BETA - Project Avatar, page 36
“You’ll want to go in on the Sunday,” he commented. “Whether tomorrow or some other Sunday—that is, unless you can make inside arrangements and vanish into the crowd, as it were. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t recommend that. However you get in, eventually you’re going to want to disappear from scrutiny at some point, to do whatever it is you wish to do. Ergo, Sunday.”
“Tomorrow would be best,” John said casually, as if suggesting a lunch date.
Sir Arthur shot him a sharp glance, and it occurred to Dee that a lot of the meaning of this conversation was probably hidden underneath the words, in the things that went unspoken. The old man seemed to read volumes into John’s remark: the pressure of pursuit closing in, the urgency of the mission, and a certain desperateness that forced a reckless approach. He nodded once and said, “Ah.”
Sir Arthur stood up slowly and shambled into the other room. There were sounds of rummaging, and a certain amount of muted muttering. At last, he returned, holding a little black USB memory stick. He sat back down and placed it on the side table, next to his tea saucer.
“I am nosy by nature,” he reflected. He meditated on this for a moment, puffing at his pipe, then nodded. “Really quite nosy. And, you see, one of the great attractions of retirement on Grand Cayman is all the interesting mysteries about. There is so much under wraps here.” He afforded himself a little smile. “I like to say that scuba divers come here for the reefs, and idle spies for the secrets.”
Dee and John both smiled politely and glanced at each other, unsure whether they were supposed to respond.
Sir Arthur relit the pipe, taking his time about it. “I have, I confess, made something of a hobby out of the so-called Clearinghouse over the past five years,” he said. “Oh, and you would do likewise, Henley-Wright, if you were old and bored and happened to live just up the road from something so peculiar. And the gossips say such awful things about the place! You never know, one day the Service might start to worry about whatever it is that goes on in there, and drop by to ask me if I know anything helpful. Lord, even the Americans might become curious about the place one day. So, as I say, I’ve made it a practice to gather what little tidbits come my way.”
He reached out a leathery old hand and slowly slid the memory stick across the wooden tabletop. John’s eyebrows rose a bit, and he picked it up, stared at it for a moment, and passed it over to Dee.
“Partial floor plans,” Sir Arthur said, looking up at the ceiling and speaking between big puffs of pipe smoke. “A fair amount of the first floor, anyway, and most of the outbuildings. Part of the basement, though I shouldn’t go down there, if I were you. Rotating security schedules, probable points of closed-circuit monitoring, all that rot. And a few other tidbits, I’ll leave you to sort them out. Of course, it’s all secondhand, you understand. Never been in there, myself. I say, if you do happen to make it in and out alive, I should hope you’ll be a sport and tell me what you see. I have so few visitors these days.”
John smiled at Dee, who could scarcely believe what she was hearing. He said, “What a paragon of the trade you are, Sir Arthur! And, by God, what an incorrigible old snoop!”
The old man puffed in silence for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head. “Yehss,” he agreed, stretching the word out.
“I don’t know where to begin to thank you,” Dee said. “Now, is there anything on this drive that could link it back to you? I can take care of that, I think.”
“No, don’t trouble yourself. It’s quite sterile, as they say. There is something I should bring to your attention, however. That building is booby-trapped—the entire building. So you’ll have to be quite careful how you go about breaching their data security. If you create enough of a bother, the computer will initiate a sequence that brings the whole place down around your ears, with just five minutes’ warning.”
John cleared his throat in a way that suggested skepticism. “Are you sure? That sounds like the sort of poppycock one might spread around to keep burglars off the property. After all, who’d be willing to go into work at a building that was rigged up as a bomb?”
“Hm, fighter pilots, for one,” Sir Arthur quipped. “I used to totter off to work in a bomb every day, when I flew Meteors with the Seventy-seventh. At any rate, it’s perfectly true. If you look in beyond the security fence at the Clearinghouse, you’ll see an orange line painted onto the grass, around the entire internal perimeter. The staff carry out regular drills to make sure they can all run from their stations to somewhere beyond that line on a five-minute warning. After that, implosive charges are supposed to collapse the building, followed by incendiaries that are reputedly hot enough to melt steel. The Yanks are quite serious about not letting the secrets in that building ever reach the light of day.”
