“I’ll come in behind you. Give me five minutes.”
—
As Virgil watched, a man got out of the car. He was dressed all in black and was carrying a black bag. He walked around the back of the SUV, climbed the steps to the entrance doors, one of which was pushed open as he approached. He went inside.
Virgil sat and waited until Jenkins walked up, patted the hood, and then climbed in the passenger side. “We going in?”
“Not yet,” Virgil said. “Let him settle down to work.”
He took out his cell phone and called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to call Stuart Booker, the president of Surface Research. “My phone comes up as ‘Caller Unknown,’” Virgil told the duty officer. “I wanted you to use the official line that identifies you as the BCA. When you get him, tell him to expect a call from me, Caller Unknown. Call me back after you get him... And if you don’t get him, call his wife.”
The duty officer called four or five minutes later. “They were sound asleep. They didn’t believe me, so I had them look up the BCA number and call me. They did and now they believe me. They’re waiting for you to call.”
Virgil called Booker, who picked up immediately. Virgil identified himself, and said, “Sir, I’m working on a complicated case that has somewhat touched upon a man who does industrial espionage. He has just gone in the back of your building in Eagan.”
“What!”
“I need your permission to go in there and hold him.”
“I live in Sunfish Lake. I’m eight minutes from there. I can bring keys.” Virgil heard him call to his wife: “Andi, get my pants and a shirt.” He then came back to Virgil. “You have my permission to go in, but I can bring keys.”
“Do you have keys for the back door, by the loading dock?”
“Yes!”
“Then let’s do that,” Virgil said. “You know where the Aerotop warehouse is? A block down from you and—”
“I know it.”
“Come in from the back, park on the other side from your building so you’re out of sight. We’ll wait for you there.”
“I’m coming. I got my pants on. I could bring my Ruger, I’ve got a carry permit—”
“No, no, no...”
—
Virgil sent Jenkins to sneak back around the Aerotop building to meet Booker; while Jenkins did that, Virgil called the duty officer at the Eagan Police Department and explained the situation. “We’ll be going in the back. If you can do it, I’d like you to keep a car a few blocks away, not too close, and then when I say go, have them pull into the front parking lot with their flashers on to discourage runners. There are three doors, grab anybody coming out.”
“We can do that. We got nothing going tonight.”
—
Virgil waited, watching the back door of the Surface Research building with his binoculars; he saw no movement at all. Ten minutes after Jenkins left, he was back with a tall, thin man with curly black hair and a large, bony nose. The man got in the back of the Tahoe, and said, “I’m Stu Booker. How’d you find out about this? Do you know what he’s doing in there?”
“We got it from one of our confidential informants, and I can’t disclose the source quite yet,” Virgil said. “Our source says this guy is accessing a computer to get all the information he can about paints that will be used to guide self-driving cars.”
“Sonofabitch! Sonofabitch! I thought that had to be it,” Booker said. “Jesus Christ, if that gets out of the building... We gotta stop this.”
“We will. You should know that our source says he’s already been in there several times.”
“Oh my God!”
“Did you bring a key for the back door?”
“Yes.” Booker fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a key on a horsehair ring. “I go in the back myself sometimes. Listen, the guy must be in the engineering office.”
Booker described a route through the production facility and up into the engineering, design, and administrative offices. “I’ll come with you and point the way.”
