Reciprosity Read online

  John Adams said, “Buonasera.” He placed a work order and his SCSI ID on the counter and slid them under the guard’s nose. “IT called us in from Rome. Something to do with a bad satellite uplink needing replacing. We couldn’t get in through the garage because one of your trucks is stalled in the driveway. Some guy named Enzo sent us up here.” Adams’ Italian was flawless.

  The guard was reaching for the work order when one of the women brushed her ample breasts against his arm and whispered in his ear. He promptly shoved the work order back across the counter. “Enzo’s an idiot! Second elevator on the right.” Before Adams could pick up the form the guard snapped a pen from his top pocket and scribbled a number on the bottom. “Code changes daily. Use that. It’ll get you anywhere.”

  Adams winked at the women and said, “Some guys have all the fun.” The guard smiled.

  So did I. Virna and I were on the fourth floor with a dozen armed GCI escorts. Each was as big as me, just younger by a year or two—okay, maybe ten or fifteen. My lovely soon-to-be was at a computer monitoring the servers and access terminals on the fifth floor. She had already installed a new program that would trace where Adams attempted to transfer or redirect the incoming Looking Glass signals. I was using a headset and microphone to direct the lobby guard’s actions and reactions. The CCTV gave me three views of the lobby and his workspace. One camera gave me an excellent view of the woman’s breast rubbing against Gino’s—that’s the guard’s name—arm. I had to admit, the young man was a natural actor.

  We had arrived at three in the afternoon on one of GCE’s long range helicopters. A senior manager met us on the roof helipad and escorted us down to our current location. Uncle Vito had already blessed my plan so the manager and his men were in-sync and ready to play their roles. Two of his guards had volunteered to act as IT techs in the server room—window dressing for Mr. Adams. I promised if they were harmed we would kill our six visitors who were in the elevator now, riding to the fifth floor. If they stopped on any floor other than the fifth, they would die.

  I loosened my belt-buckle and nudged the denim waistband away from my gut. The new cloths Giovani had lent me were a little better fit—but only a little. At least my sneakers and white T-shirt fit. Virna was still wearing Kate’s cloths, sans the kevlar vest and fake personal belongings we took from Adams and Jake. I was still a little sorry about the way Jake died. I blamed Adams and his non-lethal, lethal ammunition.

  The female distractors were abandoning Gino now, making a quick exit per instructions from Adams. They were applaudable actors, but no match for my boy, Gino.

  The elevator opened on the fifth floor and Adams and his five men stepped into a smaller, empty lobby. Through the glass door on his right was management. Through the fireproof door on his left was the server room. “Turn left, asshole,” I mumbled. “Can’t you read the sign on the door?”

  Adams turned left and led his men—the two men pulling equipment carts—into the server room. The other three turned right and entered the management offices. Shit! That wasn’t on the scheduled tour!

  I turned to Virna. “Is there anything in the management offices we should be concerned about?”

  She rolled her chair over to my station and stared at the CCTV images. “Madre di Dio! Yes!” She spun around, back to her station and started banging away at her keyboard.

  “What?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the CCTV feed.

  She remained silent for a full sixty-seconds, which I thought was impossible for her, before answering. “That should hold them. I just recoded the security access code for Uncle Vito’s office door.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s in there that you didn’t already secure on the servers?” I could only imagine as I continued to monitor the CCTV.

  “Uncle Vito is old school,” she said. “He likes paper. Everything to do with the Family operations, dating back long before you were his favorite sicario, up to and including all of our recent research on the Endowment, is in his file cabinets. They’re secured in a secret room behind his desk.”

  “Sicario! I was never a hitman. I preferred troubleshooter.”

  “Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.”

  I could always depend on Virna’s witty repartee. That’s why I love her. “Smart-ass. Get over here and monitor the three goons in management, while our volunteer IT guys in the server room approach Mr. Adams.”

