“I’ve got a nine o’clock meeting tomorrow. You want to leave me standing in front of all the big boys, telling them I’ll have the report by noon?” said a man.
“Will you at least get me invited to the meeting?”
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” didn’t have much power behind it.
As the elevator dropped away from them with this private bit of human story, Kris found a hatch, opened it, and led her team onto the 50th floor.
They were in a service area. Again, no cameras. Maybe the locked door explained that bit of savings. Penny made short work of the lock.
“There’s a camera covering the hall,” Nelly said. “Give me a minute to take care of it. Catch your breath. You’ll hit the stairs next.”
Kris found herself glad for the workouts she’d been getting. Then found the words taking on a double meaning, and had to swallow a giggle.
Giggle!
Longknifes didn’t giggle.
Well, maybe Longknifes in love found they could do a lot of things that normal people did.
Get your head back in the game, Kris growled at herself just as Nelly announced. “I’ve captured control of the cameras between here and the stairwell. I’ve ordered them to look away for two minutes. Move quickly, the guards have a problem with a flooding ladies’ room.”
Kris led, Jack right behind her. Penny walked backward, her automatic out but held low. The sound of running water and male curses hurried them along.
“How did you manage that?” Jack whispered.
“I’m the Magnificent Nelly. I’ll never tell.”
“She bragged to us,” Sal said softly from around Jack’s neck. “Thanks, Mom. Next time, I get to do it.”
They made the stairwell with no problem. The lock there fell to Penny’s and Mimzy’s work. The door opened, and the threatened alarm did not go off. There were cameras in the stairwell, but Nelly needed less than a minute to seed them all with a snapshot of nothing, and off they went.
Fifty flights of stairs was going to take some time. Kris hated to lose that time. Still, so far their intrusion was unnoticed. She listened in on the corporal’s comm device. No one had called him to warn him of incoming traffic. Kris’s legs began to complain of the workout, but at least the worst had not started.
Stairs went by, flight after flight. It was almost boring.
Then everything changed!
Lights started flashing. Alarms beeped, rang, and made all sorts of racket.
* * *
Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile and Agent Rick Sanchez arrived only a minute behind agents Leslie Chu and Mahomet Debot. What they found was a mass of confusion, rapidly going in circles and accomplishing nothing.
“Are you sure about those fingerprints?” a man with captain’s rank on his collar asked Leslie. “My girl took them, and she’s real good about fingerprints. They never come back smudged or anything.”
“Sir,” Leslie said, and it did not sound respectful in any way, “I have copies of the prints. They’re not smudged. The forms are empty. Empty for all three.”
“Diedre, you did take their prints, didn’t you?”
“I did, sir. I saw them in the computer. They’re there. Just look.”
So everyone did, and there certainly were fingerprints in that computer. Somehow, they had stayed there and not been sent from that computer out for processing. And when Diedre sent them again, the computer assured them they were sent. Again, nothing arrived at the central fingerprint database for check.
“That can’t happen,” the captain insisted.
“Nelly’s at the bottom of this one,” Leslie said with a wide Girls Rule grin.
“Have you advised Security Central at the Tower that you have a breach?” Foile asked.
“Until a second ago, all we had was this little girl’s claim that we had a problem. I didn’t have any trouble. No, I have not called Central.”
Foile glanced around. On a desk, he spotted a red phone with SECURITY CENTRAL stenciled on it. He picked it up and got an immediate, “Yes.”
“This is Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile of the Wardhaven Bureau of Investigation. Your outer security perimeter has been breached by a three-person team headed by Princess Kristine Longknife. You may want to go to an alert.”
Before he finished his suggestion, an alarm started beeping, and a red light began flashing, both on the phone and from a device above both doors.
“Now you gone and done it,” the captain muttered.
“Yes, I have,” Foile said, then turned back to the phone. “I have a team of four investigators. May I be admitted to Security Central?”
“I’ll have to check with my supervisor,” came the response, and the phone went dead.
Foile scowled at the phone. “I think we’re going to have a jurisdiction problem,” he muttered softly to his team.
34
“Well, that tears it,” Penny said from her place last in line.
“That’s a general alarm, throughout the building,” Nelly added. “I don’t think they know where we are.”
“Let’s keep it that way. Nelly, release more scouts. If there are nanos in the stairwell, we need to get them under our control.”
“I haven’t identified any nanos yet. Your grandfather is really cheap.”
“Nelly, is this commlink I’m carrying sending out a locator signal?”
“It is, Kris. Just a second. Okay, I have a nano cutting out the signal, and I’m sending a copycat signal down the stairwell. If they interrogate that puppy, they’ll think we’re way below where we are. Maybe more, depending on how long they take to ask it anything.”
“Good, Nelly.”
There had been no interruption at stair climbing as Nelly set about messing with the search for them.
“Kris, any thoughts about going to Plan B?” Jack asked.
“You tired of climbing?”
“I’d like to get to the two hundredth floor a whole lot quicker,” was all he said.
“I second the idea,” Penny said. She didn’t sound winded, but she was slowing down. All of them were.
The 75th floor gave Kris her option for Plan B. While the elevators for people in suits only went fifty floors between security checkpoints, the service elevator for dirty and messy things had only one transfer point between the ground and the top floor. It was on the 75th.
“Let’s see what they have,” Kris said, and Penny quickly did her magic on the lock. The 75th floor turned out to be a support and maintenance floor. No carpet in sight there. There were cameras as well as at least two guards, armored and armed, walking their rounds.
Clearly, Grampa Al’s attitude toward security grew with more altitude.
It took Nelly half a minute to get the cameras turned to look at what Kris wanted them to see. Then they slipped out of the stairwell and began stalking the two guards. The two were intent on discussing a particularly controversial call at yesterday’s basketball playoffs and only looked ahead.
They were fully armored—from the knees up.
Kris gave the orders to Jack on Nelly net. AIM FOR BELOW THE KNEE. I GOT THE ONE ON THE RIGHT.
I’LL TAKE THE ONE ON THE LEFT.
ON THREE. ONE . . . TWO . . . THREE.
Four gentle pops, and the two guys—make that a guy and a gal—dropped to the floor, their fully automatic machine pistols clattering beside them.
NELLY, CLOSE DOWN MOST OF THE GEAR ON THIS FLOOR. THIS IS THE BACKUP POWER FROM THE MAIN POWER IN THE BASEMENT. CLOSE THE BASEMENT DOWN AT THE SAME TIME, BUT MAKE SURE WE CAN STILL USE THE FREIGHT ELEVATORS.
THE FREIGHT ELEVATORS HAVE THEIR OWN EMERGENCY POWER, KRIS, SO FIREFIGHTERS CAN USE THEM. KIDS, DO YOUR STUFF.
YES, MOM.
Kris stepped up to survey her work. Both guards were securely asleep on the floor, at no risk to themselves. Kris eyed their weapons with the thought of upgrading her armory but shook her head. The machine pistols had only one kind of ammunition: six-millimeter armor-piercing. Putting a target to sleep was not an option for these guards.