Dee and John looked at each other. She said, “Do you know what kind of security breach would set off the self-destruct, Sir Arthur?”
The old man shook his head. “Can’t help you there, my dear. Presumably, it would have to be something fairly dire. After all, the compound has stood there for fifteen years, and it hasn’t blown up yet.”
John gave an easy smile, beaming at each of them in turn. “Well, that’s nothing for us to worry about, I’m sure. We won’t be making any great fuss, will we, Dee?”
“I sure hope not.”
“Of course we won’t! We’ll be in and out of there before anyone has time to raise an eyebrow.”
Chapter 35
Fourteen hours later, John pulled the Bentley up to the curb in the warehouse district at the southeastern edge of George Town. He left the motor running for a few moments, letting the air-conditioning keep the air dry so the windows wouldn’t fog. It was raining outside, a muggy tropical drizzle, and the afternoon was just a few degrees too warm for comfort.
Dee was as nervous as she had ever been in her life. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands, and kept folding them in her lap, then placing them here or there on the car door interior, then nervously checking her layered clothing. She glanced at John, who was scanning the street outside through a tiny, pocket-sized spotting scope.
“You look like you’re actually enjoying this,” she grumbled, as if that were some sort of personal failing.
“Hmm? What’s that?” John didn’t interrupt what he was doing. “Just another day’s work.” He lowered the spotting scope and gave her a disarming grin. “Come, come! Don’t you find all this just a bit bracing?”
She gave him a queasy frown and looked away. “Is that the switch box, up there?”
“That’s it. The periphery of the Clearinghouse compound is on the next block, and all the cable-based telephone lines relay through that box. So we may as well climb on up.”
She looked glumly out the car window at the plain-looking gray metal box, perched high atop a utility pole on the street corner. It being Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood was all but abandoned, with no cars in sight and no one on the sidewalk.
“Doesn’t look like there’s enough room up there for both of us,” she said. “Why don’t I just wait in the car?”
He gave her hand a reassuring pat while she was still looking out the window, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. He pretended not to notice. “Let’s just stick with the plan, shall we? It’s bad enough that we don’t have official uniforms and a phone company truck.”
“And that we’re supposedly doing line repairs on a Sunday.”
“My point exactly. Perhaps we’ll look a bit more official if there are two of us.”
With that, he opened the door and stepped out into the street. Dee paused to take a slow breath, and then followed his lead.
They pulled on orange slickers over their gray coveralls, and threw the hoods up. The rain was a blessing in many ways, including that it justified putting on these slickers, which would cover the telephone company logo missing from their coveralls. John handed Dee a broad leather pole strap, grabbed his toolkit, and the two of them walked over to the telephone pole as nonchalantly as they could, and began spiking their way up.
They reached the top and took positions on opposite sides of the pole, leather straps looped around their waists to let them sit back and see what they were working on. He took out a small bolt cutter and cut the lock that held the box closed. Then, after clamping a folding umbrella onto the line to keep the rain off the wiring, he swung the little door open.
“Great,” Dee said. “An umbrella. That doesn’t look like official phone company equipment.”
“Better than nothing,” he said pleasantly. “You just keep an eye on the street, if you please.”
He was attaching a flat black plastic box about the size of a pocket paperback to the wiring inside the switch box. There were a lot of wires inside, and it took him some time to sort things out. When he was done, he flipped a small switch on the little device, then leaned back to cast an appraising eye on his work.
“This will take a few minutes,” he said. “Nothing really important goes in and out of the Clearinghouse through external land lines, but the lines are protected anyway. So we have to crack a passcode to gain access.”
Dee continued to look nervously up and down the street, but no one was around. To distract herself from her anxiety, she mentally went over the details of the plan one more time.
“Then we call in,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“But not to the main building—to some outbuilding?”
“The accounting shed. A fairly large facility in its own right, but there should only be a skeleton crew working in there today.” He had pulled two little orange telephone receivers from his toolbox and was fastening them to the wiring of the switch box with alligator clips. “My guess is, there are two or three of them in there—probably approved contractors rather than regular military personnel. The security routine to enter the main building is outrageous, so a lot of the trivial work is done in these peripheral buildings.”