  “Can we help you fellas?” IT guy number one said. “Gino just notified us, he was sending up a team from SCSI Rome. Something about our satellite uplink? Didn’t know we had a problem.”

  “You don’t, yet,” Adams said as he turned toward a work table and opened his pack. He laid the work order down for the two IT volunteers to review. “We need to switch out the SCSI-2424 satellite ground station module so you don’t have trouble in the future. We also need to service the dish.”

  IT guy number one pointed to a terminal. “Use that one to interface. The module is on the back rack. The roof access is over there,” he pointed again. “How long do you think we’ll be down?”

  “Two hours, tops,” said Adams. “Takes a while to reconfigure and test.”

  IT guy number one was following my instructions to the letter. “Not a problem. Roberto and I were about to go on break anyway. That’ll give us time to get a real meal for a change. Be back in two.”

  My volunteers exited the server room, walked to the elevators, rode down one floor, and walked over to me.

  “How was that?”

  I gave them a thumbs up. “Oscar nominations in the bag.”

  Virna and I left Adams to do his thing with the servers while we watched the three men examining Uncle Vito’s office door.

  “You certain they can’t get in?” I wasn’t.

  Virna volunteered, “Not one-hundred percent. As you know, there are very few fool-proof systems.”

  That was not reassuring, even if it was the truth. “Any suggestions?”

  “You could go up there and ask them politely to go away.”

  Smart girl. That gave me an idea. I had a quick conversation with the lead GCI guard.

  Five minutes later, two of his black associates dressed as cleaning personnel entered the elevator with a janitor’s push-cart. The cloths and cart came from the janitor’s room on our floor. They were armed, just in case. They were husband and wife. Child immigrants from Eritrea in North Africa. They spoke Italian like a native. His name was Yonas. Her’s was Selassie.

  They exited at the fifth floor lobby and turned right. I could see through the CCTV that the three goons were not watching the entrance. They were all hunched around Vittorio’s door.

  Once inside, Selassie moved to her left and began dusting a desk. Yonas did the same on his right. Smart positioning for the angles just in case guns are drawn.

  Selassie announced in a subservient manner, “We are so sorry. We thought the offices were empty.”

  The three goons spun around, partly shocked, partly embarrassed that they allowed someone to sneak up on them. One of them—the smart one, hurriedly said, “Nessun problema,” with a poor Italian accent. “We were…looking for the server room. We’re with some others and I think we got turned around.”

  Yonas pointed to the door. “Other end of the lobby, sir.”

  Selassie and Yonas returned to their cleaning, watching carefully as the three men exited the management offices.

  I said through their earbuds, “Nice job. Well done. Keep up the act for another half-hour, then move to the lobby and clean it. If they still haven’t finished, sit down like you’re on a break. Virna says there’s a small kitchenette alcove behind the reception desk wall. Grab some drinks and food.”

  Back in the server room, Adams walked out of sight behind a rack, presumably up to no good, or maybe just playing with himself. One of his men was busy typing away on a terminal, while a second explored the room, disappearing out of sight for a minute or two, here and there. Once he rolled one of the equipment carts behind a rack, then r
eturned shortly with the cart. Virna and I had no clue what he might be doing, and neither did our real IT techs who were monitoring the situation along side us. The three men from the management offices aimlessly lounged around the server room, waiting for their comrades to finish whatever they were doing.

  Thirty minutes later, Yonas and Selassie were enjoying two of Uncle Vito’s favorite yogurts and Frizzante sparkling waters when the three fake SCSI service personnel they had encountered in the management offices came out of the server room trailing the equipment carts. They entered the elevator without acknowledging the cleaners, descended to the ground floor and left the building.

  On the CCTV we could see Adams texting on his mobile phone but could not see the message. The two men, who seemed to have done the bulk of the work, finished their intrusion into the servers and, according to Virna’s trojan horse, had redirected over ten terabytes of stored data. Mostly the older Looking Glass recordings that the DOD and The Endowment already had access to, along with any new incoming signals from the GCE satellite.

