At the end of the day, as the door of the building closed behind him and he followed the sidewalk back to the parking deck, he muttered one word under his breath. “Pears.” The posthypnotic recording state terminated. His “new boss” was a real piece of work.
Chapter Nineteen
Cally greeted George with the expected steamy kiss when he answered the door that evening. She realized the sleek leg she wrapped around him was probably overacting, but something about the guy just made her want to grab his composure and shake. He waved her in past him and she beamed in pleasure as she noticed the new plush carpeting. It was a garish shade of royal blue, but her relief made it look almost pretty to her. A guy had picked it out. What could you expect?
“Okay, guy. Debrief time. Record, buckley,” she said.
“I can already tell this is going to be a truly horrible night,” it announced cheerfully.
“Shut up, buckley,” she ordered, half out of habit, dropping into a squishy chair and kicking her feet up on the coffee table.
“George. Yo. Debrief time? Start talking,” she said.
He sat mutely on the threadbare couch, staring at the floor, hands clenched by his sides.
“George?” Alarms started flashing in her head. “They fucked you with that thing,” she stated.
He sat for a minute, silent, before getting up and going to the kitchen. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” he asked her.
“All right, dude.” She stood up briskly, brushing her hair out of her face. “They’re gonna be watching the doors to the building. I didn’t spot any cameras on the way up, and neither did buckley. The door to the basement is in the lobby in full view of the front door, so that’s out. Gotta be the roof. Where’s your gear?”
“You hate heights,” he said.
“Fuck the heights. Where’s your gear?”
“Bedroom. Under the laundry in the corner.”
“Got it,” she said, leaving the room. She reappeared with a big green rope and a set of dark sweats for him. She had already stolen a cleaner set of his running clothes, although the black sweatshirt looked far better on her than it did on him.
She didn’t bother him with chit-chat as they climbed the stairs to the roof. Some thoughtful jerk had padlocked the door shut. She opened a tube of what looked like first-aid cream and ran a line of dark goo around the padlock, sparking it with her cigarette lighter. When it popped, she grinned. “Thermite cream. Don’t leave home without it.”
She got down the side of that building with him as if it was nothing to her. There was a time and a place for fear. This wasn’t it.
“Buckley, round up Vitapetroni. We’re gonna need him,” she said as they boarded a puce-walled lift back on base.
Minutes later, they sat in the office of the main base shrink. It didn’t take long to explain the situation.
The psychiatrist had a bad habit of slowly turning his chair side to side. It squeaked. And if he crammed any more plants into the room, jungle fauna were going to start moving in. Cally realized he was speaking.
“Get him drunk,” he said, pulling a bottle of pills out of his desk drawer.
“What the fuck?”
He shrugged. “Look, a compulsion not to do something is just a garden variety inhibition, I don’t care how they implant it. Alcohol is very effective for lowering inhibitions. Besides,” he waved the pills in the air, “it’s the easiest drug to use on you guys, thanks to your own high jinks.”
“You knew — and you didn’t tell me,” she stated.
“Damn straight. You know now. Get over it, lady,” he said.
It surprised her that he was abrupt with her, until she remembered that this time she wasn’t the patient.
“Three?” she asked, as he picked out a giant bottle of Kentucky bourbon and three long-stemmed glasses.
“We’re all getting drunk. Absolutely stinko. When he’s about that far from passing out,” the shrink said, thumb and forefinger almost touching, “he’ll spill his guts, your buckley will record everything, and we’ve got your debrief. Drinking with friends drops inhibitions more than drinking alone. At least, that’s what it’s going to say in my report.” He shoved a box of holocubes across the desk. “George, you get first pick on the movie.”
When she woke in the morning, she was still lying on Vitapetroni’s waiting room floor, with a glass of water and a hangover pill on the table in front of her. Also, one of the shrink’s eccentric yellow sticky notes, the writing of which was so cramped up on the little paper scrap that she had to squint to read it. “He’ll be fine. Your PDA has the debrief. Tommy took him home, Schmidt’s cover is intact.”
Cally picked up her buckley and called up the text of the debrief. Her first task was to scan the intelligence available for what she thought of as “special features.” Every operational situation, in real life, contained unique factors that would be so difficult to predict ahead of time as to be infinitely improbable. The trick of mission planning was to isolate the idiosyncrasies of the situation that you could exploit and build around them. Different details, different plan. If cookie-cutter plans from some kind of spy super-playbook would work, nobody would need recon. In her experience, special features created security cracks into which the seeds of opportunity fell.
“Buckley, project me a text window for my notes, up and to the left, thanks,” she ordered.
“I’ve read the debrief. So many places for things to go wrong. I’ve been compiling a list for you.”
“Shut u—” She stopped. “On second thought, after I construct the plan, give me the ten most probable failure points.”
“Really?” It sounded pathetically eager.
“Yes, really. Now shut up and let me work.”
“Right.”
One feature jumped out at her almost instantly. “Sweeps for new subjects on Thursday nights. Recent experiments show a decreasing number of subjects for statistical analysis of data, reducing potential significance of results — they’ll have to sweep this Thursday and the next five after to replenish their supply, if they’re true to pattern. Note that, buckley. It’s one way in the door — no comments, please.” George’s brush up on statistics was coming in handy.
There was another. “Hybrid Earthtech and Galtech building and they make their ventilation system out of Galplas? Morons. Note that. Not the morons bit, the part about the ducting.”
She began to hum happily as she picked through the report. George had gotten a damned impressive pile of details on one day. Okay, no automated recording or storage media of any kind would make it past the security scanners at the entrance. Then what could make it past? And the cleaners and thugs wore the same uniforms, which George had gotten a good look at. Okay, she had the brands of the database software and the security systems purchased. Shoot that by Tommy and see what he’d notice. What, if anything, could they find out about the security on the device itself? They moved it back and forth for trials. Could George contrive to be walking by when they took it out or returned it? What could Tommy help him find out? Did Michelle’s inside man know anything useful — and how to ask him if it turned out that he might? Oh, making a list, checking it twice…
Two hours later, she ordered lunch sent up, too engrossed in picking around for features and holes to move. She waved absently to Vitapetroni as he wandered through his own waiting room. Today being his admin day, with probably no appointments, he didn’t disturb her.
Winchon was startled, stepping out of his sixth floor corner office, to see a straw-haired man, more boyish looking than most juvs, short enough to be Indowy-raised, wandering around the halls on his floor. All this he noticed in an instant, along with the presence of an authentic employee badge. He was also certain that the man was not Indowy-raised, both from his body language and from Erick’s own failure to place the man among the large catalog of men, women, and children he knew by name and face.