Guilty Minds

“Oh, data security is paramount here, Mr. Troy. All digital client files are kept on a partitioned, air-gapped, encrypted server.”

“What about paper files?”

“Kept in a separately locked, highly secured strong room.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Certainly. In fact-”

Someone knocked on Norcross’s open door. I turned. A trim guy around sixty with a thick thatch of gray hair stood there with a stupid grin on his face.

Ash Norcross waved him in. “Oh, Jeff, come on in, let me introduce you to Simon Troy. Simon, this is Jeff Winik, one of our partners and a fellow Stanford grad.”

Winik strode toward me, gave me a firm handshake, and said, “You were Stanford ’79, right?”

I nodded.

“I was Stanford ’80!”

“Oh yeah?” I said, smiling blandly as my stomach plummeted.

He went on: “Where’d you live freshman year?”

I regarded him for a few seconds. He wasn’t challenging me, trying to determine whether I was really Simon Troy. He was genuinely attempting to bond.

It was not credible that “Simon Troy” would have forgotten where he lived freshman year in college. Several long seconds went by while I frantically grappled for an answer. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck into my shirt collar.

Finally I said, “Larkin.” The name suddenly popped into my head after the hours I’d spent cramming, poring over the Simon Troy dossier that Mandy had assembled for me.

“Oh yeah? I was in Branner!”

“Well, nice to meet you,” I said, but Winik was not done with me.

“But then I got a bad lottery number,” he went on, “and I ended up in the trailer park.”

“Huh,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. Trailer park?

“Ever used to hang out at the O?” he said.

The O? What was that, a bar? The freshman union? I took a flyer and said, “I sort of kept to myself. I didn’t really hang out.” An all-purpose answer, but it seemed to satisfy him.

“Well, Mr. Troy doesn’t have much time,” Norcross said, blessedly cutting the conversation short. “He wants to see the strong room.”

52

About an hour later I was back at the hotel. The dining table was covered with electronic equipment-cables and wires and little black boxes and white plastic cards and such. I set down the briefcase I’d brought into Norcross and McKenna.

“How’d it go?” Dorothy asked.

I shrugged. “Fine.”

“No problem?”

“No problem.”

“You get the briefcase close enough to a keycard?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s see what you got.”

– 

The day before, Mandy had made her own undercover visit to the same law firm.

She’d entered the building where the firm was located with the morning rush, tailgating on someone who was entering. She took the elevator to the fourth floor and briefly stood outside the firm’s glass doors and took pictures with her smartphone, as subtly as she could, of the little black box mounted on the wall next to the glass doors.

Then she went right in to the firm’s offices and told the receptionist that she lived just down the street and was looking for temp work, and asked what agency they used to hire their temps. She spun a story about having a young child at home and needing to find work in the neighborhood. The receptionist gave her the name of an employment agency but apologized that there was nothing available at the time, so far as she knew. Mandy thanked her, and that was that.

Now Dorothy examined the photos on Mandy’s phone.

“Okay,” she said, “this is good. They’re using an HID system like just about everyone else uses. Almost certainly a low frequency 125 kilohertz system. Like eighty percent of the keycard users in the world.”

“Why is this good?” I asked. When it comes to technology, I long ago stopped worrying about sounding stupid. I ask, and Dorothy explains. This kind of technology is her forte. She enjoys being smarter than me, and I don’t mind it a bit.

“Because a couple years ago there was an interesting talk at Black Hat USA about how to defeat it.”

“How involved is this? You think we should bring in Merlin?”

Merlin’s real name was Walter McGeorge, an old army buddy who’d been a commo sergeant on my Special Forces team and later became a TSCM specialist, an expert in technical surveillance. He lived in the area, in Maryland. When I lived in DC I used to bring him in frequently to help me on jobs.

“You don’t need Merlin for this,” she said. “I promise. I can set it all up for you myself. Plug-and-play. Easy.” She tapped at her laptop. “Here we go.” She turned her laptop’s display toward me. It was an eBay page with a lot of listings, pictures of what looked like square boxes.

I recognized them. They were proximity readers, also known as badge readers. They’ve become ubiquitous in the corporate world. They’re the little black boxes mounted next to office doors at which you wave your plastic keycard to gain entry. You also see bigger versions of prox readers at the entrances and exits to parking garages. They allow drivers who have the right keycard to pass right through.

“I know what a prox reader is,” I said, “but I don’t see how that gets us in.”