Jack told himself the next time Frieden went to the bathroom, he would do five minutes of yoga on the floor to loosen up his aching muscles.
But for now, while he watched and waited, he thought about Ysabel down in Rome. He missed his romantic evenings with her, and each night as he walked the fifteen minutes from his rented space across the street from Frieden’s office to his rented apartment, he made mental note of the nicer restaurants he passed, hoping he’d have an opportunity to take Ysabel out to dinner a few times when she finally made it up here.
Jack’s apartment here wasn’t as spectacular as the place they’d shared in Rome, but it was in a great neighborhood, in the Old Town, overlooking the small and serene Place de Clairefontaine. It met all his requirements, which were not necessarily the things he would personally look for in an apartment. The Campus maintained a long list of security criteria that needed to be satisfied any time one of their people rented a safe house, so Jack had to make sure from his first arrival there that he’d be as protected as possible. He’d been relatively impressed with the building he’d found, the apartment inside, and the options for dining and exploring in the quarter around it. But still, his place wasn’t anything like his place in Rome.
Jack thought about Ysabel now while he looked through his spotting scope at the back of Guy Frieden’s bald head. He worried about her, hoped she was keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary that might spell danger. They’d spoken on the phone each of the last three evenings and they exchanged texts throughout the day. While half their correspondence was just the idle chat of two people who missed each other and enjoyed each other’s company, the other half was work-related; she’d managed to track even more sales back to the trust maintained by Guy Frieden, putting the total amount of the sales well above ten million U.S. dollars.
More than satisfied Frieden was a willing participant in the Russian/Roman art world money-laundering scheme, Jack had e-mailed Gavin Biery the night before, asking him to research the man’s office computer network to see if The Campus could get a look at his files. Jack had learned from digging into the art galleries’ systems that it was a hit-or-miss proposition, and often Biery would come back to him and tell him he’d have to physically plant a remote access tool to give The Campus the on-ramp into the network they needed to begin the encryption process.
Jack hoped that wasn’t going to be the case here, since he was alone, and while Frieden’s office didn’t look that terribly secure, Frieden’s building did have standard security measures that would take time to defeat.
Jack sat up, taking a break from looking through his scope at the office across the street. He checked his watch and realized it was two p.m. here, which meant it was eight a.m. in Virginia. Gavin Biery would just be arriving in the office.
Jack pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed the number.
As he expected, the portly IT director answered his phone just slightly out of breath.
“Biery.”
“Morning, Gavin. Sorry for hitting you right as you come through the door. Do you at least have your coffee and your doughnut in front of you?”
“It’s a bear claw, but yes.” Jack heard the squeak of Gavin’s chair as he sat at his desk. “I got your e-mail last night and spent some time looking into the network of this Guy Frieden character.”
“How did you do that?”
“I just used a secure Linux system at home and pinged Frieden’s network, took a look at his firewall, tried to find some open ports, all the basic stuff. Bad news, Ryan, he’s locked down tight.”
“Damn,” Ryan said.
Biery said, “Yeah. I’m a genius, but I’m not a freaking magician. Whoever set his computer network up knows enough to keep it safe from outside vectors. You are going to have to gain physical access to his system and plant a RAT on it for me to hack into it. Even then, that will just get me into his network. I can’t promise he won’t have good encryption on his actual files, so you’ll need to allow me some time to get into them.”
Ryan deflated. “How do I get a RAT onto his system?”
“You are the secret agent man. I’m the computer guy. Remember?”
“Right.” He thought a moment. “Has Clark made it in yet?”
“Saw him in the elevator.”
“Good. Can you transfer me?”
“Now I’m the freakin’ switchboard?”
“Gavin!”
“Just kidding.”
Clark came on the line seconds later. “John Clark.”
“Hey, John, it’s Jack. I’d like permission to take Gavin off your hands for a day or two.”
“Okay. Tell me why.”
Ryan briefly explained what he needed.
When he finished, Clark said, “You keep telling me that what you’re doing over there in Europe is mostly analysis. But what you are talking about sounds suspiciously like espionage.”
“Yeah, I know. This is going to take a bit more subterfuge than what we’ve been up to recently, but this will be a lot less than normal Campus fieldwork. Guy Frieden works with one secretary in a busy office building; security to get into that building is controlled by RFID badges. I just need to get Frieden out of his office and in a situation where I can steal the electronic data on the badge, then have Gavin make me a quick working copy of it. This can be done in a day. At that point Gavin can go back home, and I can slip into Frieden’s office while he and his secretary run out. They go out for coffee together each morning, and their office is totally empty for at least twenty minutes.”
“You can see their entire office from your vantage point?”
“Not exactly. I can’t see the door to the hall, and he has a little conference room to the left of his secretary’s desk that I can’t see into. But when Frieden and his secretary step out of the building, they shut off all the lights. I’m sure they aren’t leaving anyone in his office behind.”
Clark asked, “How are you going to manipulate Frieden so you can be in a position to clone the badge?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet. I’ll have to get him someplace where I can be within a couple of feet from him, but I can’t let myself get compromised, because who knows how close I’ll have to get at other times? Maybe you could send Ding or Dom over with Gavin, they can help me out.”
Clark said, “No can do. They are on a business trip.”
Jack knew that meant his mates were operational, and he suddenly felt an immediate twinge of regret bordering on jealousy. He preferred working on the team with the other ops officers of The Campus, and all three hadn’t operated together since Sam’s death. Still, he’d gone to Iran on his own volition, then Dagestan, and then Rome. He’d put himself here, and he believed in his work.
He didn’t regret anything other than the fact that he wasn’t there, in an obviously dangerous theater, to help his friends. “Everything okay?” he asked.
Clark said, “Sure. Just some technical support work for one of our clients. Still, it’s a crazy world. You know how even on a business trip you’ve got to keep your head on straight.”
“I do indeed.” Jack’s mind drifted off his own mission for a moment. The work over here was child’s play compared with most everything he’d done in the field in the past few years. He knew he should appreciate it, and he certainly had when he’d been with Ysabel, but at the moment his mind was with Chavez and Caruso, somewhere out in the field without him there to help them out.
Clark brought Jack back to Luxembourg when he said, “I think I know someone who might be able to help you over there. At the Agency I worked with a woman named Christine Hutton. Hell of a case officer. She got out of the biz a long time ago, she’s got to be fifty-five or sixty now. Anyway, I think she’s a German noblewoman.”