She nodded, remembering the file on Sir Arthur’s memory stick outlining the Clearinghouse security procedures. “We’re pretty sure the computers in the accounting shed have full access to the classified database.” She was really saying this to herself for reassurance, since there was no way to be a hundred percent sure. They might well enter the Clearinghouse compound only to find that they were on a fool’s errand.
A green LED on the side of the black plastic box began blinking.
“Tally ho!” John chortled, rubbing his hands. “First round goes to us.”
He handed one of the two telephone receivers to Dee, and then flipped a switch on the side of the black box. They both stood listening to its ring.
“Accounting four seven,” a bored voice said into their ears. “This is Hendricks.”
“Howdy there, Accounting,” John said in a preposterous Texas twang. Dee had to cover her mouth, barely suppressing an involuntary burst of laughter. John had his eyes closed and appeared to be concentrating deeply on getting the accent just right. “This here is General Taylor’s office, calling to confirm that y’all are gonna be at the two o’clock meeting.”
Some muffled cursing at the other end of the line then, “What two o’clock meeting?”
“Hell’s bells, you boys oughta check your e-mail more often!”
“I’ve got my e-mail open right now, in front of me. We weren’t notified about any meeting.”
“Well that ain’t my problem. I just need a confirmation you’re going to be up here in, oh, fifteen minutes.”
“All of us? We’re trying to dig out from under a backlog.”
“Aa-a-all y’all,” John drawled. “And I’d advise that you gentlemen getcher endgates in gear. I reckon the general’s planning on giving you an earful of somethin’ or other.”
Another round of muffled cursing ended with a dial tone as the accountant hung up.
“You’ve got a talent,” Dee said.
“I do like to think so. One day I’ll let you hear my Brooklynese—that always brings down the house. Come along, now, we’re on a tight schedule.”
Dee scrambled down the pole and dropped lightly onto the wet gravel by the roadside while John closed the switch box, packed up his things, and climbed down. They walked briskly back to the car, got in, and began removing their overalls. They wore business suits underneath, without jackets. She pulled two navy blue blazers from the backseat.
John checked his watch, and then turned the ignition and pulled out slowly.
“We’re just on time. Mustn’t rush this. Right about now the accountants should be starting the security routine at the entrance to the main building. With luck, we’ll have twenty minutes before they make it through security, find out that General Taylor isn’t actually waiting for them, and return to their posts.”
Dee’s hands were feeling shaky again. “It’s not going to be enough time.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “So you keep saying, but I think it’ll do.”
“And if not?”
“I suppose we’ll improvise. As long as we’ve made it into the shed, we should be able to think of something. I can divert them while you finish your work. After all, they’re only accountants.”
They came around the corner, and the front gate of a military compound came into view through the haze of rain. Two marines were guarding the gate, and as the car pulled closer, Dee could see at least a half-dozen others lounging in an open shelter inside the fence. Two armored vehicles were in view, and quite a number of guns. By the time John nosed the Bentley up to the barrier, Dee’s heart was pounding in her throat. She was glad she didn’t have to do the talking.
The two sentries signaled them to roll down their windows, and leaned down to stick their heads almost entirely inside the car.
“Agents McCandless and Jameson,” John announced in his Texas accent. He sounded bored—a man with a dull job grudgingly putting in some overtime. “We’re with the internal audit. We’re on the list.”
The guard on John’s side took their ID badges and scrutinized them. “We’ve already admitted everyone that was on today’s list,” he said dubiously.
“We’re on tomorrow’s list,” John told him. “But we’ll get started today, if y’all don’t mind.”
The marine flipped to the next page of his clipboard and ran his finger down the sheet until he found the names. “Working on a Sunday?” he asked.
“Orders are we’ve got to get through this whole audit in a week. I s’pose you boys are gonna be seeing a lot of us.”
The marine handed him back the ID cards. He looked disinterested. “Park it over there, sir. Go straight through those doors and check in at security.”
They drove across the wet asphalt of the broad, nearly empty parking lot, toward the looming brick building in the center of the compound. The place reminded Dee of a penitentiary. It was surrounded by flat expanses of lackluster grass, laced with concrete walkways and low chain-link fences, plus a number of unimaginative outbuildings scattered about the grounds at random.
Halfway across the parking lot, they drove over a conspicuous orange painted line, a foot wide, running around the main building. The line continued right off the edge of the parking lot and onto the grass, disappearing into the rainy mist a hundred yards away.
