The in Death Collection Books 11-15 - J. D. Robb [329]
“Can you get around it?”
“Eventually. The units in this club are designed quite well to shut down and lock at any attempt at contamination. There’s an internal detector and filtering system as backup. Despite that, he managed to upload a virus that wiped this unit, and every other in here. And it did it in minutes, after detecting a shield notification.”
She leaned back. “You sound impressed.”
“Oh, I am. Considerably impressed. Your man has a brilliant talent. A pity, really, that he’s as corrupt and worthless as this unit.”
“Yeah. Breaks my heart.” She stood up. “I’m going to spring the staff, have the unit impounded and sent to EDD. Once we’re cleared out, I want a look at security. Let’s see what he looked like tonight.”
He looked, Eve decided, smug. She caught it in the way his eyes drifted over the crowd—dismissing, smirking even while he kept a pleasant, inoffensive smile on his face.
He walked through the crowd, kept himself removed from them. No contact, no casual greetings. And moved directly to the cube that put his back to the wall, and kept his view of the room unobstructed.
“He’s been here before,” Eve noted.
None of the staff had been able to confirm that. Then again, the manager had been so flustered—not by the police intervention, not even by the near-riot, but, she remembered, by the realization that Roarke was in the club—that he’d had a hard time sputtering out his own name.
The unit and cube had been reserved under the name R. W. Emerson. An alias, she had no doubt, and the name, she’d learned after a quick run, of a long-dead poet.
His hair was a smooth, warm brown mane tonight, and he wore square-framed glasses of tinted amber. She supposed his attire was casual trendy with the dark pegged pants, the ankle boots, the long, hip-swishing shirt in the same amber hue as his lenses. There was a gold cuff bracelet on his right wrist and a curve of winking studs along the shell of his ear.
He ordered the coffee first, made a call on his pocket ’link. Then he drank a little while he continued to watch the room.
“He’s making sure the environment’s stable,” Eve said. “And he’s hunting. Tracking the women, considering them. You can message to any other unit in the club, right? Isn’t that one of the deals why people go instead of just staying home and scoping the ’net in peace?”
“Another way of socializing,” Roarke confirmed. “Excitingly anonymous, even voyeuristic. You message a unit across the room, can watch their reaction, decide if you want to take it to the next step and make personal contact. Units are equipped with a standard privacy shield for those who don’t want to be disturbed. Or hit on.”
She watched her suspect log on, and choose manual instead of voice mode.
“There.” Roarke touched her arm, then ordered the screen to zoom in, to enlarge a sector. “The scanner.”
She saw what looked like a small, slim, silver business card case. He drew a thin, retractable cable out of the corner, plugged it into the side port of the unit.
“Oh, he is very, very good. I’ve never seen one that compact,” Roarke told her. “Odds are he made it himself. I wonder—”
“Think about your research-and-development potential later,” she ordered. “Bang. He’s made us.”
His body went rigid, his face slack. He didn’t look so smug and superior in that instant. He looked shocked, and he looked scared. The eyes behind the fashionable lenses were jittery as they darted around the room.
He pulled the scanner out, then curled over the keyboard with the earnest devotion and intensity of the classic compugeek.
“Coding in the virus,” Roarke said quietly. “He’s sweating, but he knows what he’s doing. Uploading it.”
He was shaking. He rubbed the back of his hand repeatedly over his lips. But he sat where he was, his gaze glued to the monitor. Then he was up, leaving his barely touched coffee, and hurrying for the door recklessly enough to run into tables, bump into people.
He was nearly running by the time he made the door. Eve saw him swing his body to the right before he