The Paranoid Thief (12 page)

Jill’s brief moment of levity vanished. “A
waste or not, it’s necessary. Now here, put this around your neck,” she ordered
him, handing over a blue and gray badge on a length of cord. Randolph looked
over the thing, which read “District over site committee member.” This meant,
in layman’s terms, he had clearance to any company records and all the funding
required to achieve his job, regardless of what his job was, hence the
twenty-thousand credit suit.

“So what’s this all about?” Randolph
questioned.

“It guarantees no interference from
personnel or company heads,” Jill confirmed, adding, “Therefore we walk in, order
what we need, including an office, and get to work.”

“That maybe how you work, but it’s not my
way,” Randolph reminded her.

“And what precisely is that?” Jill asked
sounding skeptical.

“Simple,” Randolph began, noting the
stewardess had resettled herself behind the wall to give them some privacy. “I
research an area, acquire a warehouse as a base, piggyback my equipment onto
the city’s grid, then get to work on the target by learning everything about
them, from the building structures the target lives or works in, to daily
habits. Only after acquiring all this, do I plan out what may be done to
accomplish my task, whatever that may be from the contract I’d drawn out with
those who hired
me.
”

“Sounds time consuming,” Jill said dryly.

“Yes, Jill, it is. First I back log the
building so it appears rented out to those who rented last. Then I set up
security, covering all the ways in, including the sewer system—”

“Enough already,” Jill slammed her hand
down. “There’ll be no need for all that. All you’re required to do is get me
past what security measures there are for a line of sight to the target.
Period.”

Randolph sat back in his chair and glared
at Jill.

She asked, without sounding as if she
cared, “You don’t like your role, I take it?”

“You got it in one,” Randolph admitted,
folding his arms in a statement of closure.

“Well, tough! This is how it’s going to be.
I’ve had far more experience on these missions—”

“And lost partners,” Randolph threw at her,
shutting Jill up with that jab. “I may be a rookie, but take a good hard look
at my record. I’ve been pinched twice in twenty years, and those times were in
my teens when I knew no better.
Since then, zip-o.
And
I’ve done over sixty high-profile jobs, each one escalating my skills, and not
a single fatality in any one of them!”

“Not until your last one, anyway,” Jill
jabbed back with a smirk.

Randolph sat up straight. “I told you I
didn’t kill those people. I was set up!”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re just in denial,” Jill
said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Randolph considered flipping her off but
instead told her, “I’m not going to help you kill someone, and that’s final.”

“You’ll do as I say, or you’ll get one hell
of a headache,” Jill threatened.

“What, you
gonna
call Mel?” Randolph sneered.

“No, I’m quite capable of making you wish I
did call Mel,” Jill replied in such a matter-of-fact cold voice, Randolph
thought he saw icicles forming in the air.

“I’ll not argue”—he swallowed—“but it’ll do
no good. I don’t believe in killing.”

Jill sat back, taking a sip of her hot
coffee, and tried out a scenario on Randolph. “Let’s say a gunman has your
family, and orders you to kill the first person you meet on the street or he’ll
kill them. What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Jill
waved her hand in frustration. “What’s there not to know? You take the gun he
hands you and shoot the first person you meet. It’s as simple as that.”

Randolph shook his head. “But it’s never
that simple. Even if—and that’s a big if—I do, what’s to stop him from killing
my family anyway? I’ll have killed a perfect stranger for no reason, thus the
reason to do so is moot.”

“So you kill him instead,” she countered.

“No, Jill, I can’t. It’s not for me to take
someone's life. That’s reserved for the man upstairs.”

“Damn, Randolph, you really are a
lifist
!” Jill shook her head and put her cup down.
“All right fine.
I’ll take out the target without your help,
but you damn well better get the information Mel wants in this folder
afterwards,” she demanded, tossing it at him.

Randolph caught the folder and stammered,
“Now hold on. Can’t you at least wait till I’ve gotten the information? Doing
him will bring down every security measure they have, making my job a thousand
times harder.”

“And how long would that take?”

“Cripes, I don’t know. I need time to
research, say a month to do the preliminary background on the company—”

“And what do I do during this fishing
expedition?” Jill interrupted, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Hell, I don’t know. I’ve told you time and
again I haven’t worked with a partner since the last time I got caught and
convicted. Besides, I have to unravel the rat nest Mitch and Patrick left
behind.”

“If that’s your reason, then don’t worry
about it. Mel wouldn’t send us against the same building they screwed up in.”

