Her appearance had the predictable mind-befuddling effect on the security guard at the main door to the Sears Tower. He stopped her, and the young goddess made a great show of searching her purse for ID as she moved closer to him. Maybe she stiffened a bit, maybe she didn’t. The guard straightened and let her through, his brain befuddled by a common date rape drug. He stood his post, he looked — at worst — mildly inattentive. His only thought was, most likely, that everything in his world was just hunky-dory. He wouldn’t remember this morning, later, but would feel mildly happy about it.
Past the guard, the assassin slipped onto an elevator and rode it to the floor beneath her target’s office. The lovely thing about this building was that it was a popular tourist site before the war. The Bane Sidhe files had extensive information on the layout of every floor, including the locations of the restrooms. She walked up to the final floor and into the ladies’ room without encountering anyone else. The nature of offices and rush hours is that everyone shows up at once, usually within fifteen minutes of work start time. Arriving an hour ahead, she had passed a handful of people in the lobby, but no one else. She made a quick and careful jaunt down to another hall to place her little present for the receptionist in the shadow underneath a smoke detector, and returned to the restroom to wait.
Then she spent an hour playing solitaire before she told the buckley to start listening for AID updates. The lounge area of this restroom shared a wall with the executive office of the Darhel Pardal. Once again, Darhel decorating predictability was her friend. Darhel psychological theories held that such and such a place was the position of maximum psychological dominance in an office. That one spot and no other would hold the Darhel’s desk. Other details might vary with individual tastes, or the creative idiosyncrasies of the decorator, but his desk would be in the position of maximum psychological dominance. Every time. The stall she occupied should give the buckley a detection range up to a good three meters past the farthest edge of the desk.
“I have detected an AID update transmitting,” the buckley said. “Of course, I don’t know how many AIDs are in there, or if the receptionist has one, or if they’re having a Darhel convention, or—”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“Right.”
“Buckley, start ringing the phone for the receptionist. Tell me when she moves out of line of sight of Pardal’s office.”
“But you just told me to shut up.”
“Just do it, buckley. And don’t make another peep unless I’m about to get caught.”
“Peep,” it said. “I can think of at least nineteen ways you are about to get caught. Would you like me to list them in ascending or descending order of probability?”
“Buckley, has the receptionist moved out of line of sight of Pardal’s door?”
“Moving, moving. Yes, now she is out of line of sight.”
As soon as the buckley had said “moving” the assassin had begun moving, herself, leaving her coat and purse on the floor behind her. “Then shut up and stay shut,” she said.
“But—”
“Shut up, buckley.” Cally appreciated the carpet in the hall — it muffled the clacking of her stiletto heels. She stuffed the PDA into a hidden pocket in her back waistband. It wouldn’t withstand scrutiny from behind, but so what?
“Right,” the buckley muttered from the small of her back.
She took the space between the ladies’ and the executive office door at a sprint, instantly transforming back into cool beauty as she opened the door and stepped through.
The Darhel Pardal looked up from the figures projected on the desk and fixed her with his yellow, predator’s eyes. He wore the long gray cloak typical of Darhel attire, the head thrown back to reveal his fox face. He snapped it shut.
Good, he was already pissed at the interruption. Coldly pissed, but it was a start. This was the closest thing the Darhel had to sabers at dawn; these next few seconds were make or break.
“If you have the confidence,” she drawled, holding up two items, and slipping what was obviously an AID into what was equally obviously a hush box. Her body language, every vocal nuance, the words themselves — everything about that line down to the minutest detail she had crafted, practiced, and practiced again the night before. Over two and a half hours had gone into crafting and perfecting that one line, using the buckley’s AI capabilities to analyze and critique her performance again, and again, and again. With the ability to craft the right performance holographically, if it had enough data, a buckley PDA was the best acting coach in the world. Her life and the whole mission rested, more than anything else, on perfection in the crafting and delivery of that first line. Sometimes, it paid to be a perfectionist.
The lateral muscles around Pardal’s nose quirked in amusement. Darhel could feel amusement, in a way very like a cat playing with a mouse. Her task for the next few minutes depended on keeping him balanced on a knife’s edge between amusement and anger. For that species, the two emotions were not incompatible. She restrained a sigh of relief as he slid his own AID into a hush box, taken from the desk.
“You’re not nearly as good as you think you are.” He laughed. “But my morning has been tedious, and it’s so rare to find a human who even bothers to begin learning to use its voice — however clumsily.” His own speech had the rich, melodious roll his species was famous, and infamous, for.
Her opening line had carefully aped one of the opening salvos a Darhel of equivalent or greater rank would use to initiate one of the stylized verbal confrontations that were the meat and potatoes of their intra-species dominance games.
“I don’t believe I have the pleasure of your acquaintance,” the other predator said.
“My name’s Cally O’Neal, and I’ve come to have a few words with you about your attempts to murder my sister,” she said. Again, her intonations were practiced, her body language and word choice carefully prepared.
“A human can change its name to anything, by your primitive rules. Your names are disposable, indicating nothing. As for the rest, it’s nonsense, of course, but still amusing. You, of course, intend to upset me to the point that I freeze into a melodramatic death. I assure you our weakness is exaggerated, and I will be disposing of you to the proper security personnel in this interview’s aftermath. For now, you may continue.”
“Oh, but the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Epetar Group, which also holds the human mentat Michelle O’Neal’s contract for research on a certain device. A device, moreover, which the Tchpth,” her pronunciation was perfect, “would be unhappy to find outside their museum on Barwhon.” Head cocking to the side, just a bit. Shoulders just so. Sides of the lip curling in an expression never meant to inhabit a human face.
“How regrettable, for you, that you would make such an assertion. And how stupid of you to hush your AID before discussing this. Now I will have to turn you over to humans who will be, for whatever reasons, curious about how you came to know those things. I will, of course, know nothing of the means or ends. I will, however, receive a full report of the extracted information.” He breathed deeply, effortlessly suppressing the qualms it had cost him to make even a roundabout physical threat. The Darhel behavioral tags in her voice, her body, her face were so insidiously familiar to him that it never crossed his mind to notice how wrong it should be that they were displayed on a human. Like a human hearing its own mother-tongue, regional accent in a speaker from anywhere, the pattern felt so mundane as to coast in under the intellectual radar of what should and shouldn’t be.