Cally got into her red, Tweety-bird nightshirt, frowning at the narrowness of the twin bed in the small room. Quite a change from her apartment in Charleston. At least she’d been able to keep some of the art from her walls. Even added a print. Okay, so the picture of the surfer catching a wave at Malibu was a cheap reprint of a digital file. Still, it was nice having it. It was a small, tangible reminder of her time with Stewart on Titan Base seven years ago. She got a fresh washcloth from the pile under the nightstand and picked up the buckley to set her wake-up call.
“Psssst. You’ve got a message,” it said in an exaggeratedly soft voice.
“Why didn’t you beep me?” she asked.
“It’s a secret message,” it said.
“Well, yeah, buckley. I’m an assassin. I do get a few of those. What message?”
“Yeah, but this one’s really secret,” it said. By now she wanted to throttle him.
“Buckley, what’s the message? Is it from… him?”
“Say, ‘pretty please,’ ” it prompted.
“Buckley, give me the damned message,” she said.
“If you’re not going to be polite about it maybe I won’t.”
“Buckley!” she hissed. “Do you want me to load a Martha emulation on top of you? This place looks pretty drab. I could use some affordable decorating tips. Buckley, what’s ‘raffia’? Does it come in purple?”
“All right, all right. It’s from him. He’s making a trip to Charleston. Can’t stand another minute without you, apparently.”
“Text, voice, or holo?”
“Encrypted text.”
“Buckley, if it’s encrypted, how do you know what he said?”
“I didn’t say it was very well encrypted. Well, it sort of was, but you guys are way too gooshy in your choice of decryption keys. And if I can decrypt it, would you like an estimate of how quickly your bosses can decrypt it in various scenarios? I can give you a full set or just the basic dozen run-downs.”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“Well, that’s gratitude for you.”
“Buckley, please just display the text.”
“Right.”
The building looked harmless enough. Windowless on the lower floors, it squatted, a giant rectangular block, northeast of a small city on Lake Michigan. Convenient to a good beach on the lake, and several smaller lakes for the recreation of the employees, the surface of the building was simple pink brick, from base to top. The dark, mirrored windows that ringed the top floor looked out at the world with guarded impassivity.
The signs in the ample but mostly empty parking lot, and large aluminum letters on the side of the building, announced it as the Institute for the Advancement of Human Welfare. On each side of the building, raised brick beds and dense boxwood hedges separated the front parking lot from the back of the building.
Through the front door, a large middle corridor went halfway through the building. Well-tended ficus trees flanked a central security desk where solidly-built guards took pains to keep their guns concealed beneath the jackets of their cheap, maroon suits. On each side, there was a glass-fronted office with white lettering on the double doors. The one on the left identified itself as Altruism Research, the one on the right, Kindness Care. Against the glass walls inside the offices to the right, one could clearly see the generously laden shelves of a newsstand and gift shop.
Behind the guards, a brass- and granite-fronted bank of elevators led to the rest of the building. A thin strip of brass, practically invisible until one got past the security desk, outlined the card readers to the side of each elevator.
Behind the building, loading docks allowed trucks to back right up against garage-style doors that were exactly the size of the rear of a semi trailer. Thick black weather-stripping insured a strong seal between arriving truck and building. To the side of each loading dock door, cement steps led up to painted white steel doors with security card readers to the side.
An entrance from a separate road wound down to the subterranean parking deck at the rear of the building, which bore large signs reading, “Employee Parking Only.” At the deck’s combined entrance and exit, a guard occupied a small, heated booth. The gates into and out of the deck also had card readers, though nobody who was not an employee ever saw them. An elegantly domed conservatory stood at ground level on top of the parking deck. Inside, ornamental plants from several worlds graced professionally designed beds along silver-sanded footpaths, winding in to a Galplas water feature. Carefully crafted to resemble lichen-encrusted granite, the salt-water pool and fountain had at least a dozen colorful species of tropical fish.
The burial of a parking deck was unusual at this latitude. Although parts of the building were clearly of Earthtech materials, legacy of whatever occupied the building before the institute, the deck was a recent addition — pure Galtech, top to bottom. From top to bottom the warmth of the surfaces and an overengineered drainage system kept the deck operational year round — access road and all.
The man and woman walking in the garden did not work in the front offices of the building. They were an odd contrast. The man presented an image that was conservative to the point of functional invisibility. Almost everything about him was bland, from the hairspray-glazed newscaster spikes in his thinning blond hair, to the gray tailored jacket and pants, to his plain brown dress shoes. The exceptions were his eyes, which were a disconcertingly frosty blue, and his ruby and onyx tie clip, stark against the charcoal gray tie. The eyes and ruby burned, oddly paired fires against the man’s drab, brown shirt and pasty skin.
So thin he was almost gaunt, his slightness combined with his short stature to give the impression of an ice-carven gnome in a suit. He kept his elbows in closely when he walked, as if he had grown up spending much of his time in crowds. Which, in fact, he had. Growing up on the Indowy planet Haithel, he had been accustomed to crowds and crowds of the green-furred Galactic working class. The Indowy family who raised him carefully schooled in the Path, cautioning always against human barbarisms. To their quiet pride, he studied the Sohon techniques with diligence, energy, and phenomenal talent. Reaching legal adulthood at age twenty-one, Erick Winchon continued study, driven by some unsung inner need, despite clear serenity and a fanatical devotion to the strictures of the Path. By Earth’s 2042, he had become one of only three human mentats in known space. Meticulously modest, he avoided every appearance of attention-seeking.
The woman, on the other hand, clearly had no objection to attracting attention. She wore her hair in a simple but eye-catching classical style, shoulder length black hair drawn back in a lime green headband and worn with bangs. The headband matched her green suede suit, teamed with a black leather corset and vinyl go-go boots. She walked just a little too close to him, arching her back to give him a perfect view down the front of her corset. He appeared more interested in the data on her clipboard.
“So we’ve got progression in the food series down to a week?” he asked.
“From liver and broccoli straight through to raw offal. We have included cannibalism, but it’s all unknowing, so it doesn’t really count, yet. Normally, that would take another week. As you know, it takes a week more than that if we can’t convince them they’ve already broken the taboo,” she said. “We’re hoping that by refining the focus of the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors in the gamma-Brucksmann synapses we can get that down to two to four days.”