The Backup Asset

…33

He has a passion for weather. He loved observing changing weather patterns, having his forecast down to each passing cloud and wind gust. The digital weather station on his wall was the first thing he checked in the morning of each day, religiously. The information displayed on it stated that it was going to be a nice day, with partly cloudy skies, barometric pressure was going to hold steady, and temperatures reasonable for the season.

Adrenaline had kept him awake for the best part of the night; excitement and anticipation for what that day was going to bring turned more and more intense as he approached the drop time. His first drop… his first step on a path from which there was no coming back. And yet, despite the adrenaline rushing blood through his veins, the moment he entered his office, his usual obsession with weather took over and he spent a good five minutes analyzing the data on the digital weather station.

He had time though, plenty of time to prepare. His plan was relatively simple, and he was already halfway through with it. First, he had gained access to the documents. To do that, he had waited patiently for the first day when legitimate business reasons called for him to access the highly restricted document storage area named CDR — Centralized Document Repository. Each employee had to have a project number associated with each visit, and the CDR’s staff entered that information in a computer, together with the files accessed or removed. Any discrepancy between retrieved files and active projects triggered an immediate alarm; doors would go on lockdown, and no one would be allowed to leave the CDR level until cleared by internal security. The place was airtight, with procedures and systems worthy of the secrecy of the content they protected.

That’s why he had to wait a while, but the day before he was able to access the CDR and remove the three files that interested him. He could only borrow them for a few hours, not more. The second step was to make copies of the files — unauthorized copies, of course. That, in itself, had proven to be a bit of a challenge, but he had had a few days to find a way to work around that challenge while waiting for CDR access.

The challenge was the copier. The building’s new copiers were modern pieces of equipment that needed his personal code before doing anything, and stored all copied material in their memory, time-stamped, where the Internal Security department could access anything at will during random checks. There was no way he could use one of those machines. But he had found another copy machine, a forgotten piece of junk from the 1980s, still in service in the basement mailroom. It still worked; albeit not perfectly, leaving a narrow vertical black line on each page and moving very slowly, but it didn’t need access codes to work, and it didn’t store any activity logs or images of copied documents.

Accessing the copier in the mailroom was another challenge; he started the copy job during the mailroom clerk’s lunch break and had to stay late the night before to finish the nerve-racking job on the slowest copier ever invented. Every paper rustle, every footstep on the hallway resonated in his mind louder than cannon fire, causing his heart to skip a beat and his blood to rush to his head. And that piece of junk took two minutes to copy each page… how did people ever get any work done with equipment like that? The job had taken so long to finish that he ran out of time to return the files to the CDR the same day; internal security procedures rendered it inaccessible after 7.00PM.

Then he had a panic attack… the adventures of the day had probably been the most that he could handle. He wasn’t experienced at this game… not yet, anyway. It was well after 7.00PM when he had finished; he was still in possession of the original files, and he just couldn’t bring himself to walk out with the copies in his briefcase. He was too scared, too jumpy, too exhausted.

The next step required him to get the copied documents outside the building and take them home, where he could take pictures and save them on a digital memory card. He had thought of bringing a camera inside the building, but every morning he had to walk through metal detectors to get in, while his briefcase was being X-rayed. No way could he pull that off. Personal phones were kept in lockers at the main entrance during the day, and the corporate phone’s camera was a bad idea for obvious reasons.

He had decided to put it off for a day, and that had been a good decision. He knew exactly what he had to do. He wanted to organize the copies before the day’s madness would start and he risked people interrupting him or barging unannounced in his office. He also needed to return the originals to the CDR. Then, at the end of the day he’d leave with the rest of the crowd at about 5.00PM or so, and walk right out of the building with the copied files hidden in the lining of his briefcase. Easy peasy.

He started organizing the copied documents in order, by file number, making sure every page was there. As he reached the bottom of the copied papers pile, he froze… He was missing one copied page, the cover page from one of the files.

His own heartbeat deafened him, pumping hard in his chest as he tried desperately to breathe, to control the onset of another panic attack. Where could he have left it? He was sure he had copied every single page.

He rushed downstairs to the mailroom; luckily, no one was there. He went straight for the copier and almost tore it apart looking for the missing page. Maybe it got stuck in the copier somewhere, like a paper jam? Nothing there, nothing on the small table he had used, or behind it, where it could have fallen.

He looked everywhere in his own office; opened every drawer, checked every piece of furniture, every file folder he had on his desk. Nada. Exhausted, his knees weak from excess adrenaline, he let himself drop in his chair.

He tried to retrace his steps on the day before, but couldn’t focus. He had been in and out of the office, but everything was a blur. The entire day he had been painfully aware of each surveillance camera in the building and had to jump through hoops to avoid them.

He remembered he had to go to Norfolk Harbor with the project team for a few hours after lunch, but he was positive he had left the documents carefully hidden under his area rug at the time. He couldn’t remember when he took them from there, or where else he went; his memory was failing under the wave of brainwashing adrenaline.

Maybe he simply hadn’t copied that page… errors can happen, he thought. He must have just skipped it by mistake. Steadying himself, he grabbed the original of the missing page and ventured to the mailroom again. The slower-than-molasses copier finished the one page copy job just as the mailroom clerk came in with the day’s mail delivery, giving him a start.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Y — yes,” he said, holding the manila folder with the original and its copy as if he were about to hand it to the clerk, “can we ship something overnight to our New Zealand office? What’s the procedure?”

He hoped the clerk would not pick up on the strong smell of copier toner, activated by heat in the antiquated copy process, or notice how badly his hands were shaking.

“You need it interoffice, sir?”

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“You’d need an IE9D form filled, signed, stamped, and attached to the document package, together with your auth code.”

“All right, I’ll get that started.”

He left the mailroom briskly but couldn’t bring himself to breathe until he was alone in the elevator.

He had a few more hours until the drop… he was going to make it with plenty of time to spare.