“But that still doesn’t give me a free ride
in. Security’s been alerted, thus all their buildings will re-impose procedures
which have been relaxed, actively looking for breeches of security.”

Jill rotated her chair left and right,
apparently thinking instead of arguing, then nodded. “I’ll give you two weeks,
after which we do it my way.”

“For crying out loud, Jill, what’s your
hurry?”

“Cause and effect.”

Bewildered at hearing such a simple
statement, Randolph stared at her, whereby she sighed, explaining.

“Because you and I are supposed to be dead,
thus the longer we’re out on a job, the greater the possibility we’re
discovered, which in effect makes us useless to Mel, and thereby we get our
brains fried. And being as I’m not ready to die, I’ll give you only two weeks
while I do some recon.” Holding up a hand to Randolph’s counter argument, Jill
told him she would subtract a day for every minute he continued to complain.

Forced to ‘shut his mouth’.
Randolph rolled his eyes skyward, petitioning for patience, and stewed in his
chair for the remainder of their trip.

The craft touched down as schedule on the
roof of a second Global Rift Supply and Demand building somewhere in the upper
state of
Yanncy
. Once down the steps, Randolph and
Jill found themselves greeted by the chief security technician, a corporate
lawyer, and two executive managers whose assistants accepted their guests bags
from the baggage handlers assigned to the hover port. Escorted past sound proof
doors, Jill and Randolph had their credentials verified then were asked of
their needs and
comfort.
As Randolph’s time table for
even the barest essentials had been scrubbed, he begged out of the V.I.P. tour
to unwind in a large conference room on the executive’s level. Pulling up an
over-large chair to one of two terminals, he settled in, letting his fingers
fly.

First
on the agenda are my four seemingly simple search programs.
Randolph wrote
the programs from memory, which when activated in order would combine bits of code
from each to seek out hard wired lines to the outside world while looking at
the security programs working on this side of the firewall. Randolph allowed
these programs to run in the back ground while he wrote up a meaningless
program to randomly run out on the hard lines to any nodes and open computers.
Next came out of his memory a piggyback program to see what type of guard dogs
ran freely here-a-bout on the hard lines; once identified, each dog was tagged
and the program marked the nodes of its territory.

Randolph’s next task on his cut-down list
of things to do was a bit more complex, as he stripped down the second computer
so he could disable any hardware allowing other eyes into the computer,
including three spy-ware chips he found which had to have been installed by the
security people. Next he opened up his briefcase and took an etching pen to the
last quarter of the hard drive, destroying any invisible programs the operating
system never sees but always installs for government agencies to have random
checks for activities which could be considered criminal or detrimental to the
government strangle hold on average people’s lives. After this came the tedious
measures of removing all bugs and optical videos attached to the video-screen
that allowed a face to be attached to the program being run.

With this completed, Randolph set the
computer to reformat to its original out-of-the-box settings minus spy-ware
programs which send information to the builder about what the computer is being
used for. Only after these start-up procedures had been accomplished did
Randolph push back to the first computer and begin the next phase of capturing
the strongest guard dogs and any leeches attached. This arduous task, though
boring as hell, was his most important quest. For with the guard dogs, Randolph
could take them apart and
sic’em
back on their
makers, which then would give him entry codes to begin phase two.

After countless hours over the keyboards,
Randolph yawned and rubbed tied eyes, pushing away from the second computer to
glance over at a halo-video of an antique grandfather clock; 3:32 a.m. With a
stretch of his arms, Randolph got up to walk around a bit to reacquaint his
legs with movement and spied a video-phone. To Randolph’s touch of the call
button, a polite female voice answered without hesitation, “Yes, Mr.
Arlington?”

Randolph raised an eyebrow to the prompt
answer from a wide-awake secretary. “Do you have a recorder handy?”

“Yes, Mr. Arlington.”

Randolph smiled and began ticking off a list
of computer parts, tools and other devices he could take apart for the items
inside, finishing with, “and I need them by 6 a.m., is that possible?” Once
more hearing her acknowledgement of “Yes, Mr. Arlington.” Randolph signed off.
After a bigger yawn, Randolph used the facilities reserved for high class
stuffed shirts then laid on the conference table, using the suit jacket as a
blanket, and promptly fell asleep.

