Net Force - Tom Clancy [39]
And who was apt to be searching her purse, determined or otherwise? Nobody.
When she was fifty yards away, she saw the agents glance in her direction, then back to their chess game. She kept her expression neutral, even though she wanted to smile. They had seen her-and dismissed her.
The dismissal was based on good reason. For what the agents saw was an old lady, easily seventy, hunched over and walking slowly, hobbling with a cane, while a small champagne-colored toy poodle trotted ten feet ahead of her on a Flexi lead, exploring the neatly cropped wilds of the sidewalk foliage.
The poodle, a well-trained neutered male, had been rented from the Not the Brothers Dog Kennel, in upstate New York. A thousand dollars a week, the pooch, and worth every penny.
The little dog sniffed the base of an ornamental cherry tree planted next to the walk, lifted his leg and watered the trunk.
Good boy, Scout, the Selkie said. Anybody close enough to have heard her-and nobody was-would have recognized the tones of an old lady, the voice weakened by long decades of hard work and too many cigarettes.
She wore an ankle-length cotton-print dress, a thin cotton sweater and stout, sensible, lace-up Rockport walking shoes over black knee socks. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a rounded perm. The latex mask and makeup she wore had taken her an hour and a half to apply, and should pass inspection from five feet in broad daylight. She was in some apparent pain as she shuffled along-the right hip was bad-but she was bearing it for the sake of her good boy
Scout, who stopped to sniff every tree or bush, careful to mark as his own all those with scents from previous canine passersby.
She was also hot, her face itched and the stink of latex and face powder was thick, but there was no help for that.
The Selkie knew exactly what the watchers saw when they looked at her: somebodys arthritic granny, out walking her little dog before going home to bed. And home was only three blocks away, rented in a hurry, but using her current disguise. If she was stopped-and she wouldnt be-she had an address that justified her being here, and a pedigree better than the dogs. She was Mrs. Phyllis Markham, retired from her job of forty-one years as a bookkeeper for the state government, at the capital in Albany. Her husband Raymond had passed away last October, and Phyllis had finally moved to Washington so she could spend her spare time visiting the museums, which she loved. Have you seen the new Russian capsule on display at the Air and Space? Or that gray 1948 Tucker they confiscated from some drug dealer?
Mrs. Markhams daughter Sarah lived in Philadelphia, and her son Bruce was the manager of a Dodge truck dealership in Denver. Her background was all in place, and any kind of computer check would vet it. She could bore the leg off a clothes-store dummy reciting it in her dull and scratchy voice, too. She carried no obvious weapons, nothing to give her away, save the disguised electronics that nobody would recognize for what they were if they happened to see them.
Then again, the cane she pretended to need was a three-foot length of hand-crafted hickory, sanded furniture-smooth and lovingly oiled, made by Cane Masters, a small company in Incline Village, Nevada. Cane Masters specialized in building perfectly legal weapons for serious martial artists. An expert-and the Selkie was certainly that-could beat somebody to a dead pulp with a walking stick such as the one she carried, and do so without breaking a sweat.
A mugger who looked at her and saw somebodys tired and helpless old granny and an easy score, well-that would be a big mistake. And possibly