only to certain areas or at certain times.
“OK, Miss Secretary,” he whispered to the card. “Let’s try you at door number two.”
Ferguson slinked through the shadows to the next building, the largest on the site. It had three stories and — most important for Ferguson — a card lock on the door at the rear that wasn’t covered by a video camera, not even one with a broken light. He checked for alarms, then took out his pilfered identity card.
The door buzzed as soon as he put the card into the reader. Ferguson held his breath on the threshold, listening to make sure the place was empty.
Red exit lights and pairs of dull yellow bulbs posted along the ceiling lit the hallway. Each door was made of wood; placards with Korean characters hung next to each. Ferguson photographed the hall and the placards, then chose an office door about midway down the hall. It was locked, and not just with a run-of-the-mill, any- screwdriver-will-do lock, but a Desmo, an eight-pin isolated key tumbler that was almost impossible to pick.
Almost.
Ferguson had to dig deep into his lock-picking tools to take it on, fiddling with a custom-made tension wrench and wirelike spring. The lock gave almost no feedback before suddenly giving way. Ferguson was so surprised that he dropped the screwdriverlike tension wrench on the ground.
“Real quiet, dude,” he whispered, scooping it up. He left the door slightly ajar and slipped inside.
He found himself in an office shared by three people; each had a small desk and his or her own computer. Stealing a hard drive would have been easy, but it would also be pretty obvious.
Pulling one of the computers out, he saw that they were networked, and that the LEDs were flashing. Unhooking it or even just leaving it and booting up might alert a remote system administrator, or at least leave a record of the intrusion.
Ferguson was debating whether the risk was worth it when he heard a sound from the hallway. By the time he got back to the door, footsteps were coming in his direction.
Easing the door back against the jamb, he kept his hand on the knob rather than risking the sound of a click as it snapped into place. Then he took a long, slow breath, pushing the air from his lungs as silently as possible.
Whoever was walking toward him was wearing plastic-soled shoes that squeaked loudly as he walked. Ferguson eased his right hand into his jacket and took out his pepper spray.
Keys jangled.
The steps were next to him.
Then they were past.
Ferguson heard the door to the next office open. The person who’d gone in began to whistle.
He glanced at his watch. It was already quarter to five. The operation had taken him considerably longer than he had thought it would. If he was going to get out to the fence before it got light, he had to leave now.
Ferguson looked back at the room. There were boxes of backup disks next to the PCs. Reasoning that they were less likely to be missed, he helped himself to a couple from each desk, choosing at random since he had no idea what the Korean characters meant.
Outside, light from the next office flooded the corridor. Ferguson got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the doorway, looking up from the bottom to see inside. A man sat with his back to him, facing a computer a short distance away.
Ferguson tiptoed past, stopped to make sure he hadn’t been seen, then continued to the end of the hallway.
He was just about to put his hands on the door’s crash bar when he heard the squeak of the man’s shoes once again.
Ferguson threw himself into the open stairwell to his left. As soon as he did, he realized this was a mistake; a set of vending machines sat on the landing between the floors above. He scrambled down the nearby steps, ducking just out of sight before the man and his squeaking shoes trotted up the steps to the vending machines.
The doors below the stairwell had narrow glass slits on them. Curious about what might be on the bottom level of the building, Ferguson eased down and tried one.
It wasn’t locked. He pulled open the door and entered a vast room of computers. Large mainframes and server units lined the walls and formed clusters around the pillars. Metal cabinets formed low-rising walls at different points in the space, which extended the entire width of the building.
The cabinets were locked, but it was a simple matter to pick them, and as soon as he was sure there weren’t any monitoring devices or alarms, he slid his tools in and opened one up.
Large tape discs, the type used to store and back up massive amounts of data, sat in the cabinet. Most if not all had been there awhile — there was a layer of dust on the bottom row. Ferguson selected one, then closed up the case. He took some photos with his small camera, and went back the way he’d come.
23
Thera rose before dawn, once more unable to sleep. Her roommate’s snores rattled the room, but it was the adrenaline of the mission that was keeping her awake. She wondered about the scientist, and at the same time wanted to be gone, back to Japan and then home.
She’d be back in three months to pick up the tags, and have to go through all of this again. But it’d be much easier then.
Unless Ch’o deserted.
Had they gotten the message? There was no way of knowing.
There’d always be tension, anticipation, adrenaline. She could handle that. It was fear she had trouble with, unfocused fear. But who didn’t?
Dressed and wrapped in her heavy coat, Thera slipped out into the hallway and walked down to the door. The night air was frigid and sky dark. Without even thinking, she took one of the cigarettes from her pocket and began to smoke.
God, I’m addicted, she thought, tossing it to the ground and stamping it out. She took one last look at the overcast sky, then went inside to get a head start on work.
24
Slott thumbed through the preliminary technical report on the soil that Ferguson and Guns had gathered at the South Korean waste site. The report contained several pages of graphs and esoteric formulas as well as a dozen written in almost impenetrable scientific prose, but the data could be summed up in one word:
No plutonium had been found, though the scientists weren’t sure that was because there was none there or because the field equipment they’d taken to Hawaii simply wasn’t strong enough to detect it. A further analysis of the soil would take place in two days at a special CIA lab in California. There, the dirt would be compressed in a chamber and pounded with a variety of radioactive waves in a process one scientist had compared to hightech gold panning. If there were any stray plutonium-239 atoms — actually, there would have to be a few more than
There was one technical caveat. The analysis relied on the fact that anyone trying to hide plutonium would go only so far as necessary to prevent its detection by standard equipment. The nano technology the Agency was using was exponentially more powerful; still, in theory a scientist who was aware of the lower detection threshold might be able to counter it. But if that were the case, Slott reasoned, they wouldn’t have found anything in the first place.
