Breaking and Entering

by Jeremy N. Smith

  Alien held the result to the light, smiling.

  There. Her own employee badge, just like the ones she had seen inside regional headquarters—or at least close enough to pass casual inspection.

  Alien grabbed a clipboard from the rack of office supplies and returned to the computer bank, loading the Castle logo again and pasting it into a new document.

  “SECURITY AUDIT,” she typed. “PART I: QUESTIONNAIRE.”

  Shortly before ten thirty the next morning, Alien pulled up in the Taurus and parked just outside the entrance to the same Castle branch bank. “Branch manager: Leon Sanders,” her remote reconnaissance notes reminded her.

  Moments later, a middle-aged man in suit and tie exited the building, precisely as he had at half past ten—and then again at half past two—the day before. If the pattern held, she had half an hour, Alien estimated. Then Sanders would return from his break.

  She stepped out of the car, dressed as she had been at the regional headquarters, only this time with her new clipboard and questionnaire instead of a laptop case—and the fake Castle employee badge clipped to her waistband.

  Alien entered. Straight ahead were teller booths. To the left, in front of the empty manager’s office, was a desk for his assistant, a pretty brown-haired woman in her early thirties.

  “Hi,” Alien introduced herself, holding the clipboard close to her chest. “I’m from central security. I’m here to see Leon Sanders.”

  “He’s out,” the woman said, “but he should be back in thirty minutes.”

  “Hmm.” Alien looked at her watch. “I still have still three other branches to do,” she said. “How about the assistant branch manager?”

  “That would be me.”

  “Great,” said Alien. “I’m here to do a spot check of the branch.” This would occur twice a year from now on, she explained. “First I need to ask you a few questions,” Alien continued. “Then we’re going to do a little walk-through together.”

  The assistant manager gulped, standing quickly, and then, just as rapidly, sitting down, as she processed Alien’s words. Her eyes flashed on the hip badge, but she didn’t ask for a business card.

  Shame. While at Kinko’s, Alien had them print new cards, with a fresh central security title, as she was typing the questionnaire.

  Black pen in hand, Alien stepped through her questions, beginning with access: “Who opens in the morning? What time do they get here? What’s your all-clear signal?” she asked.

  “Leon or I open at seven thirty,” the assistant manager told her. “Whoever comes in first opens the break room blinds. We check all the areas before opening the others. Then we move that plant”—she pointed to a ficus by the front window, visible from the parking lot—“from the left side of the room to the right.”

  Alien nodded, outwardly stern, inwardly delighted, and scribbled the answers.

  “Do you use bait money or dye packs?” she asked. “Do you have many false alarms? Where do you store your combinations? Are the vault keys locked away?”

  More quick questions followed, covering everything from common break times to who settled the ATM. The woman answered them all. Then she opened a locked drawer and gave Alien the log noting any security issues they’d experienced in the last twelve months.

  “Can you make a copy of this for me?” Alien asked.

  “Of course,” the assistant manager said.

  They stood afterward and walked together through the facility, beginning behind the tellers, where the woman pointed out the specific details she’d mentioned in her answers to the questionnaire. From there, they entered a rear file room, only to be interrupted by a teller. “Yes, Adam?” the assistant manager asked him.

  The guy studied Alien. She stiffened, her heart beating so strongly she could feel her pulse in her neck. Had she somehow been caught?

  “Can you notarize a car title?” the teller asked the assistant manager.

  The woman nodded. “Excuse me,” she apologized to Alien, leaving the “auditor” alone with file cabinets containing the records of the branch’s customers: names, addresses, account numbers, debts, assets, and every single one of their transactions.

  In other words, precisely the information that could be mined to commit financial fraud, blackmail, or worse.

  “I assume you want to see the vault?” the assistant manager asked when she returned.

  “Of course.” Alien nodded, acting like it was a question she got daily. But she knew to make it snappy if she didn’t want an unwelcome meeting with the manager.

