It wasn’t looking good for the project though, Anselm thought privately. A single employee who happened to be a fugitive was something that could be understood, overlooked, but when that employee was the Director things started getting shaky.
Add to that the fact that He’d scanned at least five other fugitives in his perusal of the project’s files and things started looking really bad. Of course, once they’d missed Director Jacob, the Project backers had a perfect reason for not seeing the others.
Jacob could easily have cooked the books himself, which would make Anselm’s job that much harder if it came to going after the Project itself.
He locked up the cabinets then, shrugging as he did. If it were easy, he wouldn’t be the one they gave the case too.
Knowing that they were here, though, was only half the case.
What the hell were they doing here, that was the question that was burning Anselm’s blood now. The men on his list were all dangerous fugitives, men who had, in some cases, gone so far as to fake their own deaths to divert the attention of the law.
In Doctor Kragan’s case, he’d apparently faked his death specifically to come here. His hiring date was mere weeks after the `death’ of Dr Krieg. Which still made no sense to Anselm, as he’d seen the man’s body himself.
Drugged Fake a death like coma
Anselm had heard of things like that, but mostly those things were inventions of Hollywood, they didn’t stand a chance of passing a forensic examination. Put frankly, if you’re faking your death that way, you’d better be damned sure that the medical examiner isn’t going to do an autopsy.
Lookalike
That was possible. Plastic surgery had come a long way over the past few decades, and dummying up a dupe of some guy wasn’t all that hard.
Passing a DNA test was another matter, but there were ways around that.
Anselm frowned, letting himself out of the office and closing the door behind him, thumbing a command on his Portable to lock the electronic security system again. He made a note to check the autopsy on Kreig, and have a local agent pay a call on the office that did it.
Bribing a man in the ME’s office was the easiest, supplying the mole with a confirming DNA sample. The ME himself was the best bet, if that was the plan, because that allowed you to doctor the fingerprints, DNA, and dental with one shot, and keep the radical reconstructive surgery from being reported at the same time.
Other than that, Krieg would have had to really stretch to fake his death that well.
Cloning was possible, at least since the turn of the century, but was impractical given that you’d basically have to have prescient parents to pull it off. Clones needed as long to mature as a normal human, which was pretty much why the few `clones’ that existed to date were simply called twins.
Anselm came up short, eyes narrowing.
A twin
Even identical twins wouldn’t pass a full forensics examination, but it might pass a cursory one, especially if a few euros were slipped into the right handshakes.
Of course, if that were the case, maybe Doctor Krieg was the twin, and Kragan really was dead.
Anselm rubbed his eyes, he could feel a headache coming on.
Approaching footsteps startled him out of his moment of self pity, and Anselm Gunnar pushed himself back against the wall, sliding along it to an alcove, as a figure came around the corner, moving through the dark hall.
Joshua Corvine frowned as he made his way back through the halls, heading toward the Director’s office.
The CIA man had compared the diagrams of the Tower Project with the Ground Penetrating Radar scans from the satellite sweep and found a couple interesting points of intersection. One of them was in the Director’s office, a thin line on the radar map that was barely visible. If he was right, Director Jacob had a backdoor into the section of the Project tunnels that Corvine most desperately wanted to see.
Joshua hoped he was right.
The electronic security was a joke, off the rack commercial software and hardware, easily cracked by the suite of security programs and supercomputer time he had access to through his portable, so he didn’t have any problems with getting in.
Dodging guards was a no brainer, since there didn’t appear to be any, the single security guard employed to protect the Project was sitting behind a desk in an office a level above Joshua, watching screens that showed him exactly what Corvine wanted him to see.
The emergency lighting was annoying though, the shadows it case made him nervous as he moved through the empty halls.
He had that itchy feeling on the back of his neck that made him feel like he was being watched.
Joshua hated that feeling.
He picked up the pace a little, quickly arriving at the large office at the end of the hall, and let himself through the frosted glass doors.
It was an elegantly appointed, large receptionist office with two large wooden doors at the far side. Those were his targets.
The security, interestingly enough, was mechanical here, not electronic. That put a crimp in the CIA agent’s schedule, but he had come prepared.
The lock pick gun whirred a few times as it randomly tried different combinations, refining its approach with every right tumbler it clicked over. In a little under a minute the heavy doors slid open silently, and Joshua smiled wryly as he slipped in, thanking the Director for keeping his hinges well oiled.
Joshua hated that damned squeak some doors gave off. Even if a place was completely empty, it always felt like he’d just alerted an army to his presence.
Once inside, Joshua looked around the Director’s office and had to admit, he was impressed.
It was even larger than the reception office outside, and included a scale model of the Tower along one wall, the chimney reaching nearly to the ceiling. Project Awards filled that wall, plaques and trophies, as well as certificates of commendations and the like.
A bookcase killed another wall, looking like a rich man’s ego trip more than someone’s reading library, but impressive just the same. The desk that filled the back of the office was oak, unless Joshua was much mistaken, and expensive as hell.
However, none of that was what primarily interested him.
The door in the corner, now that was what he was here for.
At least, Joshua hoped so. He’d hate to have come this far just to break into the director’s closet.
Anselm watched from his alcove as the man passed him, not daring to move until the hallway was clear again. He didn’t recognize the man as he’d passed, but that didn’t mean anything, the Tower Project employed hundreds of people or more.
Though, he had to admit, few of them would be walking through the halls this late at night, looking over their shoulder from time to time like they were worried about being seen.
Anselm hesitated, looking back the way he’d come from, back toward the exit from the offices, then he looked along the path of the man who had just passed.
His gut told him that the man he’d seen wasn’t an employee, which made him a very interesting person indeed. Anselm hesitated only another second, and then quickly moved to follow.
The man led him to a pair of frosted glass doors that were labeled as the Director’s office, and Anselm’s curiosity piqued even higher. Jacob’s own office, now that was worth checking out just on its own merits.
The key, of course, was not to get caught while doing it.
Anselm surveyed the receptionists office through the clear lettering left in the etched and frosted glass, and watched as the somewhat overweight figure inside produced a lock pick gun from his pocket and went to work on the large doors that guarded Jacob’s inner sanctum.