Читать книгу The Perestroika Effect - Cecilia Tanner - Страница 18

The elevator and the stairwell were both fitted with computer controlled security devices, and they were the only means of access. He swiped his special passcard to operate the elevator and then tapped the four-digit personal identification code into a keypad to stop the elevator at the 4^th floor as he would have needed to open a stairwell door at any of the floors in the tower.

As Sergey stepped out of the elevator, he again caught a pungent whiff of the smell that permeated the rug and furniture in his office. He now recognized it as the smell that he had noticed in Tarasov’s car, the same smellprint.

Sergey's office took up only a small part of the top floor. He loved the privacy of his office on the top of the tower with the restricted access and the extensive surveillance facilities provided.

The rest of the fourth floor was one large open space, filled with old office equipment and furniture, rows of dark green filing cabinets, drawing tables, and plan holders; all left over from the busy operation that existed while the reactors were being built and the uranium was being mined. Now, it was just a dark and dusty storage room.

The security of the fourth floor included a second restricted stairwell that served as an emergency escape route, which may be necessary, he thought grimly. It could be entered through any door on any floor, but anyone entering the stairwell by these doors could only exit freely at the foyer; they could not enter another floor without punching their own code into a door-side keypad reader.

“Paranoia is an agent’s best friend, Sergey. Walk with him - talk with him,” his trainer had insisted.

Sergey checked his overcoat on the coat hanger and pulled the vodka from its pocket, and poured himself a full shot glass. He took a plate of zakusky, the Russian hors d'oeuvres he particularly loved, from the small refrigerator in the corner and settled himself behind his desk. Russians consumed a lot of vodka but propriety called for the eating of food with the vodka.

“Eat a little snack, man, don’t you be a bad man, drink vodka with zakusky, zakusky, zakusky…” he bellowed in his rich baritone.

He upended the vodka, then sampled a piece of pickled herring and sighed with satisfaction. He scanned the meters, dials, lights, and television screens in the console at the left end of his large, old alder desk that monitored the most important functions in the plant, humming happily enough. The console served both as his personal monitoring station and as an emergency backup to the big one in the Security Control Centre.

Satisfied that everything was in normal operating range, he switched through several camera views until he found Katya. She was taking radiation measurements in one of the equipment storage rooms.

His viewing was interrupted by the soft buzz tone of his encrypting telephone that was hooked via a transponder directly to a one of the geo-stationary satellites covering Russia. He could connect to any similarly encrypted telephone protected from eavesdropping anywhere in the country.

Sergey punched in a password and answered the call. It was General Samocherny in Moscow.