“Now comes the tricky part,” John said, pulling the car slowly up to a corner parking space a short distance from the security door. His voice was jaunty, but she may have caught a slight waver in it. Not reassuring.
He shut off the engine. “This is the only parking spot that’s suitable for what we’re about to do. No, don’t look around. Remember what you saw on the maps, and try to imagine the route in your head.”
She remembered. From this spot, the car could be seen clearly from the front gate and guardhouse but not from the main door of the building. She followed his lead as he climbed out of the car, braving the sprinkle of rain and leaving the umbrellas behind on the passenger seat. They would need both hands free.
They walked in a broad curve, heading roughly for the main entrance. It was a slightly unnatural path to follow, but it ensured that they were visible from the guardhouse and were seen to be heading for the main building and its security checkpoint. Their path took them onto a wedge of asphalt that was completely blocked from view of the main door. As they came closer to the building’s brick front, they passed behind a line of ornamental evergreens. Now they couldn’t be seen from the guardhouse, either.
John immediately doglegged ninety degrees right, and Dee followed him behind the evergreens and around the corner of the building. She could hear her own ragged breathing. Coming to a low chain-link fence at the end of the shrubbery, they each vaulted it in turn.
They stood for a moment with their backs pressed against the building, surveying one of the back lots. The accounting shed was dead ahead.
“We’re going to be visible for the next couple of minutes,” he told her in measured tones. “We don’t really have a contingency plan for this part. So let’s just brass it out, shall we? On the bright side, I should think that most of the offices on this side of the building might be uninhabited on a Sunday.”
Dee tried to think of some brave rejoinder, but her mouth was too dry to speak. Then John was jogging across the lawn in front of her. He loped along casually, with shoulders hunched, like a man trying to get out of the rain, and yet he was covering the distance very quickly indeed. She chased after him, trying to copy his gait.
Fifteen seconds later, they were standing under the aluminum awning at the side entrance of the accounting shed. They were still perfectly visible from at least a dozen windows in the main building, though surely less conspicuous than while running across the lawn.
John held a small electric screwdriver, with which he zipped out the four bolts holding the faceplate onto the security keypad by the door. He propped the faceplate on the concrete stoop at his feet, then took what appeared to be a cell phone out of his pocket, drew two wire leads out of the back of it, and clipped them to wires inside the wall.
“Tomorrow would be best,” John said casually, as if suggesting a lunch date.
Sir Arthur shot him a sharp glance, and it occurred to Dee that a lot of the meaning of this conversation was probably hidden underneath the words, in the things that went unspoken. The old man seemed to read volumes into John’s remark: the pressure of pursuit closing in, the urgency of the mission, and a certain desperateness that forced a reckless approach. He nodded once and said, “Ah.”
Sir Arthur stood up slowly and shambled into the other room. There were sounds of rummaging, and a certain amount of muted muttering. At last, he returned, holding a little black USB memory stick. He sat back down and placed it on the side table, next to his tea saucer.
“I am nosy by nature,” he reflected. He meditated on this for a moment, puffing at his pipe, then nodded. “Really quite nosy. And, you see, one of the great attractions of retirement on Grand Cayman is all the interesting mysteries about. There is so much under wraps here.” He afforded himself a little smile. “I like to say that scuba divers come here for the reefs, and idle spies for the secrets.”
Dee and John both smiled politely and glanced at each other, unsure whether they were supposed to respond.
Sir Arthur relit the pipe, taking his time about it. “I have, I confess, made something of a hobby out of the so-called Clearinghouse over the past five years,” he said. “Oh, and you would do likewise, Henley-Wright, if you were old and bored and happened to live just up the road from something so peculiar. And the gossips say such awful things about the place! You never know, one day the Service might start to worry about whatever it is that goes on in there, and drop by to ask me if I know anything helpful. Lord, even the Americans might become curious about the place one day. So, as I say, I’ve made it a practice to gather what little tidbits come my way.”
He reached out a leathery old hand and slowly slid the memory stick across the wooden tabletop. John’s eyebrows rose a bit, and he picked it up, stared at it for a moment, and passed it over to Dee.
