Blood Tattoo (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 5)

by Jude Hardin

  “There’s nothing missing from my safe today, and there was nothing missing the day Diana was here. I can promise you that.”

  “We’ll see. Of course, I’ll have to repeat the entire inspection, so I’ll be here for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll walk you to the safe room. I already summoned a guard, so he should be there waiting for us.”

  “Great,” I said.

  We got up, and when he turned his back to me to open the door, I stuck the disk under the front of his desk. It was an audio bug, as I’d suspected. It was actually the main reason I’d come to Aero-Fleck. The inspector disguise was mostly just a way to get me inside the big guy’s office so I could plant the device. In addition to that, Di wanted to know if the document outlining the assassination was still in the safe. If so, she wanted me to smuggle out a copy. But my primary purpose was to plant the bug.

  I followed Von Lepstein out of the office. The safe room was all the way at the end of the hall, on the right. A uniformed guard was sitting in a chair by the door. There was a small folding table beside him with a ziplock bag on top of it. The guard instructed me to empty my pockets, and then he stuffed my keys and my wallet and my sunglasses and my pack of Clark’s Teaberry gum into the bag and sealed it. Before today, I’d never bought a pack of Teaberry gum in my life, but apparently Perry Wendell Davis loved the stuff. It was part of my cover, or legend, as Di put it.

  “Your briefcase,” the guard said.

  I set the case on the table and opened it. The guard removed the two pages from the binder and ran a finger along the gold lettering, making sure the script was raised like it was supposed to be. He frisked me, and then he handed me the loose pages, along with a small slip of paper with the combination to the safe written on it. Those were the only items I was allowed to take into the room, and the only items I could bring out.

  The security measures came as no surprise. I’d known what to expect. Di had told me exactly how everything would go. Still, it was a little unnerving. I was about to enter a room I had no business entering. I was about to gain access to a safe filled with top secret documents, books with detailed information on the speaker systems for a new stealth fighter jet.

  And I’d never had any sort of government clearance in my life.

  It made me think about a couple of other civilians, a man-and-wife team named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried and convicted of espionage back in the fifties.

  Tried, convicted, and executed.

  I walked into the safe room. The guard pulled the door shut and told me to knock twice when I was ready to come out. I was locked in. There was no doorknob on the inside of the door. I looked around for security cameras. There were none in plain sight, and there weren’t any houseplants or mirrors or framed pictures where a camera could have been easily hidden. Di had told me there wouldn’t be any. Something about them posing more of a security risk than their usefulness warranted. But I looked around anyway, for my own peace of mind.

  There was a wooden chair and a wooden table and a gray vault about the size of a dormitory refrigerator. An old steel desk lamp, big and beige and ugly, provided the only source of light.

  I pulled the chair to the safe and took a seat. In the movies there would have been a retinal scanner and a fingerprint scanner and an electronic keypad with a digital display. There was none of that. No bells, no whistles. Access to the safe was guarded by a good old-fashioned combination lock and nothing else. Primitive, but effective. Good enough for government work, as they say. Supposedly, the combination was changed on a monthly basis, and after every DOD inspection. So even if it had been changed yesterday, it would be changed again today when I departed. Only four people knew the combination on a day-to-day basis, so one of those people must have planted the assassination outline. Or maybe a couple of them were working together. That was a possibility. At any rate, there were a limited number of suspects.

  I dialed in the numbers from the chit the guard had given me, pushed the shiny steel lever down, and pulled the door open. The documents were on three different shelves. They were big bulky things, printed on legal size paper, bound with heavy brown card stock and steel fasteners. I pulled the one Di was interested in: usgovdoc0001457342-sp3900. The words CLASSIFIED and TOP SECRET had been stamped on the front cover in bold red letters.

  I opened it. Now I was all in. Now I had committed a crime, a big one. Now there was definitely no turning back.

  I started at the beginning, my fingers trembling as I carefully turned each page.

  It quickly became apparent that this was not a book that had been handled carefully. It was a working copy, more like something you would find at a construction site than in a library. The pages were heavily creased where they had been taken out and folded and slipped into a pocket at one time or another, by one of the engineers or the project manager or Kurt Von Lepstein. That’s the way it worked, Di had explained. They removed a few pages at a time, as needed, rather than tote the unwieldy binders around while they tried to work.

  I didn’t understand the detailed diagrams. Not even a little bit. They looked like road maps, but the roads didn’t have any names and there was no point of reference. It was like some kind of crazy labyrinth you could never find your way out of. Like a maze from hell. Most of the pages had text printed along the margins, in English, but even that didn’t make much sense to me. It was a bunch of scientific jargon I wasn’t familiar with.

  It was all starting to give me a headache, and if the outline for the assassination wasn’t in this book—where it had been during Di’s inspection—then I still had fifteen more volumes to examine.

