(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

The screen filled with the first page of a technical report. Ginny was momentarily distracted by the contents of this page. It had something to do with drug testing….

  “I’ve got it!” she spoke into the phone. But Martinson caught her off-guard by suddenly selecting EDIT … DELETE. The screen responded.

  MEMO IS 76 PAGES.

  DELETE CONTENTS

  (Y)es(N)o

  Martinson moved too quickly. Before Ginny could notify the SNET workman to interrupt the transmission, Martinson sent the necessary “Y” down the high-speed transmission line.

  Into the phone, Ginny shouted, “Disconnect!”

  But the screen suddenly read:

  DELETING CONTENTS IS

  UNRECOVERABLE.

  ARE YOU SURE?

  (Y)es (N)o

  This final protection device saved them.

  “Disconnect!” Ginny shouted again.

  But the blinking cursor, frozen in its position on the screen, told her that the SNET man had done his job. Martinson was disconnected.

  “Ready,” Ginny informed Dart.

  Although able to access the system’s security functions by modem—a necessity to allow people like Proctor to monitor functions from the field—Ginny had no modem access to this user-area side of the Roxin network. Access was restricted to actual terminal nodes, to prevent the kind of hacking that Ginny had in mind. Where the SNET man had managed to hard-wire Ginny the ability to monitor Martinson’s line, she lacked the necessary software cryptography to manipulate data.

  That job was up to Dartelli.

  Dart reached the second floor at the same time that the security guards pursuing him charged into the third floor office where he had been working.

  He told Ginny the color code on the door that he was facing, and a moment later, when the small indicator light turned from red to green, he opened this door and entered a glassed-in area. Behind the wall of glass and a stainless steel entrance purification chamber, he saw a clean-room lab, with no computer terminal. The idea of breaking into a genetics lab did not thrill Dart; he turned around and hurried out, seeking another office.

  The next door down was marked with a blue box, a yellow box, and two red circles. Ginny, believing she was getting the hang of things said, “You’re in.” Dart tried the door. It was locked. The blue-green characters marched across the reader:

  ACCESS DENIED—PLEASE CONTACT SECURITY. THANK YOU.

  “No good,” he announced.

  “Try again,” she advised.

  “Same thing.”

  “Shit,” she said, “they’ve locked me out. We’re screwed!”

  The computer’s security program had identified Ginny’s raid and blocked her access.

  Dart stood there in the darkened corridor, his heart pounding in his chest, wondering what to do.

  He couldn’t think clearly. It was as if, all at once, his mind went blank.

  “E-S, descending by stairs. E-N, descending by stairs,” warned the lookout suddenly. “Eagle-Nova, descending. Eagle-Sam, descending. Do you copy?” The security team pursuing him had split up, coming toward him from both directions, leaving Dart sandwiched. Trapped. By Ginny’s attempting to gain him access, the computer had once again identified his location.

  How many guards on the night watch? Dart wondered. One at the front security desk; one at the third-floor security desk; two, possibly four roamers. Four to six, total, he decided. If that number held, he guessed that the team sent to bring him in would be no larger than a pair—leave one man by the car, one to roam the west side of the building, and send two after him.

  Dart glanced back at the reader.

  ACCESS DENIED—PLEASE CONTACT SECURITY.

  “Approaching the second floor,” the lookout reported.

  In an attempt to divide and conquer, the pair had split, each taking one of the stairways. No doubt the computers had been used to shut down the elevators, in an attempt to bracket Dart into being caught.

  “Lookout, how many in each stairway?” His feet began to carry him toward the south stairs, the closest to him. The plan formulated quickly in his mind: A security guard will carry a master “key,” a card allowing him access to the various rooms.

  “One each,” returned the steady voice.

  Perfect, Dart thought.

  “Arriving second floor,” the lookout warned. Dart was on the second floor.

  The door to the fire stairs was ten feet away. Five …

  His only hope was surprise. A rent-a-cop in pursuit would be excited and probably poorly trained. He would be thinking that his target was attempting to run away and hide; he would be in a hurry.