“Partial floor plans,” Sir Arthur said, looking up at the ceiling and speaking between big puffs of pipe smoke. “A fair amount of the first floor, anyway, and most of the outbuildings. Part of the basement, though I shouldn’t go down there, if I were you. Rotating security schedules, probable points of closed-circuit monitoring, all that rot. And a few other tidbits, I’ll leave you to sort them out. Of course, it’s all secondhand, you understand. Never been in there, myself. I say, if you do happen to make it in and out alive, I should hope you’ll be a sport and tell me what you see. I have so few visitors these days.”
John smiled at Dee, who could scarcely believe what she was hearing. He said, “What a paragon of the trade you are, Sir Arthur! And, by God, what an incorrigible old snoop!”
The old man puffed in silence for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head. “Yehss,” he agreed, stretching the word out.
“I don’t know where to begin to thank you,” Dee said. “Now, is there anything on this drive that could link it back to you? I can take care of that, I think.”
“No, don’t trouble yourself. It’s quite sterile, as they say. There is something I should bring to your attention, however. That building is booby-trapped—the entire building. So you’ll have to be quite careful how you go about breaching their data security. If you create enough of a bother, the computer will initiate a sequence that brings the whole place down around your ears, with just five minutes’ warning.”
John cleared his throat in a way that suggested skepticism. “Are you sure? That sounds like the sort of poppycock one might spread around to keep burglars off the property. After all, who’d be willing to go into work at a building that was rigged up as a bomb?”
“Hm, fighter pilots, for one,” Sir Arthur quipped. “I used to totter off to work in a bomb every day, when I flew Meteors with the Seventy-seventh. At any rate, it’s perfectly true. If you look in beyond the security fence at the Clearinghouse, you’ll see an orange line painted onto the grass, around the entire internal perimeter. The staff carry out regular drills to make sure they can all run from their stations to somewhere beyond that line on a five-minute warning. After that, implosive charges are supposed to collapse the building, followed by incendiaries that are reputedly hot enough to melt steel. The Yanks are quite serious about not letting the secrets in that building ever reach the light of day.”
Dee and John looked at each other. She said, “Do you know what kind of security breach would set off the self-destruct, Sir Arthur?”
The old man shook his head. “Can’t help you there, my dear. Presumably, it would have to be something fairly dire. After all, the compound has stood there for fifteen years, and it hasn’t blown up yet.”
John gave an easy smile, beaming at each of them in turn. “Well, that’s nothing for us to worry about, I’m sure. We won’t be making any great fuss, will we, Dee?”
“I sure hope not.”
“Of course we won’t! We’ll be in and out of there before anyone has time to raise an eyebrow.”
Chapter 35
Fourteen hours later, John pulled the Bentley up to the curb in the warehouse district at the southeastern edge of George Town. He left the motor running for a few moments, letting the air-conditioning keep the air dry so the windows wouldn’t fog. It was raining outside, a muggy tropical drizzle, and the afternoon was just a few degrees too warm for comfort.
Dee was as nervous as she had ever been in her life. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands, and kept folding them in her lap, then placing them here or there on the car door interior, then nervously checking her layered clothing. She glanced at John, who was scanning the street outside through a tiny, pocket-sized spotting scope.
“You look like you’re actually enjoying this,” she grumbled, as if that were some sort of personal failing.
“Hmm? What’s that?” John didn’t interrupt what he was doing. “Just another day’s work.” He lowered the spotting scope and gave her a disarming grin. “Come, come! Don’t you find all this just a bit bracing?”
She gave him a queasy frown and looked away. “Is that the switch box, up there?”
“That’s it. The periphery of the Clearinghouse compound is on the next block, and all the cable-based telephone lines relay through that box. So we may as well climb on up.”
She looked glumly out the car window at the plain-looking gray metal box, perched high atop a utility pole on the street corner. It being Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood was all but abandoned, with no cars in sight and no one on the sidewalk.
“Doesn’t look like there’s enough room up there for both of us,” she said. “Why don’t I just wait in the car?”
He gave her hand a reassuring pat while she was still looking out the window, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. He pretended not to notice. “Let’s just stick with the plan, shall we? It’s bad enough that we don’t have official uniforms and a phone company truck.”
“And that we’re supposedly doing line repairs on a Sunday.”
“My point exactly. Perhaps we’ll look a bit more official if there are two of us.”
With that, he opened the door and stepped out into the street. Dee paused to take a slow breath, and then followed his lead.
