Page 86 of Insidious Threats
He’d done one full circuit of the floor when they’d arrived and had confirmed that the office was empty, just as Petra had promised it would be. Now he scanned the hallway for shadows while she booted up her desktop machine and popped a pair of sound-canceling headphones onto her head.
He lifted one pad from her ear and said, “Really? This is poor situational awareness.”
“I need them to focus. This won’t take long. You be aware of the situation while I work.” She moved the pad back into place. Then she flipped over a cube timer on her desk. It flashed green, and the illuminated display began counting down from ten.
Eleven minutes to get from the house to the office. Four minutes to search the floor. Ten minutes to log onto the server and upload the virus. Five minutes to leave the office and get back into the car, engine running to wait for Sasha for approximately six minutes. The schedule was tight, but not impossibly so. They could fudge a minute here and there. And Petra said she could probably beat the ten-minute timer.
Still, his pulse raced. This was it. In ten—he glanced at the timer—no, in nine-and-a-half minutes, events that had been set into motion on October 13, 2007, when a man named Calvin Tennyson murdered Josh Lewis in an alley, would come to an end. The world’s eight billion souls would never have to know just how close they’d come to being controlled, monitored, and spied on by a billionaire who wanted to probe their every thought, fear, and secret to predict when they’d run out of milk, ovulate, or cheat on their taxes and then sell those predictions to the highest bidder—corporations, governments, cult leaders, strongmen, terrorists, anyone who was willing to pay to get inside all those heads.
He shuddered. Lewis’ impulse was understandable, but anyone who’d ever watched a science fiction movie could have told him it was a dangerous, indefensible idea. He flicked his eyes to the countdown timer. Seven minutes left. Sasha would have just entered the business park and would meander her way across the campus for the next twelve minutes. Everything was ticking along according to plan. He just needed to keep his tightly coiled energy in check.
He tapped Petra’s shoulder. She twisted her head to frown at him.
“I’m going to do another lap around the floor.”
She nodded and turned back to the screen.
He walked out of the room and entered a long hallway lined with four managers’ offices down the right side and two restrooms, a storage room, and a server closet down the left. The hallway came to an end at a large kitchenette located beside a set of fire stairs. The elevators were on the other side of the building.
He strode down the hall, pushing open the unlocked office doors and giving each dark, quiet room a cursory scan. He zigzagged the hall, checking both empty bathrooms and testing the knobs on the locked supply room and server closet. Nothing had changed. Nobody was in the building except for him and Petra.
He paced down to the kitchen and flipped on the overhead lights. The old bulbs buzzed to life. He eyed the ancient industrial coffee machine. They were only here for another six minutes or so. Not enough time to make a pot of coffee, no matter how much his tired brain might want a cup. He opened the cabinets in search of a jar of instant but only found hot chocolate packets and tea bags. He considered both options for a moment, then shook his head. He didn’t want cocoa. Or tea. He wanted coffee.
On a whim, he picked up the stainless steel carafe and shook it. Liquid sloshed inside. There was no telling how old the leftover coffee might be. He shrugged. Sasha would’ve been appalled, but in his view, old coffee was better than no coffee. He could microwave a mugful and throw a pinch of salt into the reheated stuff to cut the bitterness. Then he noticed the ‘reheat’ button on the machine. Even better. He returned the carafe to its spot on the warming plate and clicked it on.
Then he heard a clatter on the stairs. He froze and listened hard. Nothing. But the fine hairs standing up on his arms told him not to write it off as his imagination. He abandoned his dream of subpar coffee, hit the switch to turn out the lights, and crept out of the kitchen. He paused at the top of the stairwell and looked down the stairs. Nothing. He stood there for a long moment, waiting and listening, before he hurried back down the hallway to check on Petra.
She looked up as he entered the room and flashed him a grin.
“I’m in.”
He walked around to stand behind her, then leaned forward and studied the screen as if the information on the screen could possibly mean something to him.
“The back door worked?”
“It did. Took longer than I would’ve liked.” She glanced at the timer, and his gaze followed. Just over three minutes to go.
“Can you still get it done in ten?”
“I think so. If you stop talking to me.”
He clamped his mouth shut and calculated. They still had eight minutes until they were supposed to be in the car and six more after that until Sasha would arrive. They were fine. But the finger of unease tickling the base of his neck said otherwise. He should check the elevators. No. He should stay right here and guard Petra for three more minutes.
45
Once Stasia realized where Sasha was leading her, she knew she’d been duped. If Sasha was slowly wending her way to Petra’s office building, that meant her husband and the coder were probably already there doing something they shouldn’t be. She wasted a few minutes berating herself for allowing a pair of civilians to make her and outsmart her.
Then she regrouped. Having taken her morning run through the parklet, she knew that the woods backed up to the business park’s campus. She sprinted through the trees and bushes on a diagonal while Sasha strolled along the path. She estimated that at Sasha’s current snail-like pace, she’d beat her to the ETS office building by ten minutes, at a minimum.
When she reached the front door, she bypassed the card reader with ease using a credit card from her wallet. She laughed to herself as she eased the door open and went inside. If businesses knew how easily their state-of-the-art card readers could be circumvented, they’d think twice about installing them.
She paused just inside the door to arm herself. She didn’t like guns—too loud, too messy. But she never left home without her tactical knife. She unsheathed it from the ankle sheath strapped to her right leg and hit the button to extend the spring-loaded blade.
Holding her knife with a relaxed grip, she fixed the layout of the floor in her mind. The kitchen was at the top of the stairs to the right. The long hallway led to the bullpen where Petra worked, with the door to that space to the right. Petra’s workstation faced the door.
Once she could see her route forward in her mind’s eye, she began her silent trek up the stairs. Her foot slipped on the fourth step and she careened to the side. The knife struck the metal railing with a clang that echoed off the walls.
Stasia pressed against the stairwell wall and froze, her eyes glued to the opening at the top of the stairs. After a moment, Leo Connelly’s face appeared. She flattened herself even more, as he swept his gaze across the stairwell.
