The Bancroft Strategy (39 page)

Now he pressed a trigger on the side of the terminal knob; a hollow trocar of hardened steel extended out from the same cuff that bore the miniature fiber-optic viewer and began to spin. It was like
drilling with a pin. Eventually he maneuvered the head of the remote camera until it protruded through the just-bored hole.

At first, an irritating moiré pattern obscured the image; Belknap adjusted the controls until the Estotek floor came into sharper focus. The image was of a generic-looking office: rectangular desks, black chairs with oval seats and backs, the usual collection of printers, desktop computers, telephone consoles, in/out boxes. He adjusted the snake cam again, moving the head one way and then another until he brought into focus what he was looking for.

Recessed contact switches, unobtrusive and visible only to a trained eye, mounted in the top of the main door frames. Infrared motion detectors: small plastic boxes placed in high-traffic areas—walkways between cubicle clusters, along a long row of windows. The motion detectors would have been activated once the office closed for the evening, and they presented his most immediate challenge.

Belknap recognized the model. They were passive devices, designed to detect changes in temperature. When an infrared-emitting body entered the protected space, the devices would sense it and a flow of electricity within the device would be interrupted, activating the alarm.

He peered again at them. Again, they looked almost like light switches; nothing that would detain a casual glance. A fresnel lens focused infrared radiation through a special filter. The sensor had had two reception elements, which enabled it to correct for signals caused by sunlight, vibration, or ambient temperature changes. Those conditions would affect the two pyroelectric elements simultaneously; a moving body would activate one sensor and then the other in rapid succession.

There was virtually no way that Belknap could descend without triggering the alarm. He would not attempt to.

Belknap busied himself removing the sixteen screws holding together the steel flanges that formed a section of the sturdy floor-supporting grid. Finally, he was able to lift up a two-meter L of steel,
exposing a reticulated lay of fine wiring, like a beaded curtain. The requirements of versatility also made for porosity. Soon a jumble of carpet tiles, flanged bars, and steel pedestal assemblies formed a small heap.

With a few crude nips of a wirecutter, Belknap made a space, then lowered his Gladstone bag down it until it caught a few feet below the floor. Next, Belknap himself wriggled through the wiring, then scuttled around the airflow ductwork and the rigid piping that fed the sprinkler system. In the crawlspace beneath the subflooring he groped around, with just his small penlight to light the way, until he was inches above the ceiling tiles of the floor below, holding on to electrical cables to support his weight. Gently, he lowered himself onto the reverse side of the ceiling panels, spreading his body out on the thin metal frames—an array of T-beams, cross-tees, and suspension wires—in order to diffuse the downward pressure. The ceiling was designed to support a man's weight, since repairmen occasionally had to do work here. By contrast, the drop-in panels were of mineral fiber designed to absorb sound, not force. If he tried to stand up, he would fall through.

Now he reached down and partially unseated a meter-square panel from its frame—one of Estotek's ceiling panels—and opened his leather case. The next phase of the infiltration would be performed by rodents. He withdrew a squirming canvas bag from his leather case, high-pitched squeaks and grunts growing audible as he opened the drawstring top. Now he tipped the bag over. Its contents—four white rats—slipped through the opening left by the unseated drop panel and fell to the floor nine feet below. Then he reseated the panel and maintained a vigil through the tiny snake cam.

On the small camera screen, he watched the vermin racing around the floor, bewildered and disoriented. Then he directed the camera lens toward the nearest motion detector. The soft green light beneath the square fresnel lens had turned red.

The alarm had been triggered.

Belknap's eyes darted between his watch dial and the small digital viewfinder. Forty-five seconds elapsed before anything happened. Then a man in a brown Estotek uniform appeared with a small pistol in one hand, a large flashlight in the other. He peered around, and a long moment passed before a squeak and a flash of fur caught his attention. Cause and effect. First, the motion detector goes off; then a rat appears—and now a second rat flashing into view. The guard issued what was obviously a curse, though not in a language Belknap could understand. He recalled having heard that Estonian was unusually well supplied with expletives. The rats had been fed nothing in the past few hours save chocolate-coated coffee beans: They were caffeinated, even more energetic than usual. As lab specimens, they lacked the skills and instinct at concealment that their feral cousins would have mastered.

