Star Wars_ Cloak of Deception - James Luceno [53]
Pestage kept climbing until he was in the uppermost lane. In that part of Coruscant, the lane was restricted to skycars the mobile traffic scanners could verify as enjoying diplomatic privilege, which Senator Palpatine’s vehicle did.
He piloted the car to the attached platform of a luxurious, kilometer-high skyscraper and docked. From the car’s luggage compartment, he retrieved two expensive-looking bags. The larger was a square handheld piece; the other was a sphere about the size of a sweetmelon, which fit snugly into a specially designed shoulder bag.
Pestage carried both into the building’s upper-tier lobby, where he was scanned head to toe before being allowed to enter the turbolift that accessed the penthouse. Once again, his employer’s credentials opened many a door that would otherwise have been locked to him. Few residents were about, and none gave him a second look, trusting implicitly that anyone who had managed to get into the building had every right to be there.
He rode the turbolift to the penthouse, which was owned by one of Palpatine’s peers in the senate, but was presently unoccupied, as the senator had, only the previous day, embarked on a visit to her homeworld.
In the penthouse alcove, Pestage carried the bags to the entry and tapped a code into a touchpad mounted on the wall. When the scanner asked for retinal corroboration, he entered a second code, which essentially commanded the scanner to cut short its usual security routine and simply open the suite.
The bypass code did the job, and the door pocketed itself into the wall.
Soft lighting came up as Pestage moved into the elegant front room. Furniture and artwork attesting to the senator’s refined taste were everywhere in evidence. Pestage went directly to the terrace doors and stepped outside.
Traffic hummed below the tiled enclosure, and the lights of still-higher buildings shone down on him. The air was ten degrees cooler than at midlevel, and nowhere near as grimy. From the chest-high wall at the edge of the terrace, Pestage could see clear to the Jedi Temple in one direction and the Galactic Senate in the other.
But those weren’t the views that interested him; only the view directly across the cityscape canyon, into a mostly darkened penthouse of similar size.
Pestage set the two pieces of luggage on the floor and opened them. The square one contained a computer, with a built-in display and keypad. The second was a surveillance droid, black and round, with three antennae projecting from its metallic pate and sides. Standing the computer on end, Pestage positioned the droid alongside it.
The two devices conversed for a long moment, in a dialogue of beeps and warbles. Then the surveillance droid levitated of its own accord and began to float out into the canyon.
Pestage repositioned the computer so that he could monitor the flight of the surveillance droid while he entered commands on the keyboard.
By then the black sphere had crossed the abyss and was hovering just outside one of the penthouse’s lighted rooms, and relaying color images back to the computer’s display screen. The small screen showed five Twi’lek females, lounging together on comfortable furniture. One of the females was Senator Orn Free Taa’s red-skinned Lethan consort. The others may have been lesser consorts, or simply friends of the Lethan, indulging in drink and gossip while the fat-faced senator was off visiting Valorum at the medcenter.
Pestage was pleased. The females were so absorbed in debauched merriment that they were unlikely to interfere with his business.
He instructed the surveillance droid to move to an unlighted window, three rooms away, and go to infrared mode. A moment later the screen displayed a close-up of Taa’s computer terminal, which, while it was capable of interfacing with distant systems, could not be accessed remotely.
Pestage did rapid input at the keyboard.
Pressing close to the window, the droid activated a laser and burned a small hole in the sound-silencing and blasterproof pane—just