The Last Protector(Clayton White #1)(31)

Krantz stayed away from the streetlights and well within the shadows of the tall palm trees bordering the sidewalk as he approached the edifice. As he walked by the last palm tree, he removed the sticky miniature surveillance camera he had fixed on the trunk three days ago. Krantz used the stolen key fob to enter the building and stopped by the hand-sanitizer station positioned next to the elevator’s doors. With a flick of his hand, he removed another miniature camera, this one magnetically attached to the stand of the Purell dispenser. Krantz entered the staircase and climbed to the third floor. He didn’t encounter anyone on his way up, nor did he see anybody in the third-floor corridor. Not taking any chances, he walked the entire length of the hallway and checked that the door of the vacant commercial space was indeed locked.

There were two more sticky surveillance cameras in the building. One was by the red fire hose cabinet attached to the wall near the elevators. Krantz had angled it in a way that permitted him to see the elevator doors and the entrance to SkyCU. The second one was inside the elevator, wedged in the right back corner at knee height. He would pick them both up on his way out, but for now he wanted to keep them operational to provide an extra layer of security.

The building didn’t have its own alarm system or surveillance cameras, but SkyCU Technology did. After checking the hallway once more to make sure no one was going to surprise him, Krantz removed a set of lock-pick tools from his backpack. He took a moment to study the five-lever deadlock before selecting the right pick. Ten minutes later, he had the door open. Krantz slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind him and locked it. He heard the beeping of the alarm before he saw the panel. He grabbed a small screwdriver from his lock-picking kit and unscrewed the face of the alarm system panel. He pulled off the plastic cover and dropped it into his jacket pocket, then grabbed a small black device from his backpack.

The device, no bigger than a smartphone, had four twelve-inch-long wires sticking out of its front end. Krantz connected three of the wires to the terminal of the alarm system panel and powered on the unit by flicking a switch on the side of the device. The beeping stopped.

The room was dim, but the light coming in from streetlights was enough for him to see by, thanks to the eight windows facing the street.

At first look, and in contrast with the exterior of the building, the office was modern and beautifully decorated. Off to the left-hand side of the space was a pod of offices. The middle of the office space was occupied by a bunch of video arcade machines, the biggest flat-screen television Krantz had ever seen, an enormous L-shaped chocolate-colored leather couch, and what seemed like a dozen or so video game remotes plugged into the floor. There was also a Ping-Pong table and an espresso bar. On the right side was a large conference room enclosed on three sides by floor-to-ceiling glass walls.

Krantz stepped farther into the office and saw what appeared to be a solid wood door at the far end. As he had predicted, the door was locked with an electronic lock activated by a keypad fixed to the wall at the side of the door. From his backpack, he pulled out a white box and placed it over the keypad. Ten seconds later, numbers began to roll on a small readout in the center of the box. One by one, solid green numbers replaced the rolling ones. When he heard the electronic lock click, Krantz gently pushed the door open.

Bingo, he thought as he looked inside the server room.

The server room’s square footage was about the same as the conference room’s. There were three rows of racks holding boxy black servers covered in blinking LED lights. These were the dedicated servers for SkyCU Technology. This was where the company stored its plans and research data. It took a minute for Krantz to locate the actual file server. It was at the end of the third rack. The file server was hardwired to ten high-capacity hard drives. Krantz assumed each of them was in turn linked to another server for backup and data redundancy and then redirected once more to the cloud for safekeeping.

It didn’t matter. The thumb drive Oxley had given him had come from the Guoanbu, the Chinese intelligence service. It would do what it was supposed to.

Krantz plugged the thumb drive into one of the ports and waited. For a moment, nothing happened, and he wondered if he had missed a step. He’d been promised the device was plug and play, which suited him fine since he wasn’t the most technology-savvy guy around. He was about to pull the thumb drive out when an array of orange lights lit up its back. There was nothing left for him to do but to wait for the lights to turn green.

Then his phone vibrated. And he knew he had a problem.



Krantz’s two remaining miniature surveillance cameras had detected movement. He unlocked his phone screen and watched, trying to decide if there was indeed a threat. It would have been a more difficult call to make if there had been only one man in the elevator. But not only were there two men inside the elevator; there was also a third man standing next to the entrance of SkyCU Technology. Krantz reached for the silencer in his pocket and screwed it onto his pistol. He double-checked he had a round in the chamber and exited the server room at the same time the two men exited the elevator. Any tiny hope he had about being overly paranoid vanished when the two men teamed up with the one who’d been standing guard next to the SkyCU Technology door.

Now that the angle was better, Krantz could see what the three men looked like despite the grainy image. He wasn’t happy with what he saw. Krantz had spent almost fifteen years with the SAS. Studying faces and evaluating threats was a big part of what he did for a living. He knew what special operators looked like, and these three guys weren’t it. Their hair was trim, their bodies fit, but they just didn’t have the demeanor of apex predators.