They pulled on orange slickers over their gray coveralls, and threw the hoods up. The rain was a blessing in many ways, including that it justified putting on these slickers, which would cover the telephone company logo missing from their coveralls. John handed Dee a broad leather pole strap, grabbed his toolkit, and the two of them walked over to the telephone pole as nonchalantly as they could, and began spiking their way up.
They reached the top and took positions on opposite sides of the pole, leather straps looped around their waists to let them sit back and see what they were working on. He took out a small bolt cutter and cut the lock that held the box closed. Then, after clamping a folding umbrella onto the line to keep the rain off the wiring, he swung the little door open.
“Great,” Dee said. “An umbrella. That doesn’t look like official phone company equipment.”
“Better than nothing,” he said pleasantly. “You just keep an eye on the street, if you please.”
He was attaching a flat black plastic box about the size of a pocket paperback to the wiring inside the switch box. There were a lot of wires inside, and it took him some time to sort things out. When he was done, he flipped a small switch on the little device, then leaned back to cast an appraising eye on his work.
“This will take a few minutes,” he said. “Nothing really important goes in and out of the Clearinghouse through external land lines, but the lines are protected anyway. So we have to crack a passcode to gain access.”
Dee continued to look nervously up and down the street, but no one was around. To distract herself from her anxiety, she mentally went over the details of the plan one more time.
“Then we call in,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“But not to the main building—to some outbuilding?”
“The accounting shed. A fairly large facility in its own right, but there should only be a skeleton crew working in there today.” He had pulled two little orange telephone receivers from his toolbox and was fastening them to the wiring of the switch box with alligator clips. “My guess is, there are two or three of them in there—probably approved contractors rather than regular military personnel. The security routine to enter the main building is outrageous, so a lot of the trivial work is done in these peripheral buildings.”
She nodded, remembering the file on Sir Arthur’s memory stick outlining the Clearinghouse security procedures. “We’re pretty sure the computers in the accounting shed have full access to the classified database.” She was really saying this to herself for reassurance, since there was no way to be a hundred percent sure. They might well enter the Clearinghouse compound only to find that they were on a fool’s errand.
A green LED on the side of the black plastic box began blinking.
“Tally ho!” John chortled, rubbing his hands. “First round goes to us.”
He handed one of the two telephone receivers to Dee, and then flipped a switch on the side of the black box. They both stood listening to its ring.
“Accounting four seven,” a bored voice said into their ears. “This is Hendricks.”
“Howdy there, Accounting,” John said in a preposterous Texas twang. Dee had to cover her mouth, barely suppressing an involuntary burst of laughter. John had his eyes closed and appeared to be concentrating deeply on getting the accent just right. “This here is General Taylor’s office, calling to confirm that y’all are gonna be at the two o’clock meeting.”
Some muffled cursing at the other end of the line then, “What two o’clock meeting?”
“Hell’s bells, you boys oughta check your e-mail more often!”
“I’ve got my e-mail open right now, in front of me. We weren’t notified about any meeting.”
“Well that ain’t my problem. I just need a confirmation you’re going to be up here in, oh, fifteen minutes.”
“All of us? We’re trying to dig out from under a backlog.”
“Aa-a-all y’all,” John drawled. “And I’d advise that you gentlemen getcher endgates in gear. I reckon the general’s planning on giving you an earful of somethin’ or other.”
Another round of muffled cursing ended with a dial tone as the accountant hung up.
“You’ve got a talent,” Dee said.
“I do like to think so. One day I’ll let you hear my Brooklynese—that always brings down the house. Come along, now, we’re on a tight schedule.”
Dee scrambled down the pole and dropped lightly onto the wet gravel by the roadside while John closed the switch box, packed up his things, and climbed down. They walked briskly back to the car, got in, and began removing their overalls. They wore business suits underneath, without jackets. She pulled two navy blue blazers from the backseat.
John checked his watch, and then turned the ignition and pulled out slowly.
“We’re just on time. Mustn’t rush this. Right about now the accountants should be starting the security routine at the entrance to the main building. With luck, we’ll have twenty minutes before they make it through security, find out that General Taylor isn’t actually waiting for them, and return to their posts.”
Dee’s hands were feeling shaky again. “It’s not going to be enough time.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “So you keep saying, but I think it’ll do.”
