Whiteout - Ken Follett [53]
Now it would be much more difficult. His room was in the creaky old part of the main house, next to Olga and Hugo. He would have to wait until everyone had retired. When the house was quiet, he would have to creep out of his room, tiptoe down the stairs, and leave the house in total silence. If someone should open a door—Olga, for instance, crossing the landing to go to the bathroom—what would he say? “I’m just going to get some fresh air.” In the middle of the night, in the snow? And what would he do in the morning? It was almost certain that someone would see him coming in. He would have to say he had been for a walk, or a drive. And then, later, when the police were asking questions, would anyone remember his uncharacteristic early morning stroll?
He tried to put that worry out of his mind. He had a more immediate problem. He had to steal the smart card his father used to enter BSL4.
He could have bought any number of such cards from a security supplier, but smart cards came from the manufacturer embedded with a site code that ensured they would work at only one location. Cards bought from a supplier would have the wrong code for the Kremlin.
Nigel Buchanan had questioned him persistently about stealing the card. “Where does your father keep it?”
“In his jacket pocket, usually.”
“And if it’s not there?”
“In his wallet, or his briefcase, I expect.”
“How can you take it without being seen?”
“It’s a big house. I’ll do it when he’s in the bath, or out for a walk.”
“Won’t he notice it’s gone?”
“Not until he needs to use it, which won’t be until Friday at the earliest. By then I’ll have put it back.”
“Can you be sure?”
At that point Elton had interrupted. In his broad south London accent he had said, “Bloody hell, Nige! We’re counting on Kit to get us into a heavily guarded high-security laboratory. We’re in trouble if he can’t nick something off his own fuckin’ father.”
Stanley’s card would have the right site code, but the chip in it would contain Stanley’s fingerprint data, not Kit’s. However, he had thought of a way around that.
The movie was building to a climax. John Wayne was about to start shooting people. This was a good moment for Kit to make a clandestine move.
He got up, grunted something about the bathroom, and went out. From the hall, he glanced into the kitchen. Olga was stuffing a huge turkey while Miranda cleaned brussels sprouts. Along one wall were two doors, one to the laundry and the other to the dining room. As he looked, Lori came out of the laundry carrying a folded tablecloth and took it into the dining room.
Kit stepped into his father’s study and closed the door.
The likeliest place for the smart card was in one of the pockets of his father’s suit coat, as he had told Nigel. He had expected to find the jacket either on the hook behind the door or draped over the back of the desk chair; but he saw immediately that it was not in the room.
He decided to check some other possibilities while he was here. It was risky—anyone might come in, and what would he say? But he had to take chances. The alternative was no robbery, no three hundred thousand pounds, no ticket to Lucca—and, worst of all, the debt to Harry Mac unpaid. He remembered what Daisy had done to him that morning, and shuddered.
The old man’s briefcase was on the floor beside the desk. Kit went through it quickly. It contained a file of scatter graphs, all meaningless to Kit; today’s Times with the crossword not quite finished; half a bar of chocolate; and the small leather notebook in which his father