Checkmate

19

He stepped into the corridor and pressed himself to the far wall. The first camera was twenty feet down the hall, high on the wall. Like the maintenance room, the corridor’s lights were dimmed for the night shift. Small halogen bulbs cast pools of light along the seam between the wall and the ceiling.

He started sliding, eyes fixed on the camera as it finished its scan and began turning back toward him. There would be a blind spot directly beneath the mount. He kept moving: step, slide, step, slide… The camera reached its midpoint. The lens caught a glimmer of halogen light and winked at him. He could hear the hum of the pivot motor.

He stepped beneath the camera mount and froze. “At camera one,” he radioed.

There was an art to the proper use of surveillance cameras, and luckily for him most security personnel either didn’t understand the nuances of it, or were too lazy to bother with it.

Cameras that provided overlapping coverage were usually calibrated one of three ways: synchronized, offset, and random offset. Synchronized was just that, cameras moving in unison; offset staggered camera movements to better cover gaps; random offset used computer algorithms to provide full-area coverage combined with unpredictable movement.

The most common and the easiest to defeat was synchronized, followed by offset. Random offset was a nightmare — and of course this was the method the Burj al Arab employed. Here, in the narrow confines of the hallway where the camera spans were restricted, the problem was negligible, but later, as he penetrated deeper into the hotel, it would require some finesse.

“Blueprint overlay on your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir replied. “I’ve worked out the algorithim patterns. Just follow your traffic lights.”

Sam checked his screen: His next waypoint was a supply closet between this camera and the next. He was tempted to watch the cameras, but he kept his eyes fixed on the OPSAT. On the blueprint, the hall cameras were depicted as solid yellow triangles; as each camera panned, the triangles changed colors — red for stop, green for go.

When the camera above and the next one down turned green, he trotted forward. As he drew even with the supply closet door, it opened and a guard stepped out. He saw Fisher and opened his mouth. Fisher thumb-punched him in the larynx and his mouth snapped shut with a gagging sound. Fisher shoved him back into the closet, followed, and slammed the door shut behind him.

Clutching at his throat, the guard backed into the wall and stood there gasping. Fisher drew his pistol and aimed it the man’s chest. “The pain will pass. When it does, if you shout, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand?”

The guard nodded and croaked out what sounded like a “yes.”

Fisher let him recover, then said, “Turn around.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Do you want me to kill you?”

“No, please…”

“Then turn around.”

The guard did so. Fisher keyed his subdermal and said to Grim, “I’ve got a voice for you.”

“I’m ready.”

Fisher pressed the pistol against the nape of the guard’s neck, then reached over his shoulder and held the OPSAT before his mouth. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

In Fisher’s subdermal, Grimsdottir said, “Got it.” To the guard, Sam replied, “Just that. It’s nap time, pal.” Fisher thumbed the pistol’s selector to DART and shot the guard in the back of the neck. The man let out a groan and toppled forward onto his face. “Napper; clean,” Fisher reported.

What the guard had just given Grimsdottir was a voice print she could now match to the backlog of recordings she’d been collecting from her eavesdropping on the hotel. Though a painstaking process, having a mosaic voice print to play back to the security center would keep anyone from missing an incapacitated guard. For the remainder of the mission, this guard, though unconscious on the floor, would continue to report in as required.

Fisher frisked the guard, but found only pocket litter and a key-card ID badge, which was useless to him. The hotel’s roving patrols were assigned sectors; if this guard’s badge was used anywhere outside his sector, the alarm would be raised.

He rolled the guard’s body into a corner and covered it with a pile of painter’s tarps. He rechecked his OPSAT, then walked to the closet’s opposite wall, felt around until he found what he was looking for, and pried back a hidden access panel, revealing a crawl space roughly two feet by two feet. He crouched down and stared down the length of it.

“Waypoint two,” he radioed.

He crawled inside.

True to the schematics, his NV and IR checks of the crawl space revealed neither cameras nor sensors, and after twenty feet the tunnel ended at a second access hatch. He worked the release pins, then carefully set aside the hatch, crawled through, and pressed himself against the wall. He replaced the hatch and glanced upward. Twelve feet above his head a camera hummed, slowly turning on its mount.

He was now at the lowermost level of one of the Burj al Arab’s six elevators — one of only two that remained inside the structure during their ascent. The other four left their interior shafts at the lobby level and rose along the hotel’s exterior, providing breathtaking views of Dubai, the Persian Gulf, and to the north, Iran.

He stared up the one-thousand-plus feet of the shaft. Lit only by maintenance lights spaced every ten feet, the shaft itself seemed like a skyscraper rising into the night sky. The optical illusion gave him a momentary wave of vertigo. He shook it off and keyed his subdermal. “Waypoint three. Calling the elevator.”

“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “Remember, Sam, you’ll only have twenty seconds.”

“Yep.”

The dozens of cameras located throughout the shaft were equipped with NV, laser-based beam sensors, and infrared cameras. If something moved or gave off heat, it would be detected. Knowing his chances of successfully climbing one thousand feet of elevator shaft while playing cat-and-mouse with the sensors were nil, he’d turned to another rule from the special operators credo: KISS. Keep it Simple, Stupid.

In this case, the simple solution came from the secret vaults of DARPA. Like most DARPA inventions, this one had an official moniker that involved a lot of incomprehensible letters and numbers, and like most DARPA inventions it also had a nickname: Shroud.

Essentially a heat-dissipating and radar-reflective blanket, the Shroud could for short intervals defeat infrared cameras and sensors. There was a catch, however. The user had to remain perfectly still and the coverage lasted only sixty to seventy seconds before his body heat overwhelmed the Shroud’s dissipaters.

Fisher scrolled through the OPSAT’s menu until he reached a screen showing an overhead view of six squares surrounding a central, larger square — the hotel’s six elevators and, at the center, the hotel itself. He tapped one of the squares.

Sam punched “Yes,” then entered his floor number.

Two hundred feet up the shaft he heard a distant buzz, followed by a metallic clank as the car’s gears engaged. An electrical whirring filled the shaft.

As the car dropped toward him, the maintenance lights blinked out one by one as the car passed each floor. Moments later, the car appeared out of the darkness, slid smoothly past his face, and stopped.

“Ready to ride,” Sam radioed. “Work your magic, Grim.”

“Stand by.”

Seven thousand miles away, Grimsdottir would be at her computer, threading her way through the hotel’s security intranet and loading her own algorithm and taking temporary control of the shaft’s cameras.

This was the one and only drawback of security cameras running in random-offset mode. Guards in the security center had no point of reference, no way of knowing whether the cameras were moving as designed, or had been hijacked. It would only be after a camera failed to provide three circuits of complete coverage that the computer would detect the error and sound the alarm. He would need twenty seconds, no more, to get into position.

“Got ’em,” Grimsdottir said.

Fisher stood with his back against the wall, then reached over his head, grabbed the edge of the car’s roof, and chinned himself up. From one of his tac-suit pouches he withdrew the Shroud, unfolded it, then slipped his left hand and both feet into the hemmed pockets, drawing it taut across his back. He laid himself flat on the car’s roof. With his free hand, he scrolled the OPSAT screen:

Sam punched in “Yes,” then “59.” The Shroud wouldn’t conceal his body heat long enough to reach the penthouse level; he’d have to do last floor the hard way.

“Ready, Grim,” Fisher said.

“Releasing cameras to hotel control.”

With a slight shudder, the car started upward.