Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  “We do it the old-fashioned way.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from a pocket. It had a long column of numbers on it. “This could take fifteen minutes or so.”

  “If you get lucky,” I said.

  Merlin grunted.

  The Simplex had five buttons, which could be pressed in any order. But it had one rule, one weakness: Each number could be used only once per combination.

  That meant that the Simplex lock had “only” 1,082 combinations. I don’t know how this is calculated, but I know that math teachers sometimes give their students the “Simplex math problem” to solve: how to calculate the number of combinations for the five-button Simplex lock.

  “I can shorten the time a little,” I said. “I saw Norcross push four buttons, not five.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  On the piece of paper he’d just taken out was a list of all possible combinations for the Simplex five-button mechanical lock. Now he was going to run down the list and enter each four-digit combination.

  Seriously. I thought we’d be lucky if it only took him fifteen minutes.

  I tested our walkie-talkies one last time and then left him there pushing buttons. I took out my penlight and wandered the corridors until I found Norcross’s office. The door was closed, as I expected. The plaque on the door said ASHTON NORCROSS in black letters on gold. I waved my keycard at it, and it beeped and the red light turned green.

  There was no CCTV camera in here, as far as I could tell, but I didn’t want to take a chance, so I kept my mask on. What if there was a well-concealed camera? Not likely, but possible, and I didn’t want to risk being photographed.

  It was starting to get hot and sweaty inside the mask. Perspiration was dripping down my face.

  I remembered from my earlier visit that there was a credenza behind the desk that had books and keepsakes on display and a lower hutch section that looked like a file cabinet. I figured that might be where he kept active files on matters he was currently working on. It wasn’t locked, but inside, disappointingly, were a few reams of printer paper and nothing much else. I turned around and surveyed the desk. There was not much on top of it except a pen set, a lamp, a few knickknacks, and a computer monitor.

  I squatted down, searching with my penlight, and located a computer tower underneath the desk, pushed to one corner. It grunted quietly. I found a USB port and inserted the Rubber Ducky.

  Dorothy had instructed me to keep it plugged in for at least ten minutes, though it would probably finish its work within five.

  Then I stood back up and checked the drawers of Norcross’s desk, looking for a sticky note with numbers on it. You’d be surprised how often I find combinations to safes or passwords to computer accounts scrawled on Post-it notes or scraps of paper. We all have too many passwords and numbers to remember nowadays, and he couldn’t be expected to have the combination to the strong room memorized. But there was nothing here. Good for him. He practiced good security hygiene.

  Then again, I considered, there was his executive assistant’s desk just outside, an even more likely place for one of those sticky notes. I left Norcross’s office, headed to his assistant’s desk, and searched her drawers, and the underside of the drawers, and her computer monitor and keyboard—all the usual places.

  But nothing here either. Both Norcross and his assistant were good doobies.

  So what about the other name partner, McKenna? Maybe he was sloppier.

  I followed the corridor to the next corner office, and sure enough, the plaque on it read JAMES MCKENNA. I waved my keycard at the reader mounted to his doorjamb, but nothing happened. It was keyed separately, no surprise. I rifled through his assistant’s desk. This one was sloppier, the desk drawers jammed with extra supplies like boxes of paper clips, printer cartridges, tape, staples. It took me longer to go through this cluttered desk, more false alarms, pieces of paper to examine, but I still ended up without the combination to the strong room.

  I looked at McKenna’s office door and stood there in silence, thinking for a moment about how I might try to get in.

  Then my walkie-talkie came to life and I heard Merlin’s voice. “I’m in,” he said.

  55

  I took my toolbox and strode through the maze of hallways to the strong room. Merlin was holding the door open, and for an instant I was jolted by his strange appearance until I remembered we were both wearing masks. He said, “I knew it was just a matter of time. Can I take off this damn mask yet?”

  “Not in here,” I said.

  “I know. You’re right.”

  Merlin let the door close, with a pneumatic sucking sound, like opening a can of tennis balls, then a thunk like a car door closing. There was nothing else in this vault but a long row of black metal file cabinets. Then I noticed another keypad mounted to the wall next to the doorjamb. I noticed it because it had begun to beep, a slow, ominous, high-pitched electronic beep.

  “What’s that?” Merlin said.

  “Oh, shit.”

  I had a good idea what this was, though I’d never seen one before. Everyone entering the vault had to reconfirm credentials by punching in a verification code.

  Or else what?

  I wasn’t sure.

  “It might be the same as the code that opened the door,” I said. “Do you remember what it was?”

  Merlin unfolded his list of numbers. “Yes. Two nine three five.”

  I spun around and pressed the four numbers. But the beeping continued, a red diode flashing.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “Shit.”

  “What’s this, a secondary alarm?”

  “Of some sort, yeah. Auto-activated at night, probably.” I tried the standard defaults, 1111 and 9999 and 1234, but nothing halted the beeping.

  Behind the mask, sweat trickled down my face. It was hot, and damp, and uncomfortable.

  “You want to try?” I said.

  “Sure, but I’ll just be guessing, too.”

  “Meanwhile I’ll go through the files.”

