stairs.
“I’ll just wait for someone to come by and slip in with them,” said Lia.
“We chose this lab because there’s hardly anyone who uses it,” said Telach.
“So open the door for me,” said Lia.
“We can’t without the tag.”
“Right,” snapped Lia, but when she reached the door it did indeed fail to open. A metal shield prevented anyone from slipping a nail file into the latch and prying it open — which would have been Lia’s next choice. Before she could decide on Plan C, she spotted someone coming down the hallway toward the door.
“Rarely used, huh?” she muttered to the runner as she reversed course and started back up toward the stairs. She turned into the stairway as the person cleared the door, then waited on the steps. As the man — a twenty-five-year-old doctoral candidate who specialized in the study of RNA replication — turned into the stairwell, Lia skipped down and collided with him.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, falling against him and then away, her blouse somehow popping open in the process.
“Sorry,” said the Ph.D. candidate.
Flustered, Lia helped him up, apologized, slipped down herself, scooped up a folder that had fallen, apologized, laughed at herself, and continued quickly to the automatic door — which opened thanks to the man’s ID card, which Lia had palmed.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” said the man, trotting toward her.
Lia turned at the door. “Oh my God,” she said, staring at the folders in her hands.
She was still unbuttoned. Her bra, not nearly as sensible as her panties, provided a more than ample diversion as she dropped the folder on the ground. His badge tumbled with it; she apologized again, retreating down the lab hallway.
“Smooth,” said Rockman in her ear.
“Never underestimate the power of Intimate Moments,” she said.
“Or male lust,” said Telach.
“You even got me hot,” said Rockman.
“Before you melt down, tell me which of these doors I want,” she said.
“Any one on the left,” he told her. “Um, better get moving — the guys you kneed in the courtyard are at the supervisor’s desk.”
“I didn’t knee anyone,” said Lia, opening the door into a long, narrow room dominated by flat-panel computer displays mounted on benchlike desks parallel to the hallway. Lia walked to the back of the room, remembering the layout she had seen on her computer. She entered a second room, where a row of servers sat behind a locked panel. Ignoring the servers, she went to a PC at the far end, sat at the chair in front of it, and pulled off her right shoe. She removed a small keylike device with a USB plug from the cavity below the heel. The plug’s USB interface, common on all PC-style computers, allowed the hardwired program on the device easy and immediate access to any machine it was plugged into. The Desk Three ops called the device a dongle. They had named it after software protection devices that plugged into early computers. The name was easier to use than the official nomenclature, which referred to the device as the “Universal Access Interface, A54, WIN mod 2, 3.7.”
After placing the dongle into the proper slot, she hit the keys to reboot the computer; as soon as the PC checked the USB drive the worm program lodged in her dongle slipped inside the system.
“So?” she asked the Art Room.
“Give us a minute,” said Telach.
“I’d rather not be caught here,” said Lia.
“Odd time to start worrying about that,” said Telach.
“I do have a plane to catch.”
“These things take time.”
“Guards in the hallway,” warned Rockman.
Lia ducked down, waiting while the NSA-written code infiltrated the lab’s computer system. The system was physically isolated from the outside, unlike the other systems at the lab, which had been compromised by Desk Three earlier. The small device Lia had plugged into the port was now communicating with the Art Room via the com system contained in Lia’s clothes. The physical compromise of the system was not without risk — the agent might be caught, after all — but it would supply the Art Room with a complete copy of the data on the hard drives.
“Okay,” said Rockman. “Go — they’re going for your rest room upstairs. Go. We’re set here.”
Lia pulled the device from its socket and stomped on it, crushing it beyond recognition or use. Its memory had already been erased, and it was now just a useless piece of silicone and metal, which would be unnoticed in the garbage. She found an empty soda can and threw it inside, shocked that the scientists didn’t recycle. Then she made her way outside the hall, where she once again confronted the closed door.
“Can you take the door out for me?” she asked Rockman.
“The alarms will go off. They’ll lock down.”
“Didn’t you just tell me we were in a hurry?”
“You want the video cameras off, too?”
“Not yet,” she told him, since that would mean he wouldn’t be able to see what the guards were doing.
The lights in the facility blinked off. Lia grabbed at the door, pulling it open as the emergency beams came on. The lights came back, but a fire alarm was sounding. Lia trotted up the steps, intending to either find her way back to the roof through the mechanical section or go outside with the rest of the scientists, then slip away. But just as she reached the main floor hallway, one of the guards she had kneed earlier appeared near the doorway, helping herd people out of the building.
Ducking her five-four frame behind two researchers in long white lab coats, Lia pretended to sneeze as she passed by the door. The guard said something as Lia slipped past, but she didn’t hang around to see if he was referring to her. She made it outside, walking quickly from the bricked area to a gravel walkway that skirted around the comer of the building. She turned the comer and quickened her pace, aware that she could be seen on the surveillance cameras. She retrieved the cigarette pack, squeezing one of the cigarettes to make it look like a marijuana joint. With the garbage pails in sight just at the edge of the black spot in the surveillance net, she stopped, made a show of looking around, and then lit up. She stepped out of the camera area, tossed the pseudo- blunt, and ran toward the cans and her backpack. She’d leave the belt; its function wouldn’t be obvious, and as far as she was concerned it wasn’t worth the risk retrieving it.
As she was unzipping the ruck to retrieve her jacket, she heard the security Jeep approaching. She pulled out the cigarette pack and took out the last cigarette, lighting it just as the Jeep pulled up.
“Excuse me, ma’ am,” said one of the security people from the truck.
Lia turned around, holding the cigarette out as if she were embarrassed to be discovered. There were two guards in the truck, a man and a woman.
“You really have to be back in the gravel area,” said the man.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hold on a second,” said the woman as Lia started away. “Who are you and where’s your badge?”
“Corina Jacobs,” whispered Rockman in her ear. He had undoubtedly chosen the name from a roster of legitimate visitors, but Lia realized it was an unfortunate choice — she was Asian-American, and she undoubtedly didn’t look anything like a Corina or a Jacobs.
Then again, she didn’t look like a DeFrancesca, either.
“Jacobs.” Lia patted her blouse as if looking for her name tag. “Must’ve left my jacket inside.”
“Jacobs?” said the woman.
“I was adopted,” said Lia. That much of her story was true, though the particulars she spun from it now were fiction. “Chinese Jew, New York City, over-the-hill hippies, yada-yada-yada. Pretty interesting around the holidays. Let’s. not tell anyone I smoke, okay?” She stomped on the cigarette. “Please?”
The name was on the list the guards had; Lia saw the woman frown when she spotted it.
“That’s how I got into viruses,” said Lia. She walked toward the truck. “Because, see, my birth mother was HIV positive, which was why I was put up for adoption. I think she might have been a prostitute or something.”
