Jackie Winn was another problem. But there was already an appropriate response on site, ready to deal with her with a very high probability of success.
Jackie's fingers shook as she slid the tension bar and pick into the door lock of the printing company that occupied the space behind White Hat Enterprises. She had never been a target before and didn't know if she might be shot down in the next instant, blown up, burnt to death or any other horrible outcomes.
All she had wanted to do was run the company that was now hers, but that might not ever happen. After Nathan's death, her whole world had come crashing down and she may not even live to see the setting sun.
She took a deep breath and focused on the task at hand. Usually, she would have been able to open this lock with her picks in not much more time than it took to use a key.
Finally, she felt the last tumbler snick into place. Rotating the tension bar, the lock opened up. Taking one last look around, she saw that there was no one around to see her.
She'd already looked for surveillance cameras pointing at the front of where she was standing, but didn't see any — not that there weren't any, just that they were probably well hidden and directly wired into someplace. Before approaching, she had used her packet sniffer to see if there was any unusual Internet traffic — which would have been if someone had web-based surveillance set up. There was a huge amount of traffic from the front of the building and she wondered what the hell was happening there.
The printing company didn't have an alarm system and was almost on the verge of going out of business anyway. She slid into the front office of the business and carefully pulled the door shut, re-locking it. The place reeked of ink, paper and cleaning solvent.
Making her way around through the darkened machines, she accessed the broom closet that was built into the common wall between the buildings. It was full of clutter and she risked using the LED light she kept on her key chain to make her way through it.
She found the hidden catch and pushed on it. A panel slid open leading into the back of the workshop of Nathan's office. The familiar hum of the air conditioning blew around what should have been the comforting odors of his office that instead made her heart thump in her chest.
Securing the hidden panel, she put her fingers on the release on this side. She didn't know if she was going to have to go out this way or not. In fact, Leo, the spooky dude, didn't much elaborate beyond her being used as a target so he could shoot someone with his rifle. The man was so single minded that whatever would happen after he killed the sniper that may or may not have been targeting her, probably never crossed his mind.
Staying low, she made her way out of Nathan's office — the room still smelled of him and it gave her a pang of heartache.
Patrick's office was between hers and Nathan's. As she passed by her door, she wondered if there was anything she would want out of there. Everything that she had built up in life was in that room. Right now, she couldn't think of anything that was worth the effort it took to open the door and find it.
Leo had shown her how to check for booby traps around doors, so she carefully unlocked his door and felt for any resistance. Nope. Then she ran her fingers around the slightly opened door, looking for any wires. Still nothing. She carefully opened the door, her senses straining in the silence to feel for anything that was wrong and could literally blow up in her face. If need be, she was prepared to cut through the Sheetrock between her office and Patrick's, but that would take a lot of time and had its own difficulties.
When the door was fully open, she took a careful look around. The cup full of pencils, each sharpened to the same length, sat on his desk along with an ancient adding machine. Off on one side was a computer. File cabinets lined the back wall. Everything appeared to be where it needed to be and in perfect order. Patrick had been anal about neatness and Nathan had insisted that he probably needed to be on some sort of medication. Based on what she had learned in the last day or so, it should have been Nathan on the psych meds, not Patrick.
She stepped into the room. Where would he have kept the information for her?
“Damn it Patrick, where the hell did you hide it?”
Nothing answered in the silence. Making her way over to the desk, still wary of any possible booby traps, she sat down at his desk. Every drawer was locked. While Patrick had known about her skills with lock picking, he had made her promise never to violate his trust by using her talents on any locks in his office.
Would he have locked it up someplace? She didn't know.
She sat at his desk, the leather chair creaking.
Looking around, she didn't see any obvious place. It was as though her brain was locked up and she couldn't think.
Then she saw the desk blotter. Usually, it was perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk and didn't have anything written on it. Patrick seemed to change out the backing about once a week when it got worn or stained — though his definition was probably a great deal more precise that hers was.
There was a bump on one edge. She flipped it up off the desk. Nothing under it. She pulled the backing out, and there it was, a file folder.
Yes. Flipping it open, she saw that it was she had been looking for — half a dozen sheets of paper filled with numbers, account information, names and addresses. None of it looked familiar to her at all. There was one name that stood out — precisely highlighted in yellow — Alamut Enterprises.
She put everything back in its place and stuffed the contents of the folder into her back pocket.
Stepping in the same footprints that she had used on the way in, she glanced at her watch. It had seemed like hours, but had only taken ten minutes. She still had a little while before she had to play target and was curious about what was generating all that network traffic from in front of the building.
She made her way back to the workshop. There was a much better packet sniffer in there than the portable one she had built into her laptop.
Settling behind the machine, she booted Linux and accessed the Network Security Toolkit. After making sure that no one else was logged into the network, she plugged in the wireless card and started scanning. In a couple of seconds, it detected the transmitter and receiver and started intercepting the raw data dump.
“What do we have here?”
She grabbed a big block and started looking through it. Nothing familiar. On a whim, she dumped it through a video player. After a bit of massaging, she saw a picture of the front window of a building. The building she was sitting in. What did this mean?
Someone was spying on the building. But there was some other noise in the picture that caused static. She isolated it and dumped a copy to a nearby laser printer.
It was time for her to play bait for whoever was watching her.
Chapter 13
Ken Brody, the accident specialist and Fifth Finger of the Black Hand, sat in his van and watched the car of US House of Representative Russel Willis, a Colorado democrat, home for the weekend. Never mind that it was parked in front of the lavishly decorated condo he had purchased for his mistress in Boulder. His wife and children, who lived with him in Denver, wouldn't see him until tomorrow. Such were the perks of the leader of the House Finance Committee.
He checked the canister of weaponized fentanyl — usually fentanyl was a very powerful analgesic. It was suspected that the Russians had used a version of it to knock out the terrorists who were responsible for the October 2002 Moscow Theater siege. Several years ago, Brody had read about it and found a pharmacy student who could be bribed to develop it for him. It was too bad that he later died after experimenting with a hallucinogenic compound that he had also brewed up and had walked off the top of a sixteen-story building.