  I stepped aside and made room for Merlin. He began punching digits in no discernible order, faster and faster.

  The beeping continued implacably.

  I scrutinized the line of file cabinets. There were twelve of them, four drawers in each, and they were arranged alphabetically. The first drawer was labeled “A—Am.” I wasn’t sure where exactly I should be looking. “S” for Slander Sheet? For the Slade Group? I moved down the row of cabinets, found the drawer labeled “Sh-Sy,” pulled it open.

  The files were marked with plastic tabs, names like Schuster Institute and Symons, Kendrick.

  And there it was: Slade Group. I pulled out the brown folder, my chest tight. I opened it and found correspondence between Ashton Norcross and a woman named Ellen Wiley, of Upperville, Virginia. Ellen Wiley, whose name sounded vaguely familiar.

  The beeping stopped abruptly.

  “You get it?” I said, turning around.

  Merlin shrugged, said, “No. It just suddenly—”

  A metal ka-chunk sound.

  “What the hell?” Merlin cried.

  “Sounds like a relocking system. Spring-loaded locking bolts. Open the door—now.”

  He went right away to the door and turned the lever. But the door wouldn’t open.

  “What the hell?” Merlin said.

  “I was afraid of that.” The relocking system, I knew, was designed to block the door from opening. The sort of feature you might find in some safe rooms or survivalist shelters. In fact, I was pretty sure the strong room was actually a prefab, standalone safe room.

  “We’re locked in,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “There’s always an internal vault door release.”

  “Depends on how it’s designed. Not necessarily.”

  He tried the door lever once again. “Shit.
Well, screw this.” He slammed a fist against the steel door, which did nothing but hurt his fist. He groaned and turned away. I moved in and examined the doorframe, noticed the silicon gasket. I took out a pocketknife, flicked the blade, and ran it along the gap between door and frame. It was tight. Every foot or so the blade hit something solid, which I assumed were the relocking bolts. I didn’t see a way out.

  Then I smelled smoke.

  I sniffed, looked around, saw Merlin lighting a piece of paper, which he’d apparently grabbed from a file drawer. The paper went up in flames, sending up a plume of smoke.

  “What the hell are you doing—?” I shouted as a loud klaxon began to sound.

  “Check it out.” He pointed with his free hand at the ceiling, at what looked like a smoke detector. Arrayed around the ceiling, every eight feet or so, were sprinkler heads, only they were hissing gas, not sprinkling water.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “That’s going to automatically trigger the unlocking mechanism on the door,” Merlin said with a crooked smile.

  The sheet of paper floated away in a black wisp and danced through the air, the smoke now thick enough to sting my eyes.

  “You goddamned idiot!” I said. “That’s halon gas!” A label on the wall to the left of the door warned:

  CAUTION

  THIS AREA IS PROTECTED BY A HALON 1301 FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM. WHEN ALARM SOUNDS OR UPON GAS DISCHARGE, EVACUATE HAZARD AREA IMMEDIATELY.

  “They don’t use halon anymore!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes they do.” Some years ago it was determined that halon damaged the ozone layer, and it was banned. But existing systems were allowed to remain in place. They were grandfathered in. It was still considered a superior alternative to water-sprinkler systems, especially in archives and places where water could damage paper records. Nothing as effective had taken its place.

  Halon was not only bad for the environment, it was bad for humans. At high concentrations—in other words, in a few minutes, when enough halon had hissed out of the ceiling-mounted nozzles—it could cause permanent nerve damage and then death.

  And we were trapped in here.

  The fire suppression system didn’t unlock the doors. The relocking mechanism on the doors had been triggered by our failure to disarm the secondary security system.

  Merlin was coughing, and then I began to cough as well. I was furious at him for setting off the halon system, for doing something so impulsive without even checking with me. But even more, I was beginning to feel icy tendrils of panic seep into my bowels.

  Because I did not see a way out.

  56

  Despite the deafening clang of the alarm, despite the hissing of the halon gas, despite my growing sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in this steel-reinforced coffin, I forced myself to focus. To think.

  It wasn’t easy. I was steadily growing more and more woozy from breathing the halon, and I couldn’t stop coughing. My body was desperately craving oxygen.

  What Merlin had done wasn’t, in fact, stupid. Setting off the fire alarm should have triggered the automatic unlocking of the vault doors. That’s how it should have been, and probably what the fire code required.

  But this setup privileged security over safety. Our failure to enter the right code in the secondary panel meant we were locked in, whether that was against the fire code or not.

  When I was a teenager living in the town of Malden, north of Boston, my friends and I used to hang out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, a used-car dealership owned by one of my buddies’ fathers. There I learned, from a repo man, how to pick locks. I also learned the rudiments of electrical wiring, the stuff engineers learn in school. And I knew that the secondary alarm panel had to be connected to some kind of relay switch that triggered the relocking bolts. It didn’t take me long to find what had to be the relay. It was a white-painted metal box about four inches square, mounted to the wall next to the door. Unobtrusive. Easy to miss. These relays always have an electromagnet inside, and the magnet either closes a switch or opens it. And that, right or wrong, was about the sum total of what I knew about relay switches.

