Cindy Dees: Target

Holy cow. It had been a total long shot to try Sam’s access code here, but Diana wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She stepped inside, closing the hallway door behind her. A secretary’s desk dominated the center of the room. A single door stood behind it. Colin Scott’s private office. With another elaborate electronic lock beside the door. No wonder it had been so easy to get into this outer office.

She took a look at the number pad beside this door. Similar to the one outside, except when she swiped Sam’s card this time, nobody asked for her fingerprint and the lock didn’t open. She pulled out her pocketknife and, using the screwdriver attachment, unscrewed the stainless steel cover over the guts of the electronic lock. Who’d have thought that her electrical circuitry class at the Athena Academy would ever come in so handy? She traced the circuit quickly and identified the wires that had to be crossed to open the system. Once she did that, though, she had no doubt it would trigger an alarm somewhere else in the building. She gave it two, maybe three minutes until someone would bust in here, guns blazing.

She organized herself quickly for the break-in. Her target would be any paper records Collin Scott had in his office. They were what she’d use if she were running a conspiracy to kill the President. Electronic files were just too easy to break into. He’d probably have a filing cabinet of some kind. And it would be locked. Agency policy was that all desks were cleaned off and all papers put under lock and key every night. The infamous policy had actually cost employees here their jobs.

She’d need a sharp, tough metal object of some kind to bust into the filing cabinet. She would never have enough time to pick the lock before security got here. She looked around the outer office. Perfect. A gold-plated shovel from some groundbreaking ceremony or other. It laid in a glass cabinet in the far corner. She snatched it out of its case and hurried back to the lock. Her other time constraint was Sam waking up and calling security. And that could happen any second.

Ready or not, here she went. She set her watch alarm for two minutes. And went to work. It only took a couple seconds to slice through the pair of wires, strip their ends and twist them together. A touch with the tip of her knife to the right switch, a spark, and the door lock clicked open. And the clock was ticking.

She leaped into the office, looking around for a filing cabinet. Bingo. In the corner behind the desk. She raced over to the two-drawer console. Top or bottom drawer?

Definitely a top-drawer kind of operation.

She smashed the shovel into the side of the cabinet. It dented and made a hell of a lot of noise, but didn’t give. Again. Paint chipped away and the dent got bigger. It took another half-dozen blows before the metal finally weakened and gave way. A tiny slit appeared in the cabinet. She slammed the shovel into it and pried the hole larger. One more big heave, and a piece of metal the width of the shovel peeled back to reveal the sides of several files stuffed with paper. Most of them were red. Probably indicated they were classified. She took the extra several seconds to widen the hole to the entire height of the drawer.

Then, frantically, she knelt by the cabinet and started pulling out files as fast as she could. She read the tabs at the top and tossed them aside by the fistfuls. Come on, come on. It had to be in here, somewhere. Please God, let the file not be in the bottom drawer.

The pile of papers lying all over the floor behind her grew, and the seconds ticked by. A quick glance at her watch. Thirty seconds to go. Oww! Slashing pain ripped through her left hand. She’d cut her hand at the base of her little finger on the ragged edge of the hole. No time to do anything about it. She continued yanking files out and tossing them aside.

Twenty seconds to go.

And then, without warning, there it was. A thick, red file marked Classified. The Initials S.A.F.E. were typed on the white label glued to the top tab. No time to look at it. She had to get out of here. She stuffed the file inside her coat and froze. A beeping sound came from the outer office. Someone was using the keypad to enter it from the hallway beyond.

She leaped to the inner door to the office, scooping up a clock from Scott’s desk on her way past. It was embedded in a grapefruit-size marble sphere. She stuck her arm out the door and slammed the marble piece down on the door lock to the inner office. Sparks flew and sizzled as she slammed the door shut. Good Lord willing, this door failed to a locked position. She tested the knob and it wouldn’t turn. Now she could only hope the security man outside had no quick way to override the fried lock. And then, of course, she had to figure out how in the hell to get out of a third-floor office of a supersecure facility like CIA headquarters.

Fists pounded on the door. She ignored them. Then a male voice shouted through the door. She ignored that, too. She turned on the overhead lights to better see any possible escape route, since it was no longer a secret that she was in here. No man-size ventilation shafts opened up onto this room. Just a couple small registers. The window didn’t open. She tested it with her hands. Not glass. It was no doubt made of tough, bulletproof polymers. She might conceivably be able to break it out of the frame, but the fall to the concrete below-or rather, the landing on it-ruled that out as an option. Bookcases lined both of the other walls of the office.

She was so hosed.

She was not going to get out of this one alive. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t get done what she’d come here to do before she went down in flames. She sat down at Collin Scott’s desk and pulled the S.A.F.E. file out of her coat. Working hard to ignore the heavy pounding on the door, she read as quickly as her eyes would travel across the pages.

In the very front was a CIA analysis of a legal treatise written by one Thomas Wolfe a decade ago, predicting the rise of global terrorism and criticizing the open society America maintained. He argued with great mental agility that the only way to defeat terror was with terror. He claimed that as long as law-abiding societies were constrained by law in their fight against terrorists, they were doomed to failure. The CIA analysis found the arguments sound.

Diana frowned. A lot had changed in the last decade. The rise of huge, powerful terror networks worldwide, 9/11 and the American overthrow of entire governments in response to terror. Huge armies of American soldiers had been thrown into the fight, along with billions upon billions of dollars of resources. Was Wolfe’s premise still valid? If she lived more than the next couple of minutes, she’d have to spend some time thinking about that one. She thumbed on to the next document.

Transcripts of a conversation Collin Scott had at a Defense consortium with a couple of the men on her list of S.A.F.E. suspects from Oracle. They expressed concern at the direction the United States was going with terror policy or its lack thereof.

She read on, tracing the evolution of S.A.F.E. from a loose bunch of like-minded people to a cautiously organized interest group to a conspiracy committed to action.

The pounding at the door became even louder. Heavier. As if they were using a battering ram of some kind. The entire wall began to shake, and a picture of Collin Scott shaking hands with a giant yellow duck wearing a polyester leisure suit fell to the floor with a crash. DiscoDuck. Collin Scott had to be DiscoDuck.

She skipped most of the rest of the file and moved close to the bottom of the stack of notes and documents. She stared in dismay at a note in the margins of a meeting transcript. “If Monihan and Wolfe win the election, Monihan must be removed from his position so that Wolfe may assume leadership of the nation.”