"That's not very nice," Mabel told him seriously.
Pete looked wounded. "I'm not gonna charge him for it or anything! Just imagine her, spinning up there beautifully with all those chandeliers and those hundreds of mirrors."
Mabel knelt and looked into Kitty's face. "Has she had any water since she was knocked unconscious?"
"No."
"Well, for heaven's sake, give the poor woman something to drink, Lyle."
Lyle handed Mabel a bike-tote squeezebottle of electrolyte refresher. "You zudes don't grasp the situation yet," he said. "Look at all this stuff I took off her." He showed them the spex, and the boots, and the stun-gun, and the gloves, and the carbon-nitride climbing plectra, and the rappelling gear.
"Wow," Pete said at last, dabbing at buttons on his spex to study the finer detail, "this is no ordinary burglar! She's gotta be, like, a street samurai from the Mahogany War birds or something!"
"She says she's a federal agent."
Mabel stood up suddenly, angrily yanking the squeezebottle from Kitty's lips. "You're kidding, right?"
"Ask her."
"I'm a grade-five social counselor with the Department of Urban Redevelopment," Mabel said. She presented Kitty with an official ID. "And who are you with?"
"I'm not prepared to divulge that information at this time."
"I can't believe this," Mabel marveled, tucking her dog-eared hologram ID back in her hat. "You've caught somebody from one of those nutty reactionary secret black-bag units. I mean, that's gotta be what's just happened here." She shook her head slowly. "Y'know, if you work in government, you always hear horror stories about these right-wing paramilitary wackos, but I've never actually seen one before."
"It's a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor."
"Oh, tell me about it," Mabel scoffed. "I've worked suicide hotlines! I've been a hostage negotiator! I'm a career social worker, girlfriend! I've seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training-camp, I've been out here in the real world!" Mabel absently unscrewed the top from the bike bottle and had a long glug. "What on earth are you doing trying to raid the squat of a bicycle repairman?"
Kitty's stony silence lengthened. "It's got something to do with that settop box," Lyle offered. "It showed up here in delivery yesterday, and then she showed up just a few hours later. Started flirting with me, and said she wanted to live in here. Of course I got suspicious right away."
"Naturally," Pete said. "Real bad move, Kitty. Lyle's on antilibidinals."
Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. "I see," she said at last. "So that's what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them ... You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage."
Mabel flushed. "Did you hear that?" She gave Kitty's bag a sharp angry yank. "What conceivable right do you have to question this citizen's sexual orientation? Especially after cruelly trying to sexually manipulate him to abet your illegal purposes? Have you lost all sense of decency? You ... you should be sued."
"Do your worst," Kitty muttered.
"Maybe I will," Mabel said grimly. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
"Yeah, let's string her up somewhere real sunny and public and call a bunch of news crews," Pete said. "I'm way hot for this deep ninja gear! Me and the Spiders got real mojo uses for these telescopic ears, and the tracer dust, and the epoxy bugging devices. And the press-on climbing-claws. And the carbon-fiber rope. Everything, really! Everything except these big-ass military shoes of hers, which really suck."
"Hey, all that stuff's mine," Lyle said sternly. "I saw it first."
"Yeah, I guess so, but ... Okay, Lyle, you make us a deal on the gear, we'll forget everything you still owe us for doing the shop."
"Come on, those combat spex are worth more than this place all by themselves."
"I'm real interested in that settop box," Mabel said cruelly. "It doesn't look too fancy or complicated. Let's take it over to those dirty circuit zudes who hang out at the Blue Parrot, and see if they can't reverse-engineer it. We'll post all the schematics up on twenty or thirty progressive activist networks, and see what falls out of cyberspace."
Kitty glared at her. "The terrible consequences from that stupid and irresponsible action would be entirely on your head."
"I'll risk it," Mabel said airily, patting her cloche hat. "It might bump my soft little liberal head a bit, but I'm pretty sure it would crack your nasty little fascist head like a coconut."
Suddenly Kitty began thrashing and kicking her way furiously inside the bag. They watched with interest as she ripped, tore and lashed out with powerful side and front kicks. Nothing much happened.
"All right," she said at last, panting in exhaustion. "I've come from Senator Creighton's office."
"Who?" Lyle said.
"Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who's been your Senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!"
"Oh," Lyle said. "I hadn't noticed."
"We're anarchists," Pete told her.
"I've sure heard of the nasty old geezer," Mabel said, "but I'm from British Columbia, where we change senators the way you'd change a pair of socks. If you ever changed your socks, that is. What about him?"
"Well, Senator Creighton has deep clout and seniority! He was a United States Senator even before the first NAFTA Senate was convened! He has a very large, and powerful, and very well seasoned personal staff of twenty thousand hardworking people, with a lot of pull in the Agriculture, Banking, and Telecommunications Committees!"
"Yeah? So?"
"So," Kitty said miserably, "there are twenty thousand of us on his staff. We've been in place for decades now, and naturally we've accumulated lots of power and importance. Senator Creighton's staff is basically running some quite large sections of the NAFTA government, and if the Senator loses his office, there will be a great deal of ... of unnecessary political turbulence." She looked up. "You might not think that a senator's staff is all that important politically. But if people like you bothered to learn anything about the real-life way that your government functions, then you'd know that Senate staffers can be really crucial."
Mabel scratched her head. "You're telling me that even a lousy senator has his own private black-bag unit?"
Kitty looked insulted. "He's an excellent senator! You can't have a working organization of twenty thousand staffers without taking security very seriously! Anyway, the Executive wing has had black-bag units for years! It's only right that there should be a balance of powers."
"Wow," Mabel said. "The old guy's a hundred and twelve or something, isn't he?"
"A hundred and seventeen."
"Even with government health care, there can't be a lot left of him."
"He's already gone," Kitty muttered. "His frontal lobes are burned out ... He can still sit up, and if he's stoked on stimulants he can repeat whatever's whispered to him. So he's got two permanent implanted hearing aids, and basically ... well ... he's being run by remote control by his mook."