#thegabyteller

Going through and planting the bugged pens took time. It took a great deal of time, since Illya also had to attend to his responsibilities as a janitor. It wouldn’t do to get sloppy and risk his position. To the average person, intrigue and espionage was not something they had to be constantly on the alert for. In most cases, a janitor was just a janitor and a pen was nothing but a pen.

There were people whose job it was, however, to watch out for anomalies; hoping for these people, and the other general staff at the company, to become complacent enough to overlook mistakes was not a plan. It was a hope in a desperate situation, at best, and Illya wasn’t known for relying on something as flimsy as hope to get him through a job.

With a large janitorial staff, Illya was assigned a zone. If he could have bugged every single executive office, but those that he had access to would suffice, at least for now. It was doubtful that his chosen locations wouldn’t yield at least something of use, but if the locations weren’t strategic enough, he’d just have to change the plan. Adaptability was important, and he was no stranger to its necessity.

Always working from top to bottom, he followed this pattern until he reached the last level, one of the mechanical engineering levels. Only being allowed access to one of the rooms within that larger complex was no problem. The best thing about a pen was how easily they seemed to travel. All he needed was for someone to pick it up, and he’d have the chance to get it deeper. It was a shame he wasn’t at the R&D levels, but he was working out a way to get down there in the future.

Opening the door and pushing his cart through, Illya checked at the doorway at the unmistakable sound of work being carried out in the adjoining garage. There was a small figure hunched over, hard at work, thankfully with her back toward him. Quickly recovering himself, he had leisure to watch her for a moment without being detected, and he made active use of the time.

In his chats with other employees, he had, of course, heard about her. She wasn’t the only female employee, but the men that worked with her often had a lot to say. Not all of it was precisely flattering, nor was it Illya’s usual habit to discount someone merely based on their gender, but it was an easy matter to fake it. By all accounts, Gaby Teller was a tireless worker and seemingly inexhaustible in her dedication to the craft. Whatever drove her, be it loyalty to the company, enjoyment of her work, or a desire to prove herself, she appeared to always be at work.

It was, oddly enough, the first time their paths had actually crossed, and he was trying to decide whether or not it was a good thing. Befriending a Porsche mechanic at her level in the company would be incredibly helpful, but it was also a dangerous place to be.

Illya didn’t mind a little danger.

Grabbing the little trashcan beside a desk and turning his back to the room, Illya made as much noise as possible as he shook the can into his larger bin, knocking against it several times before practically slamming it down on the ground.

There was a certain sense of victory that came with successfully being hired by the target, but as a seasoned corporate spy, Illya was quick to shut down such a potentially dangerous emotion. That way was a path toward hubris, and the well known adage had proven itself true numerous times. A number of successes in his dossier had allowed him to climb his way to the top of their competitive intelligence division. On paper, of course, he was nothing more than a market researcher for a Russian automotive giant, but in reality he was just as skillfully trained as any junior member of Russian intelligence might expect to be. Part of that was due to his nature; Illya liked to accumulate talents. That was his hobby.

Spending his teen years in a Russian orphanage had given him little enough to do, and so acquiring skills to put himself in front of his peers served to pass the time. It had also enabled him to leave behind a life of servitude and poverty. He was in no small way driven by the scarcely admitted idea that had his parents lived, he would have easily lived the sort of life he did now. Perhaps more mundane, but just as comfortable. There was little comfort to be derived from the knowledge that at least he knew he had earned everything he had, even if the glamour of the spy life was only to be found in Western cinema.

Speaking of glamorous jobs, Illya had to admit that he’d probably never have imagined that entering this line of work would have found him wearing a grease- and bleach-splattered jumpsuit, mop in hand, his person in a very slight state of dishevelment that encouraged others to overlook him. Operating under his own five-phase plan meant that in the initial steps, he didn’t want to attract any attention to himself. Gleaning information from the current employees was the last step in his plan, and so he kept his head down and focused on his work. It was stupid, really, how open most companies left themselves. It was their own fault if they allowed such breaches of security to happen without any true effort on his part. The people currently working in Porsche’s own intelligence division ought to be fired. He would never allow this to happen on his own home ground.

A quick glance at the deceptively modest yet high-tech timepiece strapped to his wrist supported his guess that it was time to start. It wasn’t his first day on the job; phase one was the gathering of open source intelligence, information to be found in public record. Phase two, infiltration. Phase three, however, was learning everything he could about the building, and he’d been at that for the better part of the week. Learning the layout was par for the course as a new employee, and most people didn’t give him more than a second glance anyway. He’d made sure to seem confused and a little perplexed as he roamed the hallways, looking as though he was perpetually searching for something. After a few days of learning anything about the building that wasn’t included in the blueprints he’d gotten, and it was onto phase three: gather all the intel he could lay his hands on. Now that he knew which rooms held the kind of information he’d like, he was ready to start gathering primary source information.