The Recipient (26 page)

She nodded approvingly as a steady stream of information transferred from the RFID device into the tablet. The system hadn't failed her.

Before the employees had begun arriving, Casey had used the device to scan the centre's own card reading device that was stationed beside the front entrance. She had done this to obtain the cryptographic keys she would need so that the centre's security system would accept the identity card that she was about to replicate.

She had also watched the parking bays for any sign of an Audi that might have belonged to someone inside the centre but no such vehicle had appeared. She kept one eye on the car park now, hoping that it might still show up, but she wasn't particularly confident.

Turning back to the tablet, Casey initiated an algorithm from within the application and waited for it to do its work. It showed her a series of cryptographic keys that she'd retrieved from the card reader. Identifying the correct key, Casey highlighted it with her finger and copied it to the clipboard. She returned to the previous screen to check on the progress of the upload from the RFID sniffer.

A progress bar snaked slowly across the screen from left to right.

“C'mon,” she whispered urgently.

Reaching into her shoulder bag, Casey took out yet another piece of equipment: this time, a rectangular device larger than the reader. It sported a fixed cable that protruded from one end and a credit card-sized slot at the other. She plugged its attached cable into a secondary port on the tablet.

Casey watched the screen and saw a new notification flash up.

‘Card writer detected.'

She looked out through the windscreen, checking her surroundings and hoping that nobody was taking an interest in her.

Finally, a chime sounded on the tablet and she returned to it, carefully reading lines of code on the screen—each of which were accompanied by names. She looked at the assigned credentials for each one to determine their level of clearance within the centre, eliminating all those that fell below the level of administrator.

Her eyes fell across an entry halfway down the screen and they grew wide.

The name accompanying the entry read “Catea.”

She was indeed a senior employee—an
unswiped
senior employee.

“Bingo,” she murmured, taking a white, credit card sized object from the bag. She slipped it into the card writer and waited for it to be registered.

The sound of a dog barking caused Casey to jump in her seat and she jerked her head sideways, her eyes darting through the driver's side window. Instinctively, her breath caught in her throat. An elderly man, dressed in a woollen jacket and cap, approached the car, holding onto the lead of an excited Labrador. It was barking at a pair of swooping magpies. He cursed the dog as he passed in front of the car and yanked on the lead in an effort to bring the dog to heel.

He didn't even look in her direction.

Satisfied that he had passed into the distance and she was alone again, Casey initiated a ‘write' command on the tablet and waited as the system wrote the information to the card. Casey watched it intently until the application chimed, signalling that it had completed its work.

Drawing the card out, she pushed it back in so that she could check her work. The credentials for the card were displayed in the window, complete with a photo image of the card.

Casey smiled broadly at the familiar face on the screen.

‘Josephine Catea. Level 4 clearance. Administration.'

___

Buttoning her suit jacket, adjusting the strap of her handbag and straightening her shoulders Casey approached the centre's entrance, adjusting her stride to ensure that she appeared professional. Just another nondescript employee. The heels clicked noisily on the pavement, echoing against the adjacent walls of the centre. Harsh shocks penetrated the balls of her feet.

She hated heels.

Fingers of nervousness clawed at her the closer she got to the doors. She breathed as evenly as she could. All she had to do was: hope that Catea hadn't found her card, gain entry into the centre, find a computer terminal that she could commandeer and access their intranet. She would then run a search on the file numbers Saskia had scribbled down on the piece of paper.

Should be a piece of cake
, she thought, stepping up to the reader beside the double glass doors.

Should be…

Clutching the card in her hand, Casey waved it in front of the reader and waited. A blue light on the reader flashed once, followed by singular beep and the doors split down in the middle and slid soundlessly aside.

She was in.

Casey scoped her surroundings, noting the presence of several security cameras situated high up on the walls all around her. She dipped her head, just enough so that she could obscure her features.

To her left was a security desk behind a glass window. A large male guard with a handlebar moustache and a severe buzzcut sat at the desk, a newspaper spread out before him. He was munching on a bacon and egg muffin. Directly in front of her was a reception desk, also behind glass. Two staff members were stationed there: a rotund, middle-aged woman with garish spectacles that sat on the edge of her fat nose and a young man in a suit jacket that appeared grossly oversized for his thin frame. On the right of the main desk was a single door marked ‘Administrative Offices' and Casey spied a card reader there. She diverted to that direction.

The security guard looked up at her absently as she passed and flinched as some egg yolk dripped over his hand and down onto his shirt. He cursed himself, looking down as she quickened her step towards the door. Wiping the offending yolk from the belly of his shirt, the guard glanced back up in her direction. He tilted his head and smiled through a mouthful of his breakfast as he admired her legs.

The woman at the desk glanced up from the computer screen she was concentrating on just as Casey lifted her hand to her glasses, shielding her features from view. Her colleague said something to her at that moment and the woman turned in her chair to face him as Casey reached the door. Clutching the ID card in her hand, she brushed it up against the reading device on the door frame.

Here goes.

She closed her eyes, held her breath, and grabbed the door handle.

The woman turned back to look at Casey and was about to call to her.

The reader beeped once and a blue light winked on its panel, then the door's lock released.

Casey slipped through it before the receptionist could say anything. Upon seeing the door open, the receptionist shrugged and returned to her computer screen.

Casey found herself in a large, open office space with the central area occupied by desks and workstations arranged in a grid.

It was busy, with staff sitting at their desks working studiously, making or answering phone calls or concentrating on their computer screens. A couple of groups of three and four people were chatting at different desks further back. To her left and right, flanking the central work area, were individual offices behind floor-to-ceiling glass and blinds that could be raised or lowered as desired. Towards the rear of the office were additional work areas, divided from the main area by cubicle walls.

