I said, “Guilty, but it worked in testing. I trusted it. Like I’m going to do now.”
She shook her head, saying, “Seems like your trust is limited to using it with me in the harness. It’s not your ass going into the wind.”
She leaned over the edge again, getting a reference point on the overhang at the seventieth floor. “You’re going to pay for this.”
I grinned and said, “I know, I know.”
We were on the outside observation deck of the ninety-first floor of Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. The wind was strong enough to cause her hair to billow out. Honestly, the climb she was about to attempt wasn’t something even I would want to do—but that was why I had Jennifer.
We’d been midway from Australia to Taiwan on the Rock Star bird when I got the word from Wolffe that we had Alpha authority in Taiwan, which meant the business card had panned out.
While we knew Ju-Long Import/Export LLC was a front company for the People’s Liberation Army, they still had to do some legitimate business to maintain the façade, and the Taskforce had leveraged that weakness.
They’d found an American who had a current contract with them, then had stolen that man’s identity, conducting a little social engineering with the company. In the end, it had been pretty simple: They’d called the company, said the CEO of the American firm was going to be in Taiwan on business and wanted to set up a meeting with Chen Ju-Long. They’d been told he was out of the country, but would return in two days.
Which matched what we’d found on the card.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the damn office was on the seventy-seventh floor of one of the tallest buildings in the world.
We’d done the research on the nine-hour flight to Taipei and had learned that the building had been built with earthquakes and typhoons in mind, with blocks of floors used solely for stability and support separating the actual square footage occupied by renters.
We determined that there were three blocks of office spaces: the first—the low zone—from the fifth to the eighteenth floor, then the mid-zone from the twenty-second to the fifty-eighth, ending finally with the high zone at the upper level, each of the blocks separated by maintenance floors.
Of course, given our luck, Ju-Long Limited was in the high zone, with a private elevator that whisked approved visitors to the selected floor by use of a special badge. We didn’t have the time to crack all of the systems to gain access to the elevator, and so had looked for another way to get inside his office.
On the plus side, as it turned out, most of the available space at the higher levels was empty, the builder still trying to find renters for the enormous price they were asking, meaning if we could get in we wouldn’t have to worry about a bunch of different offices asking us who we were. The downside was we couldn’t figure out a way to get that high in the building because of the private elevator. But we could by using another one.
The ninety-first floor was an outside observation deck, with the two floors below it being an indoor observation area and restaurants, all open to the public, essentially giving us the ability to get above the Ju-Long office. The seventieth floor was a maintenance and stability level with a ledge shaped to appear from the outside like the jutting outcroppings of a traditional Chinese temple. The ledge itself had a walkway not unlike the observation deck we were on, and had door accesses for the maintenance men to utilize the window cleaning scaffolding or perform other utility work.
Which was just perfect for Jennifer.
A gymnast in an earlier life, she was like a gecko when it came to climbing stuff, and the drop was only about 250 feet. Okay, that “only” was me. I’m sure it was something a little different to Jennifer.
On the flight over, looking at the blueprints Creed had sent, Knuckles had seen the same thing I had—we could drop her over the edge, get her down to the seventieth floor, let her break in to the maintenance level, then have her go back up to the seventy-seventh floor using the stairs.
Once she was there, she could break into Ju-Long Limited. The electronic security was focused on the access at the ground level, through the keypad on the elevator, and not on the floor space itself. It had nothing but normal locksets, and Jennifer could crack those easily.
She’d heard us discussing the mission as if she wasn’t even there, and had brought out the obvious point—namely that if she got down to the seventieth floor and couldn’t get in, she was going to have a hell of a time getting back up. But that’s why she was paid the big bucks. We both knew she could climb plate glass with a little spit on her hands.
The entire mission was simply to access the Ju-Long office to see what she could find before he arrived tomorrow, using computer cloning devices, cameras, and good old-fashioned digging through file cabinets and desk drawers. It was a lot of work for such a potentially small payoff, but building a mission like this was always getting the little things to pay off, no matter the effort. Only in the movies were you handed the diabolical plot. The rest of the time, you had to work for it.
Jake Shu was doing something bad, and from what we’d seen with the protests since we landed, that ulterior motive was coming to a head sooner rather than later.
Jennifer held the cable against her chest and said, “What’s going to happen if they come out here looking? What are you going to do?”
I grinned and said, “Drop you.”
She scowled and I said, “Hey, we paid for the outdoor experience. They told us we had thirty minutes. Get over the edge. The clock is ticking.”
There was a price of admission to take the observation elevator to the ninety-first floor, whereupon one could circle the building taking in the views. Usually, there would be a line of people wanting the experience, with a controller not letting a tourist out until someone else came back in, but two things were working for us: One, it wasn’t a weekend, meaning there was naturally less interest from the public, and two, the current unrest in the city had depressed anyone wanting to do a tour of anything. Because of it, we were on our own, outside all by ourselves, the ticket guy two corners away and out of view.
Jennifer’s ledge was twenty floors below, and we’d analyzed which side of the building to use. The rent was incredibly expensive in the building—especially at the high zone—and because of it, most of the floor space was unoccupied on the south side, with Ju-Long being the only tenant, while the north had several working offices. We’d analyzed the risk and decided that sliding down the building with a single office in operation was better than sliding down the north side that had several—even if the one Jennifer was going by was also our target.
I tested the belay system, seeing it was functioning, and glanced back to the edge of the corner we were on. I saw nobody and said, “Time to go.”
Jennifer smiled. “You’re really going to owe me for this.”
I said, “I know . . . I know.”
She crawled out over the edge, and my radio came alive from Brett. “This is Blood. We have a man going up in the special elevator.”
Jennifer paused, and I said, “Okay? Why do we care? Jennifer is about to drop.”
“Because he’s got a man following him. The first guy had an access badge for the elevator. The second one did not.”