“Roger.”

It took some patience in the tight confines of the shaft to remove his rebreather harness and weight belt and get them hooked on the ladder, but after a few contortions he got it done. Though he didn’t plan to exfiltrate the hotel the same way he’d come in, he knew better than to assume anything. Having his gear here would give him insurance against not only Murphy’s Law—“If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”—but also what he’d come to think of as Fisher’s Law: “The road of assumptions is lined with coffins.”

HEclimbed to the top of the ladder, then spun the locking wheel, and lifted the hatch just enough to slip the tip of the flexi-cam through. The lens revealed what he’d expected: the hotel’s maintenance center. Dimly illuminated by fluorescent shop lights spaced down the length of the ceiling, the space was roughly one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide. The walls were lined with banks of monitoring consoles and framed blueprints. Down the center of the room stood row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelving for the odds and ends it took to keep the hotel running, from the smallest of screws to new showerheads to cleaning supplies and paint. Here and there were stacks of crates containing what he assumed were larger items like motors, pumps, electrical switch panels.

After the roar of the intake tunnels, the maintainence room seemed eerily quiet, with only the occasional crackle of radio static and a faint electrical hum to break the silence. He panned the flexi-cam around. At the far end he saw a forklift pass between a row of shelves and disappear. Aside from that, he saw no movement. He wasn’t surprised. At this time of night the maintainence shift was likely run by a skeleton crew. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the security staff. According to Grimsdottir, it was fully manned twenty-four hours a day.

He switched to EM, or Electro-Magnetic, view and looked for odd signatures that would indicate sensor grids or cameras. There was nothing. He withdrew the flexi-cam.

“Okay, Grim, I’m not reading any cameras or sensors.”

“Confirmed,” she answered. “There’s nothing until you reach the outer corridor.”

“Roger, I’m moving.”

He lifted the hatch, climbed out, closed the hatch. He paused in a crouch, waiting and watching. The fluorescent lights, which were likely fully lit during the day, had been switched to half-power. The walls and shelving units were cast in shadow.

He sprinted to the nearest wall and flattened himself against it, then slid to his right, eyes scanning the room, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. His other hand touched steel. He knew without looking it what it was.

“I’m at the main door,” he radioed.

“First camera is twenty feet down the corridor. It’s on a ten-second span, no thermal, no NV.”

“Waiting for your mark,” Fisher whispered.

“Ready . . . ready . . . Go!”

He turned the knob, swung open the door, and slipped into the corridor.

19

BURJ AL ARAB

HEstepped into the corridor and pressed himself to the far wall. The first camera was twenty feet down the hall, high on the wall. Like the maintenance room, the corridor’s lights were dimmed for the night shift. Small halogen bulbs cast pools of light along the seam between the wall and the ceiling.

He started sliding, eyes fixed on the camera as it finished its scan and began turning back toward him. There would be a blind spot directly beneath the mount. He kept moving: step, slide, step, slide. . . . The camera reached its midpoint. The lens caught a glimmer of halogen light and winked at him. He could hear the hum of the pivot motor.

He stepped beneath the camera mount and froze. “At camera one,” he radioed.

There was an art to the proper use of surveillance cameras, and luckily for him most security personnel either didn’t understand the nuances of it, or were too lazy to bother with it.

Cameras that provided overlapping coverage were usually calibrated one of three ways: synchronized, offset, and random offset. Synchronized was just that, cameras moving in unison; offset staggered camera movements to better cover gaps; random offset used computer algorithms to provide full-area coverage combined with unpredictable movement.

The most common and the easiest to defeat was synchronized, followed by offset. Random offset was a nightmare—and of course this was the method the Burj al Arab employed. Here, in the narrow confines of the hallway where the camera spans were restricted, the problem was negligible, but later, as he penetrated deeper into the hotel, it would require some finesse.

“Blueprint overlay on your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir replied. “I’ve worked out the algorithim patterns. Just follow your traffic lights.”

Sam checked his screen: His next waypoint was a supply closet between this camera and the next. He was tempted to watch the cameras, but he kept his eyes fixed on the OPSAT. On the blueprint, the hall cameras were depicted as solid yellow triangles; as each camera panned, the triangles changed colors—red for stop, green for go.

When the camera above and the next one down turned green, he trotted forward. As he drew even with the supply closet door, it opened and a guard stepped out. He saw Fisher and opened his mouth. Fisher thumb-punched him in the larynx and his mouth snapped shut with a gagging sound. Fisher shoved him back into the closet, followed, and slammed the door shut behind him.

Clutching at his throat, the guard backed into the wall and stood there gasping. Fisher drew his pistol and aimed it the man’s chest. “The pain will pass. When it does, if you shout, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand?”

The guard nodded and croaked out what sounded like a “yes.”

Fisher let him recover, then said, “Turn around.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Do you want me to kill you?”

“No, please . . .”

“Then turn around.”

The guard did so. Fisher keyed his subdermal and said to Grim, “I’ve got a voice for you.”

“I’m ready.”

Fisher pressed the pistol against the nape of the guard’s neck, then reached over his shoulder and held the OPSAT before his mouth. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

In Fisher’s subdermal, Grimsdottir said, “Got it.” To the guard, Sam replied, “Just that. It’s nap time, pal.” Fisher thumbed the pistol’s selector to DARTand shot the guard in the back of the neck. The man let out a groan and toppled forward onto his face. “Napper; clean,” Fisher reported.

What the guard had just given Grimsdottir was a voice print she could now match to the backlog of recordings she’d been collecting from her eavesdropping on the hotel. Though a painstaking process, having a mosaic voice print to play back to the security center would keep anyone from missing an incapacitated guard. For the remainder of the mission, this guard, though unconscious on the floor, would continue to report in as required.

Fisher frisked the guard, but found only pocket litter and a key-card ID badge, which was useless to him. The hotel’s roving patrols were assigned sectors; if this guard’s badge was used anywhere outside his sector, the alarm would be raised.

He rolled the guard’s body into a corner and covered it with a pile of painter’s tarps. He rechecked his OPSAT, then walked to the closet’s opposite wall, felt around until he found what he was looking for, and pried back a hidden access panel, revealing a crawl space roughly two feet by two feet. He crouched down and stared down the length of it.

“Waypoint two,” he radioed.

He crawled inside.

TRUEto the schematics, his NV and IR checks of the crawl space revealed neither cameras nor sensors, and after twenty feet the tunnel ended at a second access hatch. He worked the release pins, then carefully set aside the hatch, crawled through, and pressed himself against the wall. He replaced the hatch and glanced upward. Twelve feet above his head a camera hummed, slowly turning on its mount.