Insistent knocking on the conference room
door made Randolph rise from his nap, grumbling,
I just
laid
down.
Releasing a deep yawn,
he rolled his eyes to the halo clock and found it was two past 6 a.m.
That can’t be right!
Grumbling yet
again, Randolph rolled off the table, pulling open the locked door to find
three delivery men with carts loaded. Once they waltzed out with their empty
carts, a different secretary from the previous day entered unbidden, setting a
tray of bagels, toast, coffee, juice and fresh water on the table. She flashed
Randolph a sweet smile over an hourglass figure in a white and blue miniskirt
and blouse ensemble, stitched to enhance every curve her mother and a plastic
surgeon could contrive, and whispered enticingly, “My name is Gentle, Mr.
Arlington. If you have any needs of something or “someone”—she winked—“all you need
do is ask.”

 
By
that smile and invitation, Randolph knew her IQ was probably lower than her
bust size. Still, he watched as her hips swayed side to side on her way out.
With a shake of his head, Randolph headed for the door then he heard the woman
give out a startled cry as Jill shoved her aside, storming in, and began his
morning with an angry demanding voice, “Where the hell have you been all night?
And you’d better not say it was with that piece of ass!” She glared, indicating
Gentle by slamming the door.

Randolph filled his glass with water and
saluted Jill mildly. “Well, good morning to you too, sunshine.”

“Don’t give me that!” Jill snapped, coming
closer. “What is all this junk and what
are
you up
to?”

In answer to her question, Randolph
selected a slice of lemon, dropped it in the water, and leaned against the
conference table. Once relaxed, he told her bluntly while pointing, “These two
computers are on so many watch lists in this building, it would take me an hour
to list them. Then of course there are the seventy-five watch dog programs
sitting on the other side of the firewall of the outside hard line; you
couldn’t ask for the time of day without every one of them knowing it.” He took
a sip of water and tapped a key, scanning the readouts encoded for his eyes to
decipher and corrected, “Make that eighty-two. Apparently my program picked up
on seven more while I was sleeping.” Randolph turned back to Jill and waved his
glass around in a gesture of including the room, adding, “And I suggest you be
careful of what spills forth from your lips, as I’ve found one short-range
transmitter, which is lying in the corner over there.”

“That’s impossible.” Sweeping her arm
about, she told him, “These offices are swept daily.”

“Okay, then explain this,” Randolph
demanded, taking up the coffee cup he’d used last night and dropping it on the
floor then crushing it under foot. He bent over, and sifting through the
remains, picked up a slightly abused bug and showed it off to her. “Now if
you'll excuse me, I have a ton of work to accomplish because of an uneducated
partner imposing a near impossible deadline on me.”

“Hold it,” Jill demanded, grabbing
Randolph’s arm and shoving the bug in his face. “How’d you find this?”

“My mother could have found that one,”
Randolph imbued his tone with an indication Jill hadn’t the capability, “which
tells me that’s the decoy or the secretary’s attempt to increase her credit
account.” He slapped Jill’s hand off and set down his drink to go through the
first of his delivered boxes. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to build a
detector to get this room cleared of spying devices before I really get start
working at my job.”

“Randolph, why do you have to do all that?
Why can’t you simply purchase one from the supply store? Detectors are
perfectly legal to buy,” Jill asked with curiosity this time, now that her ego
had been deflated a bit.

“Look, Jill, you may wish to put your life
in other people’s hands, but I don’t. Working out of my own place is dangerous
enough.” Randolph indicated the room with a gesture. “But
this,
filled with people I don’t know and infested with who knows how many bugs—I
can’t take the chance.” Randolph emptied a box on the table. “And as I can’t
trust anyone here not to replant their bugs if I leave this room, this will be
my living quarters.”

After having his say, Randolph ignored Jill
and scattered out the equipment.

Jill stood for a time and contemplated his
words and actions. Though she held a perverse wish to continue her argument,
she
none-the-less left Randolph to his work with a
dismissive hand-wave on her way out the door. But once on the outside of the
office, she wondered how a conference room could have so many bugs without the
building manager knowing? With lowered head, Jill slid her eyes over the secretary,
whose only function was eye candy; Jill thought perhaps special measures might
be better off on her person, rather than in her case.

Within an hour of dismantling the
equipment, Randolph built from scratch a short-range bug zapper. Once
activated, the device killed off seven bugs, including two implanted in the
tray brought in with breakfast. After that, he spent the next seven hours
constructing a sweeper with directional lights to indicate where any active
video-cameras or listening devices were located. When the light on his
instrument turned green, after crushing two video-cameras set to view the room
at different angles, he set to work building his own computer, designed to
handle the open lines of the city with its trap doors and counter spy-ware, to
render the computer invisible to the public eye. Next, testing out the computer
to see if he missed anything, Randolph inserted the guard dogs and leech
programs he’d adjusted and sent them on basic errands to verify his competence
in redesigning them for his usage.