A couple of people glanced in her direction as Casey entered but nothing about her presence appeared out of place. They returned to whatever it was they were doing.

Now to find a terminal.

Locking her eyes onto the cubicles toward the rear, Casey turned to her left and prepared to walk down the aisle that separated the offices on that side from the workstations in the centre.

A petite young woman stepped in front of her, brandishing a thick stack of manilla folders. The expression on her face hovered somewhere between hope and desperation. Casey blinked.

“Hi,” the young woman greeted in an overtly pained voice. “Are you the temp I asked Gareth for?”

Before Casey could respond, the young woman thrust the stack of folders out at her.

“Thank God!” she crowed. “He's lumped a tonne of data entry onto me and I knew I was just going to collapse underneath it unless I could convince him to find me some extra help.”

Before Casey could speak, the young secretary turned on her heel and gestured hurriedly as she trooped down the aisle toward the rear of the central work area.

“My regular number two has called in sick again,” she continued as Casey juggled the pile of folders in her arms. “Something about her horse being sick and
like
, having to get a vet out to see it,
like
immediately! It's so infuriating.”

Turning into one of the cubicles at the end, the secretary shifted some papers aside on the wraparound desk so that Casey could set the folders down. The cubicle itself was small. Several pictures of a woman posing with a horse had been pinned to the wall and a calendar hung next to them featuring pictures of horses. The secretary leaned to her right to switch on the computer terminal then offered the chair to Casey.

“Take a seat. I'll just boot up for you.”

She dropped her voice and continued speaking out of one corner of her mouth.

“I'll log you in under my credentials but don't tell Gareth. He can be a whiny little toad and I wouldn't want you to have to deal with him.”

Casey sat and waited silently, bobbing her head in concert with the young woman's voice as she continued babbling.

“Oh my God! I totally didn't introduce myself. I'm Cherie, by the way. I'm just a couple of desks down if you need anything. Now, I was assured that you're already familiar with our network.”

Casey nodded as the computer completed its start up and Cherie logged her in.

“There you go,” Cherie said cheerily. “You're all set. Now, can I get you a coffee? We just got this new pod machine and it makes, like twelve different types of coffee, from lattes to mochaccinos and cappuccinos. It totally disgusted Gareth but we overruled him.”

“A latte would be great, thank you,” Casey answered.

Cherie beamed and turned to leave the cubicle before stopping abruptly. She gasped.

“
Oh my God!
I completely forgot! I didn't even ask you your name.”

“It's Josie,” Casey answered with a soft, uneasy chuckle.

“Josie. We have a Josie here in Admin, upstairs. She's nice, but don't ever call her Josie though because she can be a total bitch about—”

“I better get to work,” Casey interrupted her gently.

Cherie blinked then blushed.

“Right. Sure. I'm sorry. I'll…ahh…get that coffee for you.”

Casey waited a few seconds before peering around the edge of the cubicle entrance to make sure that she was clear. She watched Cherie until she had disappeared from view then, she grabbed the leather bag and set it down next to the keyboard.

That was weird.

Taking out her notebook, she opened it to the page where she had secured Saskia's scrawled numbers with a paper clip. Casey navigated to a search pane and typed in the first of the numbers.

‘SX801244'

She hit the Enter key and was confronted with a bold-type, pop-up message.

‘Insufficient Credentials. Please Contact Your System Administrator.'

“Typical,” Casey hissed. She knew this was too good to be true.

Undeterred, Casey patted the pocket of her jacket, feeling the shape of the ID card there. She took it out, listened to see if anyone was coming, then reached into her bag once more for the tablet and the card writer.

She knew that the identification had included an administrator password which was embedded into the card information. It would be a simple matter of reading that data from the tablet in order to find it.

Casey inserted the ID card into the slot of the writer, then brought up the application she'd used to write the card. Within moments, the card's information flashed up onto the screen. Casey leaned into examine the information and spotted a password right away.

She could hear Cherie approaching from the far end of the office. She grabbed one of the thick folders from behind her and put it down on top of the tablet, then cocked her head to listen. As much as she wanted to, Casey resisted the urge to back up from the desk and peer around the edge of the divider.

Turning back to the terminal, she quickly logged out of the system and returned to the entry screen. Lifting the bulging folder, Casey scanned the tablet's display, desperately searching through the information until she found what she was looking for.

She could hear Cherie's high-pitched laugh not more than a dozen feet away.

She stabbed the password into the login and hit ‘Enter.'

The computer flashed up a notification window.

‘
Logging in. Please Wait…'

“You're filthy, Paul!” Cherie cackled from behind the cubicle divider.

She was coming!

Approaching footsteps.

And then she was there. Casey froze.

“Okay,” Cherie said, entering the cubicle and setting a cup down on the desk beside Casey. “I didn't ask you if you wanted sugar, so I just grabbed a couple of sachets. I'm so rude.”

Casey turned in her seat and looked up at Cherie with a gracious smile.

“That's fine. You're very kind.”

Cherie returned Casey's smile with her own then flicked her eyes at the computer's screen.

The intranet window she had logged Casey into was there, a cursor blinking in the search pane.

“Now, do let me know if you get stuck at all,” Cherie said happily. “I'm just a few feet away.”

Casey nodded quickly, nervously tugging at her earlobe.

Cherie stepped back then turned and left. Casey closed her eyes, listened to the heart beating rapidly inside her and willed it to slow down.

Calming herself, she carefully extracted her notebook from underneath the folder and set it down in front of her. She entered the file number into the search pane on screen.