  My eyes started to cross, and I thought I was going to have to close them for a while. But then there it was, about three quarters of the way in. Di had found it further toward the front, so someone had moved it since she’d done her inspection. Someone—one of the four people with access to the safe—had repositioned the page within the same binder. I wondered why, and then it occurred to me that maybe some of the other schematics had encrypted text embedded into them as well. Di hadn’t said so, but maybe they did. Maybe the person who moved the outline was communicating with its intended recipient by shuffling the pages around.

  Di had gone through extensive training in cryptology, but I had not. The outline was nothing more than gobbledygook to me. Di had told me what to look for, and that was the only reason I’d even recognized it. To a casual observer, or an ordinary Department of Defense inspector, or a project manager or an engineer or a CEO, the outline looked like any other page in the volume.

  But the text on this particular page worked on two levels. For the engineers, it provided the information necessary to understand the schematic—more scientific jargon. For Di, who had seen through all that, down to the code, and of course for the person who created the page, it provided a detailed plan for assassinating the president.

  And a detailed plan to frame Di for the crime.

  She had sent me to Aero-Fleck for the inspection because of DOD protocol. Otherwise, she would have come back to the plant herself. When a re-inspect is ordered, for whatever reason, it has to be performed by someone other than the person who did the original. Aero-Fleck was well versed in the protocol, as were all government contractors, so a big red flag would have been raised if Di had shown up to investigate the problem herself. It would have aroused too much suspicion, and it would have made it practically impossible to achieve our secondary goal, which was to make a copy of the outline.

  Di wanted a copy, and there was only one way that was going to happen.

  I had to get the document out of the room.

  I carefully disassembled the binder. I lifted the page out and folded it, making sure I followed the creases that were already there, and then I rolled it into a tight cylinder. Per Diana’s instructions, I undid my pants, reached back and pulled the latex condom from between my butt cheeks. I inserted the rolled-up page into the condom, and
then inserted the condom into my rectum. It was uncomfortable, but not unbearable. I pulled my pants up and got everything fastened back and reassembled the binder. I walked around the table a few times, practicing, making sure I could manage my normal gait without looking like I had a broomstick up my ass.

  I locked the binder back in the vault, looked around and made sure everything was exactly as it had been when I walked into the room.

  I knocked twice on the door. The guard opened it.

  “You done already?” he said.

  “No. I need to go to the head.”

  I set the two sheets of paper with the raised gold lettering on the table by the guard’s chair, along with the combination chit. He frisked me again.

  “Turn that corner, and then the restrooms are there on the left.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I turned the corner, trying not to allow my discomfort to give me away. It felt as though a proctologist was following me around. I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. If they caught me, I would never see the light of day again. I would be arrested and charged with espionage. My life would be over.

  But I wasn’t going to get caught. I was determined not to. The money Di had promised was going to allow me to get my business where it needed to be. Juliet could cut back her hours at the hospital, focus more on getting her master’s. Brittney could get rid of that old Camry and have something decent to drive. Maybe I could even get a new car myself. The money was going to change our lives. And even though I was technically committing a very serious crime, the end result was going to be a good thing. I was going to help save the president, help thwart one of the most elaborate and diabolical conspiracies in the history of the world. In the end, I was going to be fat with cash and I was going to be feeling pretty good about myself. I was determined not to get caught.

  I walked into the john, ducked into the stall and secured the door. Di had said the restrooms on this side of the second floor never got much traffic. It hadn’t been the ideal place for her to leave a plant, but she said it was the best she could do under the circumstances. Most of her potential recruits were male, so that’s why she had chosen the men’s room over the women’s.

  If an inspector from the Department of Defense came into a business like Aero-Fleck and established that there was a page missing from a document like usgovdoc0001457342-sp3900, a lot of things would happen. The factory would go into lockdown mode immediately, and nobody would be allowed to come or go until every employee was thoroughly searched—including a cavity search.

  So of course I wasn’t going to tell anyone there was a page missing.

  I was hoping to get out of the building without even seeing Von Lepstein again, but, if I did have to talk to him, I would tell him that the inspection went perfectly. I would say there were no problems, that Diana Dawkins had simply forgotten to check off the document in question when she handed in her report.

  That would get me away from the place, but I still couldn’t take the document with me. If I took it with me, the person or people who created it—one or more of the four Aero-Fleck employees with access to the safe—would know next time they came looking for it. Once they discovered the security breach, they would simply change their plan and Di and I would be back to square one. So I couldn’t leave the premises with the document. I had to make a copy.

  I stood on the toilet and lifted the drop-ceiling tile directly above me. I eased it out of its frame and set it to the side. There was a cast iron pipe running parallel to the wall. I reached behind the pipe and found the digital camera Di had planted there the day she’d found the assassination plan. It looked like a gold lipstick tube. When you turned the screw-on cap clockwise past the stopping point, it opened a tiny port on the bottom for a split second—just long enough to capture the image. It was a cool little gadget, like something you might see in a James Bond movie. I liked it.

