The large clock on the wall read 11:17 as Jessica prepared to leave the office. It had been a long and difficult day in a week plagued with major computer glitches that threatened to stall her department’s major project – there would be hell to pay if that were to happen. Around 3:00 she had recommended to her supervisor that her team work through the weekend, but for some reason the division manager refused to authorize the overtime. After today’s mess she was just glad now to be getting out of here for the weekend – Monday would be here all too soon.

Jessica turned the light out, stepped through the doorway, and drew the steel door shut behind her. It made a soft but solid metallic “clunk,” snug and tight as it closed to. The hall lights had been out for over a week, and maintenance hadn’t gotten to repairs yet so the dim light of the exit sign halfway down the hallway cast everything in a ghastly green tinge. Jessica was thankful there were no mirrors around – the thought of seeing herself in greenface wasn’t appealing at all. The soft rubber soles of her sneakers made slight squeaking sounds as she padded quickly down the hallway.

At the end of the hall, Jessica pushed on the panic bar of the door leading into the stairwell. Again, there was the distinct metallic sound as the door swung shut behind her and locked. “The stairway must be lighted with 40-watt bulbs,” she thought to herself as she moved cautiously down the stairs. She reminded herself that her memo to administration about liability issues relating to dimly lit stairways still sat in a folder of unsent E-mail messages on her console. Monday, for sure.

As Jessica reached the ground floor, she could see through the window of the stairwell door into the lobby. There she saw a man wearing a ski mask pointing a very large automatic weapon at several security guards huddled behind a wall out of sight of the front windows.

Three men in dark leathers and wearing ski masks were moving something across the lobby. They were all armed with very large weapons. “Thank whoever it was that decided stairwell doors needed windows, or I’d have walked right into that!” thought Jessica to herself. She backed into the shadows beneath the stairs and watched as they finished loading a large case onto the elevator.

While one ski mask stayed with the elevator, the other three herded the security men into the security station office, yanked phones off the walls, smashed the doorknob on the inside, and pushed the door shut. Ski masks number two and three entered the elevator joining ski mask number four, and the door slid shut. One lone figure remained, and he leaned against the wall behind the lobby security station and waited.

Jessica retraced her steps back up the stairs. The stairwell doors open into the stairwell, and there are no handles on that side, a measure to secure the building offices and labs from access without clearance. Entry is gained only through the elevators where card readers served as keys. “Damn!” mumbled Jessica to herself. Then she remembered something James, the maintenance man showed her once, a procedure he’d learned to by-pass the security system to do just the thing she needed now. Well, actually, he had told her he thought it would work, though he’d not tried it to see if it actually did.

Jessica climbed to the seventh floor, and slowly approached the landing, remaining in the shadows. No one. “I hope no one’s in an office where I can’t see them,” thought Jessica. She took out her Swiss Army Knife and opened the file blade, and in one swift movement jammed it into the metal framing around the window near the edge of the door.

She turned and climbed to the sixth step leading to the next landing, and standing on her tiptoes reached up and pushed aside the translucent glass panel of the stairwell light. She unscrewed the bulb, and reaching up stuck a penny on the end of the bulb and shoved it back into the socket and screwed it in until it shorted with a “pfizt” sound and the bulb burst. The lights of the circuit for that floor went out – “Thank god the lights in the hallways aren’t working!” thought Jessica to herself as she unscrewed the bulb a little. She quickly leaped from the stairs to the doorway and grasped the handle of her knife and pulled firmly toward her.

It was not common knowledge, but the electronically controlled panic bars on the doors had one design flaw, that they would not function without power and would unlock with any power failure. The system designers installed a retrofit auxiliary generator that would kick in within thirty seconds of a power outage, and reactivate all the electronic systems on that floor, including the panic bars. Not a wholly satisfactory arrangement, but someone thought it to be at least functional.

The heavy door pulled slowly toward her, and she was able to grasp the edge and hold it open. Within seconds, there was a whine behind the walls as the emergency generator kicked in and the exit signs came back on, and the panic bars and locks “clunked” into active mode once again. Jessica was aware that in the extreme silence within the building, the sound of the generator would be heard by the ski mask men, but hoped they would think it was routine mechanical sounds for such a large and complex building. Somewhere in the bowels of the building in some maintenance office, a warning light appeared on the building’s electrical blueprint grid, showing the exact location of the electrical outage. She would thank James later.

Jessica peeked around the doorjamb and down the hallway. Empty. She listened for any movement. Silence. She stepped into the hallway, holding the panic bar to allow the door to close quietly, and then headed for her office. The squeaking of her sneakers seemed to pound on her eardrums, and she tried to walk more lightly to eliminate any sound. She reached her office, and ran her ID card through the slot in the lock; the lock “clunked,” and she quickly grabbed the knob and pushed the door open. She left the lights off just in case any ski masks walked by, and quickly hit the switch on the surge protector that turned on her console.

“Damn!” As powerful as her computer was at 993MHz, it was taking too long to boot up. Jessica chose not to use the telephone to call for help, as it would show as a light on the security station console downstairs, and if ski mask number one was alert, he’d see that someone was still in the building and would know exactly where. She clicked the E-mail icon on her screen, and the window blipped on. She selected the window to write a quick note to the San Jose Police Department. As she started to click the “Send” button, she remembered her E-mail complaint to administration, and clucking her tongue, retrieved the memo, and clicked “Send.” In a milli-second both messages were sent via a secure data line. Now, to wait – to wait.

