The evening of the next day, as the employees of N-Hance Technologies made their way to the parking lot at the end of their work day, the personnel of Spotlight Security Solutions, a third party firm contracted by N-Hance, were performing their final checks for a routine shift change. Inside the main security office, a woman was getting her things together to leave while a man sat at a desk, his eyes wandering between a series of monitors showing camera feeds throughout the building.
“Hey Peyton,” he called over to his co-worker, “ever wonder why they have all these locked doors?”
Peyton glanced over at the various monitors with camera feeds and shrugged. “Not really. When you work for outsourced private security, you quickly learn that everyone has secrets none of us will ever know…but, when there’s so many secrets, 99.9% of them are probably boring.”
The man inclined his head in thought, but couldn’t help but nod at the logic. “So who has the night shift today?”
Peyton ran her fingers over the nearby calendar posted on the wall. “Let’s see…looks like it’s Sam.”
“Sam?” the man’s eyes lit up as he turned back to the monitors.
“Matt, what are you doing?” Peyton asked, with a hint of annoyance as she already knew the answer.
“Nothing, just…one final set of rounds before I go.”
He flipped through the feeds until he saw a familiar figure stride down one of the hallways of the building. Like the others, she was clad in the company’s standard uniform: navy blue polo shirt, jeans, and cap with vibrant red hair tied up in a ponytail and threaded through the back. She also wore a utility vest, an addition of her choice, fastened around her shirt. Even with all of that, her fit and curvaceous physique was clearly visible, especially from her mostly unbuttoned polo, conceivably that way due to impossibility rather than choice. It revealed deep cleavage, a row of chiseled abs from being slightly too short to cover them, and did nothing to conceal the smooth, hypnotic, up-and-down rhythm of her chest that matched her gait.
Samantha—or Sam, as most called her—dutifully proceeded with her patrol down corridor 3B, but paused as she heard the familiar buzzing of the security camera behind and above her. She sighed and rolled her eyes, not bothering to turn around but fishing the walkie-talkie out from her vest. “Is that you, Matt? I know you’re zoomed in on my ass.”
“Huh…?” came the feigned confused response on the other end. “Noooo, I wouldn’t—how could you even…”
“She probably knows what the camera sounds like for each of its functions, idiot.” Peyton chided him back at the station. “Now quit perving so we can get out of here. We still gotta arm the alarm at the east gate.”
“Hey, c’mon,” Matt replied defensively, yet still rising from his seat to follow her. “I’m just…wondering what gym she goes to.”
“Fitness Freaks.” Peyton responded automatically, not thinking about it.
“The one in the north side or south side of—waaaaaait, how did you know that? Do you go there too?” Matt raised a suspicious eyebrow.
Peyton tensed as her cheeks suddenly went bright red. “Of course not! Shut up!”
“And the only way you’d know she goes there is if you saw her—or possibly watched her…” he smirked triumphantly.
“I said shut up!” Peyton snapped through gritted teeth. “One more word and you’ll have a proctologist staring at your ass trying to figure out how my foot got so far up it.”
The two reached the east gate and went about their final task, inputting the clearance code and locking the automatic fencing behind them, before walking toward their vehicles. Sam glanced out a window and watched their departure, but only briefly, soon returning to her rounds as she twirled her nightstick idly.
The remaining twilight hours passed uneventfully. As the moonless night fell, the only light came from sparse rows of streetlights that lined the quiet road passing next to the N-Hance building. This remained the case until a pair of headlights emerged from a nearby cross-street. They belonged to a black, unmarked van, but promptly darkened once the vehicle reached the building’s side entrance.
Stopping right before the locked east gate, the doors opened and out stepped a pair of slender legs, followed by an equally lithe body clad in a fishnet skirt and top with a utility belt and open leather jacket. Brushing away strands of her sleek blonde hair with her finger, Cami gazed up at the darkened N-Hance building and smiled.
“So this is Quantech’s big competitor,” she murmured softly. “Time to see if all these gadgets they had me take are up to the task.”
She walked up to a panel with a number grid bolted to the security gate and removed a flat, metallic disk from her belt, with a diameter no bigger than a golf ball’s. Studying it for a moment, the voice of her handler echoed in her head:
“This is the CX-500 model of Quantech’s state-of-the-art ping impersonator. Connect this to any device in a security network and it will mirror the heartbeat ping of the device to fool any monitors into thinking it is still up and running, even if it isn’t.”
Delicately, she attached the disk to the panel and waited a few seconds before a blinking red light on the disk became a stable blue light. Next, from the other side of her belt, she removed another object resembling a tuning fork attached to a tv remote. Once again, she remembered her handler’s words:
“The military really wants to get its hands on this beauty. Portable, small-scale EMP, able to knock out power to any device within a 6-inch radius. Enough to get the job done without sending anyone back to the 18th century. Oh, and the CX-500 is shielded against its effects, if you catch my drift.”
Holding the forked end of the device up against the panel, she pressed a large button in the middle of the remote. A soft, yet high-pitched whine emanated from the device, and a moment later, the back-lit panel on the fence flickered and went dark. Cautiously, Cami gently pressed her hand against the gate, her shoulders relaxing slightly in relief as it creaked open.
Excellent. First hurdle cleared. She proceeded through the gate into the loading area, soon finding herself surrounded by several trucks and large crates. Navigating this minor maze, which included finding a push truck (should be handy for getting stuff to the van later, she surmised), she found the door to the building, along with something a bit unusual: a small, solitary box left next to it.
Hmmm, what’s this? she stooped down to pick it up. Despite its being in the loading dock, it was the only box of its type around, implying it had been delivered separately from any of the larger boxes. The building address was neatly handwritten on top but had no return address.
Cami turned to put the box on the push truck, but paused. I suppose Quantech is paying me partially for my discretion, but all this super-secret science stuff is making me very curious. One little look shouldn’t hurt...  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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