance. Earlier today, in a few seconds of surfing the Web on a grimy laptop at the secondhand store under the pretext of giving the computer a test drive, Thornton learned that the Windward Actuarial building’s Chamberlain A200 security system was susceptible to jamming by the remote control to most Panasonic TVs.

He unpocketed his Panasonic remote now. The count in his head reached twelve-Mississippi. Eighteen
seconds to klaxon. He aimed the remote at the security system control box. The conic tip of the remote flashed a wan red. Using the channel selection, he punched in 1-0-1, then moused down. The display on the control box reflected neither maneuver, though he’d followed each step to the letter. So what now?

Eight seconds to go. Seven.

He thought of one more thing he might try. The cure-all
ENTER
button. He clicked it. The alarm bell icon was replaced by a message.
DISENGAGED
.

Exhaling in relief, he opened the door. “We’re good,” he told Mallery. Unless it’s a silent alarm, he thought.

She entered, shutting the door behind her. “Let’s go to work,” she said.

Aiming the TV remote at the control box, he entered the numbers 102 through 117, disengaging the remaining sixteen alarm zones.

By the pink light of motion detectors, they charged up the stairs to the third floor. No alarms sounded.

Someone from the Bic pen school had also virally spread the word on opening lever-handled doors equipped with key card locks. Consequently today’s shopping had also included eight-gauge steel wire, about an eighth of an inch in diameter. Thornton uncoiled and straightened ten feet of it. He knelt on the carpet in front of Windward’s door, stood the wire parallel to the door, then folded it about five inches above the handle. He shaped those five inches into a
hook, which he forced through the gap between the base of the door and the jamb. He aimed the hook straight up, until it clicked the inside levered handle. Getting a firm grip on it, he yanked down, at the same time throwing his shoulder against the door. The door fell open, taking him with it.

“How about that?” he exclaimed.

“Fantastic, except …” Mallery stared into Windward Actuarial.

Thornton looked around the office—carpet, bare walls, and nothing else. It made no sense. It was impossible that the Littlebird team had emptied the place during the brief periods when he or Mallery wasn’t watching from the hotel. The back alleyway was too narrow to allow a desk through. “Maybe they put everything somewhere else in the building,” he said.

“You overheard the security guard tell Lamont to try an actuarial firm that wasn’t as busy,” said Mallery. “Maybe Lamont had been using Windward as cover, really trying to access another business in this building, or maybe he’d just gotten it wrong. If you’re a transcriber, you would probably wonder what you were doing in an actuarial firm. But you wouldn’t think twice if the name of the place were SofTec, right?”

Ten seconds later, they were across the hall, at SofTec’s door, identical in appearance and size to Windward’s, meaning there was no need for Thornton to adjust the hook or the wire.

In less than a minute, he and Mallery were inside
SofTec, mouths agape at the contents of the thirty-by-thirty-foot windowless space: three rows of three cubicles, each row bridged at head level by a steel rack crammed with hard drives, some as small as cell phones, others the size of briefcases. Perhaps 1,000 drives in all, they emitted a medley of processing sputters, fan-blade whirs, and all manner of electronic clicks and grunts and beeps. Several thousand tiny bulbs—orange, yellow, and red—and green LED panels combined to project an aura like that above Manhattan at nighttime. The office’s organizing principle seemed to be piling on hard drives into the overhead racks as needed. The racks sprouted a multicolored jungle of cables and cords that all but encased the three cubicle rows.

“It’s what we expected,” Mallery said as she wandered around. “The audio from the bugs is collected on the hard drives, then transcribed by people in each of the cubes. See the headphones?”

“Yes.” Dodging one of the bulky posts supporting the nearest rack, Thornton stepped over a series of power cords and entered a cubicle. He recognized the pair of foot pedals from his newspaper reporting days. They were used in transcription to keep the hands free to type—one pedal for pause and play, the other for rewind. He picked up one of the lightweight headsets. Plenty of padding on the headband. Holding one of its thick cups to his ear, he heard a voice. “This terminal is picking up a woman speaking a foreign language. Romanian, or maybe Hungarian,” he told Mallery.

“Could be a live transmission,” she said.

Setting the earphones back on the desk, he followed the cable from the terminal to the drive in the rack directly overhead, to which someone had taped a strip that read:

The hard drives on either side had labels with similar characters.

The same thing was on all the hard drives. “I should have figured they wouldn’t just spell out for us whose audio is whose,” said Thornton.

“We can read the labels,” Mallery said from the far side.

He stared at her. “What am I missing?”

“Ten years in computer labs with bad lighting and worse ventilation, during which time you would have had more than your fill of encryption.” She pointed from label to label.

“These all have between six and twelve characters, no spaces. Last names, right?”

“Probably.” Thornton didn’t see what difference it made.

“The longer ones, Eastern European, Spanish, maybe end in
A
or
V
, a lot with
VA
or
OV.
Plus
A
s and
O
s and
E
s are mile markers. I think you were listening to someone named Cavanova. Davonova? Gavanova?”

Feeling like he’d witnessed a magic trick, Thornton exclaimed, “Galina Ivanova is Hungary’s new minister of finance.”

“You know what’s in her head and you can place some pretty good bets on the Budapest Stock Exchange domestic equity indices.”

“Interesting. Any idea how it fits into the puzzle?”

“It tells us they’re going with first initial and last name here, and now we have eight letters.” Mallery looked at the labels to either side of Galina Ivanova’s. “Also the drives are in alphabetical order.” She chuckled. “I don’t know why they even bothered with code.”

Thornton shook his head in wonder. He started to speak but was interrupted by an odd creak. He whirled around. The door was still closed.