  Connected to the relay was white-painted electrical conduit about half an inch wide, which ran along the doorframe, then straight up to the ceiling. That had to be the power supply.

  I handed Merlin the brown folder so I had both hands free. “Let me have your magnet,” I said.

  Merlin, no surprise, seemed to get why I wanted it. I’m sure he knew a hell of a lot more about mechanical engineering than I did. “You think—?”

  He handed me the oblong chunk of rare-earth magnet. Neodymium, he’d said. It was extremely strong, but was it strong enough? I took it and knelt down. I pulled open the metal box and saw, as I suspected, a copper coil inside. The guts of the electromagnet. Then I placed the neodymium magnet on the exterior of the box and waited.

  And nothing happened.

  My chest had grown tight, and I was short of breath and light-headed, and my heartbeat had begun to speed up, not from adrenaline either.

  “Nice try,” Merlin said. “But the fire department should be here soon.”

  What I did next was out of desperation. I took out the Glock I’d stolen from Curtis Schmidt’s house. I stood up, gripped the gun two-handed, and cocked it. My head was swimming.

  “Heller, you’re not serious.”

  “Stand back,” I said.

  I fired a round into the wiring conduit on the doorframe.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the bolts ka-chunked open. I grabbed the door lever and pulled it open. We both dove forward, out of the halon, and gulped air. I stumbled a bit, unsteady on my feet. I could hear sirens in the distance, which meant they must have been close to the building.

  Merlin pointed toward a door marked STAIRS. We ripped off our masks so we could breathe better.

  And we ran.

  57

  I screwed up, Nick,” Merlin said.

  “It was a good idea,” I said. “It didn’t work. That’s not screwing up.”

  “No, I don’t mean lighting the paper on fire. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, I left the folder behind.”

  “Oh.” I paused. “You did, huh? Yeah, that’s a screw-up, all right.” I felt a surge of hot anger but did my best to conceal it. Merlin looked so dispirited that I added right away, “But not a tragedy. We got the name and her location. We have Ellen Wiley and Upperville, Virginia. I remember that much.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

  We walked down a dark, wide street, moving from pool to pool of yellowish light cast by the sodium-vapor street lamps. Traffic was light, but not nonexistent. It was a little after four in the morning. Dawn was still a few hours off.

  —

  Merlin’s mistake had put added pressure on us—“us” being me, Dorothy, and now Mandy Seeger, since I thought of Mandy as being part of our team. Not only had we set off the fire alarm and damaged the strong room door, but at some point soon, someone in the firm would find the misplaced Slade Group file folder, and that would start a clock ticking. The fact that the file had been isolated and removed from the secured file cabinets would tell them it was probably important. That would point a blinking neon arrow at Ellen Wiley’s name. Maybe they’d alert her that someone might be coming for her.

  Because someone was.

  I allowed myself five hours of sleep. That was about the minimum I could operate on with my cognition fairly intact. At ten in the morning, Dorothy, Mandy, and I gathered in the living room of my hotel suite. I’d given her the name of Slander Sheet’s owner, Ellen Wiley, and she’d made a call to an old friend at The Washington Post.

  “So it’s Ellen Wiley, huh?” she said. “Amazing.” She was reclining in one of the big lounge chairs, one leg tucked under the other.
She was wearing black leggings and a white button-down shirt. She wore her wavy hair up. I couldn’t decide if she was a redhead or a brunette with coppery highlights.

  “The shadowy owner herself,” I said. “What do I need to know about her?”

  Mandy was looking over a sheaf of paper. “My friend at the Post pulled a file on Wiley and e-mailed it to me. She’s an interesting case, Ellen Wiley. Extremely rich—a tobacco heiress. She inherited a big chunk of the Philip Morris tobacco fortune. She’s got homes in Upperville, Anguilla, Scottsdale, and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. I’m pretty sure Upperville is her chief residence. A huge estate on two thousand acres in horse and hunt country. She’s a big patron of the arts. Gives a lot to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville. Divorced three times, each time married to a younger man. She’s not a recluse, exactly, but she’s extremely publicity-averse. She stays away from the press.”

  “So why does she own Slander Sheet?” Dorothy asked.

  Mandy riffled through the file. “That’s a mystery.”

  “I need to see her up close. I want to ask her some questions. I’m fairly good at sussing out liars.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “So where is she now? How do we find out?”

  Mandy smiled.

  “At her estate in Upperville.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She’s hosting a fund-raiser tonight for wounded veterans at her house.”

  “So tonight’s out. We go to see her tomorrow.”

  “I say we go tonight. You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t wounded. Who’s ‘we’?”

  She smiled again. “You need a date.”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “What’s ‘invited’?”

  “I like your style,” I said.

  58

  The drive to Upperville took a little more than an hour, straight down 66 west and then up north to Route 50.

  I wore a suit—I had nothing fancier with me, of course, than the suit I’d worn on the way down from Boston—and Mandy wore a white zip-front peplum jacket over a matching skirt. She also looked like she’d spent some time putting on her makeup. She looked terrific, sophisticated and attractive.