Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

The woman appeared to be in her midthirties and had glossy black hair. She was attractive, in a matronly way.

“Do you come to town often?”

“As little as possible.” Simon Troy lived in Jenks, Oklahoma, outside of Tulsa, and rarely traveled. He was also a billionaire and one of the largest landowners in the United States and was known to be mostly a recluse. Very few photos of him could be found on the Internet. In truth, I didn’t look very much like him, except for the gray hair and mustache I was wearing, and the black horn-rimmed glasses. But no one here at Norcross and McKenna was going to question whether I was Simon Troy or not. They wanted to believe.

We’d considered creating a false identity, but backstopping it — largely, seeding the Internet with enough plausible appearances — was time-consuming, and we didn’t have the time. Whereas a billionaire like Simon Troy, seldom photographed and never interviewed, seemed relatively easy to impersonate. Mandy Seeger provided me with a download of what little information on him existed, and I studied it, hard. Dorothy then called the law firm from a spoofed Tulsa phone number to arrange this last-minute meeting.

“Well, Mr. Norcross was happy to clear some time in his schedule to meet with you.”

We didn’t talk again as she led me along a corridor to a corner office. A rotund man with a red face and silver hair bounded from behind his desk, his hand extended.

“A great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Troy. I’m Ash Norcross.”

I gave him a limp, diffident shake, took note of the keycard clipped to his belt.

“Can we get you a cup of tea? I understand you don’t drink coffee.”

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

“Thanks, Val,” Ashton Norcross said, dismissing his admin. To me he said, “I understand you got my name—”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said languidly. “I have to get back to Capitol Hill. A few senators I need to see.”

“Well, then, let’s get right to it.” He half-bowed and indicated a seating area with two brocade sofas. I sat, and then he sat across from me. I set down my briefcase to my left, close to him, a few feet away from his keycard. Close enough, I hoped.

“As you may or may not know, I tend to stay out of politics,” I said. “In any public way, I mean. You won’t find my name on any FEC databases, or at least not in a long while. But I’ve come to believe our republic is under assault.”

“And so it is, Mr. Troy. And so it is. No argument here. In fact, we at Norcross—”

“But as you may know, I don’t like to see my name in the paper.”

“Absolutely.”

“I stay as low profile as possible.”

“Understood. You’ve come to the right place.”

“Now, I’ve had a bad experience with one of our local law firms in Tulsa. Turned out that their security was lax. I want to know what precautions you take.”

“Well, our security is state-of-the-art.”

“If I were to become a client, where would you be storing the files you’d keep on me?”

“Oh, data security is paramount here, Mr. Troy. All digital client files are kept on a partitioned, air-gapped, encrypted server.”

“What about paper files?”

“Kept in a separately locked, highly secured strong room.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Certainly. In fact—”

Someone knocked on Norcross’s open door. I turned. A trim guy around sixty with a thick thatch of gray hair stood there with a stupid grin on his face.

Ash Norcross waved him in. “Oh, Jeff, come on in, let me introduce you to Simon Troy. Simon, this is Jeff Winik, one of our partners and a fellow Stanford grad.”

Winik strode toward me, gave me a firm handshake, and said, “You were Stanford ’79, right?”

I nodded.

“I was Stanford ’80!”

“Oh yeah?” I said, smiling blandly as my stomach plummeted.

He went on: “Where’d you live freshman year?”

I regarded him for a few seconds. He wasn’t challenging me, trying to determine whether I was really Simon Troy. He was genuinely attempting to bond.

It was not credible that “Simon Troy” would have forgotten where he lived freshman year in college. Several long seconds went by while I frantically grappled for an answer. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck into my shirt collar.

Finally I said, “Larkin.” The name suddenly popped into my head after the hours I’d spent cramming, poring over the Simon Troy dossier that Mandy had assembled for me.

“Oh yeah? I was in Branner!”

“Well, nice to meet you,” I said, but Winik was not done with me.

“But then I got a bad lottery number,” he went on, “and I ended up in the trailer park.”

“Huh,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. Trailer park?

“Ever used to hang out at the O?” he said.

The O? What was that, a bar? The freshman union? I took a flyer and said, “I sort of kept to myself. I didn’t really hang out.” An all-purpose answer, but it seemed to satisfy him.

“Well, Mr. Troy doesn’t have much time,” Norcross said, blessedly cutting the conversation short. “He wants to see the strong room.”

About an hour later I was back at the hotel. The dining table was covered with electronic equipment — cables and wires and little black boxes and white plastic cards and such. I set down the briefcase I’d brought into Norcross and McKenna.

“How’d it go?” Dorothy asked.

I shrugged. “Fine.”

“No problem?”

“No problem.”

“You get the briefcase close enough to a keycard?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s see what you got.”

The day before, Mandy had made her own undercover visit to the same law firm.

She’d entered the building where the firm was located with the morning rush, tailgating on someone who was entering. She took the elevator to the fourth floor and briefly stood outside the firm’s glass doors and took pictures with her smartphone, as subtly as she could, of the little black box mounted on the wall next to the glass doors.

Then she went right in to the firm’s offices and told the receptionist that she lived just down the street and was looking for temp work, and asked what agency they used to hire their temps. She spun a story about having a young child at home and needing to find work in the neighborhood. The receptionist gave her the name of an employment agency but apologized that there was nothing available at the time, so far as she knew. Mandy thanked her, and that was that.

Now Dorothy examined the photos on Mandy’s phone.

“Okay,” she said, “this is good. They’re using an HID system like just about everyone else uses. Almost certainly a low frequency 125 kilohertz system. Like eighty percent of the keycard users in the world.”

“Why is this good?” I asked. When it comes to technology, I long ago stopped worrying about sounding stupid. I ask, and Dorothy explains. This kind of technology is her forte. She enjoys being smarter than me, and I don’t mind it a bit.

“Because a couple years ago there was an interesting talk at Black Hat USA about how to defeat it.”

“How involved is this? You think we should bring in Merlin?”

Merlin’s real name was Walter McGeorge, an old army buddy who’d been a commo sergeant on my Special Forces team and later became a TSCM specialist, an expert in technical surveillance. He lived in the area, in Maryland. When I lived in DC I used to bring him in frequently to help me on jobs.

“You don’t need Merlin for this,” she said. “I promise. I can set it all up for you myself. Plug-and-play. Easy.” She tapped at her laptop. “Here we go.” She turned her laptop’s display toward me. It was an eBay page with a lot of listings, pictures of what looked like square boxes.