  Thirty seconds later—less than twenty minutes since she’d entered the building—Alien stood with her pen and clipboard in a cool, dry, thick-walled room, silent as a tomb.

  “Here’s the water,” the assistant manager said, pointing out a clear gallon jug—there in case someone was somehow locked in. Beside the water was an empty white plastic bucket, for obvious reasons, a flashlight, and a phone.

  “Very good,” said Alien, running a finger along the rows of safe deposit boxes.

  The hard part now was pretending she already knew everything. “So . . . ,” she said. “Tell me more about where you store your keys.”

  Over the next thirty-six hours, Alien tried her “random audit” ploy on three more Castle branches in the area, now dealing directly with the managers. It worked at every one.

  The manager at the last branch was especially helpful. She told Alien about the back door that was hard to close, the location of the security videotapes, and even the combination of the vault. As they left the bank branch file room, Alien saw and took an extra set of building keys. Now, if she had wanted to, she could have treated the branch like her own personal piggy bank.

  She returned at five p.m. Friday with one of Ted’s actual staffers, Castle’s security lead on the East Coast. The manager was mortified. Not embarrassed, though. Just angry.

  “I will hate you forever,” she told Alien the moment her superior was out of earshot.

  The words hurt. Alien tried to shrug them off.

  Better me than the real bad guys.

  Her plane landed at midnight on Friday. Alien finally got home to Fireberry at one a.m. A scratchy Janis Joplin record was playing and the aroma of a fresh mushroom-and-onion pizza filled the living room. Tanner waited in the kitchen, having opened a wine bottle and made her dinner.

  Alien kissed his cheek before cutting and nibbling half a slice. “I have to work all weekend,” she told him. “The project report is due Monday morning.”

  Her mind was still racing from the week’s events. In college, in these circumstances, she would have taken G to come down, and then microdoses of acid to work nonstop again once she woke. Now she had FDA-approved alternatives.

  Alien filled a cup of water. Upstairs, after changing for bed, she took two translucent orange plastic prescription pill bottles from her backpack. AMBIEN 10 MG TABLET, the first one said. ADDERALL 10 MG TABLET, said the second.

  Alien opened the Ambien bottle, washed a little white pill down with water, and climbed up to bed with Tanner.

  Right after her alarm went off Saturday morning, she rose groggily and downed a little blue Adderall.

  Without changing out of her blue satin nightgown, Alien placed her notebooks from the week between her lava lamp and open laptop. “‘CASTLE’ BANK—Engagement #1,” she typed. “CONFIDENTIAL.”

  Strong winds whipped Alien’s hair as she sought the entrance to a cavernous steakhouse a week later. Even in February, twenty-seven degrees was cold for Washington. Inside, it felt like eighty. She checked her trench coat and smoothed her hair. She gave the hostess Bruce’s name, and was led to a table deep in the recesses of the restaurant. Jules was also there, along with another Jedi, Hank, a tall and slender man in tan chinos and a blue blazer.

  The Jedis wore identical pewter lapel pins. These were in the shape of a tiny bent spoon, a reference to the scene in The Matrix where Neo, the hero, is shown how to bend spoons with his mind. The tric
k, Neo learns, is to realize that “there is no spoon”: the physical world people believe they inhabit is an illusion.

  Throughout lunch, at their plush cushioned booth, the Jedis jokingly lorded their status over Alien: “Ms. Tessman, can you pass the salt?” “Ms. Tessman, can I have the water?” “Ms. Tessman, I dropped my napkin. Would you retrieve it for me?”

  Finally, though, Jules said, “Ms. Tessman, would you please stand up?”

  Alien did. People at surrounding tables stared.

  With exaggerated ceremony, Jules pinned a pewter spoon on her blouse. “Prepare to be spooned,” he declared in mock solemnity.

  “Better than forked!” Bruce said.

  Alien beamed.

