House on Fire

47

At four thirty that afternoon, cars were streaming out of the Phoe- nicia Health Sciences parking lot. I was headed in the opposite direction. I found a space in the visitors’ lot, grabbed my trusty metal clipboard and the Boscloner device, in its laptop bag.

I was wearing a suit and no tie — I’d noticed on my last visit that ties were rare at Phoenicia — and a pair of heavy black-framed glasses. The clipboard was key. It made you look official, like you belonged wherever you were.

I approached the silvery, modernistic building. I passed through a revolving door into a marble-walled lobby, saw the long marble reception desk, saw turnstiles, people hustling through them and exiting the building, leaving for the day. I looped around the lobby, at one point taking a picture of the big Phoenicia logo behind the reception desk (but actually capturing an image of the security guard in his gray uniform).

I stood by the revolving doors, examining my clipboard, generally standing in the way.

And letting the Boscloner do its thing. Stealing the creds, as the expression goes — the credentials. Every time anyone with a Phoenicia Health Sciences security badge passed within three feet of me, it was recording a long series of numbers associated with their badge. All the metadata. I’d turned off the notification sounds on my phone, so it was doing it silently.

I stood there as long as I dared, recording badge numbers and observing security. It seemed fairly tight. No one could just come in and enter the building. You had to either have an RFID card or be issued a temporary one, as a visitor. After about five minutes, it seemed long enough. If everything was working right, I had captured the data off several dozen badges. Any one of them would get me past the turnstiles and into the building itself. But beyond that, I had no idea what level of access they’d get me. How close to the executive suites.

With a final glance at my clipboard, I turned around and entered one of the revolving doors and left the building.

Then I walked around the building all the way to the back, where the loading dock was located.

Sure enough, there was an outdoor smoking area next to it. Smokers, in our censorious times, are often relegated to undesirable locations, like next to a loading dock.

A couple of smokers stood far apart from each other on a freshly paved asphalt square, near a parking area for trucks, on either side of the loading dock. The dock was still operating; the doors were open. I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes before five o’clock. Still early in the evening rush hour.

The two smokers were a man and a woman, apparently unconnected to each other. They could have been executives, or lab techs, or administrative assistants. You couldn’t tell from the way they were dressed. I took out a pack of Marlboros, shook one out. Put it in my mouth. Made a show of feeling my pockets, looking for a match or a lighter. Then I approached the woman, who looked to be in her forties. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and said, “Could I bum a light?”

She said, “I think I can do that,” in a heavy smoker’s rasp, pulled out a cheap Bic lighter, and handed it to me.

While my Boscloner captured the data off her ID badge, I looked at it, clipped to her purse over her left shoulder, and mentally recorded its appearance. Light blue with Phoenicia Health Sciences’ logo and her last name in big letters on top — o’grady — and her first name on the bottom: Darlene.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” she replied with a pleasant smile.

We stood, smoking for a while in companionable silence. If I needed any intel about the company, now would be the right time to strike up a casual conversation. But all I needed was her badge data.

A white van pulled up nearby, and a number of navy-blue-uniformed men and women got out. One of them opened the van’s rear doors and began taking out mops and buckets and distributing them. The cleaners were here for their evening shift, just as people were vacating their offices.

I walked over to the van and, while my device was capturing their ID card data, I asked one of them, a small woman of indeterminate age, how to get to Route 95 South.

Depending on the company, and the security precautions it takes, cleaners of office buildings often have wide access. Their RFID badges could be particularly valuable.

“Pardon?” she said.

“Ninety-five south,” I repeated, gesturing toward the exit.

She shrugged and kept wheeling her mop-and-bucket. She joined a line of blue-uniformed employees, all pushing carts or pulling buckets behind them.

I had what I needed now. I’d stolen enough creds.

I drifted away from the loading dock and headed back to my car.