Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

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 stairs, 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.