  I turned to her. “Well? Tell me. Did it work?”

  She looked up from her terminal and smiled. “They’re bouncing it around but my program is working. I have a location—in Virginia. I’ll have it pinpointed shortly.”

  I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re brilliant! Thats why I love you.”

  I watched as Adams and his two men exited the server room. He said something to Yonas and Selassie as he pushed the button for the elevator. His voice was too low—almost a whisper—to hear over the CCTV microphones. A minute later he walked out of the building as calm as when he entered.

  “He’s one cool customer,” I said to no one in particular.

  Ten minutes later I held a debriefing with my cast. Gino said the three women that were sent to distract him spoke with a local dialect. Possibly hired actors, or maybe chiama le ragazze—call girls. The IT actors had nothing else to add to their previous report. Yonas and Selassie reported the brief comment Adams made at the elevator, “Tell Mr. Cassine that’s twice I’ve bested him.”

  I didn’t like that. I also didn’t like a nagging tug at the back of my brain. It had been there ever since Adams walked out of view of the server room CCTV.

  I turned to Virna. “Are there cameras on the roof?”

  “Of course.” She nudged me aside again and brought up another group of CCTV images on my terminal. “See. One watching the server room access stairwell. One watching the helipad. One watching the satellite dishes. One watching the central core emergency stairwell. And one watching the stairwell near the helipad.”

  “Where does the helipad stairwell lead?” I asked with growing apprehension.

  She giggled at some secret joke. “The men call that one Vito’s Buco della figa. I prefer Rabbit Hole.”

  Now the nagging tug was approaching panic stage. “Are you saying there is a stairwell leading to Uncle Vito’s office?”

  “Yes. He uses it when he flies one of his mistresses in for a conference. And, of course, if he’s in danger, that’s his way out.”

  “And you say it’s in his office?”

  “Not his office-office. The door to the stairwell is in his file room.” I didn’t respond. I waited the full two seconds for her to realize what just happened. “Oh, merda,” she exclaimed as she started banging away on the keyboard. When she was done she said, “They hacked the roof CCTV. We’ve been had again!”

  I was already running for the elevator. Virna jumped in just as the door was closing. We didn’t say a word riding up or running through the management offices to Vito’s office door. She quickly punched in the code she had reprogrammed to keep Adams’ men out. I was so fucking smart I never stopped to consider, what if the three men at this door were another diversion, like in Lugano?

  “We don’t have CCTV in his office,” Virna volunteered as the door opened.

  We stepped in. First glance, everything looked normal. We ran to the secret panel behind Vito’s desk. Virna pressed her right hand against one of many intricate patterns carved into the wood paneling. The wall silently slid open. Beyond was a space rivaling the server room in scale. Steel file cabinets lined the side walls. Three more back-to-back rows stood in the center. Over a hundred file cabinets containing the entire history of the Cassine Family. Every operations, every criminal organization the Family took down, every dirty secret of hundreds of government officials and politicians. Every financial record. Every business The Family either publicly or covertly ran.

  And every mission I did for the family as their number-one troubleshooter years earlier.

  Virna and I hurried up and down the isles looking for signs of intrusion. The cabinets were the best high-security file cabinets money could buy. Fireproof with electronic combination locks. I didn’t find a single one that looked like it had been tampered with, not that I would recognize one if I saw it.

  “Over here, Luke.”

  I joined Virna at the cabinet she was staring at. “What is it?”

  “I know it’s a small thing, but Uncle Vito had these locks customized with a small display above the keypad. You would never know it was there unless you knew what to look for. She demonstrated and pressed two fingers against the ‘1’ key and the ‘0’ key at the same time. The surface lit up and displayed today’s date. It also displayed the time using the 24-hour clock method.

  “That’s just over an hour ago! Shit!” I said to Virna, “Can you open it?”

  “Yes. Uncle Vito can be lazy. He uses the same six-digit code for practically everything.”

