Paranoia (45 page)

“I didn’t want to fuck around, get cheap stuff,” he said. “I got all professional equipment.”

“I guess you had to,” I said. “Even though it’s one-time use.”

“You want me to pick up uniforms?”

“Yeah.”

“What about badges?”

“I’m working on that,” I said.

“Aren’t you nervous?”

I hesitated a moment, thought about lying just to bolster his courage, but I couldn’t. “Totally,” I said.

I didn’t want to think about what might happen if things went wrong, though. Some prime real estate in my brain was now being colonized by worry, obsessively working through the plan I’d come up with after meeting with Seth’s boss.

And yet there was another part of my brain that wanted to just escape into a daydream. I wanted to think about Alana. I thought about the irony of the whole situation—how this calculated scheme of seduction had led down this unexpected path, how I felt rewarded, wrongly, for my treachery.

I’d alternate between feeling crummy, guilty about what I was doing to her, and being overwhelmed by my attachment to her, something I really hadn’t felt before. Little details kept popping into my mind: the way she brushed her teeth, scooping up water from the tap with a cupped hand instead of using a glass; the graceful hollow of her lower back swelling into the cleft of her butt, the incredibly sexy way she applied her lipstick. . . . I thought about her velvet-smooth voice, her crazy laugh, her sense of humor, her sweetness.

And I thought—this was by far the strangest thing—about our future together, a generally scary thought to a guy in his twenties, but somehow this wasn’t at all scary. I didn’t want to lose this woman. I felt like I’d stopped into a 7-Eleven to buy a six-pack of beer and a lottery ticket, and I’d won the lottery.

And because of that, I never wanted her to find out what I was really up to. That terrified me. That dark, awful thought kept popping up, interrupting my silly fantasy, like one of those kids’ clown toys with the weighted bottom that always go
sproing
upright every time you bat them down.

A smudgy black-and-white image would be spliced into my gauzy color fantasy reel—a frame from a surveillance camera: me sitting in my car in the dark parking lot copying the contents of her laptop onto a CD, pressing her keys into the wax, copying her ID badge.

I’d bat back the evil clown doll and there we are on our wedding day, Alana walking down the aisle, gorgeous and demure, escorted by her father, a silver-haired, square-jawed guy in a morning suit.

The ceremony’s performed by Jock Goddard as justice of the peace. Alana’s family’s all in attendance, her mother looking like Diane Keaton in
Father of the Bride
, her sister not as pretty as Alana but sweet, and they’re all thrilled—this is a fantasy, remember—that she’s marrying me.

Our first house together, a real house and not an apartment, like in an old leafy Midwestern town; I was imagining the great house Steve Martin’s family lives in, in
Father of the Bride
. We’re both rich high-powered corporate execs, after all. Somewhere in the background, Nina Simone is singing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” I’m hoisting Alana effortlessly over the threshold and she’s laughing at how cornball and cliché I’m being, and then we boink in every room of the house to initiate the place, including the bathroom and the linen closet. We rent movies together while sitting in bed eating take-out Chinese food from the carton with wooden chopsticks, and every so often I sneak a look at her, and I can’t believe I’m actually
married
to this unbelievable babe.

Meacham’s goons had brought back my computers and such, which was fortunate, because I needed them.

I popped the CD into my computer with all the stuff I’d copied from Alana’s laptop. A lot of it was e-mails concerning the vast marketing potential of AURORA. How Trion was poised to own the “space,” as they say in tech-speak. The huge increases in computing power it promised, how the AURORA chip really would change the world.

One of the more interesting documents was a schedule of the public demonstration of AURORA. It was to happen on Wednesday, four days from now, at the Visitors Center at Trion headquarters, a mammoth, modernistic auditorium. E-mail alerts, faxes, and phone calls were to go out only the day before to all the media. Obviously it was going to be an immense public event. I printed the schedule out.

But I was intrigued, most of all, by the floor plan and the security procedures that all AURORA team members were given.