Another rat skittered into view; fecklessly, the guard leaped toward it with his thick-soled boots, trying to stomp on it. Belknap was reminded of children who tried to kick the pigeons on a city sidewalk: so close and yet so elusive.

The next part would require exquisite timing. Withdrawing the remaining rat from the tightly cinched canvas sack, Belknap lifted a corner of a ceiling panel and stuck its head through. Obligingly, it squeaked madly. Snipping off a piece of fiber-optic filament, Belknap knotted a length of it to one of the rat's hind legs. He then pushed a few inches of the squirming creature through the small crevice. It clawed the air wildly. Belknap pinched its tail hard to make it squeak.

Now the guard whirled around, saw the creature's small darting head protruding from a loose ceiling tile. A false dawn of comprehension showed on the Estonian's gray, fleshy face: Vermin—perhaps specimens being held by the medical science company on the floor above—had escaped through the ceiling.

“Kurat! Ema keppija! Kuradi munn!”
A flurry of unintelligible imprecations: What couldn't be missed was the frustration and annoyance in the guard's voice. But not, however, alarm or anxiety. It was a
pest-control problem, not a security breach, the Estonian had decided. He disappeared for a couple of minutes and then returned. Belknap knew the standard security protocols well, and if they were being followed, the guard had gone to cancel any central notification. It was a customary two-stage arrangement when live guards were deployed in combination with electronic sensors. The alarm first notified just the guard, who had perhaps four minutes to investigate its cause. If he deemed it an unwarranted alarm—and 90 percent of all such alarms were unwarranted—he would stop the notification from advancing any further. If he failed to do so, the alarm would then be relayed to a remote location. The guard had responded as a well-trained professional should have. He had identified the cause of the false alarm, had temporarily disabled the sensors in the sector, would maintain his own vigil. The appearance of vermin did not constitute a security concern. Exterminators could be called in the morning.

Belknap also knew, now, that only one guard had been stationed there. Had there been a second, the man would assuredly have summoned him, if only to gawk at the spectacle, a reprieve from the tedium of the posting.

The guard was now directly beneath him. He looked like another victim of the Estonian national cuisine. Yet he moved with surprising agility. For a few seconds he stared at the wildly scrabbling rodent. He started leaping up at it, batting at it—inches away from Belknap, who now pushed up the ceiling panel and, clenching a heavy wrench in his right hand, prepared himself for a sudden strike. It happened as if in slow motion. There was a long second in which the guard, having propelled himself into the air, saw the entire panel above his head lift up, saw a man in the shadows. There was a split-second of eye contact between the two men: The guard's face flashed dismay and astonishment and then a fearful sense of the inevitable as the heavy steel in Belknap's hand struck his forehead, concussing him with a dull
thunk.
The guard, knocked senseless, fell limply to the carpeted floor.

Belknap threw down the Gladstone bag and clambered down from the ceiling, swinging from a cross-tee to a desk a couple of horizontal yards away, and then onto the floor. Now he scrutinized the model number of the nearest motion detector. If he remembered its default settings correctly, it would have phased into a five-minute suspension cycle. Two of those minutes had already elapsed.

With almost automatic movements, he pulled on the sensor's white plastic casing, which popped off easily. If it were an old-style system, he would have been able simply to block the lens while it was off—perhaps with a piece of cardboard—and thereby prevent its activation when it was powered up. But the newer models came with blockage detectors and went into alarm mode if they sensed a visual obstruction of that sort. So Belknap set to work with a very small screwdriver. He removed the tiny corner screws that held in place the amplifier and comparator units. Just beneath them he saw four wires running into the device. Two were the alarm-circuit wires, the code 12
VDC
appearing in tiny print on the coated wire—voltage direct current. The two other wires were the ones he needed to manipulate. He stripped back the insulation and twisted them together. Then he reassembled the sensor. He proceeded to the other two sensors in the area and went through the same procedure. When the master control resumed, it would sense normal power, but the sensors would no longer be functional.

