The lesson had stuck.
These videos showed a reassuring lack of surprises and she left for lunch mostly reassured by a solo operation that was actually running smoothly.
The rest of Sunday was a matter of coping with the downside of surveillance — the boredom. Fortunately, since so much had been delegated to her cameras, her options were a lot broader than they would have been in the prewar days. She took in a movie and spent a couple of hours in a drop-in gym, taking in classes in hip hop and clogging.
After supper, she went straight to bed. There were many chemical substitutes for sleep, some of which she wasn’t immune to, but none of them was as effective as the real thing. Tomorrow would be a long day.
At four a.m. she was still shaking off grogginess when the first crisis of the day hit, and she stood swearing at the overflowing hotel toilet. Of course there was no plunger. She tossed the towels on the floor and tiptoed distastefully to the side of the thing, squatting down to turn off the water at the back. Then she trudged back out to the sink and used the last clean washcloth to wash her face and take a sponge bath. Okay, obviously housekeeping will be coming in here today. No help for it. Gotta pack everything up.
At five she was standing at the hotel counter suppressing the desire to drum her fingers on the counter, or, better, choke the crap out of the clerk behind the counter while screaming at him to move his ass. The hotel obviously did not put their best staff on the graveyard shift. It was almost five-thirty before Mister Slow Motion had managed the simple task of calling in housekeeping for her old room, booking her out of it, and transferring her to another room for tonight. She shoved the key card into her pocket and left. There was no point in unloading her stuff — what there was of it — back out of her trunk, and every reason not to.
She got into her car and sat for a minute without turning the key. I don’t really have to kill this schmuck. She gritted her teeth and started the engine, pulling out of the parking lot and into the light but building traffic, and shook her head to ward off a memory of a tall man — tall to an eight-year-old — standing silently and servicing the ravening carnosauroid targets as they came into range. The hand on her shoulder when she shook and her aim faltered, that steadied her so she could bring the grav-gun back on target. Sure I don’t. Nobody would know or care if I didn’t… nobody but the dead. And looking myself in the mirror. And looking Robertson in the eye if I ever work with him again. And what Granpa would think. And he’s a fucking traitor and he needs to die. Dammit. And he’s the last one. The last debt. The only one where I didn’t see the body and DNA type it myself. Which should damned well be a lesson to me, but after this, it’s all just business. Last one.
The traffic wasn’t so bad on the way to the mistress’s apartment to service the cameras. Her name was Lucy Michaels, but Cally preferred to keep her relationship with a woman she was going to drug and leave in bed with a dead man as impersonal as possible. She was going to great lengths, comparatively speaking, to leave the non-target alive. Worth wouldn’t have. Even some of the Bane Sidhe wouldn’t have. It should have made her feel better.
Unfortunately, the time reaching and servicing the first set of cameras gave the Monday morning rush traffic time to accumulate, and the route across town to the target’s house was not quite solidly packed in, but definitely slow. At a traffic light she popped the cube with her music collection into the sound console and had it list the catalog. Hrms. Evanescence. Fallen. Good album. I still wonder how the first landings and adjusting to Urb life influenced her writing. Guess we’ll never really know. She must have struck a chord with every shell-shocked teen in the country that year.
The light changed and she pulled away to the tense opening strains of “Going Under.”
It was just past seven-thirty when she pulled into the target’s neighborhood, parking around the corner from his street but still within easy range for a download. A male agent couldn’t have gotten away with parking so openly on a residential street. Cally just popped a piece of bubble gum, switched the car sound system over to a likely radio station, cranked the volume a bit, and started blithely painting her nails a very trendy shade. Anyone who noticed her sitting there would assume she was a teenager waiting for a friend. The hot pink terry sweatband under her hair and across her forehead, along with a very baggy Cubs T-shirt and gray sweatpants, were the kind of things a local teen wouldn’t be caught dead in at the mall, but would readily choose for an early morning run with a friend.
While she brushed on a topcoat, her PDA ran a search pattern to isolate the video segments with human figures or moving vehicles. The target and his wife had evidently enjoyed a quiet Sunday at home. Most importantly, there were no signs of unanticipated house guests, no signs that anyone lived there but the target and wife. The target was already gone for the day, as expected. The wife was not.
She switched the cameras over to real-time plus two seconds and flipped open a copy of Runway, pretending avid interest in the pages of the fashion mag. The PDA beeped softly whenever a human figure or moving vehicle came in sight of the cameras. A glance quickly darted at the screen was enough to tell her whether the interruption was the target’s wife or not. She was getting a late start, for a real estate agent. When the woman finally left the house at nearly nine-fifteen, Cally was careful not to look at the car as it passed her position. There would be no eye-contact to be noticed and remembered.
Cally waited a good fifteen minutes before getting out of the car and jogging around the corner and down the street to the target’s house. This was the most sensitive phase of this task. She had to get from the street into, and later out of, the target’s house either without being seen or, at worst, looking so ordinary as to be unmemorable. She turned and walked up the driveway and around to the kitchen door in back of the house as if it was the end of her run and she was returning to her own home, hoping fervently not to be seen at all.
It only took a few seconds to pick the electronic lock on the back door using a highly illegal attachment to her PDA. Ordinarily, the lock registered whenever the locksmith’s override code was used on a door, authenticated that the locksmithing unit was registered with the city, and recorded the serial number of the unit used to issue the override code. Hers not only intercepted the signal, it also hacked and downloaded the lock’s settings, assured it sincerely that it had been uninstalled and returned to the factory for service, opened the lock, and then reloaded the settings while giving the lock a severe and permanent case of amnesia about the entire incident.
Once inside, she could use the lock/unlock buttons for any other dealings with the door, which after all was programmed to keep unauthorized people out, not in. She put on a pair of rubber gloves, locked the door behind herself, and went looking for the stairs.