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The sensor lit, registering my presence, and I shut my eyes, bracing myself for the sound of alarms, running feet… but the only thing that happened was the door swinging smoothly open.
“Jack?” Gabe’s voice came into my ear more urgently as he heard my exhalation. “What just happened?”
“It’s fine. The door’s open. Don’t think it’s set anything off.”
I could literally hear Gabe clenching his teeth on the other end of the line, trying not to snap the retort he wanted to make, but I knew the words he was holding back. He’d wanted me to wait while he tried to access the security system via the Pi and figure out if the door was alarmed. But that could take hours, and in this job, doing nothing was a risk in itself. Sometimes you just had to go on your gut—act on impulse.
Besides, it wasn’t really impulse, and Gabe knew it. It was instinct, honed by years of doing exactly this kind of thing.
“You hope it hasn’t set anything off,” he said at last, and I grinned. I could afford to be magnanimous. If there had been an alarm screaming out, or worse, the sound of barking, while Gabe yelled I told you so, I would have been laughing on the other side of my face. But one of Gabe’s many good qualities was that he wasn’t a sore loser. I could tell he’d already moved on to the next challenge when he asked, “Where are you now? Lift lobby?”
“Yes.” I looked around me. The lobby was furnished with a tall yucca and a futuristic metal chair. “There’s three corridors coming off and…” I looked up at the dial above the lift doors. “Blimey, fourteen floors. Do we know where the server room’s supposed to be?”
“Hang on,” Gabe said. I heard the click of computer keys. “Looks like IT’s on the fifth floor, so start there. What floor are you on? Ground?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked around me. “The car park’s on two different levels.”
A long sign opposite the lift listed the different floors. Apparently I was on the first. And 5—IT and HR was helpfully listed four lines above. So much for Gabe’s computer wizardry.
I sent him a quick snap of the sign on my phone, captioned no shit sherlock, and I heard his rumbling laugh come over the earpiece as the message landed.
“Look, what can I say—we tech heads are used to being asked to solve problems people should be able to figure out themselves.”
“Go screw yourself, Medway,” I said amiably, and he laughed again, this time a low, meaning chuckle that made my stomach flutter.
“Oh, I would, but I’ve got someone much hotter in mind. And she’s going to be home in an hour or two. If she gets off her arse.”
I felt a smile tug irresistibly at my lips, but I made my voice stern.
“I won’t be home at all if you don’t get me into the server room, so keep your mind on the job and leave my arse out of it.” I looked at the lift panel. It was the high-tech kind where you had to beep your card and select a floor. “The lift’s got a card reader on it, so I’m assuming the upper floors are pass-card protected.”
“Well, I probably can’t override that until you’ve got me access to the server room, so time to get your steps in, babe.”
I sighed theatrically and looked around for the fire escape route—aka the stairs. A labeled door in the corner of the lobby showed me the way, but before I took it, I dropped a bugged USB stick outside the lift doors. Gabe had handed me half a dozen before I left, innocent-looking little things loaded with a Trojan horse program of his own devising. With any luck, someone coming in on Monday would pick it up and plug it into their computer in an effort to locate the owner. When they did, they would find a bunch of bland Word documents and a sneaky little bit of code that would embed itself in their hard drive, make contact with its mothership, and allow read/write access to their computer as long as it was connected to the internet.
Coming out onto the fifth floor I dropped another USB and then touched my headset.
“You are in a small lobby,” I said to Gabe in a robotic voice. “Corridors lead to the north, east, and west. To the south of you is a lift. In the distance is a tall, gleaming white tower. No, wait, that last part’s from Colossal Cave Adventure.”
“Drop USB device,” Gabe said, and I laughed.
“A, that’s three words. And B, I’ve already done that. As you’d know if you’d managed to hack the CCTV system. So—which corridor?”
I glanced up and down the three equally featureless hallways, listening to the click of Gabe’s mouse as he tried to make sense of the layout.
“You came in the fire door we talked about and lift C is at your back, is that right?” he asked.
“Yes. At least, I assume it’s lift C. There’s a door marked HR to the left, if that helps.”
“Yeah, it does. You need the corridor straight ahead, I think.”
I gave a thumbs-up, remembered Gabe couldn’t see me yet, and then walked across to the glass door straight in front of me. This time it didn’t slide open automatically.
“Okay, we’re at another security door—and I’m on the wrong side. There’s a card reader. What next, Inspector Gadget?”
“Anywhere to enter a code?”
“Yes, a key panel. Numerical.”