  A wedge of yellow light arced across the hallway floor as the guard opened the door to the stairs. This wedge spread open like a fan unfolding, illuminating the far wall.

  A boot and a dark pant leg stepped through. The guard had gotten ahead of Dart by a fraction of a second. The other guard, at the far end of the hall, could not be far off.

  Dart threw himself to the floor, diving for that leg as if it were home plate. He hooked his left arm out and snagged the leg as he slid past, pulling the stunned guard with him. The man went down, looking as if he’d hit a banana peel, all limbs in the air at once. A whoosh of air was expelled from his lungs.

  Dart scrambled atop him, grabbed him by the hair, and snapped the man’s head down firmly against the hard floor. The sound of the contact instantly made Dart nauseated. The guard groaned sickeningly.

  He’s alive. Thank god, Dart thought as he reached down and ripped the man’s credit-card-size pass from where it was clipped to his pocket. Dart flipped it over, establishing that it did, in fact, carry a magnetic stripe.

  He had one shot, he realized. After that, they would block use of this card as well.

  “Hold it! Stay where you are!” roared a voice from the far end of the hall.

  Dart came to his feet and charged through the door and into the stairway. Down or up? he debated. His legs carried him up.

  Behind him, in the hallway, he heard the fast-paced running of the guard coming in hot pursuit.

  In his left ear he heard Ginny. “We gotta get this happening, Dart. We’re running out of time. And I mean fast.”

  Dart ran all the way up to the top of the stairs and through to the hall, attempting to slow down his thoughts and concentrate. His adrenaline was his biggest enemy.

  Using the guard’s card to enter a room would alert security to his location, and would, in turn, limit his chance to do what had to be done. It gave him an idea.

  He slid the stolen card into the first security box he encountered. The light turned green. Dart spun the doorknob, threw the door open, and then quickly pulled it shut. He ran to the next security box, the next door, and followed the same procedure. And the next. One eye trained nervously on the fire stairs through which he had just come, he crossed the hall and used the card on two more offices, blocking the first with a pen to keep it from closing. The security computer would now show six offices accessed.

  Backtracking, Dart entered through the door that he had blocked by the pen. He could hear the security man’s footfalls charging up the fire stairs. He had only a few seconds …

  With the door open, he shoved his stolen card into the reader and began violently rocking the card back and forth. The sound of the feet stopped, Dart guessing the guard was standing immediately on the other side but was being more cautious than his partner below. Dart continued to wiggle the security card. It cracked along the left edge. With one tremendous effort, Dart tore the card straight across, leaving a significant piece of it down inside the reader, to prevent another card from being inserted.

  He pushed the door firmly shut just as he heard the fire stairs door whine open. The guard was on the sixth floor with him.

  Dart slipped into the first chair that fronted a terminal. He touched the space bar, and the screen saver cleared.

  “Go,” he said to Ginny.

  A voice interrupted and ins
tructed, “The tiger’s in the garden.” Terry Proctor had arrived. Dart felt a chill run through him, right into his bowels. It was a huge risk for Proctor to come here in person, illustrating to Dart just how desperate the man was.

  Dart pulled out the cellular, hoping for privacy—getting off the police frequency—pushed RECALL and SEND and a moment later, Ginny answered. “We’ve got less than two minutes. Now listen carefully …”

  Level by level, Ginny steered Dart through the proper key combinations and necessary passwords. To ensure that Dart was on track, Ginny kept repeating anxiously, “What’s the title line? What’s the title line?” Dart would read the uppermost title and await the next instruction.

  Out in the hallway, Dart heard the security guard open a door and then silence. He’ll have to search every office, Dart thought, realizing he had bought himself some time.

  He could picture the operation continuing outside. Proctor’s arrival had triggered a third phase, independent of Dart: The lookout confirmed that Proctor had entered; the ERT team, dressed all in black, was presently scaling the walls of the compound, on their way to sealing the building’s exits. Proctor would be trapped.

