Guilty Minds

In the afternoon I did a bunch of errands, picking up everything we could possibly need. We rendezvoused at a dive bar in a strip mall in Leesburg around midnight. He’d chosen it because it had a separately ventilated smoking section, which was permitted because of some loophole in Virginia law. Neither one of us had anything alcoholic to drink; wanting to keep sharp for the job, we both had Cokes. We sat at a booth. He smoked continuously.

I showed him the Halloween masks I’d picked up from a costume store, transparent masks, one of a young man, one of an old man. They both transformed our appearances, made us unrecognizable. Merlin insisted on wearing the young mask. In the bar’s restroom we changed into the navy polo shirts with the Compuservice logo on the left. I had toolboxes for each of us to carry in.

This was the part of a black-bag job that always jazzed me: the preparations, thinking of every eventuality, everything that might go sideways. The high-wire tension. Assembling equipment, making lists, making sure that if we were caught, we’d have a way out.

But you can’t ensure everything. Things go wrong.

Shit happens.

54

It was a few minutes after two o’clock in the morning. The parking lot was dark and almost empty. A cold wind whipped our faces. The only lights on in the building, as far as I could see, were in the lobby, where a lone security guard sat at a counter and probably was browsing aimlessly on the Internet.

The front door to the building was unlocked. We passed the guard, and I said, “Good evening, or is it good morning?”

The guard smiled and gave us a sort of salute. We were confident, we knew where we were going, and we looked like we belonged. He probably assumed we were computer nerds coming to solve some middle-of-the-night crisis. We headed for the elevators. That was the limit of building security. Easy.

We got off the elevator on the fourth floor. The hall was dimly lit. We quickly came upon the entrance to Norcross and McKenna. The glass doors were dark. Apparently no one was inside. That had been a worry of mine: Lawyers often work very long hours. At midnight I wouldn’t have been surprised to find someone toiling there, a lone beleaguered partner, even several associates. At two in the morning, there was less chance of encountering someone.

I pulled our masks out of my toolkit and handed the young man one to Merlin. I put on the old man mask. I’d noticed earlier that there was a CCTV camera just inside the glass doors, pointed at the entrance. From now on we were being photographed. Our ball caps and masks made it impossible for the cameras to record our likenesses.

I waved my cloned keycard up to the card reader, a little black box mounted to the wall next to the glass doors. I bit my lip.

The little light switched from red to green and it beeped. I pushed the door and it came right open.

Until that moment, when something relaxed inside me, I hadn’t been aware of how clenched with anxiety I’d been.

There was low-level emergency lighting here in the office, just like in the hallway, so although it was dim, there was just enough light to make our way. I knew where I was going.

I led Merlin through twisting corridors to the strong room. The door appeared to be wooden, mahogany, like all the other doors in the firm, but I knew that it was actually a sandwich of wood over several inches of high-grade steel. This was not a room you could slip into through the air-conditioning ducts and the ceiling tiles. There was no dropped ceiling. The wall, floor, and ceiling were reinforced concrete, Norcross had told me proudly, eight inches thick. Not only was the room fireproof, but it was protected against intrusion.

Merlin knocked on the door a few times and chuckled at its dead sound. He glanced at the steel lever attached to the Simplex lock, a vertical row of five steel buttons. He nodded and ran his fingers down the buttons. It was a familiar lock, the sort of thing you see inside all sorts of businesses, including jewelry stores and watch shops and casinos. FedEx uses them to secure their drop boxes.

“You start working on this,” I told him. “I’ll head over to Norcross’s office.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” Merlin said. “This shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.”

He unlatched his toolbox and pulled out a small cloth bag. From the bag he drew an oblong block of metal about two inches by three inches. “Watch,” he said. He placed the shiny metal block on the side of the Simplex lock. Then he grabbed the lever and tried to turn it. Nothing happened.

“Shit,” he said. “They fixed it.”

“What are you doing?”

“This is a rare-earth magnet. Neodymium. A couple of years ago some security expert figured out that if you put one of these next to the Simplex lock, it messes with the combination chamber and unlocks it right away.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s doing anything.”

“Yeah. They must have upgraded to one that uses a non-ferrous metal inside. Oh, crap. That would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?”

“Now what?”