  There was a dull clicking sound followed by all four draws poking out about a quarter of an inch, as if some hand holding them tight released its grip.

  I asked, “Do you know what’s in there?”

  Frown lines appeared on her otherwise flawless face. “Based on the cabinet label at the top, you are in one of these drawers, Luke.”

  “Open them,” I said.

  She did. She found me in the second drawer, or what was left of me. A folder tab about half-way in the drawer read, Lucius Alessandro Cassine. Everything that had been in the folder was gone.

  I stood there contemplating my past while Virna checked the remaining ninety-nine locks. Sixteen minutes later we left the file room, reset the wall, walked out of the management offices and stood at the elevator door. She pushed the call button. The doors opened but I was powerless to move. That tug at the back of my animal brain was back to panic mode. What was that goon doing while Adams was stealing my life? The one that took the equipment pull-cart behind the server racks. I tried to picture what it looked like after he reemerged with it. Then it struck me. He seemed to roll it with considerably less effort.

  I didn’t say a word to Virna, I just bolted for the server room at the other end of the lobby. She caught up to me as I crashed through the door.

  “Luke! What is it?” she shouted as she followed me behind the server racks.

  We both said, “Oh shit!” at the same time.

  Sitting on the floor was a square box. It was eighteen inches on a side. The casing material looked to be metallic, but could have just as easily been plastic or even shiny paper. There were no visible wires or latches or screws to undo. Scattered around on the anti-static concrete polymer floor were empty tubes of superglue.

  “Luke, is that a...”

  “Bomb? Yea, I think it is and those bastards glued it to the floor.”

  A small LED screen blinking red was the only sign that the bomb was active. I took one step forward and the screen turned yellow. I stopped.

  “It must have a proximity sensor.”

  Virna tugged my arm. “What happens if it turns green?”

  I know next to nothing about bombs and had no intention to participate in on-the-job training. “Let’s back out slowly,” I said.

  We took one step and the yellow turned to three flashing green words: 20 MINUTES: RUN, followed by a smiley face.

  “B
astard!” I ran to the lobby phone, snatched up the receiver and suddenly realized I had no clue how to announce an evacuation of the building. Virna knew exactly what to do. She punched three-digits and held the ‘0’ button down until a voice could be heard over the building’s intercom system: THIS IS NOT A DRILL. EVACUATE THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY. It began in Italian and repeated in English and five other languages. Then alarms started going off.

  My internal clock said we had eighteen minutes. I grabbed Virna by the arm and we ran to the emergency stairwell behind the lobby kitchenette. There was no option to try and save any servers or Vito’s paper files. The file cabinets were fireproof, not sure about bomb-proof. And if I had to make a wild guess, the servers were probably backed up at a remote location.

  We stopped on each floor as we descended, opened the exit doors and yelled into empty spaces. We encountered some stragglers on the second floor and herded them down the stairs. Luckily it was after hours and the building was mostly empty. Yonas and Selassie were at the exits, counting heads. We hurried past them and they followed on our heels.

  “What is it?” they asked as we reached the parking lot, which I hoped was a safe distance from the building.

  “Bomb,” Virna answered as she looked at her watch. “Two minutes.”

  The blast didn’t wait two minutes. The top two floors on the west side of the building disintegrated in a massive explosion. Everyone ran, including me and Virna, toward the street as glass, mangled solar panels and HVAC units went flying through the air like a child throwing toys. Much of it landed where we had been standing. The helicopter, what was left of it, crashed through the glass walls of the neighboring FedEx building. There was little smoke or fire. That would come next as the interior burned through the lower floors.

  Yonas nudged me. “There might be secondary explosions if the fire reaches the armory. It is a fireproof vault, though.”

  That wasn’t reassuring. “Have all your guards set up a cordon and push everyone back across the street. And send runners to the nearby building to alert them to evacuate. Better safe than sorry, my daddy always said.”