  This changed the dynamics—there was no predicting the behavior of a cornered animal.

  “Are you listening?” an almost hysterical Ginny asked. She said, “L-A-T-E-R-I-N-5. Did you get that?”

  Dart typed it in and hit the ENTER KEY.

  The cover page of the clinical trial appeared on his screen. Dart felt a huge wash of relief. It was dated fourteen months earlier.

  “The file is seventy-six pages long,” Ginny told him.

  He heard a banging behind—the security guard was at his door.

  “I’m not going to get out of here with this disk,” Dart informed her, realizing his situation. He had a disk in his pocket on which he was supposed to record the information; that seemed impossible now. After a long beat of silence, he asked, “Are you there?”

  In his left ear he heard the dispatcher in the command van announce, “The garden is surrounded.” The ERT team was in place.

  The security guard’s deep voice attempted to whisper a radioed request, but Dart overheard it through the door: “I need a master key, ASAP. Third floor.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said into the cellular, “here’s what we’re going to do.” A fraction of a second later she snapped, “Oh shit, hang on. You’ve got visitors.”

  Glancing toward the door, and knowing that the security guard was coming through it any second, Dart said, “I can’t hang on. There’s no time.”

  “Mark the complete text. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Ginny?” Dart shouted into the phone.

  There was no answer.

  Ginny’s second laptop alerted him the moment Martinson’s password was used to log on to the system. Many of the commonly used security soft-wares prevented the duplication of a password if one person was presently on the system. Ginny had hoped that was the case—that by Dart already being on the network, Martinson, or whomever Martinson had called, would be denied access. To her horror, the system allowed this other person access onto the network.

  Dart guessed that this person was Terry Proctor and that he might even be in the lobby now, following Martinson’s instructions to erase the files.

  Ginny felt helpless. The screen followed the intruder’s every move. He traveled past the main menu and along the route Ginny now knew only too well. In a matter of thirty to sixty seconds, the intruder would be on top of Dart; how the system would perform was anybody’s guess. Ginny’s guess was that it would freeze, locking up, and that only the system operator would be able to correct it. And the SYSOP worked for Martinson, which meant the files would never be seen again.

  Dart couldn’t copy the text to a disk because the disk might be confiscated by the security guards and destroyed.

  It left Ginny only one choice. Using a modem line, she was going to have to attempt to raid the system’s security firewall a second time, attempting to avoid her earlier mistake.

  She picked up the phone and said to Dart, “Is the text marked?”

  “I’m ready,” Dart said into the phone. He heard the sound of someone running. The master key—a real key, not some security card—was seconds away from being delivered.

  Ginny said, “Go to the Edit menu. Select Cut.”

  “Cut?” Dart barked. “You mean copy!”

  “I said cut, Detective. Do it now.”

  “But I’ll lose the file!” Dart protested.

  “Edit. Cut!” Ginny ordered. “Do it now!”

  Ginny’s eyes widened as she followed the activity on the second laptop. She watched as Proctor typed L-A-T …

  “This is not up for discussion. Do it fucking now!”

  Dart’s index finger hesitated above the button on the computer’s mouse. He felt a bead of sweat trickle down his jaw. He heard the key in the door. And then he heard that same key turn.

  Cut would make the blocked text disappear. Does she know what she’s doing?

  “Now!” he heard repeated in his ear.

  His index finger punched the button automatically and the seventy-six pages of clinical trial reports disappeared from the screen.

  “Thank God,” Ginny said through the phone. “Now,” she added, “if you want to see those files again, there’s something you’ve got to do—”

  “Not right now,” Dart interrupted, dropping the cellular phone and springing out of the office chair and dragging it to the door just as the doorknob turned.

  Dart blocked the door with his foot, flipped the chair upside down, wheels in the air, and wedged it inside the handle to prevent the door from opening.

