He raised his watch to his face in an exaggerated manner, straining to read the dial. Placing his wrist against his nose, he was able to make sense of the watch’s hands. One-thirty? He must have gotten carried away with shots. He vaguely remembered doing vodka shots with this woman. Her name slipped away as they stumbled into his apartment. Was he even in his own apartment? He tried to focus on his surroundings, but the hazy blur worsened until it darkened completely.
Erin Foley lowered Pyotr to the ground and closed the apartment door, ensuring that it remained unlocked. She leaned over the young scientist and shook him a few times to be sure that he was unconscious. He didn’t stir. Her timing had been nearly perfect. She had ordered a final round of vodka shots after he excused himself to use the bathroom, spiking his drink with gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB). The date-rape drug typically took hold within fifteen to twenty minutes after ingestion, leaving her with time to maneuver him down the street to his apartment without raising any suspicions.
He left the club without protest, clearly energized by the prospect of what she had been advertising for the past hour. It hit him right after they turned onto his street. She noticed the glassy eyes before he started losing motor control, which gave her enough advanced warning to hasten their arrival. Ivan had made it clear that it was her job to get him into the apartment. After the stunt she pulled in the car, she didn’t expect any help from the bratva, and lugging Pyotr up two flights of stairs after five strong drinks would have been a chore in high heels.
Before exploring any further, she removed her cell phone and placed a quick call.
“He’s out,” she said, receiving a gruff acknowledgement.
Erin started searching in the most obvious place, removing Pyotr’s wallet and thumbing through the various compartments. Nothing. She glanced around the living room, not finding what she was looking for in the open. Further observation suggested that she should start her search in the bedroom. Pyotr’s apartment was immaculate and orderly, with nothing out of place on the dining room table or kitchen counter. Even the magazines were neatly stacked on the small coffee table in front of his couch. She could envision him entering the apartment at the end of a long day at the lab, and despite his exhaustion, still straining to keep his surroundings in order.
She strode across the well-appointed room toward the doorway leading into the bedroom, flipping on the light. She found his private chambers in the same condition. Pristine and organized, bed covers pulled tight and an extra blanket folded near the foot of the bed. She took a few steps into the room and spied a long mahogany dresser with a perfectly centered black valet box sitting on top. She made her way to the dresser, reaching for the top center drawer instead of the more obvious box. Inside the drawer, she found several pairs of neatly arranged socks, separated into two sides. Casual socks on the left, formal black pairs on the right. She saw something jammed between the stacks and reached down to retrieve the grand prize. She stared at the thick plastic card for a moment, grinning.
“Roskov, Pyotr. Clearance Level 4. Vektor Laboratories,” she repeated.
The white card was attached to a lanyard by a small clip that penetrated a small hole punched into the plastic at the top of the identification card. The front of the card displayed a picture of Pyotr, along with the basic information she had just uttered. The back contained the words, “THIS SIDE FOR ACCESS.” The back of the card was imbedded with a biometric microchip that verified Roskov’s identity and security clearance, granting him mostly unlimited access to Vektor Labs, including Farrington’s target building. The security clearance system at Vektor operated on a layered principle. Since Roskov worked in Building Six, the most secure location within the Vektor Laboratories compound, his security card granted him nearly unfettered access to the entire area.
She heard the apartment door open and stepped back into the main room. Two men stood inside the apartment. Ivan and the guy she had disabled in the back seat of the car. Without moving her head, she instinctually took note of the rack of knives next to the stainless-steel sink. Logic and training told her that she was in no danger at the moment, but once Farrington’s team departed the warehouse, en route to Vektor, all bets were off. If either of these men harbored a grudge, they might make a move against her at that point. She hoped to be long clear of Novosibirsk by then.
She held out Pyotr Roskov’s identification card to Ivan, who calmly took it and placed it in a pocket on his black leather jacket.
“How long?” she said.
“Three to four hours. You need to stay here with Mr. Roskov. The dose we provided was a small one for someone his size. He should be dead to the world for at least ten hours, but you never know. If he wakes up and finds his security card gone before we replace it, this whole plan is fucked,” Ivan said.
As much as she didn’t want to sit around this apartment, she couldn’t argue with Ivan’s logic. In fact, she had been impressed with their plan from the beginning, even if she could barely stand to be around them. Surreptitiously acquiring a high-level security card from Vektor presented several opportunities to explore. The team’s electronics tech, “Misha,” working alongside the bratva’s best credit card forgery people, would reproduce Roskov’s identification card with one major modification.
The new card’s biometric chip would transmit a simple Trojan horse virus deep into Vektor’s automated digital security system, providing Misha with a customized “backdoor” to access the system. Most biometric chips used in point-of-access security systems utilized passive authentication protocols, where the chip is simply read by the scanning device. Most of the security focus is placed on encrypting the chip, leaving the point of interface vulnerable to active data transmission from a modified microchip.
When Roskov held his new card up to one of the secure access terminals, the microchip would actively transmit the virus during the negotiated scan of the chip’s stored biometric data. Misha hoped to transmit the entire virus in one transaction, but had designed the replacement chip with the capability to stop and start, monitoring its own progress to ensure all of the data found its way into the system.
Ivan’s partner placed a small duffel bag on the ground and pushed it toward her with his foot.
“Everything you need,” Ivan said, nodding at the bag.
“All right,” she said, making no move to retrieve the bag in front of them.
She had no reason to intentionally place herself within striking distance of either man. Ivan cracked a faint grin, which under any other circumstance could be interpreted as bizarrely creepy. He had a disturbingly calm, unaffected look plastered on his face most of the time. Smiling was not one of Ivan’s practiced facial expressions, and the result was unnerving.
“When we’re done here, I want to learn how you did that trick with my hand,” he said.
“Takes a lot of practice,” she said.
“We’ll have time,” he said, flattening his grin.
“In that case, it’s a date.”
She caught both of them looking at the bag again, which was supposed to contain a portable mask system to deliver an aerosolized anesthetic in the unlikely event that Roskov roused from his deep, artificial slumber before they arrived with the replacement card. A few hits of sevoflurane, a general anesthetic, would render him unconscious again for a short period of time. She could continue to safely deliver sevoflurane in small doses until she could leave the apartment.
“All right. I give up. What’s in the bag?”