House on Fire

49

The executive floor had mahogany paneling and thick carpeting. The halls were wide. Here and there were framed prints of sailing ships. I walked in near-darkness, waited for my eyes to acclimate, moved slowly and carefully. I figured out the arrangement as I walked. The leadership team — the chief executive officer, the chief financial officer, and the chief scientific officer — all had window offices on the south side of the building. They were all gathered in one spacious suite. The rest of the floor was the executive support team.

And when I reached the executive leadership suite, I realized it was separated from the rest of the floor by means of a large sliding glass door that was controlled, on the outside, by an RFID reader. I pulled out my card key and waved it at the gray square mounted on the wall.

And nothing happened.

So the cloned key card had gotten the elevator to move and did take me to the seventh floor. Once on the executive floor, though, it was functionally useless.

Did I dare call that guard — what was his name, Jomi? There was always the chance that he’d figured out there really was no security audit.

Best not to summon him if I could help it.

So I retraced my steps until I came to a supply closet I’d passed. Its door had been open, and I’d noticed reams of printing paper and shelves of office products. I flicked on the light and, in less than a minute, found what I was looking for: a can of compressed air. The sort of thing you use for dusting off keyboards and such. I flicked off the lights, returned to the hallway, and made my way back to the sliding glass door. This was a trick that my old friend Merlin had told me about. The security vulnerability here is that on the other side of the glass door is a passive infrared sensor. You didn’t wave your key card. It sensed your approach, and it opened. They did that for fire safety reasons.

I turned the canister upside down and sprayed the air in the gap between the glass door and the doorjamb, pointing up at the motion detector.

The door slid right open, and I was in the executive suite.

More specifically, I was in an elegantly appointed waiting room with leather couches and chairs. At one end of the oval room were three assistants’ desks. Each one was next to an office door.

The third door had a plaque on it that read:

That door, I discovered at once, was locked. That surprised me. Given all the security measures, he sure didn’t need to lock his door.

But he had. Dr. Scavolini took no chances. So I took out from a pocket in my messenger bag my Sparrows door bypass tool. It’s called the Hall Pass. It’s a funny-looking steel thing the size of a credit card, with a sort of beak at one end. I inserted it into the gap between the door and the jamb. Hooked the beak around the door latch. I had to lever the beak around the latch and pull it up before the door finally came open. It doesn’t work on all locks, but it worked on this one.

The lights came right on. I quickly looked around, registering details. No CCTV cameras in here that I could see. I found the light switch and turned it off. My eyes adjusted quickly to the silvery moonlight. Pretty soon I could see just fine.

Arthur Scavolini’s office was spacious and spare and modern and neat. One wall was all glass, floor to ceiling. Against the window was a table covered with silver-framed photographs, of Scavolini and his family. He and his wife and their three young kids. An eight-by-ten photograph of Scavolini with a familiar-looking black man with a large mustache. I’d seen him on TV a bunch but couldn’t recall his name. He was a scientist and a celebrity. Next to him was a large telescope. Behind the two men was a black background with swirls of stars. It looked like the Milky Way. The photo was signed in blue ink, “to Art,” then a big signature I couldn’t read.

In front of the table was a large blond-wood desk, a simple slab of highly polished lumber topped with glass. The desk chair was a modernistic, ergonomic thing. The only items on the desk were a laptop and a couple of small placards with quotes on them.

I walked over to the desk and turned the laptop so I could see the ports at the back of the machine. I placed my messenger bag on the desk and took out the gizmo Devlin had given me. A four-port USB hub with two things already plugged into it: the black device called the Bash Bunny, and the credit-card-size computer drive that I was going to copy to.

I’m barely tech-savvy, but I knew enough to follow Devlin’s instructions. Plug in the USB hub to a port at the back of the laptop. A blue light winked on. I looked at my watch, waited exactly thirteen seconds, and sure enough the blue light turned green. That meant it had done its thing, which was to crack the password on Dr. Arthur Scavolini’s laptop. How it worked, I couldn’t tell you. I just know that it worked on Windows workstations only.

I clicked the little switch down a notch, which put it in attack mode. The light went from green to red, which told me the thing was doing its next job: copying the contents of Dr. Scavolini’s laptop to my little black credit-card-size hard drive.

Not everything, actually. But every file on the computer that ended in.pdf or.xls or.docx. Devlin told me he’d programmed it this way to cut down on the time it would take to steal the contents of the man’s computer. I was looking for an old file on a clinical study. It might be a regular old word processing document, but it also might be a PDF file, or an Excel spreadsheet.

I’ve long ago come to the realization that I don’t need to understand the technology to do the job, just as long as I can trust the people I hire. And I trusted Devlin and knew he was good at what he did.

Now I had to wait about ten minutes.

I sat in the ergonomic desk chair and looked at the two little wooden placards. Some executives place inspirational sayings on their desk. You know, like Success is failure turned inside out and Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

Dr. Arthur Scavolini’s placards — the words engraved in metal — were both science-related. One read, The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. The other read, You are the result of 4.5 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.

I waited impatiently for the Bash Bunny to complete its work. At any moment, I knew, the security guard might return. Or even the police, which would make my life far more complicated.

Ten minutes dragged on. I looked out of the window. Saw a few cars pass by on the highway in the distance. I checked his office for file drawers and didn’t find any. He probably stored his files in cabinets outside his office.

I went out to his assistant’s area and propped the door open. There were rows of cherrywood file drawers behind his administrative assistant’s desk. I pulled at one. It was unlocked. I yanked it open. Glanced at them. These were personnel files. Nothing useful there.

I heard a bing and drew breath.

That was the sound of the elevator arriving on the seventh floor.