They met back at the apartment and Christine passed the reader to Gavin, who had his equipment set up in the kitchen. With a kiss good-bye to Christine and more effusive thanks for her help, Jack sat at the kitchen table and watched the Campus IT director work.
He extracted the info from the reader via a digital SD card and he programmed it into an RFID tag machine. Gavin had brought a photo of Jack from a file on the Campus network, and he affixed this on the card, along with the name of the building and other information represented on the cards held by building employees.
Last, he attached a black neck lanyard that perfectly matched the one worn by the employees of Frieden’s building.
All totaled, Gavin finished the job in under thirty minutes. He held it up for Jack to look at.
Jack asked, “How sure are you it will be accepted by the scanner?”
“One hundred percent.”
Jack looked at Gavin with incredulity.
“I’m serious, Ryan, find some other part of this op to stress about. That was a breeze.” Gavin then handed over an electronic device to unlock Frieden’s office door and asked Jack if he remembered how to operate it.
Jack said, “You’re kidding, right? You put me and the guys through two days’ worth of training on that gadget.”
“And now that training will pay off,” Gavin said, with a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He also handed Jack a completely nondescript thumb drive. “Here’s your RAT. It’s just like the one Ysabel used down in Rome. Get it into a port on any networked device in his office, wait nineteen and a half seconds for the program to upload, and then pull it out. After that, you’re done, I’ll take care of the rest remotely.”
Jack and Ysabel had joked in Rome about Gavin’s precise instructions to wait nineteen and a half seconds. They both agreed the first nineteen seconds went by quickly, but that last half second felt like an eternity.
Gavin returned to D.C. that afternoon on a commercial flight, and Jack spent the evening in a local gym, trying to undo some of the damage he had done over the past weeks wining and dining Ysabel and sitting on his ass all day.
The next morning at eleven a.m. Jack stood in a doorway six floors below his rented office and watched Guy Frieden and his secretary leave their building, the same as they had the previous four days. He knew they were headed to a café around the corner from Frieden’s office on the pedestrian shopping street. As soon as they disappeared up Grand Rue, Jack crossed the street, a purposefulness to his walk that gave an air that he did this every day.
He wore a gray suit under a brown Fendi wool overcoat and he carried a black leather Tumi bag. His beard was trim and neat and he wore Tom Ford clear-lensed eyeglasses with no correction to give him even more of a professional presence.
He entered the building and marched up to the counter, waved the badge Gavin made for him over the reader, careful to glance away from the camera that recorded his entrance while he did so. He was rewarded with a green light and a rotating turnstile. He pushed through and headed for the elevators, continuing the appearance of utter relaxation.
On the fifth floor Jack passed a dozen individual offices, most of them private bankers or attorneys, before he made it to a door with a gold nameplate that read Guy Frieden, Avocat. He continued on down to the end of the hall, then he turned and started back toward the door. When he was certain no one was coming, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a white box the size of a deck of cards. This he placed over the card reader lock next to Frieden’s door. Automatically the device began pulling in data from the reader and then decoding it.
It was another one of the Campus team’s inventions, and Jack knew it didn’t always work, but Gavin and company had researched the locking protocols used by this office building, and Gavin assured him he’d get in.
As usual, it took a little longer than Gavin said it would, but, also as usual, it worked as advertised. The door opened thirteen seconds after Jack pushed the lock decoder against the card reader.
Frieden’s office was dark and quiet. Jack looked out the window to his vantage point across the street, then hurried to the computer on the desk, pulling out the RAT as he moved. He plugged the device in, initiated it with the simple movement of the mouse on the desk, and left it there while it worked its magic.
He had a few seconds to snoop around, so he looked through the drawers on Frieden’s desk. He didn’t see anything that looked very interesting, so he headed back into the lobby to check the secretary’s desk.
Jack saw Guy Frieden’s secretary had a calendar blotter on her desk, so he pulled out his phone and began taking pictures of the handwritten notes on the pages. Each and every day of the exposed month had some sort of notation, but they were all in German.
He carefully checked the following month, but this page, and the two calendar pages representing the rest of the year, were completely blank.
Jack assumed at the beginning of each month Frieden’s secretary took all the appointments off whatever computer program she kept them on for scheduling, and she then hand wrote them on the calendar for quicker reference. It left him with a very incomplete picture, but enough notes were written on the blotter that Jack knew he didn’t want to pass it up.
He gave the RAT a full minute to do its thing, more than three times as long as Gavin said the device needed to install itself, but Jack figured it couldn’t hurt.
Jack was out of the building seven minutes after he entered — he doubted Frieden had managed to finish his biscotti yet — and he was on the phone with Gavin as soon as he was back in his tiny sixth-floor office. Gavin promised to get to work on hacking into the system immediately.
Next Jack called Clark, following the orders of the director of operations to notify him the moment he was clear. Jack felt a little silly checking in, like he was calling his mom to let her know he made it home safely, but Clark had requested the contact. Jack knew Clark didn’t like his men operating in the field, even if it was a low-risk mission in such a serene place as Luxembourg.
24
Russian private equity investor Andrei Limonov assumed he would have his next meeting with Valeri Volodin at the Kremlin, so he’d been surprised when the car that picked him up at his apartment at the prearranged time took him not east to the president’s offices, but west, to Volodin’s private home, the palatial estate of Novo-Ogaryovo.
Volodin was famous for his late-night meetings, often conducted in his offices in Building One of the Kremlin complex, or even in sitting rooms in the Grand Kremlin Palace, normally reserved for ceremonial functions. But meetings in his private residence were exceedingly rare. Limonov had heard a few rumors from his friends working high in the Economic Ministry that the president had changed many of his habits in the past several months, giving them the impression he was becoming more paranoid about those around him. Limonov didn’t know any of this firsthand, of course, but he could well imagine that the Kremlin had become a difficult place to work since the recent economic downturn and Russia’s military forays of the past year.
The private equity manager was no fool. He had no doubt in his mind that his task of moving Volodin’s secret wealth was directly related to the president’s concerns about those around him.
Limonov was X-rayed and passed through a biometric scanner and his briefcase was searched, then he was led through the entrance to the property, and a few minutes later he sat alone in an ornate sitting room, looking out a window at a massive lawn. His eyes tracked a pair of guards and their dog walking at the edge of the property, and saw the sweep of a spotlight running across a wood line on a hill beyond the property’s outer fence.