“And if not?”
“I suppose we’ll improvise. As long as we’ve made it into the shed, we should be able to think of something. I can divert them while you finish your work. After all, they’re only accountants.”
They came around the corner, and the front gate of a military compound came into view through the haze of rain. Two marines were guarding the gate, and as the car pulled closer, Dee could see at least a half-dozen others lounging in an open shelter inside the fence. Two armored vehicles were in view, and quite a number of guns. By the time John nosed the Bentley up to the barrier, Dee’s heart was pounding in her throat. She was glad she didn’t have to do the talking.
The two sentries signaled them to roll down their windows, and leaned down to stick their heads almost entirely inside the car.
“Agents McCandless and Jameson,” John announced in his Texas accent. He sounded bored—a man with a dull job grudgingly putting in some overtime. “We’re with the internal audit. We’re on the list.”
The guard on John’s side took their ID badges and scrutinized them. “We’ve already admitted everyone that was on today’s list,” he said dubiously.
“We’re on tomorrow’s list,” John told him. “But we’ll get started today, if y’all don’t mind.”
The marine flipped to the next page of his clipboard and ran his finger down the sheet until he found the names. “Working on a Sunday?” he asked.
“Orders are we’ve got to get through this whole audit in a week. I s’pose you boys are gonna be seeing a lot of us.”
The marine handed him back the ID cards. He looked disinterested. “Park it over there, sir. Go straight through those doors and check in at security.”
They drove across the wet asphalt of the broad, nearly empty parking lot, toward the looming brick building in the center of the compound. The place reminded Dee of a penitentiary. It was surrounded by flat expanses of lackluster grass, laced with concrete walkways and low chain-link fences, plus a number of unimaginative outbuildings scattered about the grounds at random.
Halfway across the parking lot, they drove over a conspicuous orange painted line, a foot wide, running around the main building. The line continued right off the edge of the parking lot and onto the grass, disappearing into the rainy mist a hundred yards away.
“Now comes the tricky part,” John said, pulling the car slowly up to a corner parking space a short distance from the security door. His voice was jaunty, but she may have caught a slight waver in it. Not reassuring.
He shut off the engine. “This is the only parking spot that’s suitable for what we’re about to do. No, don’t look around. Remember what you saw on the maps, and try to imagine the route in your head.”
She remembered. From this spot, the car could be seen clearly from the front gate and guardhouse but not from the main door of the building. She followed his lead as he climbed out of the car, braving the sprinkle of rain and leaving the umbrellas behind on the passenger seat. They would need both hands free.
They walked in a broad curve, heading roughly for the main entrance. It was a slightly unnatural path to follow, but it ensured that they were visible from the guardhouse and were seen to be heading for the main building and its security checkpoint. Their path took them onto a wedge of asphalt that was completely blocked from view of the main door. As they came closer to the building’s brick front, they passed behind a line of ornamental evergreens. Now they couldn’t be seen from the guardhouse, either.
John immediately doglegged ninety degrees right, and Dee followed him behind the evergreens and around the corner of the building. She could hear her own ragged breathing. Coming to a low chain-link fence at the end of the shrubbery, they each vaulted it in turn.
They stood for a moment with their backs pressed against the building, surveying one of the back lots. The accounting shed was dead ahead.
“We’re going to be visible for the next couple of minutes,” he told her in measured tones. “We don’t really have a contingency plan for this part. So let’s just brass it out, shall we? On the bright side, I should think that most of the offices on this side of the building might be uninhabited on a Sunday.”
Dee tried to think of some brave rejoinder, but her mouth was too dry to speak. Then John was jogging across the lawn in front of her. He loped along casually, with shoulders hunched, like a man trying to get out of the rain, and yet he was covering the distance very quickly indeed. She chased after him, trying to copy his gait.
Fifteen seconds later, they were standing under the aluminum awning at the side entrance of the accounting shed. They were still perfectly visible from at least a dozen windows in the main building, though surely less conspicuous than while running across the lawn.
John held a small electric screwdriver, with which he zipped out the four bolts holding the faceplate onto the security keypad by the door. He propped the faceplate on the concrete stoop at his feet, then took what appeared to be a cell phone out of his pocket, drew two wire leads out of the back of it, and clipped them to wires inside the wall.
