The brake lights on the trash truck flared as the front end pulled into the other lane. A loud thud-thud-thud-thud-thud filled the street as the back end of the vehicle bounced on the asphalt while it tried to stop. The cab careened into a lamppost and sent a shower of sparks raining down, bringing the truck to a shuddering halt.
Morgan slammed on his brakes to keep from ramming into the vehicle that now blocked the entire street. He quickly shoved the Mercedes into reverse, preformed a rapid Y turn, and then raced back to the previous intersection.
There was no way they could show up in Rome and tell Mr. Loban the mission had been unsuccessful. That would be a quick way of making this their last job ever. Sure, they could just skip the flight and go on the run. They might even get away with it for a while, but Morgan had no doubt Mr. Loban would eventually track them down. And when he did, he would make them suffer for a long time before taking their lives. Finding the chip was the only option.
Morgan circled the block to the other side of the crash, but, as he expected, the sedan was nowhere in sight.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Fischer said. “They could have gone anywhere.”
A half block past the crash was another intersection that could have taken the sedan north or south, and then another and another. And down each of those were more intersections, exponentially increasing the number of potential escape routes.
Which way? he thought. Which way? Which way?
Less than a minute after the sedan had left the park with the body, it had begun heading north. This had lasted for all but the last five minutes, when it had begun making turns and moving more easterly. It could have all been misdirection, but Morgan was willing to bet that the car’s initial direction had been set before the driver had known they were being followed.
At the intersection, he turned north and allowed his instincts to take over.
Fifteen minutes later, on the Henry Hudson Parkway, he spotted a gray sedan in the distance. He pointed it out to Fischer, who retrieved their binoculars and trained them on the car.
“Son of a bitch. It’s them.”
Using her self-developed search engine, Orlando initiated a hunt for any information on Russian mob boss Nicholas Loban. It took nearly twenty seconds for the results to appear, but given that the program was drawing from sources hidden behind what their owners thought were impenetrable firewalls, that was surprisingly quick.
She skimmed the basic info to make sure it jibed with what she already knew, then whittled the list down to only entries concerning Loban’s ties to the US and his known associates. His profile in the States turned out to be pretty low-key, more an information-gathering network than anything else, and none of his few contacts were familiar to her.
Annoyed that she hadn’t found anything useful, she decided to search for attempted robberies involving microchips. She found several computer-store thefts, and a missing bag of Intel processors from a wholesale supplier in New Jersey, but that was basically it.
She thought about it for a moment and realized she was being too literal with search parameters. If this chip was important enough to kill for, its disappearance would probably not be reported to traditional authorities.
She refined her search, concentrating on high-tech firms experiencing recent security breaches.
The item that caught her eye was near the bottom of the third page, an alarm report received by the Newton, Massachusetts, police department.
The security system at a local computer technology company had alerted the police to an alarm at 1:37 a.m. three nights earlier. Before patrol officers had arrived, the police received a call from a man named David Pinter, the company’s COO. Pinter said it had been a false alarm and apologized. The patrol cars were called back. End of report.
The mistaken alarm would have been enough to spur Orlando to look deeper, but it was the company’s name that told her she’d found what she was looking for.
Eli/Kreck Systems.
E/K, like the letters on the box holding the chip.
A check of the company revealed what she already suspected. Eli/Kreck was a defense contractor. In her experience, a high-tech firm that did work for the military would not employ a security system prone to false alarms. It could happen, but she wasn’t buying it.
She tried to break into the company’s data network, but it soon became clear it would take more than one of her quick hacks to get in. No problem. There were other ways to infiltrate a company’s system. The fastest and potentially easiest would be through one of the employees. Not some mid-grade or low-end worker, though. Those people tended to be more security minded, since any breach traced back to them would mean their jobs and possibly even a jail sentence. More times than not, the way in was through the personnel at the top.
The company’s public website provided all the information she needed. The founder and president had a master’s in software engineering from MIT, so she immediately struck him from the list. The directors of the three main departments had similar stories and were also removed. The winner, as she’d suspected, turned out to be the same man who had called the police, COO David Pinter. His degree was in business administration. He had worked at several companies over the years, specializing in organization and client management. He was older than the others, and by the looks of him, a good three decades more than the founder. Which likely meant he had been a cosmetic hire, to put aging investors at ease by letting them know someone with experience was on the team.
It took exactly seventeen seconds for Orlando to find out where Pinter lived. Hacking his home computer system was even easier. A minute and a half later she was in Eli/Kreck’s system, reading an internal memo on the events surrounding the alarm.
It had not been set off in error. Two intruders had entered the building and made their way to the most secure room in the facility, a place called the GT lab. There, they took an item referred to as the SPYDER and then tried to leave the building. Unfortunately for them, at some point between entering and exiting the lab, they had triggered an alarm.
Orlando was initially confused as to why company security hadn’t caught the intruders before their attempted exit, but then she found another memo, this one concerning the chemical analysis of the coffee the security officers had been drinking. The powerful compound that had been added to it was a sedative Orlando and her team had used in the past.
Two of the guards, however, were not coffee drinkers. When they heard the alarm, they had immediately responded. The thieves were taken down by single shots to the head. Apparently, getting a job with Eli/Kreck security required advanced military training.
One unintended result of the encounter was that “irreparable damage” had been done to the SPYDER. The only other one in existence was stored at the company’s manufacturing facility in Sunnyvale, California. Needing it for the work they were doing in Newton, Eli/Kreck turned to the same military contacts who’d helped cover up the attempted robbery to arrange the SPYDER’s transportation across the country.
That’s where the report ended, but Orlando had no problem filling in the rest. The military had contacted the NSA or perhaps the CIA, who, in turn, had contacted Helen Cho. She had then arranged for a secret transit by Jenna Tate. But the mission had been compromised.
Another report said the drugging of the guards had been an inside job, the main suspect an engineer named Charles Williams who had failed to show up at work the next day. The head of security had gone to his house and found Williams gone, the place cleaned out. That was as far as the internal investigation had gotten so far.