The Recipient
Despite their rhetoric to the contrary, government departments were notoriously lax when it came to the security technologies, often trailing their corporate counterparts by a factor of years. Casey was banking on that fact.
The smartphone’s screen transitioned once more and a new notification popped up.
‘RFID scan initialised. Ready…’
Casey allowed herself a smile, then she set the phone down and reached into her bag again, taking out a tablet computer and pressing the power button on its side. Checking to make sure that it was fully charged, Casey then placed it down beside the phone.
“Okay,” she whispered aloud in the darkened cabin. “We’re ready.”
___
A steady stream of employees was flowing along a path connecting the parking area with the centre. Some walked in groups of three or four, engaged in mundane conversation while others trooped inward on their own. There was a mixture of uniformed personnel: guards, cleaning staff, maintenance staff and ancillary staff along with office workers who were dressed in more formal business wear.
The path flanked a large concrete wall topped with razor wire and was separated by a garden bed populated with uniform shrubbery and leafy saplings. A lone gardener worked about halfway along the path. Armed with a shovel, the gardener, dressed in a pair of tan shorts, matching shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, diligently tilled the soil, ignoring the steady procession of employees, then stood to lift a bag of mulch that lay beside a wheelbarrow. Several employees gave the gardener a wide berth.
Cutting the plastic bag of mulch open with a squat pair of garden shears and tipping it out, the gardener adjusted the right hip of her shorts, upon which sat a mobile phone in a pouch. As the centre staff passed by her, none of them noticed anything particularly unusual about her nor did any of them react to the audible beep that sounded as the device on the gardener’s belt scanned each individual identity card that was either clipped to a belt or hanging from a lanyard around a person’s neck.
As she emptied the last of the contents onto the garden bed, Casey looked up from her work, angling the brim of her hat down over her eyes.
She watched as the procession filed passed her, oblivious to her presence. They approached the door and dutifully scanned their identification over the reading device beside it before entering the building.
Casey reached for a rake that lay on the ground beside the wheelbarrow and began spreading the mulch out before her. As she did so, she noticed an expensive sedan speed into the car park from the entrance to the centre. Its tyres skidded on the bitumen as it lurched into a parking space close to the centre’s entrance and braked hard. Casey noted it was a reserved spot.
Curious, she stood taller while continuing to rake the mulch across the garden bed and she watched as a woman fairly lurched from the interior of the car. Dressed in a smart, figure-hugging business suit, the attractive woman juggled a large handbag and a take-away coffee cup while balancing a phone wedged between her ear and the top of her shoulder. Evidently, she was engaged in some sort of intense conversation.
Approaching the centre through the thinning procession, the woman stopped and stooped down, setting her coffee cup on the pavement while she aimed her keyless remote at the car, locking it, all while continuing her conversation.
Cocking her head, Casey watched the woman as she stood and ended her phone call. Several people nearby acknowledged her as they sidestepped around her. One of the workers stopped and bent down to pick up her coffee cup and handbag for her. Though clearly annoyed, the woman managed to break her taut expression and offer a thankful smile.
“Thanks, Paul,” she greeted.
“You’re welcome, Ms. Catea,” he replied. “Good morning, by the way.”
Casey turned slightly and allowed herself to study this exchange. The office worker continued on his way, leaving the woman, Ms. Catea, to collect herself. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she sipped from her coffee cup, then searched inside her bag.
Frustration began to spread across her face once more. Clearly, she wasn’t able to find what she was looking for.
Adjusting her smartphone in the holster on her hip, Casey angled herself towards the woman and listened carefully. The smartphone beeped subtly, registering that it had scanned the chip of Catea’s swipe card. It was definitely buried somewhere inside the large and expensive leather handbag.
A second office worker paused as she passed by Catea and asked if she was okay.
Catea looked up at the younger woman and offered a pained expression. “I can’t seem to find my damned card. Could you swipe me in? I’m running so late and I’ll need to empty my entire bag in order to find it.”
Smiling sympathetically, the younger woman nodded and flashed her own identification card. “I’ve got this. Come on. I’ll give you a hand.”
Together the two women walked towards the entrance and Casey watched as the younger woman touched the reader with her card. The doors slid aside and they disappeared inside.
Casey went back to weeding the gardens.
___
Returning to the car and ensuring nobody could see her, Casey quickly stripped out of her gardener’s outfit. She washed her face, arms and hands with some disposable wipes, and struggled into a white shirt, matching grey jacket and skirt and heels. She clipped her hair back as professionally as she could, and angling the rear-vision mirror toward her, applied lipstick and checked herself.
Not bad, she thought.
Satisfied that she could pass for a ‘suit’, Casey turned her attention to the smartphone and detached the RFID reader from it.
The woman she had watched on the pavement outside the centre’s entrance hovered in her memory. She appeared to carry some level of seniority, judging by the way the other workers had interacted with her. But the critical thing was the fact that one of those colleagues had swiped her in. Officially at least, she wasn’t yet logged in with the centre’s security system, or so Casey theorized. She believed she had a small window in which to act.
