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What was his ultimate goal? The inside of this building looked more like teenagers had gone on a drunken rampage than an actual attempt at theft. Mark slowly walked through the gallery but didn’t see anything that provided insight as to what the true plan had been. He made his way back into the office.
“Any luck?”
Jenna blew out a breath, a crease growing between her eyebrows. “There’s nothing on this thing worth stealing. And there’s evidence of a breach, but why? The computer was accessed during the break-in, but other than client data and the gallery’s financials, I don’t see anything that would give Joaquin motivation to send a robot in here.”
Mark looked around, evaluating the office from both a safety and an architectural perspective. “Keep looking,” he said. “Be absolutely sure.”
She kept staring at the monitor. “Yeah.”
Something about this room was bugging him, and he wasn’t sure what it was.
He stepped back out of the office and looked down the hall to the rear of the building. It went maybe twenty more feet, with what looked like a utility closet behind the office. He walked over and opened the door. Nothing unusual. Shelves with cleaning supplies, a bucket and a mop, what appeared to be a few alternate displays for things like sculptures and three-dimensional art pieces.
But it didn’t run the length of the office. The office was at least twelve feet across, and the closet was eight deep at most. He stepped inside and pressed a hand to the back wall.
It was warm. The wall that shared the office was cool.
It was possible that the space behind the closet was used by the business next door, but design-wise, it didn’t make sense.
Going back to the office, Mark went straight to the bookshelf covering the extra “empty space.” It wasn’t like the detective movies where there were scratch marks on the floor showing that the shelf was movable. No, he was pretty sure no one had moved this bookshelf in years and hadn’t wanted to.
Bracing himself against the wall, he shoved the shelf, moving it about a foot. Yeah. There it was. A doorframe.
“What are you doing?” Jenna asked.
“Following a hunch.”
He shoved the shelf again, and Jenna jumped up to help him. Together, they moved the shelf across the back wall, and Mark thanked the universe that his body was cooperating today. He felt no tingles or weakness, and he wanted it to stay that way.
Once they got the bookshelf out of the way, they could clearly see the door. It was locked with a keypad.
“Well, damn, Outlaw,” Jenna said, tracing her hand softly over the keypad. “Looks like you just found the jackpot.”
“How so?”
“That keypad makes the ones on my house, car, and the bus look like children’s toys. And that door? It would take a bazooka to get through it. I’d be willing to bet the walls are made of something similar. This is the kind of tech I’d expect to see on…” She froze and turned back to the computer. “Hold on.”
As she sat back down, her fingers flew across the keyboard faster than he could see, opening up coding windows and flipping through screens he could barely process.
“Wow, I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “You should always trust your hunches, Mark.”
He laughed. “What is it?”
“I think you may have just cracked the case, but I want to be sure before I even say it out loud. I need to get back to my computer.”
They did, with Mark carrying her inside the bus once again. But Jenna didn’t have quite the same reaction this time. She was focused, fully intent on what she was doing. As soon as they got back in, she jumped in front of her computer.
He let her work, ignoring the mutters she made to herself. He’d worked with her at Zodiac enough to know that staying out of her way was the best thing he could do. She would tell him as soon as she had something.
“We were right,” she finally said. “Smash and grab wasn’t Joaquin’s plan.”
Mark dragged a chair over so he could sit next to her. “What did you find?”
“Behind that door in the office is one of the remote backup servers for the IRS.”
His eyebrows rose into his hairline. “What?”
“It’s not entirely uncommon, and it’s not just the IRS. Government agencies have partial server backups in civilian buildings everywhere for, well…backup reasons. They don’t announce the servers’ locations because that would defeat the purpose. What better place to hide them than in nonofficial buildings?”
