No, the condo was out.
She hung up the phone, climbed onto her bike and headed for the motel where she'd rented a room. It was a couple of miles away and she'd used the male identity to register, in case they were looking for any single women checking in.
Trying for a hit on a convoy was also risky. The only practical way was explosives. A Stinger missile, maybe an antitank rocket or a bomb. To use a rocket or missile, she would have to expose herself to the guards for a line-of-sight shot. If they spotted somebody with a rocket launcher standing on the side of the road or leaning from a window, she would bet heavy they'd shoot first and ask the body questions later. And rockets were iffy. She had heard of cases where missiles had hit ordinary windshield glass at an angle and bounced off without exploding. Bullets did it all the time.
And as for a bomb? She would also bet that the FBI or Net Force teams in charge of protecting the target sent somebody along the route to check manholes and garbage cans for strange packages, once they were down to one or two routes to the condo. Besides, a remote-controlled bomb might not dispatch somebody inside a well-armored limo. A big enough charge to be sure of a kill would probably be picked up by an electronic sniffer or even a bomb dog. If they knew for certain she was still after the target, they would stick him into a secure facility and he'd camp out for weeks or months. She didn't want to wait for that. Once, she would have been as patient as necessary, but having made the decision to retire, she was ready to finish this and move on. A few days, a week maybe, that was all she had to give it. And given how she had failed before, she wanted to do this up close and personal. The cane was out, but a knife or bare hands had a certain appeal.
A car honked at her as it swung around to pass the bike. She waved, trying to give the impression she was sorry for blocking the road. The car passed. The driver yelled something at her, the last part of which was " — stupid bastard!" He didn't slow down.
The Selkie grinned. The driver of the car had no idea how dangerous it would have been to pull over and beat on a small bicyclist who'd slowed him down more than he wanted. She didn't want to have to use the pistol in her fanny pack on some angry motorist, but it was always an option if she couldn't beat his head in with all her training.
No, the only viable alternative for a deletion now was to do it where the target wouldn't be constantly surrounded by guards, and in such a way that nobody would know he'd been hit until she had plenty of time to get away.
Given her options, the only place that fit was a place considered secure.
She'd have to kill him inside Net Force Headquarters.
36
Getting yourself — or some illegal object — into a secure area when you weren't supposed to was not as hard as most people would like to believe. Offhand, the Selkie knew of at least four ways to smuggle a firearm onto a plane, even without resorting to a ceramic one, like the little pistol she now had tucked into the waistband of her panty hose. The pistol was a three-shooter with triple-stack-two-inch barrels. The weapon had been illegally made in Brazil, for their foreign service operatives, from the same hard-ceramic the Japanese had developed for those ever-sharp kitchen knives. The caliber was 9mm short, and the ammo was caseless boron-epoxy, no cartridges, fired by a rotating piezoelectric igniter. Propellant was a more stable variation of solid rocket fuel. The thing even had a rudimentary rifling in the trio of snub-nose barrels, though the bullets were light enough so long-range target shooting wasn't an option. The piece had a twenty-meter effective accuracy range; outside that, it was fire and hope you had a patron deity if you wanted to hit anything on purpose.
At close range, the non-metal gun would kill a man as dead as the biggest steel cowboy six-shooter ever made.
The gun had been cast in two main pieces, barrels and frame; the pivots, hinges, screws, trigger and firing mechanism were also ceramic. In theory, the weapon could be reloaded and used again, but in practice, it was a throw-away. Once it had fired its initial load, the internal ceramics got a little fragile. It made a lot more sense to use a new gun than risk having the old one misfire at a critical moment. The trivalent metalloid boron in the three composite bullets contained less metal than a tooth filling. The piece wouldn't pass a Hard Object scan, but standing on its end it would likely skate by a fluroscanner because it didn't look like a gun from that angle, and it would go through any standard security metal detector on the planet without a blip. Lying on a table, the pistol would look almost as if it had been carved from a bar of Ivory soap.
Strapped to her right inner thigh, almost to her groin, was a sheath knife, also of ceramic, full-tang, with a plastic handle. The blade was a tanto-style, with the angled point, and was both short and very thick. Ceramic tended to be brittle, and it needed thickness to keep from snapping if it was going to be used for stabbing, and not just throat-cutting.
The standard security setup at most government buildings, which were, after all, limited in their funding for such things, involved picture or fingerprint identification tags, metal detectors and uniformed guards. If you had business in such a place and were not an employee, the process could be as detailed as the security force was willing to use. A computer check of your ID, a search of your carry-in and your person, somebody from inside assigned to accompany you wherever you went — these were all standard for basic Level Three access. Net Force was a Level Three through Level One building; that meant that getting into the building itself needed only L3 techniques. More private areas would have tighter wards — palm or retinal scanners, knuckle readers, vox codes and such. She wasn't going to slip through those to her target's office and knock on his door, not without a lot more time to prepare. But, then, she didn't really have to.
Getting to a hard target wasn't necessary — if the target made itself easy and came to you.
With even the smallest computer knowledge, it was easy enough to find low-level employees — secretaries, receptionists, maintenance people — who had worked for Net Force only a short time. Choosing one who was unmarried and living alone that she could look like, was even easier. The Selkie, after all, could look like almost anybody…
Thus it was that Christine Wesson, a not-too-ugly brunette with brown eyes, age twenty-nine, came to the end of her short and probably undistinguished life. And now, a woman who looked enough like Wesson to pass for her to anybody who didn't know her very well, wearing her clothes, came to the southwest entrance — the busiest one — of Net Force HQ. It was a thank-God-it's-Friday, and a crush of day-shift employees arriving for work stood in line at the reader, waiting their turns to slide their ID cards through the scanner slot. It went fast. One swipe, a green light, and you were in.
The Selkie already knew the card was valid, since it had gotten her into the parking lot — in the late Christine Wesson's eight-year-old rattle-infested Ford.
Christine herself was wrapped in plastic bags in her bathtub, under a hundred or so pounds of melting crushed ice that should keep the neighbors from complaining about the smell — at least for long enough that the Selkie could finish her work and be gone.
Once inside the facility, there were several places she needed to check out, and several other places the Selkie could stay to avoid hanging around in the halls.
Two years ago, security people at the interim Pentagon had been found enjoying vids surreptitiously taken of women — and a few men — using the rest-room facilities in the building. Public outcry had been loud and immediate — but the military was long-used to ignoring whatever whim-of-the-moment the uninformed civilian public wanted. However, the idea that somebody might see a four-star general's wee-wee as he took a whiz had bothered the brass no end. And who knew but there weren't similar spy-eyes in Congressional Johns? It was amazing how fast some laws could get written and passed when they were really important. As a result, surveillance gear in federal buildings had been restricted — at least the cameras were supposed to be kept out of bathrooms. The fake Wesson could park herself in a stall with a book and kill a couple of hours. She could dawdle over lunch in the cafeteria. She could go to the outside smoking area for a frowned-upon, but still legal, low-tar-low-nicotine cigarette, a pack of which had been in Wesson's purse. With her ID tag twisted on her blouse, she'd be anonymous. Nobody knew her, and it was a big bureaucracy.