Читать книгу The Payback - Mike Lawson - Страница 6

From his office window Norton could see a Los Angeles class attack submarine moored at one of the piers. He was too far away to read the sub’s hull number but he thought it was the USS Asheville, SSN 758. He had worked on the Asheville last year, spent a lot of time drinking with some of the chiefs. He stared at the sub a minute longer, then realizing he was just stalling, turned the rod and closed the venetian blinds. It was unlikely that anyone would be able to see what he was doing through a fourth-floor window but he couldn’t take that chance.

Norton turned away from the window and peered over the partitions that enclosed his cubicle. It was lunchtime. There were four guys playing cribbage two cubicles over, and near the door, a secretary buffing her nails. There wasn’t anybody else in the office that he could see. He had sent Mulherin up to bullshit with the secretary. Mulherin was good at bullshit. If anyone started to come down the aisle in Norton’s direction, Mulherin would slow the person down and say something to warn him.

Having no further reason to delay, Norton pulled the chessboard out of his backpack. The board was thirteen inches square and an inch and a quarter thick, a little thicker than most chessboards. He pressed down on one side of the chessboard and a thin door popped open and a dozen chess pieces spilled out onto his desk. He then tipped the chessboard downward and a slim laptop computer slid out of the hollow space between the top and bottom of the chessboard.

The chessboard had been Carmody’s idea.

After he used the laptop, Norton would slide it back into the hidden compartment in the chessboard, put the chessboard on top of his file cabinet, and arrange some pieces on the board to make it look as if he was playing a game with Mulherin. What a joke that was: Mulherin playing chess.

Getting the laptop into the shipyard was the riskiest part of the whole operation. Norton only needed to use it a few minutes a day, and when he did, he’d do like he was doing now – use it at lunchtime with Mulherin standing guard. But he’d been worried about bringing it in. In fact he’d been sweating so hard he was surprised one of the jarheads at the gate hadn’t noticed.

Personal computers were prohibited inside the facility – only government-issue equipment was allowed – and if the marines guarding the gates had picked him that morning for one of their random security checks, and if by some chance they had discovered the laptop hidden in the chessboard, he’d have been screwed. Absolutely screwed.

But the likelihood of that happening had been small. If the terrorist threat level was high, the marines searched everything coming through the gates. Cars, knapsacks, purses, lunch boxes. Everything. But Norton had brought the laptop in when the threat level was normal and he had waited until there was a backup at the gate, a lot of people bitching that they needed to get to work, which tended to make the marines rush their searches. That had been Carmody’s idea too, going in when the line was long. Carmody was a smart bastard.

Norton realized at that moment that it wasn’t the marines that he’d been worried about. It was Carmody. Carmody scared the hell out of him.