“Damn!” thought Jessica, waiting in the dark office. It had been seven minutes since she sent her E-mail message to the police. Her ears were attuned to the sounds in the hallway, hoping against hope that she would continue to hear only silence. Then, there was that familiar sound as the door of the elevator slid open. She could hear muffled murmurs as several people came down the hall toward her office.

Jessica quickly slipped into the copy room off her office, and slid down behind the copy machine. “Damn, it’s filthy here,” she muttered to herself, then remembered she shouldn’t be making any noise. The voices approached and then passed her office, and moved toward the stairwell doors. They stayed briefly at the end of the hall, and after a moment were gone. She waited awhile, and then slipped out from behind the copy machine and returned to her office.

Jessica stopped dead in her tracks. There sitting on the stool next to her desk was ski mask number two. He held Jessica’s attention as he pointed a very large caliber weapon at her head. “That was very stupid,” he said in a whisper, his eyes ablaze and a smile on his lips.

“But, how did you know I was here?” Jessica stammered, wondering how, indeed.

“It was so quiet down-stairs, my partner heard the telephone circuits clicking – that meant a call was either coming in or one was going out.” Ski mask number two smiled, “and since none of the lights on the switchboard were lit it had to be one of the data lines.” He paused, smiling. “All data lines to the outside originate in the labs on the sixth floor and above. It didn’t take long to find you here.”

Jessica frowned – “But I didn’t make any noise,” she protested, “how did you know where to look?”

“It was strictly luck – I just happened to be walking along your corridor. Keyboards do make a little noise, and this is a very quiet place when there aren’t any people around.”

“Shit,” muttered Jessica half to herself.

“Now, tell me who you sent that E-mail to,” ski mask number two asked, his voice still just a whisper.

“It was a note to our VP of Operations about a problem with the lighting in the hallways –maybe you noticed,” Jessica said, lying only a little, and this by omission.

“You weren’t sending a message to the San Jose PD?” ski mask number two queried.

“No,” said Jessica a little too quickly.

“Right,” said ski mask number two, his lips curled in a smile and with a gleam in his eyes. “It won’t matter, we’ll be done by the time they respond,” said ski mask number two. “Now, come with me,” he directed, and the two exited her office and moved quickly to the elevators. They rode in silence up to the 14^th floor, and as they exited, were met by ski masks number three and four.

“We’re hooked up and are done here,” said ski mask number three, “Let’s move.” Ski mask number two motioned Jessica toward the door to the sterile room where all the high-security data mainframes are housed. Ski mask number two held the door for her as she entered the room.

“I shouldn’t be in here without a sterile suit,” she protested, knowing her protest was pretty lame under the circumstances.

“Just hold your breath and everything will be all right,” he replied, a twinkle in his eyes. And, with that, ski mask number two closed the door and jammed a piece of putty-like material into the lock. In seconds it made a “pfizt” sound with a flash of light, and the door was effectively locked tight.

“Hey, tell me what you guys are doing,” Jessica yelled through the double-paned glass windows of the sterile room door.

Ski mask number two smiled and winked at Jessica and slipped into the stairway to the roof.

As Jessica paced back and forth along row after row of massive computer cabinets, her thoughts were flitting between wishing she was home in a hot bath, and kicking herself for not having left work earlier. She paused in front of cabinet XFL-00000 – “Ah, Uncle Sam, Department of Defense, Black Budget Number…Unknown…!”

Then a light went on behind Jessica’s eyes, and she took out her Swiss Army Knife and quickly unscrewed the cabinet facing, exposing the inner workings of the most highly guarded data system of the company’s government accounts. She located the panel of touch-sensitive pads and manually typed in deactivation codes to block access to certain data linkages by shutting down the computers.

In moments the whirring platinum-gold-oxide data disks came to a halt, and the entire room settled into an eerie silence. Jessica turned, and leaning against the computer, slid down its face until she was seated on the floor and waited. “Where are the police when you need them?” Jessica muttered to herself. “Maybe they don’t check their E-mail all that much.” Then she muttered, “I don’t need this. I should be home in a hot bath.” She wondered where the janitorial crew was. “Probably in the basement watching Letterman,” she thought wryly.

Jessica could now hear the whoop-whoop of a helicopter through the insulated walls, and figured that the ski mask men were carrying out their escape from the landing pad atop the building. After what seemed an eternity of megaseconds of silence, she looked up and saw a face at the door to the sterile room – a uniformed officer of the San Jose Police Department. He smiled as a company security guard used a blowtorch to slice through the door handle, and opened the door.

“Was that you guys in the helicopter on the roof?” asked Jessica.

“That was us,” smiled the police officer. “Are you Jessica?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, we got here just before the bad guys’ chopper did, and we got first dibs. Our guys in the air tracked them to a small landing strip in the hills behind the Stanford Linear Accelerator and they’re now in custody.”

His smile revealed a row of pearly whites. “We’d already gotten the initial alarm, and your E-mail was patched through to us on our way here. These guys didn’t know that you have a silent alarm directly connected with our office that’s activated whenever the security guard station downstairs is shut down – these poor guys turned themselves in! And, good news! They’d connected their laptop through the building’s circuitry to transmit critical data from this big bad computer over the company’s dedicated lines, so by deactivating the computer from here you prevented them from transferring some pretty serious secured information.”

Jessica turned as a squad of San Jose’s finest herded four unmasked ski masks down the stairs from the roof.

As they passed, ski mask number two stopped and smiled at Jessica – “Hey, it was a pleasure doing business with you, bright-eyes.”