Kinetic Solutions, page 16
Rob locked the door behind him, just to buy them a few extra seconds in an emergency, then moved to the far end of the room where he had a view of the garage door and the exterior door on the front quad. The well-lit front quad they had so assiduously avoided while getting in here.
Mac sat down at the desk and went to work.
Alicia had given her a small unit to plug into the machine. She did so, then leaned back.
If everything went well, the little thing Alicia had programmed would walk right up to the computer’s brains, introduce itself, and then be invited inside.
Alicia was also monitoring it from the truck, parked about a mile away. She might have to step in, take charge, and beat that same computer mind to death, hopefully before it managed to call for help.
Any alarm would give away the game. Even to a smart person doing records.
Rob couldn’t help that his breathing kind of stopped as he waited on tenterhooks for the game to move to the next stage.
“We’re in,” Alicia said over the line.
Rob let go his breath in a heavy sigh matched by Mac.
Mac started typing. This was where her expertise came into play. She and Alicia knew computer systems everywhere and could make them sit up and dance. Rob was good with people.
“F-2 looks promising,” Mac called to him after a few minutes studying the screen.
Rob moved over and looked at his options. Letters across from the left. Numbers from bottom to top.
F-2 was closer to him, middle. He grabbed the handle and pulled.
The faint whiff of cold death he’d been trying to identify earlier got stronger as the drawer opened fully.
Female. Nude. Average to skinny build, which was good. About the right height, which was better. Scars and faded tattoos that spoke of a hard life. Rob checked her arm and found marks where she’d used a hypoinjector to mainline something good directly into her veins.
Every civilization had people who developed problems with consumption. Even when you tried to help, some folks would slip through the cracks. Or squirm their way, unwilling to be told otherwise.
She’d had a rough life, looking at her face. It was drawn and looked ancient, but she had all her teeth. That had been the great fear. Salonnia no longer had Helen’s dental records to compare with, but any gaps here would cause questions.
She looked ancient and withered though.
“Actual age?” he asked, glancing over.
“Late forties is best estimate,” Mac said, rising and moving closer. “Oh, yeah, I see.”
As with other things, she’d bring a woman’s senses and sensibilities to this, noticing things a guy like Yankov or Montague would miss.
Mac rested a hand on the woman’s arm for a moment, as though communing with her ghost and asking permission.
Something.
“She’ll do,” Mac pronounced after a few moments of silence.
“Could I get a ride?” Rob asked Alicia on the comm.
“Stand by,” Alicia said. “We appear to have a vehicle in the vicinity, so it’s your lucky night.”
Well, yeah, of course there was a truck close. That jabber was in case somebody had managed to overhear the signal. Always in code.
Rob looked around and found a gurney tucked into a corner. He retrieved it and lined it up on the side of the tray.
“Ready?” he asked Mac.
She nodded and grabbed the woman’s feet. Rob got his hands under her torso and neck, then lifted and slipped her onto the rolling stretcher.
Pushing the tray closed, he pulled the gurney over towards the door while Mac went back to the computer.
Up until now, everything had been easy. This was when it got complicated.
Folks who came to work tomorrow might remember that F-2 had been occupied, so the computer needed to show that the woman had been retrieved by somebody, without leaving any cues that might cause some office drone to ask questions. Or make phone calls.
None of this worked if they left any burrs to hang on somebody’s mind.
Parking the woman’s body, Rob moved to the front door and checked it. Fire exit style, so it could be opened from the inside without a key. Hopefully, Mac and Alicia had enough control of the computer systems around here.
He glanced over at her and got a confirming nod, so she was reading his mind. Also good.
Rob cracked the door open enough to smell the night air over chilled death. That scent really got inside your head and did a number.
Industrial mixed with decay. He would need a long shower later to wash everything so he got the smell off.
Headlights approached, entered the circular driveway. Alicia pulled the van around, stopped, then began to back into place.
Once she got close enough, he closed his door and pressed the big red button that activated the chain drive.
The door opened and let warmer, cleaner air in. Plants and animals that were still alive.
Alicia parked and Rob opened the rear of the machine. Alicia came out the back and slipped by him to go help Mac. That part of the operation was more important than this part.
Rob peeked around the edges of the van, but didn’t see anybody approaching, so he moved the gurney into position and collapsed the front legs as he pushed it inside.
Rob joined it, pausing again to look through the windshield.
Nothing but night out there.
He had gone shopping today and found himself a chill box designed for backwoods camping out of a vehicle. Six feet long inside, two wide, two tall. Perfect for more beer than you and a bunch of your buddies ought to be drinking in a single weekend.
He lifted the poor dead woman off the gurney as delicately as he could and moved her to the chiller. It had been on for hours, so she would really be going from one small, cold coffin to another one. Hopefully, she wouldn’t mind.
Being dead for several days helped.
Rob said a quick prayer for her soul and to say thank you before closing the lid and moving back to the rear of the van.
