Chapter One
Espionage is easy. Don’t let the movies make you think otherwise. High tech security systems, redundancies, backups, passwords, biometric scanners, and whatever other fancy things they like to throw into every script all have the same weakness.
They’re made and monitored by people.
People are easy to fool, and anyone with more than a rudimentary understanding of fieldcraft knows it. Someone with enough confidence and audacity can do more in an afternoon than a dozen drones in a week, if they’re in a decent position and know what to do. We’re social animals, like it or not, and we’re all conditioned from birth to respond in certain ways to certain people. We listen to older people, ignore landscapers, sign whatever the delivery guy sticks under our noses, and move on with our lives.
If you were to ask someone what their opinion of their plumber was, they’d probably remark on the quality of his or her work. They may mention a few side details, like oh, he’s a nice guy, but they don’t really know anything about their plumber to share.
But everyone has a strong opinion about their boss. Whether they work in an office, a construction site, or one of those new tech startup companies that operate out of someone’s garage, everyone works for someone, and everyone has something to say.
These are the kinds of things that nobody really thinks about much, if at all, and it’s something that, regardless of how much training someone has, can be exploited.
After I got the details and the payment for the job, I spent the next week getting ready. The target was in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, a few dozen miles away from any towns. I wasn’t sure exactly what they did there, but there were always several guards on duty, patrolling the perimeter in shifts. The guards carried actual assault rifles, not the civilian ones that politicians talk about banning every few months—these were ones that could unload a thirty round magazine in less than three seconds. I was extremely durable, but I was not anxious to experience what it felt like to be turned into Swiss cheese.
The other security measures looked fairly basic, limited mostly to the fence and strong doors, which made sense. In the middle of the desert, particularly a flat desert, it was not only unlikely that anyone would show up to cause trouble, but it would be nearly impossible to do so without being spotted by one of the guards on duty.
I knew all this because I flew over the compound myself. I was a buzzard at the time.
Shapeshifting is excellent for reconnaissance. But it’s not always enough to see what’s going on, because, as I said earlier, it’s really about people. So, to remedy that, I watched the guards from a perch on the roof of one of the buildings long enough to see one of them drink from a flask.
He may as well have handed me a picture of him sleeping with the First Lady. Liking to drink is one thing, but drinking on duty usually indicates something deeper than that. This guy liked to drink. If an outfit like Blackstone caught wind of one of their employees drinking on the job—especially when he isn’t even in the field—he’d be fired and blackballed in a heartbeat. This guy wanted a drink badly enough to risk his career, such as it was. That made him a target.
So, when he left the compound and headed home, I followed him from the air, then waited unobtrusively for him to go out for the night. He didn’t disappoint; he was only home long enough to shower and change out of his clothes before driving to the local bar, a dive called The Rusty Badger, which was a stupid name. The place was almost empty, because it was a Tuesday evening, but the bartender seemed to know him, and they struck up a conversation over a shared beer.
I left long enough to scrounge some clothes I had stashed before starting my recon, and returned, this time as a human, though I didn’t look like myself at all. I made myself a little taller than normal, though not tall enough to be too intimidating, and changed my features enough to be unrecognizable. Nobody got to see my real face except for me and my family. It wasn’t professional.
I went inside, and, after I bought the guard (whose name turned out to be Sam, though his friends called him Lucky) a few drinks, then a few more drinks, I started to learn some things. Lucky had washed out of the Marines, for example, because he had had “disagreements” with the CO. He had worked for Blackstone for two years, though he had never seen any action. He and most of the guards were bored most of the time.
And they all hated their boss, Josh Breckan, to whom Lucky referred as “a pencil-pushing pencil-neck.” Josh Breckan, according to the file provided by my employer, was high up enough in the organization to have the information I was looking for on his personal computer in his office at the compound.
Lucky, who plied me for about a dozen drinks in exchange for information that he thought was worthless but was actually worth at least fifty grand, eventually was driven home by the bartender, who had apparently done it often enough that he wasn’t particularly bothered at the prospect.
That was how, eight days after I had had a conversation with a nervous wreck in the humid Miami heat, I stood across the street from the home of Josh Breckan, Pencil-neck of Blackstone’s New Mexico compound.
Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) Page 2
