Boldt edged closer, excitement pounding inside his chest. Ten feet… Five feet…
On the edge of his peripheral vision, Boldt saw Malone’s movement as she glanced back over her shoulder at him. Boldt paused, instinctively knowing something was wrong.
The seated man turned, and Boldt saw his face. Not David Hayes, but a man in his sixties with poor skin.
Malone threw the briefcase off the side of the ferry with all her strength. Its brushed aluminum spun in lazy loops as it tumbled and then disappeared, out of sight.
Boldt stood paralyzed. The ferry was nowhere near landfall. Five thousand dollars in marked bills had just been tossed overboard. No matter how tempted, he could not give Malone away-could not compromise her. Instead, he casually reached inside his jacket pocket and tripped the button to speak to Riz’s dispatcher.
A moment later came the response: A helicopter would be dispatched, though it wouldn’t be airborne for at least thirty minutes. Boldt was to secure a GPS location from the ferry’s captain ASAP.
A trickle of dread swept through Boldt as he sensed a much bigger plan at work, wondering if that plan still called for the abduction of Malone, a.k.a. Liz Boldt.
Hendersen had caught Boldt’s radio communication and waited on the main passenger deck.
Malone remained outside in the bitter wind, cradling Liz’s cell phone in her palm as if it held answers.
Boldt hurried across the deck, jumping a chain that forbade him from doing so, and climbed the steep ladder. He pounded on the heavy door to the pilothouse, displaying his credentials and shield through the thick glass window.
A moment later he was inside, relaying the ferry’s latitude and longitude to Riz and company. He checked the ship’s radar, surprised it picked up no boats in the immediate area. No vessels of any kind. He’d been absolutely convinced that some kind of small craft was out there retrieving the money.
Boldt engaged one of the deck officers, throwing a string of questions at him.
The man, small but with a thick neck and jutting jaw, replied in a tight, high voice. “The WSDOT website offers ferry-cam-dot-com. Vessel watch. Live video of the terminals. GPS locating of the ferries.”
“GPS?” Boldt asked. The Global Positioning System’s satellite technology allowed pinpoint location. Given the exact time Malone had thrown that briefcase, a person could evidently visit a website that indicated the ferry’s precise location.
“On the Web,” Boldt mumbled, realizing that Hayes could know exactly where that briefcase had been tossed overboard. Or had the briefcase bought from Brookstone had a transmitter already embedded in it? Had anyone checked for that? He didn’t think so.
Boldt scrambled down the steep steel steps leading from the pilothouse and crossed to the upper sundeck, realizing that Hayes could already be heading for the cash. He grabbed for the radio, yanking it from his pocket, dispensing with policy.
Boldt asked to speak to Riz. When the C.O. came onto the radio, Boldt said, “Tell me Liz is okay.”
“She’s in a back office with one of our girls,” Riz said.
“We’re sure?”
“Positive, Lieutenant. Your wife’s been on the phone with him off and on for the last ten minutes, Malone listening in to those calls and performing as he says.”
Two guys in their twenties came through the door and into the upper deck area engaged in a heated baseball debate, the only two words that Boldt heard being “sacrifice fly.”
And then all at once, he had it. The briefcase would never be retrieved. Sacrifice fly. Hayes had tested Liz, directing her to withdraw the money and toss it on command, and she had passed that test. But there was something larger at work as well.
“Oh, shit,” said the lieutenant, known for never swearing. “We’ve been scammed, Reece. He dug a hole and we fell into it. Seal the building!” Boldt hesitated only a second, knowing the trouble he was about to cause if he turned out to be wrong about this. “David Hayes is inside the bank.”
SIX
BOLDT BELIEVED THAT HAYES HAD used the money drop not only to distract police but to access the bank’s powerful AS/400 servers, described by Liz as the “heart of the data system.” But with the office building currently locked down, and everyone inside the building being funneled out a single exit, proffering ID and subjected to random searches, Boldt’s theory showed signs of collapse. David Hayes was nowhere to be seen.
An acne-ridden young man named Pendleton Hartsmith joined a florid-cheeked Irishman, Douglas Witte, who headed the bank’s security department. The pair sat with Boldt in a small conference room typically reserved for loan review. It smelled of carpet glue.
Witte explained that access to WestCorp’s offices required a credit-card-sized ID card, like the one Liz carried. Each and every access was recorded by time, date, employee, and location of entry or egress. The UNIX servers and the AS/400s each required additional clearance for access.
“Following nine-eleven,” Witte explained, “we installed palm scanners on our two hardware plants, the suites that house our major servers. Access is limited to a very select group of executives.”
Including Liz, Boldt thought. “And can we determine if that security has been breached?”
Witte said, “It hasn’t. It’s the first thing we checked when you called for this lockdown. The AS/400s are pristine.”
Witte popped a stick of gum into his mouth and offered some to the others. Hartsmith took a stick. Boldt passed.
“Cameras show anything?”
“Your guys have already requested our pictures,” Witte said. “We’re making dubs, as I understand.”
“I see a possible conflict,” Hartsmith said. That won both men’s attention. “We’re all digital here, Lieutenant. Security clearance, video surveillance, it’s all digitized information, and all of it is stored on one of the four UNIX servers.”
Witte jumped in and explained. “That’s what I meant by making a dub. Our video surveillance is stored electronically to disk. Think TiVo. We can review it straight off the disks or dub it down to half-inch tape, or DVD, as we’re doing for you.”
“And if someone got into these servers,” Boldt said, leading Hartsmith on.
“That’s my point. You look at it that way, it’s a pretty fallible system.”
Boldt could see Hayes having entered the building, and then the processing suites, but convincing the computer-controlled security system otherwise. Boldt suddenly wondered if that had already happened, if Hayes had come, gotten his money, and gone.
“Can you put a guard, a human being, one of your security guys, on the doors to these processing rooms? Can we not rely on the technology so much?”
“It would cost. I’d have to check.”
“Check,” Boldt said. “And if you’re refused, let me know right away.”
He looked for cracks in his reasoning, absolutely certain that Hayes used the money drop as a diversion, but stumped to prove it. Witte pulled himself out of a chair and left the small conference room. Hartsmith’s intelligent eyes stared off into space, deep in thought.
“It’s problematic,” Hartsmith said. “A computer controlling its own security. But then again, it’s integrated. A closed system. You can’t get into the system to mess with it, because it guards its own door.”
“But if you do get through that door… ” Boldt could see Liz being forced to gain Hayes access to the servers, could feel her terror. Increasingly, it seemed to Boldt that if Hayes could not get her to cooperate, his only choice would be to kidnap her or someone else at the bank with the proper security clearance.
“Then we’re toast. Yes. You erase any record of your visit, and you dump any video that captured you. It’s brilliant, really, except that it’s putting the cart before the horse.”