“We have to move fast,” Mac was standing there, already pulling the gurney as he pushed. “Somebody noticed the bay door opening and called the desk phone just now. Local police are probably headed this way to investigate us.”
Rob hadn’t heard it, but he’d been paying attention elsewhere.
“You handle the gurney,” he said, a snap decision that saw him moving back to the front of the van and climbing into the driver’s seat.
“How long?” he called.
Mac repeated it to Alicia. He watched Alicia finish typing and stand up. She started to move this way.
“Override,” Mac called, causing Alicia to turn back and unplug their device.
It would never do to have someone figure out what had just happened.
Mac waited for Alicia to get in, then triggered the garage door and jumped over the sensor beam.
As she got the rear doors closed, Rob shifted into drive and took off. Not a dead run flight that might screech the tires. At the same time not waiting around. He’d mapped everything out ahead of time when scouting earlier, but if a cop was coming, there was absolutely no way to tell from which direction.
He headed towards a residential section of town nearby. Blue collar. The sort of place where a panel van like this might be parked along the street because it was somebody’s livelihood.
The last thing he needed to do tonight was explain why he had a stolen corpse in his van. The explanations would go from lurid to disgusting and end up with all of them in jail.
Not good.
Rob drove quickly but smoothly, turning corners randomly every few blocks just in case. Eventually, he got back into the more commercial districts. He looked at Alicia in the rear-view mirror.
“Anything?” he asked.
“So far, they seem to be marking it down as a false alarm,” she said, looking up from the clamshell computer she’d been monitoring. “Nobody saw us and the building itself is intact.”
“At least until somebody finds the fence cut,” Mac offered. “How long?”
Rob shrugged.
“If F-2 is off their radar, they might never put all the pieces together,” he replied.
“And if she isn’t?” Mac asked.
“Then we might have a problem.”
33
Carlota took a deep breath as the taxi deposited her over a few blocks from her destination. She adjusted her satchel over one shoulder and looked around the neighborhood innocently. Downtown. High rises and offices.
And one publishing company.
According to Rob, the building itself was under constant surveillance, but not that closely. They would likely see her enter, but might not realize it was her immediately.
She had gotten Erika’s help to strip all the color from her hair. Not much had lasted this long, so what she had naturally was mostly gray and starting to come in fully white.
Carlota caught her reflection in the mirrored surface of a storefront as she walked and did a double-take at the ancient crone who stared back at her. Makeup tricks pushed the other direction had added wrinkles instead of hiding them. Carlota had even added a bit of a hunch to her walk.
Babushka, making her way, rather than sexy secret agent.
She had to trust Erika.
More especially, she had to trust Rob.
It helped that she’d woken up this morning and realized that she really did want to survive. The game that had sounded so awesome and powerful a year ago had turned out to be a death wish writ large, though it had taken her a long time to fully appreciate that.
Carlota had been railing against a galaxy that seemed to be done with her. Why the hell had she decided to help it get rid of her?
But she knew that answer. The Rage was real. All the things that had been foisted on her over the years—the decades—because she was a woman in a system built to maintain men.
She’d lost her cool. Her composure. Had fallen prey to that seductive siren call of destruction.
Until she woke up and decided to survive.
Technically losing was acceptable if it gave her more years to enjoy who she might invent herself to be. Not the old woman in the reflection, though she supposed at some point she might just give up on keeping her hair dark and let herself turn into the sexiest grandma in the galaxy.
Erika had certainly managed something similar.
Today, she was dressed in a casual business suit. Slacks and matching tunic blazer in navy, a particular fabric Rob had picked out. Black shirt underneath instead of white, with a ribbon where a man might have worn a tie.
Sensible shoes for running. Even in heels she could move quickly, but the plan today assumed angry men chasing her.
Men.
Rob had managed to seduce her in a way Carlota wouldn’t have believed possible a week ago. He had surrounded himself with competent women and then listened to them. Some of the arguments she’d participated in, setting this up, had seen Rob on one side and Carlota and Erika on the other, with the younger woman handling communications security siding with her when she spoke.
And Rob had listened. Changed his mind when their take made more sense. Even thrown himself fully into it, rather than sullenly.
She looked forward to the chance to seduce him later. Erika had whispered a few things in her ear over the last four days.
Carlota crossed the last intersection now and made a point to ignore the vehicle at the far corner across with two men seated in front. Or the one fellow at a nearby kiosk, ostensibly buying a newspaper and coffee.
Amateur hour, if they stood out that badly. The first two looked like cops, rather than agents. The other one was a stringer who would need to seriously up his game if he ever wanted to be fully recruited.
Instead, she pushed open the door to the building itself and went inside, starting a timer clock in her head.
Somewhere, the woman who handled electronics would be watching as Carlota vanished from sight and would set Rob and Erika in motion.
How long did she have?
Carlota didn’t know, and found that element of uncertainty comforting. Emil Yankov was as dangerous a foe as they came. How soon would somebody call him? How many resources did he have immediately on tap?