Plugging the RFID reader to the female end of a USB extension cable, she connected that into a port on the underside of the tablet computer, then flipped the device over. Navigating the touch screen, she brought up an application that began displaying the data she had retrieved from the dozens of ID cards she had passively scanned earlier in her guise as a gardener.
She nodded approvingly as a steady stream of information transferred from the RFID device into the tablet. The system hadn’t failed her.
Before the employees had begun arriving, Casey had used the device to scan the centre’s own card reading device that was stationed beside the front entrance. She had done this to obtain the cryptographic keys she would need so that the centre’s security system would accept the identity card that she was about to replicate.
She had also watched the parking bays for any sign of an Audi that might have belonged to someone inside the centre but no such vehicle had appeared. She kept one eye on the car park now, hoping that it might still show up, but she wasn’t particularly confident.
Turning back to the tablet, Casey initiated an algorithm from within the application and waited for it to do its work. It showed her a series of cryptographic keys that she’d retrieved from the card reader. Identifying the correct key, Casey highlighted it with her finger and copied it to the clipboard. She returned to the previous screen to check on the progress of the upload from the RFID sniffer.
A progress bar snaked slowly across the screen from left to right.
“C’mon,” she whispered urgently.
Reaching into her shoulder bag, Casey took out yet another piece of equipment: this time, a rectangular device larger than the reader. It sported a fixed cable that protruded from one end and a credit card-sized slot at the other. She plugged its attached cable into a secondary port on the tablet.
Casey watched the screen and saw a new notification flash up.
‘Card writer detected.’
She looked
out through the windscreen, checking her surroundings and hoping that nobody was taking an interest in her.
Finally, a chime sounded on the tablet and she returned to it, carefully reading lines of code on the screen—each of which were accompanied by names. She looked at the assigned credentials for each one to determine their level of clearance within the centre, eliminating all those that fell below the level of administrator.
Her eyes fell across an entry halfway down the screen and they grew wide.
The name accompanying the entry read “Catea.”
She was indeed a senior employee—an unswiped senior employee.
“Bingo,” she murmured, taking a white, credit card sized object from the bag. She slipped it into the card writer and waited for it to be registered.
The sound of a dog barking caused Casey to jump in her seat and she jerked her head sideways, her eyes darting through the driver’s side window. Instinctively, her breath caught in her throat. An elderly man, dressed in a woollen jacket and cap, approached the car, holding onto the lead of an excited Labrador. It was barking at a pair of swooping magpies. He cursed the dog as he passed in front of the car and yanked on the lead in an effort to bring the dog to heel.
He didn’t even look in her direction.
Satisfied that he had passed into the distance and she was alone again, Casey initiated a ‘write’ command on the tablet and waited as the system wrote the information to the card. Casey watched it intently until the application chimed, signalling that it had completed its work.
Drawing the card out, she pushed it back in so that she could check her work. The credentials for the card were displayed in the window, complete with a photo image of the card.
Casey smiled broadly at the familiar face on the screen.
‘Josephine Catea. Level 4 clearance. Administration.’
___
Buttoning her suit jacket, adjusting the strap of her handbag and straightening her shoulders Casey approached the centre’s entrance, adjusting her stride to ensure that she appeared professional. Just another nondescript employee. The heels clicked noisily on the pavement, echoing against the adjacent walls of the centre. Harsh shocks penetrated the balls of her feet.
She hated heels.
Fingers of nervousness clawed at her the closer she got to the doors. She breathed as evenly as she could. All she had to do was: hope that Catea hadn’t found her card, gain entry into the centre, find a computer terminal that she could commandeer and access their intranet. She would then run a search on the file numbers Saskia had scribbled down on the piece of paper.
Should be a piece of cake, she thought, stepping up to the reader beside the double glass doors.
Should be…
Clutching the card in her hand, Casey waved it in front of the reader and waited. A blue light on the reader flashed once, followed by singular beep and the doors split down in the middle and slid soundlessly aside.
She was in.
Casey scoped her surroundings, noting the presence of several security cameras situated high up on the walls all around her. She dipped her head, just enough so that she could obscure her features.
To her left was a security desk behind a glass window. A large male guard with a handlebar moustache and a severe buzzcut sat at the desk, a newspaper spread out before him. He was munching on a bacon and egg muffin. Directly in front of her was a reception desk, also behind glass. Two staff members were stationed there: a rotund, middle-aged woman with garish spectacles that sat on the edge of her fat nose and a young man in a suit jacket that appeared grossly oversized for his thin frame. On the right of the main desk was a single door marked ‘Administrative Offices’ and Casey spied a card reader there. She diverted to that direction.
The security guard looked up at her absently as she passed and flinched as some egg yolk dripped over his hand and down onto his shirt. He cursed himself, looking down as she quickened her step towards the door. Wiping the offending yolk from the belly of his shirt, the guard glanced back up in her direction. He tilted his head and smiled through a mouthful of his breakfast as he admired her legs.