With this accomplished, he stood and
stretched his legs, ate the last of his cold pizza, downed a warm beer chaser
and stretched out for four hours of shut-eye. In the morning, after shoving out
the clutter of packaging and accepting breakfast from a bemused secretary, who
couldn’t fathom why he’d not taken her up to the executive suite for an
entertaining night, Randolph finally began his real work. By the fourth day,
wishing he could step out for a shower and shave, he readjusted his many guard
dogs, destroyed five infested hard drives and sent out the leech programs with
piggy back codes.

At this stage, Randolph wiped tired eyes,
marveling he’d done two weeks of work in four days’ time with only the five
mistakes. He then shook his head and began sorting through the city’s tax
records, county building plans, state leases and a hundred other levels of
bureaucracy which allowed a corporation to build and maintain a business. Next
came all the support outfits which kept the place operating at peak efficiency.

As Randolph was running a basic program to
pile and sort by importance, he ran into tax records and gross incomes which
didn’t jibe with the size of the outfit. With his curiosity tweaked, he brought
up the business and tagged them for further investigation, sending out new
programs and starting another file.

Another day and part of the night slipped
by as he piled up more details; Randolph was in the midst of designing a
special leech when the conference door opened without his permission. Glancing
over and noting Jill walking in, Randolph returned to his typing.

“Well, what do you want?” Jill questioned
irritably, leaning up against the wall next to the door.

“Need?”
Randolph
questioned; he missed a stroke and had to backup a few keys to verify the code.

“Yes, need. You left me a message to come
right over,” Jill told him in some anger.

Randolph looked over at her with a lead
weight landing in the pit of his stomach and deigned, “Jill, I never sent—”

His alarm system went off. Four men in
business suits, pointing guns and bearing badges from the Federal Building of
Fair Commerce spilled into the room.

“FBFC; freeze!” the first through the door
commanded while the others fanned out. “You’re both under arrest under statute
2279, Corporate Espionage Act.”

Randolph, however, did the opposite. He
turned back to the keyboard as the words spilled from the agent’s mouth and hit
three keys simultaneously, causing the lights in the room to go out and a
strobe light to flash. Using the disorientation distraction, he ducked under
the conference table as his computer did a complete melt down from the
microwave elements he’d installed. By the end of the second strobe, Jill moved
and Randolph heard a yell followed by a body hitting the table. Laser beams next
appeared, racing across the room to where Randolph had been as he scrambled
onto the tabletop and propelled himself up into the crawl space in between
floors. Without worrying about noise, as Jill was making a real nuisance of
herself, Randolph scrambled across the ceiling supports till he hit the
concrete wall, pulled off an opening in the air duct system he’d made, and
rolled in, hearing a man scream from within the office. Without any thoughts
for Jill whatsoever—she could take care of herself—Randolph hooked himself up
to the descending wire harness he constructed last night, hit the on button on
the payout machine and was on his way down the air shaft between the walls when
he felt the concussion grenade and electric pulse scrambler go off. After a
minute of disorientation, realizing his home made device had been rendered
useless by the electrical pulse, leaving him hanging like a duck in cold
storage awaiting to be plucked and gutted for the pot, Randolph hit the
disconnect button and free-fell four stories in the air system before hitting
hard, at a T intersection, wishing he’d lost consciousness.

Randolph bit down hard on the scream of
pain and soon found he’d broken his leg. He wiped his blurring eyes of tears.
Where in the hell did they come from? This
was supposed to be a secured building.
With great effort, Randolph ignored
his leg for the moment, wiped his eyes several times, and pulled from his
pocket a laser pen, which he used to make holes in the ventilation system so he
could hook his belt into one after another in his quest to descend the forty
floors to its end. After he gained the thirty-eighth floor, the system turned
on, instantly turning the temperature to sixty degrees, which could have been a
great help if it were only directed on his broken leg. Randolph ground his
teeth, knowing perfectly well what was to happen next, and tried to work faster
in his descent. But after gaining only a floor lower, Randolph saw below him
the robotic eye of the duct cleaning robot as it ascended the shaft to the
blockage he was creating in cooling off the building. With no room to disable
the robot, Randolph cringed and pocketed his pen to await the clawing arm
grabbing hold of his leg. Upon the machine reaching him, Randolph bit down on
part of the belt and held back a scream when the grapple seized his bad leg and
began twisting to dislodge the blockage before pulling him down the shaft.