True Faith and Allegiance

He wished he could steal all the OPM files, take them with him to Macedonia, so he could use them to generate even more income in the future. He could let the Albanians protect him, and make it look like he would be their loyal servant in recompense for what they offered him, but instead he could secretly be waiting for the heat to die down so he could slip away again, somewhere even safer, free of both murderous gangsters and Chinese spies. Once he went back into hiding, either on a Caribbean island or in some other place where those after him could not reach him, he could again go into business selling off the names and locations of America’s spies and soldiers on the dark web.

Eleven million would just be the tip of the iceberg.

He knew he could easily access the OPM files today if he wanted to, but stealing the information would be much tougher. He was allowed to go into the air-gapped room that held them to view the OPM data and take handwritten notes from individual files. But as there was no way to download or transfer the information from the computer, the only way to take the intelligence for later would be to write down all the information from the twenty-five million individual files or take pictures of millions of pages off the computer monitor.

And that wasn’t happening.

Well… there was another possibility, and it came into Dalca’s head as he watched a new terrorist video from ISIS’s propaganda service out of Syria showing an attack in America. It was a drive-by assassination of a man in an SUV on a darkened St. Louis street. His vehicle was peppered with AK fire; the cameraman ran forward and showed a blond-haired male slumped dead, held in place by his seat belt. The caption said he was a CIA officer. Then the cameraman jumped back into the passenger side of a blue Volvo, just as a man raced from a car parked in an oncoming lane and tried to block the terrorist escape.

It was the foolish act of someone so jacked up on adrenaline and so in denial as to what he was witnessing before his eyes that he could not conceive he was in any real danger. The Volvo hit the man head-on, he disappeared under the hood of the vehicle in slow motion, and the video showed the entire incident.

Dalca was fascinated by the images, but he was more fascinated by the new idea that popped into his head. He only needed to cause some sort of distraction here in the building, then go into the air-gapped room and physically remove the hard drive containing the American files. It would take him at least five minutes, so he’d need some privacy, but it was the one way he could have his cake and eat it too. The one chance to run and not lose the lifetime meal ticket afforded by the OPM data.

After a moment’s deliberation he decided this was worth it. If he was leaving Bucharest tomorrow and never returning, handing himself over to the Albanians for their protection, it would be damn nice to have an ace in the hole.

* * *

Thirty minutes later Dalca walked through the basement dry goods storage facility of ARTD, looking for something specific. He found it on top of a shelf. A box of hand sanitizer, used in the restrooms. He knew the material was flammable, because in prison he’d been told they were allowed only bar soap, to reduce the risk of a deliberate fire. He removed the lids from two of the industrial-sized containers, and walked with them to the large paper-products recycling bin. Most all the trash this five-story building generated was paper of some sort, in the form of shredded documents or cardboard boxes, so it was a large container, some two meters high and ten meters long. Now it was only half full, but after Alexandru poured all the flammable hand sanitizer over it, he knew it would make one hell of a distraction.

After checking to make sure no one was anywhere around to see him, he tossed a lit match into the bin, and it went up with a whoosh that seemed to suck the air out of the area. The flames shot high as the gases around ignited, and soon black smoke billowed from the massive collection of cardboard boxes and other paper products.

Minutes later, Dalca sat in his office when the fire alarm went off, already waiting with several screwdrivers in the pocket of his slacks and a broom in his hand.

While everyone vacated the fourth floor he walked alone into the air-gapped room, moving along the wall carefully under the security camera centered on the machine in the middle of the five-meter-square space. He used the broom handle to unplug the camera from its power supply high in the corner, then moved quickly to the computer.

In the end it took fewer than five minutes to remove the hard drive and slide the device into his backpack. He didn’t bother with screwing the housing of the computer back together, he just propped everything in place and pocketed the tiny screws.