The woman at the desk glanced up from the computer screen she was concentrating on just as Casey lifted her hand to her glasses, shielding her features from view. Her colleague said something to her at that moment and the woman turned in her chair to face him as Casey reached the door. Clutching the ID card in her hand, she brushed it up against the reading device on the door frame.
Here goes.
She closed her eyes, held her breath, and grabbed the door handle.
The woman turned back to look at Casey and was about to call to her.
The reader beeped once and a blue light winked on its panel, then the door’s lock released.
Casey slipped through it before the receptionist could say anything. Upon seeing the door open, the receptionist shrugged and returned to her computer screen.
Casey found herself in a large, open office space with the central area occupied by desks and workstations arranged in a grid.
It was busy, with staff sitting at their desks working studiously, making or answering phone calls or concentrating on their computer screens. A couple of groups of three and four people were chatting at different desks further back. To her left and right, flanking the central work area, were individual offices behind floor-to-ceiling glass and blinds that could be raised or lowered as desired. Towards the rear of the office were additional work areas, divided from the main area by cubicle walls.
A couple of people glanced in her direction as Casey entered but nothing about her presence appeared out of place. They returned to whatever it was they were doing.
Now to find a terminal.
Locking her eyes onto the cubicles toward the rear, Casey turned to her left and prepared to walk down the aisle that separated the offices on that side from the workstations in the centre.
A petite young woman stepped in front of her, brandishing a thick stack of manilla folders. The expression on her face hovered somewhere between hope and desperation. Casey blinked.
“Hi,” the young woman greeted in an overtly pained voice. “Are you the temp I asked Gareth for?”
Before Casey could respond, the young woman thrust the stack of folders out at her.
“Thank God!” she crowed. “He’s lumped a tonne of data entry onto me and I knew I was just going to collapse underneath it unless I could convince him to find me some extra help.”
Before Casey could speak, the young secretary turned on her heel and gestured hurriedly as she trooped down the aisle toward the rear of the central work area.
“My regular number two has called in sick again,” she continued as Casey juggled the pile of folders in her arms. “Something about her horse being sick and like, having to get a vet out to see it, like immediately! It’s so infuriating.”
Turning into one of the cubicles at the end, the secretary shifted some papers aside on the wraparound desk so that Casey could set the folders down. The cubicle itself was small. Several pictures of a woman posing with a horse had been pinned to the wall and a calendar hung next to them featuring pictures of horses. The secretary leaned to her right to switch on the computer terminal then offered the chair to Casey.
“Take a seat. I’ll just boot up for you.”
She dropped her voice and continued speaking out of one corner of her mouth.
“I’ll log you in under my credentials but don’t tell Gareth. He can be a whiny little toad and I wouldn’t want you to have to deal with him.”
Casey sat and waited silently, bobbing her head in concert with the young woman’s voice as she continued babbling.
“Oh my God! I totally didn’t introduce myself. I’m Cherie, by the way. I’m just a couple of desks down if you need anything. Now, I was assured that you’re already familiar with our network.”
Casey nodded as the computer completed its start up and Cherie logged her in.
“There you go,” Cherie
said cheerily. “You’re all set. Now, can I get you a coffee? We just got this new pod machine and it makes, like twelve different types of coffee, from lattes to mochaccinos and cappuccinos. It totally disgusted Gareth but we overruled him.”
“A latte would be great, thank you,” Casey answered.
Cherie beamed and turned to leave the cubicle before stopping abruptly. She gasped.
“Oh my God! I completely forgot! I didn’t even ask you your name.”
“It’s Josie,” Casey answered with a soft, uneasy chuckle.
“Josie. We have a Josie here in Admin, upstairs. She’s nice, but don’t ever call her Josie though because she can be a total bitch about—”
“I better get to work,” Casey interrupted her gently.
Cherie blinked then blushed.
“Right. Sure. I’m sorry. I’ll…ahh…get that coffee for you.”
Casey waited a few seconds before peering around the edge of the cubicle entrance to make sure that she was clear. She watched Cherie until she had disappeared from view then, she grabbed the leather bag and set it down next to the keyboard.
That was weird.
Taking out her notebook, she opened it to the page where she had secured Saskia’s scrawled numbers with a paper clip. Casey navigated to a search pane and typed in the first of the numbers.
‘SX801244’
She hit the Enter key and was confronted with a bold-type, pop-up message.
‘Insufficient Credentials. Please Contact Your System Administrator.’
“Typical,” Casey hissed. She knew this was too good to be true.
Undeterred, Casey patted the pocket of her jacket, feeling the shape of the ID card there. She took it out, listened to see if anyone was coming, then reached into her bag once more for the tablet and the card writer.
She knew that the identification had included an administrator password which was embedded into the card information. It would be a simple matter of reading that data from the tablet in order to find it.
Casey inserted the ID card into the slot of the writer, then brought up the application she’d used to write the card. Within moments, the card’s information flashed up onto the screen. Casey leaned into examine the information and spotted a password right away.