The files! Gennady had told him roughly what he should be looking for. But first he had to find them. Assuming they were here in the first place.

The small power diode pulsed on; the system would indicate that the office was alarmed once more. Nervously, he moved an arm in front of the wall-mounted sensor. The green light remained steady. Deactivation had been successful.

The files he was looking for were probably locked in the large windowless space placed at the building core. He approached the door carefully, scrutinizing it carefully. If he had any doubts about it, they
were dispelled by the battery of discreet alarm systems that protected it, beginning with a rubber mat, like a double-length welcome mat, in front of the door. At first he took it as a something to protect the carpet when heavy wheeled carts came in. A closer inspection revealed that it was a pressure mat. A series of metal strips were embedded between two layers of plastic, separated only by an intermittently applied spongy material. Step on the mat and the metal strips would touch, activating an alarm. Belknap pried up the carpet tile next to where the mat ended, and with the help of his penlight identified the pair of wires that led to it. He snipped one of them, rendering the pressure mat useless.

Trickier would be the recessed contact switch, similar to the one on the door leading to the outer corridor. A magnet in the top of the door held a switch in the adjacent frame in closed position. Once the magnet was moved away, the switch opened and the protection loop was broken. Belknap pulled up a chair and stood on it. He ran his fingertips along the smooth painted surface of the metal door frame until he felt a slight change in texture. Tapping with his nails, he confirmed that the hollow metal had given way to a thicker, more solid-sounding steel plate. He retrieved a bottle of acetone from his kit bag and wetted the area with the solvent, scraping away at the paint with a screwdriver until he uncovered the flat screw-heads that kept the door-frame unit in place. The unit had been masterfully concealed beneath putty, sealant, and paint. It was concealed no more.

Now he carefully removed the steel plate that protected the alarm unit and revealed the tiny reed switch, two spring metal strips that were encapsulated in a glass tube, which was kept closed by the presence of the door magnet. With a pair of pliers he swiftly crunched the glass vial and clamped together the two metal reeds physically. Now he wrapped a piece of tape around the tiny metal strips, binding them together. He was just about to start working on the door lock when he had a sudden thought. He had stopped at the first contact switch he found. But might there be others? Now he continued
to feel along the steel frame, tapping with his fingernail. There was indeed a second one.

Dammit!
He cursed the gods and himself, grateful only for the reprieve granted by his second thought. How could he have been so careless? With movements that were more practiced and less tentative on the second go-round, he disabled the second contact switch, and then did a final inspection of the complete door frame before he set to work on the keyway with the tension wrench and rake pick.

Five minutes later the door swung open, revealing an airless space of about fifteen feet square, dominated by a bank of filing cabinets. There was another door frame on one of the inner walls, suggesting a room within a room. But perhaps it only led to a stairwell.

Belknap looked at his watch. So far, the after-hours infiltration had come off almost without a hitch, but the thought made him feel edgier, not more relaxed. Overconfidence could prove fatal; and no real operation ever went entirely smoothly. When things went smoothly, he wondered when the anvil was going to fall.

The cam locks on the steel cabinets connected to a hook-and-latch mechanism and succumbed to Belknap's focused attentions before long. He pulled open the drawers, removed a thatch of papers, began reading through them. Before long, frustration welled up: He was no expert, didn't know what to look for. He wished that Andrea were there to help him decipher the material. Yanking open one drawer after another, he finally found a file labeled
R. S. LANHAM
.

The file was empty. A meaningless name, an empty file—it seemed a parable of futility, mocking his very hopes. The hound was chasing its tail.

After twenty minutes in the files, Belknap found himself fighting off waves of tedium. Yes, Andrea Bancroft should have been there: corporate documents—just her speed. But he forced himself to stay at it, speed-reading through business boilerplate. Only when he reached a tranche of papers stamped
COPY
did he begin to find what he was looking for. These were offshore documents of incorporation, and
his eyes raced across them so swiftly that at first he did not recognize the name
as
a name. As a name of a recognizable person, rather than an arbitrarily named business entity. But there it was: Nikos Stavros.