One neatly up-curled eyebrow twitched. “Are you accusing me of lying?”
“Who, me?” Lopé made a show of looking offended. “Not me! I’d never do such a thing.” He indicated the floating readout. The display facing him wasn’t visible to her. She shifted in her seat, fighting to control her outrage.
“I’m not going to sit here and be insulted,” she said tightly. “Certainly not by a program whose origin and results are unknown to me.”
“That’s perfectly understandable, and easily corrected.” He waved his left hand, and the floating display instantly showed a mirrored image of itself to the applicant. “Program doesn’t say you’re lying.” His voice hardened. “You said that. Program suggests that you’re being evasive. Evasions are not lies. They are, however, suspect. If you’re not lying about something, then it’s likely you’re hiding something.” He leaned forward, over the edge of the sentilite desk, and lowered his voice.
“What are you hiding, Ms. Tadik?”
“I am not hiding anything!” Despite an evident effort to maintain control of herself, she couldn’t keep her voice from rising. “What good would it do me? I couldn’t hide anything from Weyland-Yutani if I wanted to. No one can. Not even you!”
He sat back. “You wouldn’t know that unless you’ve already tried to do so, and failed at it.”
Angry and exasperated, she rose from the chair. “Forget this. I’ve had enough.” Turning, she nodded in the direction of the nearby outer office. “There must be thirty, forty finalists still waiting out there. Pick one of them. I’m through with this nonsense.”
“That’s your choice to make.” The sergeant started to rise. “But I’m not quite through with you, Ms. Tadik. There are one or two additional questions I think I need to ask you.” He smiled pleasantly. “Just to conclude the record of this interview. If you don’t mind?” Standing now, he indicated the chair she had just vacated.
“But I do mind,” she snapped back. “You’ve trashed quite enough of my reputation, Mr. Lopé. I’m not going to let you denigrate me any further.”
Trashed? All he’d done, Lopé reflected, was ask the same kinds of questions he’d put to previous applicants. Partly to resolve questions of character, partly to clear up inconsistencies in personal histories, but also to see how each applicant would fare when pressured about personal matters. Some had lied, some had hemmed and hawed, a few had taken umbrage, but most had answered calmly and as truthfully as they were able, regardless of how embarrassing the questions might be.
Not this Meryem Tadik. What she was doing, albeit slowly, was preparing to bolt. He didn’t need a program to tell him that. He could see it in her eyes, in the way her muscles were tensing up. He could just as easily have let her go and moved on to the next applicant, but his military curiosity was piqued. He would have felt more comfortable about the confrontation had she simply cursed him out. That kind of response might not even have prevented him from hiring her. But she was being defensive as well as evasive.
Why?
“Just another quick question or two, Ms. Tadik,” Lopé insisted. “Please note that I haven’t ruled you out as a candidate.” As he started to come around the desk he again indicated the chair. “If you’ll just sit back down…”
“No.” She moved away from him and toward the door. “I don’t think I will. I told you, I’m done. I’ll leave you to harass someone else.”
He shook his head regretfully as he approached her. “Asking a routine set of questions hardly constitutes ‘harassment.’ None of those who have already entered into the service ever used that description, regardless of the line of inquiry.” Reaching out, he gently grasped her right forearm.
Its density startled him.
She shook him off. “Leave me alone, Sergeant. Find somebody else.” As the door opened he moved again to restrain her, and she kicked out. A rising side kick, delivered fast and hard. His training allowed him to drop an arm to block it, but the impact was enough to send him stumbling back toward the desk.
“Stop!” His shout followed her as she bolted through the outer office lounge. Disappointingly, not one of the waiting applicants thought to try to intercept her.
“Hey! Hold on there!” Seated candidates looked startled as the sergeant came sprinting out of the interviewing room. Standing ones found themselves shoved aside.
Lopé lost sight of her, and he pulled up short in front of two opposing lines of lift stations at the end of the hallway. Company employees eyed him with a mixture of disquiet and bewilderment.
“Tall woman, split red hairdo, late twenties,” he barked. “Which way?” A dozen stunned workers gaped back at him. “Somebody tell me something, goddamnit!”
An elderly woman dressed as a senior executive, the last member of the cluster Lopé expected to hear from, spoke up.
“That way, I think.” She pointed to her right.
Stairs. The automatic door barely had time to open as the sergeant rushed the portal. Once through he flew downward, descending the steps two and three at a time. The absence of a fire chute was a blessing. Had one been available, Tadik would already have reached the ground floor and disappeared into the roiling, snarling pedestrian tide that ebbed and flowed against the tower’s exterior.
As he swung around a stairwell, his feet off the floor, something pinged against the wall just to his left. There was a flash of light, a crackling sound, and a brief but intense whiff of ozone. Had the positively charged plastic shell struck him, it would have flashflared his nervous system, resulting in momentary paralysis. Unable to control his muscles, he would have toppled head-first down the stairs and into the next landing. Some such charged shells were powerful enough to induce a myocardial infarction, and could kill him.
Plastic charge and battery wouldn’t necessarily show up on the building’s security systems, he knew. Especially if they had been brought inside camouflaged in a purse or bag. Later, he would have a few choice words for tower security. Assuming he didn’t get himself shot before then.
As he continued to descend, a second round struck so close to his head that his right ear and cheek went numb. If he ate anything over the course of the next six hours, he would probably drool. But by now he didn’t care about anything except catching up to the uncooperative Ms. Tadik. Plainly, she was distressed about something considerably more significant than a few inconvenient questions involving her love life.
He slowed slightly. She was armed, he was not, so he’d have to be careful in picking his spot to try to take her down. It would have to be soon, too. Her height and hairdo were distinctive, but not exceptional. If she succeeded in slipping outside and into the torrent of pedestrian traffic, he could lose her entirely.
His options were limited. If he raised a ruckus in the lobby, there was a real risk of inducing general panic among the hundreds of employees and visitors who would be milling about. Security personnel posed a problem, as well. Though none of the building’s guards were armed with lethal weaponry, a wrong takedown burst from a crowd control device could still do serious damage, especially to the weak or elderly.
In a sense, he was running the same mental simulations as he would have on a battlefield, except in this case there were only two combatants, and one of them was unarmed. That didn’t mean Lopé was defenseless, though—far from it—but the best-trained hand-to-hand combatant couldn’t defeat an armed opponent, no matter how weak. And whatever else she might be, the fleeing redhead hadn’t struck him as weak.