  He glanced up at the ceiling: large rectangular panes suspended by an angle-iron aluminum frame. It offered one possibility of escape.

  The door came partially open, encountering the chair. The guards on the other side leaned their weight into it. The sound was deafening.

  A bead of sweat slipped into Dart’s eyes, stinging him.

  Dart considered going out the window. The golf-ball-like architecture crowned at the top of each module. Being on the top floor, this office’s windowpanes were more parallel to the ground than those of the floors below and would be easier to climb. Dart was not one for heights, but it seemed to offer him the fastest exit.

  He took two steps toward the window and reached it before identifying the hollow thump underfoot. He stooped to inspect the source of that sound.

  Behind him the office chair slipped. The door popped open two or three inches and several fingers appeared in the crack, groping to remove the chair.

  Dart flung himself across the room, drove his shoulder into the door, and broke all four of the man’s fingers. An animal cry erupted from the far side of the door. Dart hiked the chair back into position and leaped over to the windows.

  Along the office’s perimeter, a series of floor panels covered spaces created to house phone lines, transmission lines, computer cables, and electrical conduit. To allow easy access, the office carpet had not been glued here, and Dart pulled it back. He yanked up the first-floor panel and found himself staring down into a darkened dead space through a tangle of wires. Three feet below him was the suspended acoustical tile of a fifth-floor-office ceiling. Steel I-beams supported the floor of the office Dart was currently inside.

  He didn’t hesitate. He sat down, forced his toes through the mesh of wires, and lowered himself down.

  The door banged and the chair slipped again.

  Dart kicked at the pressboard panel beneath him, broke it in pieces, and could see through to a desktop in the office below. He let go his purchase and fell through the dead space and down into the office below, landing awkwardly on the desk, driving a sharp pain into his injured ankle.

  He heard the chair explode above him. They were inside.

  Dart jumped off the desk, ignoring his pain, and ran for the door. A moment later he was running quickly toward the fire stai
rs, hoping he had enough of a lead.

  “That sounded ugly,” the voice said in his left ear.

  “Patch me through to Ginny,” Dart said. “I’ve lost the phone.” Like it or not, Proctor’s people would now hear every word.

  On Ginny’s instructions, Dart headed for the bottom of the stairs. As Dart ran, she talked nonstop.

  Ginny’s detected raid on the Roxin server had triggered the mainframe to adopt a defensive position, eliminating an outsider’s ability to access the machine through modem and pulling the system temporarily off-line. The situation could be reversed, but only from the SYSOP terminal inside Roxin’s data processing center, which Ginny guessed was likely to be located on the facility’s basement level.

  “How can you possibly be sure about this?” Dart questioned on the run.

  “There are three different systems they could be using, and I know every one of them. They all share the ability to take modem communications off-line. By definition, they cannot be put back on-line using software; they require someone to throw a physical switch—a button. It’s what keeps them secure. The front panels are all basically the same: some system indicators and either one or two buttons. I know the way this works, Joe. This is my area of expertise,” Ginny reminded. “You’re going to have to trust me. And listen, Joe, once we’re back on-line, I need a couple minutes, minimum.”

  “What am I looking for?” He asked.

  “It will be a plain vanilla box—maybe a stack of them, depending how many incoming lines there are. If there’s more than one, you’ll have to trip each master. The front panel will show a series of seven small lights across it, red probably; in all likelihood, only the farthest right-hand light will be lit. On the far right-hand side of the box itself will be a vertical stack of red lights—one for each incoming line—these are actually buttons, not lights. Below these lights,” she emphasized, “there is another button off by itself.” Then, editing herself, she said, “On two of the machines it is below. On the Black Box model it is above. But it will either read ‘Master,’ or ‘Group On-line,’ or ‘All.’”

  “Master, Group On-line, or All,” he repeated.

  “Yes. And that is the one you want. One or more of those masters is going to be red. When you push it, it will change to green or amber. At that point we’re back on-line.” She asked, “Is that enough of a description?”