Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Ding spoke through his earpiece. “Jack . . . Dom’s going to need fifteen mikes minimum.”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Not a problem.”

Oh, boy.

—

Dom did not have a key to get into room 3112, but he didn’t let that slow him down. As he stepped up to the door he pulled out a device built by Gavin Biery and his whiz kids at The Campus. It was a microcontroller just larger than a deck of cards, with a small cable that fed from it to a barrel connector.

Dom took the connector and knelt down so he could see the bottom of the key-card door-locking mechanism. Here, hidden from view of hotel guests, was a tiny round port. He pushed his connector into the port and flipped a switch on his device.

Certain brands of key-card locks have these ports for the purpose of recharging the battery on the locking mechanism and uploading the hotel site code, a thirty-two-bit key that provides general access to all locks in the hotel. This is the master key that housekeeping and other hotel workers use so that they don’t need an individual and ever-changing card to get into each room.

When Gavin powered up his microcontroller by flipping the switch, the lock sent the thirty-two-bit key from the lock down to the device, and then the device read and decoded it, and sent it back up to the lock.

The green light illuminated next to the key-card access slot in under a second, even though there was no key in the slot.

Dominic opened the door, unplugged his device, and slipped it back into his backpack.

—

Ryan stood in the marble bathroom of his junior suite, staring at himself in the mirror, trying to figure out what he was going to do about the woman on his bed.

He’d been surprised by how quickly Élise was escalating matters. They were both single, attractive people, and she had shown some interest, but it seemed more of a curiosity to her and less of a lustful nature.

Jack thought about kissing her. He’d not been able to properly enjoy it because of the earpiece and the chatter from his team, but otherwise it would have been a different story. Still, he was working, and this wasn’t real. The thought of screwing some woman for the purpose of stalling her so someone else could ransack her hotel room made him sick to his stomach.

Clark thought the French spook was herself running some kind of op on Jack, either to compromise him or to gain information or influence, but Jack didn’t see evidence of that himself. Clark was trained to think OPSEC and only OPSEC, while Jack had a lot of recent experience with members of the opposite sex showing interest in him.

He flushed the toilet, ran the water in the sink, and tried to tell himself this wasn’t a harmless TV reality show, this was life or death. The woman in the next room was an enemy operative who was working on behalf of the damn North Koreans, and he didn’t need to give a rat’s ass about anything other than his mission.

There was no way to disengage without blowing the objective and revealing that he’d played her, and there was no way to keep her in this room without having sex with her.

“What’s going on, Ryan?” Clark asked.

Ryan popped his earpiece out of his ear and slid it in his pocket, flipped off the water, and left the bathroom.

Time to go to work.

Élise was on the bed. She still had her clothes on, but her come-hither look told him he wasn’t out of the woods. He took a step toward her.

And then her mobile phone rang in her purse.

There was a momentary look of surprise on her face. Jack wondered if the distinctive chirping ring meant the call was coming from a particular number. She stood up from the bed and picked her purse up from the coffee table. While doing so she said, “Sorry. I’d better take this.”

“Sure,” Jack replied.

—

Hello?”

“It’s Riley. Where are you?”

Veronika Martel could tell by the Englishman’s voice that something was very wrong. “Hi, Rebecca. Nice of you to call, but I am in the U.S. at the moment. It’s very late at night over here.”

“Listen to me,” Riley continued, as if she hadn’t said a word. “There is a man in your hotel room right now.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Not relevant. The point is I do know. What I don’t know is just what the fuck he is doing, but I have men heading there now to find out. Wherever you are, you get your bloody ass back to your room right now!”

—

Ryan sat down on the bed and watched the Frenchwoman turn away as she held the phone to her ear. After a brief conversation she turned back around, facing Ryan, and her face went from a guise of slight annoyance about the call that Ryan thought might have been feigned to an obvious appearance of anger that was both very real and very dark. Her eyes narrowed, staring directly at Ryan.

He didn’t know what was happening, but he asked, “Is something wrong?”

The woman hung up the phone and snatched up her purse. “Who . . . are . . . you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” He tried a little chuckle and stood up, began walking over to her. Don’t leave, he told himself. “You Googled me, remember?”

When he was halfway across the small suite, she turned and stormed for the door.

“What’s wrong? Wait.”

But she was gone, almost at a run, and the door slammed behind her.

“Damn it.” Ryan scrambled for his earpiece, digging for it in his pocket, but after a few seconds he gave up with the tiny contraption and dove headfirst across the bed. He grabbed his phone on the nightstand and unlocked it, then opened the conference call. “Dom! Get the fuck out of there! She knows!”

47

Caruso had found the phone; it was in a wheeled roll-aboard whose lock he picked in twenty seconds after spending a minute checking it for telltales. Within three and a half minutes of entering the Frenchwoman’s hotel room he had the device downloading to Gavin’s specially designed unit.

And then, within seconds of his beginning the download, the frantic call came from Ryan telling him the woman was loose and on her way back to her room. Caruso was less worried about her showing up while he was here—to travel from the thirty-ninth floor to the thirty-first floor she’d first have to go down to the lobby to reach the other elevator bank—and more worried about how the hell she knew he was here in the first place. She’d gotten a call, Ryan said, so Dom assumed she had confederates in the hallway who had seen him, confederates who were somehow patched into hotel security cameras, or confederates who had bugged her room.

Whatever the case, it meant unknown parties were involved in this and aware of him, and this meant trouble.

Dom wasn’t sure what to do, so he called out to Clark. “John?”

“I’m in the lobby, watching for trouble heading your way. Don’t see anyone, but get out of there. Could be someone already up on that floor.”

“This download is gonna take a few more minutes.”

Clark said, “It’s too late for covert. They know there was an intrusion. Just snag the phone and bolt.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

Caruso slipped the two phones joined with a cable into his backpack and started for the door. Her suite was similar to Ryan’s; there was a small hallway that ran along the kitchenette and hid the front door from the living and sleeping area, and Dom ran for it, but once he turned into the little hallway of the suite, he saw the latch of the door slowly lowering.

It was too late to escape out the front.

Caruso turned and ran back into the suite, leapt over the coffee table and onto the sofa, then over the back of the sofa to the balcony door. He unlocked it and flung it open, then started outside.