STAY IN PLACE FOR THE NEXT TEN MINUTES, I’M MAKING A FILM LOOP, Nelly told Kris.
The three of them stood where they were below the loading dock. Kris shook her arms, stomped her feet, and looked miserable as the cool of the night proved their thin uniforms unsuited for outside work. The others did the same.
They said not a word.
I’VE GOT TEN MINUTES RECORDED. THE MONITOR DOESN’T HAVE ANY STORAGE ABILITY, BUT I’VE PLANTED A NANO IN IT. YOU ARE OFF THE SECURITY NET, Nelly announced.
“Where’s the nearest ladies’ room?” Penny asked.
“You peed before coming on shift,” the corporal growled without looking up. “You can pee when you’re off shift. The company don’t pay you to pee.”
“It also don’t want blood on its nice new uniforms,” Penny said.
The corporal looked up at that one.
Jack gave the guy one of those male-bonding looks and headed up the steps for a whispered consultation with the corporal. As Jack bent over, his hand dug his automatic out of all the foam flab at his butt.
The weapon came around. There were two soft reports, and the corporal was asleep before his head hit the desk.
Jack balled the guy up beneath the desk as Kris and Penny took the steps up to the loading dock two at a time.
Jack handed Kris the corporal’s comm device. The chatter on it was very much normal. As Kris pocketed it, she smiled at her friends. “Let’s go visit Grampa Al.”
* * *
Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile stared across the table at the legendary General Trouble. They’d been staring at each other for the last fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes!
Foile had actually timed it.
Most normal people faced with dead silence felt com-pelled to fill it. Obviously, the general did not fall into the subset of normal people. Foile finally pursed his lips. He’d have to try another tack.
“Can you help me understand this situation we’re in?” he said, leaving the question as open as he could. Open in scope and almost desperate in its begging.
The general raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Your grandson, Billy Longknife, asked me to find his daughter before she gets herself, and a whole lot of other people, suddenly dead.”
That drew no answer.
“Doesn’t that worry you? My agent, Leslie Chu, is a fan of your great-granddaughter. She tells me that you helped sober Kristine up when she was just a kid. Cleaned up her act and got her headed into most everything she’s done.”
That got a smile from the old general. What man can stay stolid as a fence post when his kid is being praised?
“I think when the record is finally told, you’ll find that Kris never did anything she didn’t want or intended to do,” the man said.
“But her father really thinks she’s going to get herself killed this time. That’s the only reason I’m chasing after her.” Even Foile heard the pleading in his voice.
He’d never pleaded during an interrogation before.
The old man shook his head. “A lot of folks have tried to kill her. A lot of them are dead, and she’s still breathing.”
“I think this time it might be different.”
The troublemaker nodded at that. “You might be right.”
Foile waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, he found himself saying, “Do you want her to get killed?”
The look on the general’s face could have killed Foile. Very likely it had killed Iteeche and Unity thugs. Foile swallowed. “Won’t you help me at all?”
“I’d like a glass of water,” was all the general said.
As Foile stood up to get him one, his commlink came alive.
“Sir,” said Leslie, “there’s been a security breach at Longknife Towers. We’re not sure what’s going on, but they hired three new security guards tonight. A check of their personal files has come back negative, and the fingerprints that were taken have disappeared from the computer net. I have no idea who they hired, but I’ll bet my pension that we’ve found my princess and her two sidekicks.”
Foile turned back to the general.
He was smiling.
Foile left his hat on the table as he raced for the door.
33
Kris trotted into the large but very empty receiving bay. There were several service elevators, but taking one of them would be a quick way to end the visit in handcuffs. She spotted the door that led down to the basement and took it.
Five floors down, below parking, below most signs of human interest, they paused outside a door that proclaimed NO ADMITTANCE.
“Nelly, send a nano in.”
She did, and Kris quickly got a picture of a dirty room filled with large and noisy machinery. A lone guard in a brown uniform carefully made his way among the pieces of whirling equipment. He’d just passed the door that Kris stood behind.
“Where are the cameras?” Kris asked.
“There aren’t any,” Nelly answered.
“So much for them watching our every move,” Jack said.
“I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you, that they’d lie to us the first day on the job,” Penny said to no one in particular.
“Penny,” Kris said, and the security specialist quickly unlocked the door.
Kris took a quick step through and put two sleepy darts in the guard’s back. He crumbled at the knees and went down easy.
Once in the support area, Kris glanced around the room. “Here’s the central electrical power, water, sewer, and cooling, everything you need to run this place.”
“And only one guard with no cameras?” Jack finished.
“I’ve seen tighter security around a cookie jar,” Penny said.
“Is Grampa Al kidding himself?” Kris asked.
“Or is he just too cheap to pay for what he needs?” Jack said.
“I wouldn’t let our guard down,” Penny said.
“Nelly, drop some nanos in the machinery. You can never tell when we might want to turn off the lights or flush all the toilets.”
“You heard the woman, kids, let’s take over this place.”
“Mom, do we get to blow anything up?” Sal asked from Jack’s neck.
“No, kids. We do this elegantly,” Nelly said, to Kris’s great relief.
While the computers did their thing, Kris led her team over to the elevator pits. Jack had opened a small door that led into the shaft. As promised, there were rungs along the wall leading up. The three of them began to climb. The fit between the wall and the closest elevator car was close, what with the extra beam Kris was packing, but all three made their way up the shaft.
The elevators in Longknife Tower were divided into four groups. The first took you from the first to no higher than the 50th floor, where you had to get off . . . under the eyes of guards . . . get your security badge checked . . . and switch to a bank that could take you to floors between fifty and one hundred.
If you wanted to go higher than that, you went through another scan, this time of palm prints and retina, and got to ride up to the 150th floor. Of that checkpoint, all the schematic that Grampa Trouble’s friend had gotten ahold of only said RESTRICTED AREA.
Since Kris didn’t intend to pass through any of those security checkpoints, she really didn’t care what they were.
They settled on the top of the elevator car just as Nelly said, “I’ve got control of the car’s computer. It’s a tiny thing and easy to confuse. Hold on.”
And they began to rise. It was kind of scary as the wind whistled by—and the ceiling of the shaft got closer, but Nelly stopped them on the 49th floor. They switched back to the ladder rungs just as the elevator door opened, and two workers got in.
“I hate it when I have to work this late,” a woman’s voice said.