Right here was the game. That surge of adrenaline that she’d missed, dying slowly by inches behind a desk. Any fool could move paper around.
Only a field agent could do something like this.
She ignored the elevator and found the staircase. Better to climb steps than be trapped in a small box. She’d gotten lucky that the man holding the pistol to her chest had wanted to seduce her rather than execute her. Carlota had felt his eyes undressing her and smiling at what he found.
She would take him up on that unspoken offer when this was all done.
If she survived something so crazy.
Armand had shown her how to be an agent again. Erika had reminded her how to be sexy. Rob might be the third piece. Being alive.
Carlota emerged from the stairs and found the door for Constanz Books. She’d only ever dealt with him via comm and mailed package, but Carlota had scouted the place once, at the very beginning.
Learning the field of battle.
She entered the office and smiled at the young woman behind the desk.
“May I help you?” she looked up brightly.
“I’d like to talk to Jan,” Carlota said.
“I see,” the woman nodded, slightly evasively. “And you are?”
“Carlota Rojas,” she replied, watching those eyes get big for a moment.
Initially, Carlota had argued to walk in here looking like she had before. Rob had supported her.
Erika, of all people, had put her foot down hard and refused to budge from the old lady peasant routine.
“If you want to be you tomorrow, you can’t be you today,” she’d said emphatically.
Looking at the receptionist, Carlota could see the image of the ancient crone burning itself into the woman’s memory permanently.
“Certainly,” the receptionist said brightly. “If you’ll have a seat, I’ll let him know.”
Carlota smiled and moved with aging grace and stiff joints she didn’t feel, marking the legend as a withered woman.
Old, like Montague wanted to tell himself, those nights when her ghost might sneak up and howl obscenities at him when he tried to sleep.
Jan Constanz didn’t take long to emerge from the back. He took her in and saw only the makeup and white hair. That much was in his eyes.
He didn’t undress her like Rob had. Or Erika. Didn’t linger on her curves with questions as to what they felt like. Tasted like.
She was just another crone. A babushka and nothing more.
He blinked several times in a row as he studied her. Like the receptionist, he would tell reporters and police that she looked old and haggard.
“Madam Rojas?” he asked unnecessarily.
Carlota nodded.
“What a surprise!” he exclaimed. “Please, come back to my office and we can chat.”
His eyes strayed to the bag she had brought. It was large enough for stacks of paper. Possibly heavy enough as well. What might it contain? Could that be The Manuscript itself?
The man hadn’t lusted after her body, but she could see it lingering lovingly on the possibility that he might have the whole manuscript in his hands today.
If he was a good boy.
Carlota rose slowly. Painfully. Walked like an old woman, emphasizing that slight hunch with a bit of a limp thrown in.
Misdirection, which was apparently Rob’s signature move as an agent for Lincolnshire’s Service.
She followed Constanz into and through a maze of gaps between boxes and desks, noting how everyone had stopped working to stare at her.
Carlota wondered which ones had been quietly suborned by Yankov or Montague and would need to find an excuse to call someone right away with the coup of their careers.
Jan Constanz was still a liberal progressive fighting The Man. That was why she’d picked him in the first place, from more than a dozen options here in Bennan. But she could see where the thought of the money had gotten to him.
Too bad. Still, she supposed that he would at least put it to use grinding the gears of the system, rather than having a harem of bimbos or a string of mansions when this was all done.
“What can I do for you, Madam Rojas?” he asked as they got settled.
She had left the door to his office open. The better for the others to hear this conversation.
“I wanted to surprise you, Sri Constanz,” Carlota replied in a husky voice, a little ragged with time and age.
Pouring it on, since she wouldn’t ever see the man again, either way.
Carlota reached behind her and opened the satchel. She heard his breath catch with a faint gasp, but didn’t smile at his predictability.
She pulled out the whole stack and sat it on his deck, then peeled the next chapter off the top, extracted one page with backing details, and put the rest back in her satchel.
“I’ve already mailed off copies to everyone else, but wanted to deliver yours in person,” Carlota said off-handed, as if that wasn’t the single stupidest thing she could have done on the entire planet.
Right up there with calling Emil Yankov personally to taunt him and not expecting the man to have the line traced in moments.
“Thank you?” Constanz replied. “What brings you into town?”
“Call it a whim,” Carlota offered, sticking to the broad talking points she and Erika had worked out. “We’ve reached the mid-point of the game, and everyone needed a little break in their routine.”
“And the rest of the manuscript?” he asked, still breathless and jarred out of his own pattern of life by her appearance.
“You’ll have it in due course,” Carlota chuckled. “It would ruin everything if folks didn’t have a chance to stop me, after all.”
He nodded, and she could see him at a loss for words.
“How is the publishing process proceeding at your end?” she queried.
“Well,” he replied, brightening right up. “We have a cover selected, and are working with a graphic designer to do the back and the dust jacket. Since we know how long it is, we will only need a day or so from receiving the final chapter to do a quick copyedit pass and then send it on to the printer.”
