Chain of Evidence

He’s alive. Thank god, Dart thought as he reached down and ripped the man’s credit-card-size pass from where it was clipped to his pocket. Dart flipped it over, establishing that it did, in fact, carry a magnetic stripe.

He had one shot, he realized. After that, they would block use of this card as well.

“Hold it! Stay where you are!” roared a voice from the far end of the hall.

Dart came to his feet and charged through the door and into the stairway. Down or up? he debated. His legs carried him up.

Behind him, in the hallway, he heard the fast-paced running of the guard coming in hot pursuit.

In his left ear he heard Ginny. “We gotta get this happening, Dart. We’re running out of time. And I mean fast.”

Dart ran all the way up to the top of the stairs and through to the hall, attempting to slow down his thoughts and concentrate. His adrenaline was his biggest enemy.

Using the guard’s card to enter a room would alert security to his location, and would, in turn, limit his chance to do what had to be done. It gave him an idea.

He slid the stolen card into the first security box he encountered. The light turned green. Dart spun the doorknob, threw the door open, and then quickly pulled it shut. He ran to the next security box, the next door, and followed the same procedure. And the next. One eye trained nervously on the fire stairs through which he had just come, he crossed the hall and used the card on two more offices, blocking the first with a pen to keep it from closing. The security computer would now show six offices accessed.

Backtracking, Dart entered through the door that he had blocked by the pen. He could hear the security man’s footfalls charging up the fire stairs. He had only a few seconds …

With the door open, he shoved his stolen card into the reader and began violently rocking the card back and forth. The sound of the feet stopped, Dart guessing the guard was standing immediately on the other side but was being more cautious than his partner below. Dart continued to wiggle the security card. It cracked along the left edge. With one tremendous effort, Dart tore the card straight across, leaving a significant piece of it down inside the reader, to prevent another card from being inserted.

He pushed the door firmly shut just as he heard the fire stairs door whine open. The guard was on the sixth floor with him.

Dart slipped into the first chair that fronted a terminal. He touched the space bar, and the screen saver cleared.

“Go,” he said to Ginny.

A voice interrupted and instructed, “The tiger’s in the garden.” Terry Proctor had arrived. Dart felt a chill run through him, right into his bowels. It was a huge risk for Proctor to come here in person, illustrating to Dart just how desperate the man was.

Dart pulled out the cellular, hoping for privacy-getting off the police frequency-pushed RECALL and SEND and a moment later, Ginny answered. “We’ve got less than two minutes. Now listen carefully …”

Level by level, Ginny steered Dart through the proper key combinations and necessary passwords. To ensure that Dart was on track, Ginny kept repeating anxiously, “What’s the title line? What’s the title line?” Dart would read the uppermost title and await the next instruction.

Out in the hallway, Dart heard the security guard open a door and then silence. He’ll have to search every office, Dart thought, realizing he had bought himself some time.

He could picture the operation continuing outside. Proctor’s arrival had triggered a third phase, independent of Dart: The lookout confirmed that Proctor had entered; the ERT team, dressed all in black, was presently scaling the walls of the compound, on their way to sealing the building’s exits. Proctor would be trapped.

This changed the dynamics-there was no predicting the behavior of a cornered animal.

“Are you listening?” an almost hysterical Ginny asked. She said, “L-A-T-E-R-I-N-5. Did you get that?”

Dart typed it in and hit the ENTER KEY.

The cover page of the clinical trial appeared on his screen. Dart felt a huge wash of relief. It was dated fourteen months earlier.

“The file is seventy-six pages long,” Ginny told him.

He heard a banging behind-the security guard was at his door.

“I’m not going to get out of here with this disk,” Dart informed her, realizing his situation. He had a disk in his pocket on which he was supposed to record the information; that seemed impossible now. After a long beat of silence, he asked, “Are you there?”

In his left ear he heard the dispatcher in the command van announce, “The garden is surrounded.” The ERT team was in place.

The security guard’s deep voice attempted to whisper a radioed request, but Dart overheard it through the door: “I need a master key, ASAP. Third floor.”

“Okay,” Ginny said into the cellular, “here’s what we’re going to do.” A fraction of a second later she snapped, “Oh shit, hang on. You’ve got visitors.”

Glancing toward the door, and knowing that the security guard was coming through it any second, Dart said, “I can’t hang on. There’s no time.”

“Mark the complete text. I’ll get back to you.”

“Ginny?” Dart shouted into the phone.

There was no answer.

Ginny’s second laptop alerted him the moment Martinson’s password was used to log on to the system. Many of the commonly used security soft-wares prevented the duplication of a password if one person was presently on the system. Ginny had hoped that was the case-that by Dart already being on the network, Martinson, or whomever Martinson had called, would be denied access. To her horror, the system allowed this other person access onto the network.

Dart guessed that this person was Terry Proctor and that he might even be in the lobby now, following Martinson’s instructions to erase the files.

Ginny felt helpless. The screen followed the intruder’s every move. He traveled past the main menu and along the route Ginny now knew only too well. In a matter of thirty to sixty seconds, the intruder would be on top of Dart; how the system would perform was anybody’s guess. Ginny’s guess was that it would freeze, locking up, and that only the system operator would be able to correct it. And the SYSOP worked for Martinson, which meant the files would never be seen again.

Dart couldn’t copy the text to a disk because the disk might be confiscated by the security guards and destroyed.

It left Ginny only one choice. Using a modem line, she was going to have to attempt to raid the system’s security firewall a second time, attempting to avoid her earlier mistake.

She picked up the phone and said to Dart, “Is the text marked?”

“I’m ready,” Dart said into the phone. He heard the sound of someone running. The master key-a real key, not some security card-was seconds away from being delivered.

Ginny said, “Go to the Edit menu. Select Cut.”

“Cut?” Dart barked. “You mean copy!”

“I said cut, Detective. Do it now.”

“But I’ll lose the file!” Dart protested.

“Edit. Cut!” Ginny ordered. “Do it now!”

Ginny’s eyes widened as she followed the activity on the second laptop. She watched as Proctor typed L-A-T …

“This is not up for discussion. Do it fucking now!”

Dart’s index finger hesitated above the button on the computer’s mouse. He felt a bead of sweat trickle down his jaw. He heard the key in the door. And then he heard that same key turn.

Cut would make the blocked text disappear. Does she know what she’s doing?

“Now!” he heard repeated in his ear.

His index finger punched the button automatically and the seventy-six pages of clinical trial reports