Then I opened one of the pullout garbage drawers in the kitchen island. Wrapped in a trash bag were a few objects I’d stored in Zip-Loc bags. One was the Ani DiFranco CD I’d left around my apartment, expecting her to pick it up, as she did. The other was the wineglass she’d used here.

Meacham had given me a Sirchie fingerprint kit, containing little vials of latent print powder, transparent fingerprint lifting tape, and a fiberglass brush. Putting on a pair of latex gloves, I dusted both the CD and the wineglass with a little of the black graphite powder.

By far the best thumbprint was on the CD. I lifted that carefully on a strip of tape, put it in a sterile plastic case.

Then I composed an e-mail to Nick Wyatt.

It was addressed, of course, to “Arthur”:

Monday evening/Tuesday morning will complete assignment & obtain samples. Tuesday early morning will hand over at time and place you specify. Upon completion of assignment I will terminate all contact.

I wanted to strike the right note of resentfulness. I didn’t want them to suspect anything.

But would Wyatt himself show up at the rendezvous?

I guess that was the big unanswered question. It wasn’t crucial that Wyatt show up, though I sure wanted it to be him. There was no way to force Wyatt to be there himself. In fact, insisting on it would probably just warn him
not
to show. But by now I knew enough of Wyatt’s psychology to be fairly confident that he wouldn’t trust anyone else.

You see, I was going to give Nick Wyatt what he wanted.

I was going to give him the actual prototype of the AURORA chip, which I was going to steal, with Seth’s help, from the secure fifth floor of D Wing.

I had to give him the real thing, the actual AURORA prototype. For a number of reasons it couldn’t be faked. Wyatt, being an engineer, would probably know right away whether it was the genuine item or not.

But the main reason was, as I’d learned from Camilletti’s e-mails and Alana’s files, that for security reasons, the AURORA prototype had been inscribed with a micromachined identification mark, a serial number and the Trion logo, etched with a laser and visible only under a microscope.

That’s why I wanted him to be in possession of the stolen chip. The real thing.

Because the moment Wyatt—or Meacham, if it had to be—took delivery of the pilfered chip, I had him. The FBI would be notified far enough in advance to coordinate a SWAT team, but they wouldn’t know names or locations or anything until the very last minute. I was going to be in complete control of this.

Howard Shapiro, Seth’s boss, had made the call for me. “Forget about dealing with the bureau chief in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” he said. “Something dicey like this, he’s going to go to Washington, and that’s going to take forever. Forget it. We go right to the FBI—they’re the only ones who’ll play the game at this level.”

Without naming names, he struck a deal with the FBI. If everything came off successfully, and I delivered Nick Wyatt to them, I’d get probation, and nothing more.

Well, I was going to deliver Wyatt. But it was going to be my way.

83

I got into work early on Monday morning, wondering whether this was going to be my last day at Trion.

Of course, if everything went well, this would just be another day, a blip in a long and successful career.

But the chances that everything in this incredibly complicated scheme would go right were pretty small, and I knew it.

On Sunday, I’d cloned a couple of copies of Alana’s proximity badge, using a little machine Meacham had given me called a ProxProgrammer and the data I’d captured from Alana’s ID badge.

Also, I’d found among Alana’s files a floor plan for the fifth floor of D Wing. Almost half the floor was marked with cross-hatching and labeled “Secure Facility C.”

Secure Facility C was where the prototype was being tested.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what was
in
the secure facility, where in that area the prototype was kept. Once I got in, I’d have to wing it.

I drove by my dad’s apartment to grab my industrial-strength work gloves, the ones I’d used when I worked as a window cleaner with Seth. I was sort of hoping to see Antwoine, but he must have gone out for a while. I got this funny feeling while I was there, like I was being watched, but I wrote it off as just your basic free-floating anxiety.

The rest of Sunday, I’d done a lot of research on the Trion Web site. It was amazing, really, how much information was available to Trion employees—from floor plans to security badging procedures to even the inventory of security equipment installed on the fifth floor of D Wing. From Meacham I’d gotten the radio frequency the Trion security guards used for their two-way radios.

