The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor Read Free Book Online

anyway, since it was out all by itself and not within walking distance of anything, precluding conducting operations from our original hotel, but the police fight made it imperative that we get out of the area. It had been too dark in that alley for them to have gleaned any viable description, so they’d fall back on the only thing they had—hotels within walking distance of the scene—and that would have put us in the net.
    As I was checking out, Knuckles came into the lobby. He’d already completed reconnaissance of Jake’s room and built a plan of attack. He’d “borrowed” a maid’s uniform and determined the room-cleaning schedule—which is to say there wasn’t one—meaning Jennifer could access it at any time of the day and not look out of place. He wasn’t too happy when I told him that Jennifer was headed to the airport instead of the new hotel. All the flights left at two or three in the morning, and I figured it was better to fly her home in the same cycle of darkness. The police would be looking for a couple, and getting her out would throw off their search. Of course, Knuckles didn’t see it that way.
    “What do you mean, she’s leaving? We’re in the middle of a fucking mission.”
    “Her brother’s in trouble. He left a voice mail that’s not something to mess around with.”
    “So call him and tell him she’ll be home in a day or two. How bad could it be?”
    “He won’t answer his phone. It goes straight to voice mail. Look, her brother’s a reporter in Dallas, and she thinks he was working on a story about the drug cartels.”
    That gave him pause. We’d both kept up on what was going on in Mexico because of the potential nexus of the cartels and terrorists out to harm the United States.
    I continued. “I heard the voice mail, and he was really in fear for his life. It sounded like someone was about to jerk the phone out of his hand.”
    He took that in, then said, “You really think this is some type of
Sopranos
bullshit?”
    “I don’t know, but Jennifer’s freaking out about it, and rightly so. She needs to get home.”
    He tried to maintain his anger, but it was a losing battle. He knew the decision was correct, and he would have made it himself if it were someone under his command. He just didn’t like the fact that he had no control over our little civilian company. And I understood that. We were still slogging through how such things worked and who was ultimately in charge, because my company was unique. It wasn’t established by the government, but by Jennifer and me through our own seed money, and yet we got a Taskforce paycheck for missions such as this.
    On the one hand, we could be kicked to the curb as too much trouble, but on the other, our company allowed penetration of just about any place on earth—like it had here—and it was run by operators. Confusing, but that’s what the world was when you were working outside the traditional intelligence and defense architecture.
    With diminishing aggravation, he said, “This damn mission won’t work without her. I’ve already got a maid’s uniform and a plan for entry.”
    I smiled at that. A year ago he wouldn’t have used Jennifer at all if he could help it, instead giving her some menial task that wouldn’t affect the outcome of the mission. Now he was building operations that revolved around her participation.
    “That’s not true,” I said. “The hard part is gaining entry to the room, and you’ve already cracked that. The rest is just cover development.”
    The locks at the President Hotel were made by a company called Onity. They used key-cards just like hotel locks all over the world. The difference was that the Onity lock had a fairly well publicized hack utilizing the DC barrel connector at the base of the casement, whereby a simple tool could trick it into opening. Onity had done nothing about the vulnerability until a rash of robberies in Houston, Texas, prompted an outcry. They’d created a