  I pulled my pants down and extracted the document. I’d taken the same kind of bowel prep people take before the night of a colonoscopy, so the condom was clean. I sat on the toilet, pulled the page out, unfolded it and placed it flat on the floor in front of me. I snapped ten pictures, adjusting the position of the camera each time to make sure I recorded the whole thing. I refolded the paper and rolled it into a cylinder again, and while I was stuffing it back into the condom the door creaked open and someone walked into the restroom.

  I looked upward. The ceiling tile above me was still ajar. I’d left it that way so I could put the camera back by the pipe when I was finished with it. I planned to retrieve it after the inspection, after the guard frisked me for the final time.

  But now some guy was in the restroom with me. If he noticed the missing tile, it could mean big trouble for me. I was in danger of literally being caught with my pants down. It had been a mistake to leave the tile off while I took the pictures, a crucial error in judgment that might end up costing me dearly.

  The guy stepped up to the urinal.

  I didn’t breathe.

  I heard the unmistakable sound of him unzipping his trousers, followed by the hiss of urine against porcelain.

  Maybe the guy hadn’t even noticed me. That’s what I was hoping. Most members of the male species just waltz in and whip it out and do their business and wash their hands and leave. Not like women, who somehow manage to take five or ten minutes every trip. What they do in there all that time is anybody’s guess. It’s one of those unsolved mysteries of the universe, like Stonehenge.

  So I was hoping he hadn’t noticed me, but my hopes were dashed when he said, “How ’bout those Gators?”

  My secret agent operation aside, I hate it when people walk in and start talking to you while you’re on the crapper. It just never seems right to be having a conversation during such a private activity. Normally, I would have just ignored the bonehead, but I didn’t want to antagonize him.

  My hands were sweating.

  “They did good,” I said.

  I figured he was talking about the University of Florida basketball team, about their performance at the NCAA tournament last month. I don’t keep up with college sports, but I’d heard enough to know they made it to the Final Four.

  “Next year they’ll go all the way,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  He zipped up. “Look at that shit,” he said. “Those fucking idiots in maintenance left the ceiling tile open.”

  Damn.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fucking idiots. No wonder it’s so hot in here. All the cold air is going into that hole. I’ll fix it before I leave.”

  He turned the water on to wash his hands. “Fuck that. Those dumbasses need to be more careful. I’m going to call the maintenance supervisor and give him a ration of shit, and then—”

  “Really. I’ll fix it. It’s no big deal.”

  He was drying his hands with a paper towel when his cell phone trilled. He answered the call. He was silent for a few beats, and then said, “You’re kidding. All right, I’m on it.”

  He walked out of the restroom in a hurry, didn’t say anything else to me.

  I stuffed the condom back where the sun never shines. It was a little tender going in this time, and I noticed a smear of blood on my finger when I was finished.

  I stood on the toilet again, stashed the camera back behind the pipe, lowered the ceiling tile into place. Like it never happened. Except for Bonehead, the guy who had come in and relieved himself. Now I had him to worry about.

  It seemed as though the call he’d gotten might have been urgent, though. From the sound of his voice, and from the way he’d departed so expediently. Maybe he wouldn’t give the ceiling tile a second thought. That’s what I was counting on. My life depended on it.

  I washed my hands and left the lavatory and walked back to the guard’s little station outside the safe room.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “Upset stomach.”

  “Want some Rolaids?”

  “Sure.”<
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  He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out half a roll and handed it to me.

  “Keep them. I got more in the office.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I peeled off a couple and popped them into my mouth and chewed them. The guard patted me down again and gave me my papers and let me back into the safe room.

  I did everything in reverse, and five minutes later the document was back into its binder where it belonged and the empty condom was back between my butt cheeks. Success. Mission accomplished. I was starting to get used to this spy gig. I was starting to enjoy it.

  I spent the next two hours pretending to go through the rest of the books. If someone had walked in, they would have seen an inspector from the Department of Defense sitting there doing his job. But nobody walked in. I worked undisturbed until I turned the final page and locked the final binder back into the vault.

  I knocked twice, and the guard let me out. I assumed the position, and he felt me up for the last time. At least I hoped it would be the last time. If he wanted to do it again, he was going to have to buy me a drink first. Maybe light some candles.

  “You’re good to go,” he said.

  “Cool.”

  He handed me the ziplock bag with my things in it, and watched carefully as I put my document list back into the flimsy three-ring and closed it all up in the briefcase.

  “Mr. Von Lepstein’s in a meeting,” he said. “Did you need to talk to him before you leave?”

  “No. I’ll send him my report via email. Everything checked out OK.”

  “Great. You have a nice day now.”

  “Thanks. And thanks again for the Rolaids.”

  “They help?”

  “Actually, I think I’m going to have to go again on my way out. Damn bean burritos last night.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

  I took a detour to the restroom on my way to the elevator. Locked myself in the stall again, stood on the toilet and lifted the ceiling tile and retrieved the camera.