I didn’t know everything I needed to know about the security procedures—far from it—but I did find out a few key things. They confirmed what Alana had told me over dinner at the country inn.

There were only two ways in or out of the fifth floor, both manned. You waved your badge at a card reader to get through the first set of doors, but then you had to show your face to a guard behind a bulletproof glass window, who compared your name and photograph to what he had on his computer screen, then buzzed you through to the main floor.

And even then, you weren’t anywhere near Secure Facility C. You had to walk down corridors equipped with closed-circuit video cameras, then into another area set up with not only security cameras but motion detectors, before you came to the entrance to the secure area. That was unmanned, but in order to unlock the door you had to activate a biometric sensor.

So getting to the AURORA prototype was going to be grotesquely difficult, if not impossible. I wasn’t even going to be able to get through the first, manned checkpoint. I couldn’t use Alana’s card, obviously—nobody would mistake me for her. But her card might be useful in other ways once I got onto the fifth floor.

The biometric sensor was even tougher. Trion was on the cutting edge of most technologies, and biometric recognition—fingerprint scanners, hand readers, automated facial-geometry identification, voice ID, iris scans, retina scans—was the next big thing in the security business. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but finger scans are generally considered the best—reliable, not too fussy or tricky, not too high a rate of false rejections or false acceptances.

Mounted on the wall outside Secure Facility C was an Identix fingerprint scanner.

In the late afternoon, I placed a call, from my cell phone, to the assistant director of the security command center for D Wing.

“Hey, George,” I said. “This is Ken Romero in Network Design and Ops, in the wiring group?” Ken Romero was a real name, a senior manager. Just in case George decided to look me up.

“What can I do for you?” the guy said. He sounded like he’d just found a turd in his Cracker Jack box.

“Just a courtesy call? Bob wanted me to give you guys a heads-up that we’re going to be doing a fiber reroute and upgrade on D-Five early tomorrow morning.”

“Uh huh.” Like: why are you telling me?

“I don’t know why they think they need laser-optimized fifty micron fiber or an Ultra Dense Blade Server, but hey, it’s not coming out of my pocket, you know? I guess they’ve got some serious bandwidth-hog applications running up there, and—”

“What can I do for you, Mister—”

“Romero. Anyway, I guess the guys on the fifth floor didn’t want any disruptions during the workday, so they put in a request to have it done early in the
A.M
. No big deal, but we wanted to keep you guys in the loop ’cause the work’s going to set off proximity detectors and motion detectors and all that, like between four and six in the morning.”

The assistant security chief actually sounded sort of relieved that he didn’t have to
do
anything.

“You’re talkin’ the whole darned fifth floor? I can’t shut off the whole darned fifth floor without—”

“No, no, no,” I said. “We’ll be lucky if my guys can get through two, maybe three wiring closets, the way they take coffee breaks. No, we’re aiming for areas, lemme see, areas twenty-two A and B, I think? Just the internal sections. Anyway, your boards are probably going to light up like Christmas trees, probably going to drive you guys frickin’ bonkers, but I wanted to give you a heads-up—”

George gave a heavy sigh. “If it’s just twenty-two A and B, I suppose I can disable those. . . .”

“Whatever’s convenient. I mean, we just don’t want to drive you guys bonkers.”

“I’ll give you three hours if you need it.”

“We shouldn’t need three hours, but I guess better safe than sorry, you know? Anyways, appreciate your help.”

84

Around seven that evening I checked out of the Trion building, as usual, and drove home. I got a fitful night’s sleep.

Just before four in the morning, I drove back and parked on the street, not in the Trion garage, so there wouldn’t be a record of my re-entering the building. Ten minutes later, a panel truck labeled
J.J. RANKENBERG & CO—PROFESSIONAL WINDOW CLEANING TOOLS, EQUIPMENT, AND CHEMICALS SINCE
1963 pulled up. Seth was behind the wheel in a blue uniform with a J.J. Rankenberg patch on the left pocket.