A motion detector.
A passive infrared sensor. It would detect minute changes in room temperature, caused by the heat given off by a human body. A common device, but not easy to defeat.
A solid red light meant the sensor was armed and ready.
I cursed aloud.
There were ways to get by these things. I tried to recall the tricks I’d heard about, though this wasn’t my expertise. Not at all. The best I could do was guess. I considered abandoning the operation.
But I’d come too far to turn back.
69.
So I gathered a few items from the Batten Schechter offices. The first was easy. Arrayed on the console behind Schechter’s assistant’s desk was an assortment of pictures. I slid the rectangle of glass out of a framed photograph of a panicked-looking little girl sitting on a shopping-mall Santa’s lap.
In a storeroom among the shelves of packing and mailing supplies I found a carton of polystyrene sheets, used to line boxes or protect rolled documents, and a roll of packing tape.
When I returned to Schechter’s office, I slid the Leverlock flat against the carpet under the double doors and had them open in ten seconds.
Then came the tricky part.
Holding the polystyrene square in front of me like a shield, I advanced toward the motion sensor, moving slowly through the eerie twilit interior, palely illuminated by the city lights below and the stars above. If I was remembering correctly, the foam would block my heat signature from being detected.
It took an agonizingly long time to reach the wall where the sensor was mounted. I held the sheet of foam a few inches from the sensor’s lens. Not too close, though. If I blocked it entirely, that would set it off too.
Like most state-of-the art infrared sensors, this one had a built-in flaw. It was equipped with what’s called “creep zone” coverage: If someone tried to slither on the floor underneath it, its lens would detect it right away.
But it couldn’t see above.
From behind the polystyrene scrim I took the small square of glass, taped to my belt, lifted it slowly, then placed it against the sensor’s lens. The strip of packing tape kept it securely in place.
Then I let the foam sheet drop to the floor.
The red light remained steady. I hadn’t triggered it.
I exhaled slowly.
Glass is opaque to infrared light. The sensor couldn’t see through it, yet didn’t perceive the glass as an obstruction.
I switched on the overhead lights. Two walls were paneled in mahogany. The other two were glass, nearly floor to ceiling, with breathtaking views of Boston: the Back Bay, the Charles River, Bunker Hill, the harbor. The lights twinkled like a starlit canopy fallen to earth. If this was the view from your office every day, you might start to believe you ruled the land below.
His desk was a small, delicate antique: honeyed mahogany, tooled bottle-green leather top, fluted legs. The only object on it was a phone.
There was a time once when the more powerful an executive was, the bigger his desk. You’d see CEOs with desks big as tramp steamers. But now the more important you were, the smaller and more fragile your work surface. As if to show the world you exerted power by mind control. Paperwork was for peons. There was no computer anywhere in sight. How someone could conduct business these days without a computer baffled me. Clearly it was good to be king.
Priceless-looking antiques were everywhere-spindly Regency chairs, dusky mirrors, parchment waste cans and credenzas and pedestal tables. A finely knotted antique silk rug in pale olive green flecked with muted yellows and reds that Mr. Derderian would drool over.
I knew bank CEOs who’d been fired for spending this kind of money on their office décor. They’d forgotten that if you decorated like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, you were likely to die like one, at the guillotine. The smart CEOs ordered from Office Liquidators.
But David Schechter had no shareholders to answer to. His clients didn’t care that their billable hours paid for expensive furniture. A rich lawyer is a successful one.
Then I noticed a second set of mahogany double doors.
They were unlocked. As I pulled them open the overhead lights came on.
Schechter’s personal filing cabinets. The ones that held documents too sensitive to be kept in his firm’s central files where anyone could access them.
Each steel file cabinet was secured with a Kaba Mas high-security lock. An X-09, electromechanical, developed to meet the U.S. government’s most stringent security standards and generally considered unpickable.
The locks were unpickable, but not the cabinets themselves. These were commercial steel four-drawer file cabinets, not GSA-approved Class 6 Security file cabinets. It was like putting a thousand-dollar lockset on a hollow-core door a kid could kick in.
I chose the one marked H-O, hoping to find Marshall Marcus’s file. Kneeling, I inserted a metal shim between the bottom drawer and the frame, and sure enough, the locking bar slid up.
Then I pulled open the top drawer and scanned the file tabs. At first they looked like client files, past and present.
But these were no ordinary clients. It was a Who’s Who of the Rich and Powerful. There were files here for some of the most influential public officials in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The names of the men (mostly, and a few women) who ran America. Not all of them were famous. Some-former directors of the NSA and the CIA, secretaries of State and Treasury, certain Supreme Court justices, White House chiefs of staff, senators and congressmen-were dimly remembered if at all.
But it wasn’t possible that David Schechter could have represented even a fraction of them. And what kind of legal service could he have provided anyway? So why were these files here?
As I tried to puzzle out the connection among them, one name caught my eye.
MARK WARREN HOOD, LTG, USA.
Lieutenant General Mark Hood. The man who’d run the covert operations unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency I once worked for.
I pulled out the brown file folder. It was an inch thick. For some reason my heart began to thud, as if I had a premonition.
Most of the documents were tawny with age. I rifled through quickly, not sure what these papers were doing here.
Until I noticed one word stamped in blue ink at the top of each page: MERCURY.
So here it was.
And somehow it was connected, through my old boss, to me.
The explanation was here, if only I could make sense of the columns of figures, the cryptic abbreviations or maybe codes. I kept turning the pages, trying to find a phrase or a word that might bring it all into focus.
I stopped at a photograph clipped to a page of card stock. At the top of the card were the words CERTIFICATE OF RELEASE OR DISCHARGE FROM ACTIVE DUTY. A military discharge form, DD-214. The man in the photograph had a buzz cut and was a few pounds lighter than he was now.
It actually took a second before I recognized myself.
The shock was so profound that I didn’t hear the tiny scuffling on the carpet behind me until it was too late, and then I felt a hard crack against the side of my head. A sharp, crippling pain shot through my cranium, and in the moment before everything went black I tasted blood.
70.
When I came to and my eyes were finally able to focus, I found myself in a paneled conference room, seated at one end of an immense coffin-shaped conference table.
My head throbbed painfully, especially my right temple. When I tried to move my hands, I realized my wrists were secured with flex-cuffs to the steel arms of a high-end office chair. The nylon straps cut into the skin. My ankles were bound to the center stem of the chair.
I had a dim memory of being dragged somewhere, trussed upright, cursed at. Hell, maybe waterboarded for good measure. I wondered how long I’d been slumped in this chair.