  As dessert was arriving, they were joined by another man, showing some of the signs of entering one’s forties. His dark hair was receding, he slouched a bit, and his mustache had flecks of gray, but he projected an attractive warmth and geniality. “Flight delay,” he explained. “Sorry I’m late.”

  When the guy unbuttoned his coat, Alien saw he had his own bent spoon pin.

  “Agent Tessman,” she introduced herself. “Elizabeth.”

  “Agent Michaels,” he replied. “Jim.” He reached over the table to shake her hand. “We’ll be working together on Castle next week. I’m your new partner.”

  Alien and Jim flew together to a combination check processing facility and Castle back office outside Indianapolis. Driving straight from the airport, they reached a featureless office park late Sunday afternoon and entered a huge parking lot off the highway.

  “This is going to be tough,” Jim said, pointing out a ten-foot-high fence at the rear of the check processing center and a mantrap-style sealed entrance—two sets of doors, the first requiring a badge, the second requiring a personal identification number—stopping tailgaters cold out front. “We may need something like the stuff you pulled in Wilmington.

  “Shit,” Jim muttered a moment later, and then Alien saw them: two security guards, approaching from an outer station at the main entrance.

  She grabbed a map from the glove box and leaned toward him.

  “I think we should have taken a right,” Alien said, loud enough for the guards to hear.

  “What are you doing here?” one guard asked.

  “Oh, we’re lost,” Jim said, with a tinge of frustration in his voice. He turned to her, saying in a tone that showed he was annoyed, “Listen, honey, I’m sure it’s off this exit. I don’t need a map.”

  Alien affected exasperation. “He never asks for directions,” she complained to the guard.

  Jim shrugged as Alien named their hotel and the guard pointed them on their way.

  He didn’t break character even as they hit the highway.

  “I’m sorry I got angry, dear,” he said, and they both laughed.

  Monday morning, the same parking lot was packed. Leaving Jim behind in the rental car, Alien lit a cigarette and walked to the designated smokers’ area near a side entrance to the back office building. She tried not to make it obvious that she was casing the place. Guards watched everyone coming through the main door. The side door was unguarded but required a keycard swipe to open. And there was a surveillance camera.

  Still, maybe she could tailgate her way inside.

  “Morning,” a goateed man in his late twenties greeted her as he entered the smoking area.

  “Morning,” Alien returned. She thought about her last cigarette. It had been part of another world, back in Santa Fe three and a half years ago. Smoking again now, in sub-zero suburban central Indiana, felt like a strange dream. She was cold; the trench coat was not made for a Midwest winter.

  “I’m new here,” she said to the guy, just flirtatiously enough. “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I’m a service tech from Diebold—we run the bank’s security system,” the guy said.

  “Really?” replied Alien.

  As if to pass the time until they were done with their cigarettes, she asked him questions about his work. Alien soon knew what alarms Castle used, how they tracked alerts, and what times the system went down for service.

  “Better get to it,” the guy said as he took a last drag on his Marlboro and flicked it away. He turned up the collar of his leather bomber jacket. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Yeah,” Alien said, grinning as she waved good-bye to her new friend.

  Alien walked back in the direction of the car. Rather than get in, once she caught Jim’s eye she nodded. He nodded back.

  Alien headed right, toward the side entrance, figuring it would be a security afterthought, at least until the end of the pre–nine a.m. rush.

  A man just ahead of her swiped, pulled open the door, and entered. Alien stepped up and caught the handle of the door just before it could close.

  When the man was well into the building, she pulled the door open casually as if it had been shut all the way and stepped inside.

  She was at the start of a long hallway. At the end of it, just before a bank of elevators, she saw a second, interior guard station, facing the main entrance doors. Alien held back a moment, joining a sea of Castle employees two and three abreast.

  Alien entered the elevator with her group.

  Barely breathing, she pressed the button for the tenth—and top—floor.

