Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [17]
When he lifted the hood again the one thing on Damon’s mind was getting to the bathroom, so it wasn’t until he’d done what he had to do and emerged again that he saw the envelope lying on the floor just inside the apartment door. The absurdity of it stopped him dead in his tracks and almost made him laugh. Nobody pushed envelopes under apartment doors—not, at any rate, in buildings as well supplied with spy eyes as this one.
Damon picked the envelope up. It wasn’t sealed.
He drew the enclosed piece of paper out and unfolded it curiously. The words printed on it might have been put there by any of a million near identical machines. They read:
DAMON
IT IS TRUE
CONRAD HELIER IS ALIVE
ARNETT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN HE HAS TESTIFIED
AHASUERUS AND HYWOOD HAVE THE REMAINING ANSWERS
OPERATOR 101
This time, Damon did laugh. This made the whole affair seem suddenly childish, like a silly game. He remembered the way Yamanaka had carefully called his attention to the unusual features of the original message, implying that it wasn’t really an Eliminator who had posted it. This was surely confirmation of the fact—no authentic Eliminator would post personal messages under someone’s door. This had to be a joke.
Damon slipped back under the hood and called Building Security.
The call was answered by a real person, just as the lease specifications promised. “This is thirteen four seven,” he said reflexively, although she could have read that from the automatic display.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Hart?” said the real person gravely. She had a broad halo of honey blond hair, a superabundance of facial jewelry, and an anxious expression, none of which were properly coordinated with her sober gray uniform.
“Somebody just slipped something under my door—within the last thirty minutes. Could you decant me the spy-eye tape that gives the clearest picture?”
He took her assent so much for granted that he almost severed the connection before she said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Hart, but that won’t be possible. We’ve suffered a slight system failure.” She sounded very embarrassed, as well she might. Setting aside such routine antisocial behavior as jamming the elevator open for a couple of minutes, the misdemeanor rate within the building was so low that Security was having a hard time justifying its proportion of the lease tax.
“What do you mean, a slight system failure?” Damon asked, although he had a pretty good idea.
“Well,” said the blond woman unhappily, “to tell the truth, it’s not that slight. In fact, it’s fairly general.”
Damon considered the implications of this news for a few moments before saying: “General enough to allow someone to walk into the building, take the elevator to the thirteenth, push something under a door, take the elevator back down again, and walk out undetected?”
“It’s possible,” she conceded, quickly adding: “It’s a very unusual situation, Mr. Hart. I’ve never known anything like it.”
Damon judged from her tone that she had encountered similar situations several times before, but had been instructed not to admit the fact to the tenants. This wasn’t the kind of building that software saboteurs would target, but it wasn’t the kind they’d leave alone either. Damon had crashed similar systems in the days when he’d been in training to be an all-around juvenile delinquent and taken pride in it. The only authentically unusual thing about this particular act of sabotage was that someone had taken advantage of it to pay a personal call. The blond woman, who was waiting impatiently for him to break the connection