Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [4]
“Nope. Heard there was a problem last night?” The guard was a short black guy in a standard-issue polyester blue jacket and tie a shade darker than Rafe’s. Although the tie might have been silk—he looked like a guy who would upgrade when possible. He sat the long security desk like a command center. Which, based on the number of blinking lights and constantly-changing screens set into the five-foot-wide surface, it was. Like something out of Star Trek, only without the nifty beeps and pings and whirring red alerts. This console was sleek and silent, even when a knob flicked red. He glanced at it, flipped a switch, and corrected whatever the problem was, all without taking his attention off her.
“You asking me, or telling me?” Wren asked. She heard the hardness in her voice, and winced inwardly, trying to tone it down a little. Don’t antagonize the witnesses, you idiot! A slight cock of the head to the right, like the bird she was nicknamed for, and a faint smile that could be mistaken for encouragement softened her words.
It worked enough to take the edge off his initial reaction. “They told me there was going to be a full-scale shakedown later today. That says trouble.”
She nodded, shifting her weight slightly to convey interest, and a willingness to hang around and listen to him for as long as he wanted to talk.
“And it had to be last night,” the guard—his name tag read Blair—continued. “’Cause when I came in this morning, Joe had already gone off shift, and there were two guys here in way-too-expensive suits, working the desk instead of him. And here you are, full clearance pass, asking to see my log book. So, you with FullTec?”
The name was familiar from her predawn briefing materials. FullTec was the name of the company that had installed the security system for this building back when it was built in 1955, and rewired it every ten years or so thereafter. She’d checked them out online, too. They’d been ahead of their time even then, and were still riding the cutting edge of security technology now. No building wired by them had ever been broken into, held hostage, or otherwise menaced. The upper level executives who gathered for multibillion-dollar conference calls rested easy in a FullTec building. Said so right on their Web site.
But, according to her job notes, they hadn’t been the ones to prepare the missing item. Which meant that they—probably—didn’t know anything at all about the special protections built into it. That had been Talented work: a mage, probably, or maybe one of the earliest lonejacks. Special protections that kept the owner, the ruler of this little financial empire, safe and secure in his dealings with the outside world.
A protection that had disappeared at 11:32 p.m. last night.
She banished those thoughts for later, returning her full attention to the guard and the here-and-now.
“No, actually, I’m a freelancer. Called in special to double-check some of the systems.”
Blair nodded his head, sagely impressed. The tie was definitely silk. “Ah. Watching the watchdogs, huh?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“So, you a tech? Some kind of whiz-kid hacker?”
Wren laughed, thinking of Sergei’s caustic comments while he watched her fumbling attempts to upgrade her computer last weekend. Current—the power source of magic—screwed with electronics, so her relationship with her computer was at best user-cautious. “Nope.” She paused, a germ of mischief making her tell this poor bastard the truth. “I’m a thief.”
Twenty minutes later, she was alone with the main control box for the building’s wiring system. The guard had laughed at her words, but the look in his eyes had been cool, and suddenly she’d been given an escort down into the basement. Not Rafe, either. A new guy, still polite but bulkier and much less cute. Not quite a goon, but with definite goonlike tendencies only barely tamed by the