  The cubicle setup, she saw, was like that in the Wilmington regional center, but more densely packed and without any separate offices along the perimeter. The dividers were high enough to afford a semblance of privacy, and would also hide her if she lingered for a moment at a particular desk. Alien had with her a digital camera, equipped with image stabilization and small enough to hold unobtrusively in one hand. It could document any security holes faster and more persuasively than handwritten notes. Given how discreet she needed to be, Alien set the camera on silent and for continuous shot mode.

  The security measures in place to prevent an unauthorized person from making it to this floor were reasonably good, if obviously not impenetrable. But if someone did get past them, there was almost zero additional defense against data theft. InfoSec experts called a situation like this the “M&M” security model. Once you penetrated the hard outer shell, there was nothing to stop you from getting at everything inside.

  Alien passed a floor map. Emergency evacuation plans. Keys hanging in locks. Open file cabinets with documents marked CONFIDENTIAL and Q4 FINANCIALS and UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION FILING.

  Around the corner was a PREVENT TAILGATING! poster, instructing everyone to “watch your back when you enter a secured entrance.”

  Good advice.

  Many desks displayed unattached keycards linked to the building. At least half a dozen computers had people’s usernames and passwords written on sticky notes attached to the monitors. As she had hoped, Alien found a few empty cubicles, their occupants either out for the day or not yet at work. Pausing before the computers in these cubicles, she surreptitiously plugged in thumb-sized keystroke loggers that could track every keystroke typed, website visited, or program run, and send that information to an Elite Defense email address or file server. This could be even better than stealing a computer, because the data would keep flowing and her victims might never know it.

  Not that she couldn’t do both.

  On one unoccupied desk in the middle of the floor was a Dell OptiPlex minitower identical to the workstation that had gone missing from the hospital.

  Shielded by the cubicle dividers, Alien took out and opened a big black garbage bag. A minute later, she had grabbed the computer and was carrying her prize, wrapped like a present, into the elevator, and down to the first floor.

  No one looked up.

  The same guard station and card-activated door stood between Alien and the parking lot.

  Alien hoped to stroll by the guards and wait for someone to enter through the side door. A guard exited his little booth a moment after she stepped off the elevator, however. Alien heard her heels click and then hi
s footsteps keeping pace exactly behind her.

  “Hold on!” he said ten feet from the end of the long hallway.

  Alien froze, shoulders tensed. The thirty-pound computer frame cut into her arms.

  The guard ran past, placing himself between her and the door.

  Which he opened for her with a swipe of his own keycard.

  “I got that for you, ma’am,” he said. “Have a good day.”

  Jim opened the car trunk, took the computer from Alien, and placed it gently down.

  “That was fast,” he complimented her.

  “Friendly hosts,” Alien said.

  Jim left to try his own skills. When an employee in front of him swiped at the side entrance, he hustled forward to grab the open door, as Alien had. Then, calm and courteous, Jim held the door open for a Castle staffer behind him before proceeding.

  Fifteen minutes later, he returned, pockets emptied of his own keystroke loggers, wheeling a sixty-gallon blue plastic shred bin.

  Alien was impressed. She peeked inside. Documents intended for shredding filled the receptacle to the brim. Every one was stamped CONFIDENTIAL.

  “I love shred bins,” Jim said. “This way, they gather up the secret stuff for us. And then we just roll it out.”

  “How’d you get it past them?” asked Alien.

  “Rolled it into the elevator and out the front door.” Jim chuckled. “After all, the side door was too narrow.”

  “And?”

  “A guard yelled at me: ‘Hey!’ I thought, ‘Shit,’ and turned around and said, ‘Yes, sir?’

  “‘Next time you need to take that down a freight elevator,’ he said.”

  Jim and Alien had an hour before their local Castle contact could meet them, so they drove around a bit to celebrate and decompress. When Jim saw a small lake ahead, he pulled into the parking lot by its beach.