Then Carla noted the way the guard was pacing back and forth in front of the gate. His manner suggested intense frustration. He reminded Carla of the security guard she’d encountered earlier in the hallway, and that guard’s grumbled comments. And that gave her an idea.
The young guard waved her toward the gate. When he read her employee badge he showed immediate interest. “I hear there’s some trouble in the display hall.” he said eagerly. It was obvious he wished he could be seeing a little of that trouble himself.
She kept her eyes on the ground, trying to work up some tears. As she slid the employee badge through the scanner, she dug a manicured fingernail into her other palm, deliberately cutting the skin. That did it. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Hai,” she said, giving the head bob that was the equivalent of an abbreviated bow. She’d decided to play the role of the demure, eyes-downcast Japanese woman to the hilt. She could do the accent perfectly, but she was taking a gamble, hoping he wouldn’t switch to Japanese. With luck, he’d be a nishi or sanshi, with only a poor grasp of the language. She’d only remembered enough of her high-school Japanese to order sushi, recite her name, and count to ten.
“Two members of my tour group were seriously injured,” she told the guard. “I have been called to give a personal report.” She sighed heavily, and let a tear trickle down her cheek. “Everything always happens on my shift.”
The guard nodded his sympathy and lifted the retscan unit from its cradle. Carla buried her face in her hands, pretending to be ashamed of her tears, and uttered a series of short, hiccuping sobs. “I never asked to be reassigned to the display hall. I should be in Accounting. That’s what I’m trained for. And now I’ll be fired!” She kept wiping tears from her eyes, deliberately getting her hands in he way of the scanner.
After one or two attempts to lift the ret-scan unit to Carla's eyes, the young guard gave up. “Go.” he said to her at last. “Make your report. And good luck.”
“Thank you.”
Carla waited until she was around the corner to break into a wide grin. She was inside! She focused on the icon in her cybereye’s field of view that would activate the file containing the map Corwin had downloaded on his most recent run into the Mitsuhama mainframe. The datalink to her cybereye let her read information uploaded to it. Now all she had to do was follow the map to the elevator that led down to the research lab. And hope that everything was going according to plan. Everything could still come unglued if she ran into any more security roadblocks. Or if Corwin ran into any ice. Or if the guard who’d just let her slip through his post without a retinal scan learned that an employee from the Byte of the Future exhibit had lost her badge. Or if…
Carla shook her head, chiding herself for letting her worries overtake her. The only thing now was to get as far as she could. And to keep the camera in her cybereye rolling. The chip she was using had plenty of memory, but if need be she had plenty more to spare.
24
Carla walked down the hallway, trying not to stare at the security cameras. The thirtieth floor of the Chrysanthemum Tower was an area of plush carpets, dark wooden doors that looked as if they were made of ebony, and expensive bio-luminescent lighting panels. This was the floor occupied by MCT Seattle’s middle management; gleaming chrome name plates, set in the middle of the polished black doors, bore the names of several of the people who’d been saying “no comment” to Carla recently. She resisted the urge to try any of the doors. The offices were sure to be well protected by sophisticated alarms and magic-activated intruder alert systems.
Since it was Saturday, only a few of the offices were occupied. The occasional office worker passed her in the hallway, but the normal hustle and buzz of a busy office complex was missing. Although Mitsuhama followed the Japanese tradition of expecting its employees to work copious amounts of overtime, few actually came in to work on a weekend in person; most put in the extra hours at home-based work stations.
According to the map in Carla’s cybereye, the elevator that led to the research lab was just ahead, around a bend in the corridor. She stopped midway down the ball and pushed open the door to a washroom. As she’d suspected, the room was not monitored by camera-at least, no obvious monitors were in evidence. It was probably wired for sound, however, so she went through the motions of flushing the toilet and washing her hands in the sink.
Carla pulled out her cel phone, switched off its visual pickup, and dialed a number. She heard a ring, a brief pause, and then another ring again as the call was routed through a series of telecommunications grids. If Mitsuhama security was monitoring this call by picking up its frequency from a remote scanner, they’d log it as being made from a rented cel phone to an auto body shop in Renton. In fact, the call was only being patched through that number-and from there, through telecommunications grids in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Seoul, and San Francisco-and back again to a Seattle residence, where the young decker Corwin answered the phone.
“Albert’s Auto Body,” he said. “Don’t get bent; we’ll fix that dent.”
Despite her nervousness, Carla smiled. She used the rough code they’d prearranged. “Hello. I’m calling about the car I dropped off this morning. The Mitsubishi Runabout with the dented side panel. Has it been fixed yet?”
“It’s fixed,” Corwin answered. “And the paint job is perfect. You can’t even see where we made the patch.”
“That’s wonderful,” Carla answered brightly. “I won’t be able to pick it up tonight; I’ve got a backlog of work to clear up. I have to be back at work in less than a minute. I’ll stop around tomorrow morning, instead.”
“Good luck clearing up that backlog. I hope you don’t have to work too late. See you in the morning.”
As she hung up the phone, Carla nodded. So far, so good. Corwin was inside Mitsuhama’s computer system and had successfully cracked the node that controlled the security cameras on this floor. The “paint job” he was referring to was a direct feed of a digitized image of Evelyn Belanger. Using the trid that Carla had shot of the wage mage yesterday, he’d stripped away the background of the garden and used only the cropped image of Evelyn walking. Feeding this back into the security cameras, he used KKRU’s sophisticated Movement Match graphics program to paint it over the image of Carla that the hallway monitors were picking up. if anything had gone wrong with the splice, he would have warned Carla just now. But everything was going perfectly. Anyone watching the security monitors would be unable to see the patch.
For her part, Carla had warned Corwin that she was less than a minute away from reaching the elevator that led to the research lab. Folding shut her cel phone, she tucked it in a pocket. Then she took a deep breath, braced herself, and stepped out into the corridor. She turned and headed for the elevator, keeping her hands by her sides, walking smoothly and not making any sudden or exaggerated gestures that the graphics program would have to compensate for.
Reaching the elevator, Carla stood so that the monitor cameras would be able to capture a clear shot of her as she pulled Farazad’s credstick from her pocket and plugged the triangular tube of plastic into the key slot that called the elevator. It was essential that Corwin get a good look at her, that this be timed perfectly.
As the credstick clicked into place, a pleasantly modulated voice came from a speaker mounted just to the left of the elevator doors: “This elevator is for the use of authorized personnel only. Please provide a voice sample.” It then repeated the instructions in Japanese.