Furious

33

Kris trotted into the large but very empty receiving bay. There were several service elevators, but taking one of them would be a quick way to end the visit in handcuffs. She spotted the door that led down to the basement and took it.

Five floors down, below parking, below most signs of human interest, they paused outside a door that proclaimed NO ADMITTANCE.

“Nelly, send a nano in.”

She did, and Kris quickly got a picture of a dirty room filled with large and noisy machinery. A lone guard in a brown uniform carefully made his way among the pieces of whirling equipment. He’d just passed the door that Kris stood behind.

“Where are the cameras?” Kris asked.

“There aren’t any,” Nelly answered.

“So much for them watching our every move,” Jack said.

“I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you, that they’d lie to us the first day on the job,” Penny said to no one in particular.

“Penny,” Kris said, and the security specialist quickly unlocked the door.

Kris took a quick step through and put two sleepy darts in the guard’s back. He crumbled at the knees and went down easy.

Once in the support area, Kris glanced around the room. “Here’s the central electrical power, water, sewer, and cooling, everything you need to run this place.”

“And only one guard with no cameras?” Jack finished.

“I’ve seen tighter security around a cookie jar,” Penny said.

“Is Grampa Al kidding himself?” Kris asked.

“Or is he just too cheap to pay for what he needs?” Jack said.

“I wouldn’t let our guard down,” Penny said.

“Nelly, drop some nanos in the machinery. You can never tell when we might want to turn off the lights or flush all the toilets.”

“You heard the woman, kids, let’s take over this place.”

“Mom, do we get to blow anything up?” Sal asked from Jack’s neck.

“No, kids. We do this elegantly,” Nelly said, to Kris’s great relief.

While the computers did their thing, Kris led her team over to the elevator pits. Jack had opened a small door that led into the shaft. As promised, there were rungs along the wall leading up. The three of them began to climb. The fit between the wall and the closest elevator car was close, what with the extra beam Kris was packing, but all three made their way up the shaft.

The elevators in Longknife Tower were divided into four groups. The first took you from the first to no higher than the 50th floor, where you had to get off . . . under the eyes of guards . . . get your security badge checked . . . and switch to a bank that could take you to floors between fifty and one hundred.

If you wanted to go higher than that, you went through another scan, this time of palm prints and retina, and got to ride up to the 150th floor. Of that checkpoint, all the schematic that Grampa Trouble’s friend had gotten ahold of only said RESTRICTED AREA.

Since Kris didn’t intend to pass through any of those security checkpoints, she really didn’t care what they were.

They settled on the top of the elevator car just as Nelly said, “I’ve got control of the car’s computer. It’s a tiny thing and easy to confuse. Hold on.”

And they began to rise. It was kind of scary as the wind whistled by—and the ceiling of the shaft got closer, but Nelly stopped them on the 49th floor. They switched back to the ladder rungs just as the elevator door opened, and two workers got in.

“I hate it when I have to work this late,” a woman’s voice said.

“I’ve got a nine o’clock meeting tomorrow. You want to leave me standing in front of all the big boys, telling them I’ll have the report by noon?” said a man.

“Will you at least get me invited to the meeting?”

“I’ll see what I can arrange,” didn’t have much power behind it.

As the elevator dropped away from them with this private bit of human story, Kris found a hatch, opened it, and led her team onto the 50th floor.

They were in a service area. Again, no cameras. Maybe the locked door explained that bit of savings. Penny made short work of the lock.

“There’s a camera covering the hall,” Nelly said. “Give me a minute to take care of it. Catch your breath. You’ll hit the stairs next.”

Kris found herself glad for the workouts she’d been getting. Then found the words taking on a double meaning, and had to swallow a giggle.

Giggle!

Longknifes didn’t giggle.

Well, maybe Longknifes in love found they could do a lot of things that normal people did.

Get your head back in the game, Kris growled at herself just as Nelly announced. “I’ve captured control of the cameras between here and the stairwell. I’ve ordered them to look away for two minutes. Move quickly, the guards have a problem with a flooding ladies’ room.”

Kris led, Jack right behind her. Penny walked backward, her automatic out but held low. The sound of running water and male curses hurried them along.

“How did you manage that?” Jack whispered.

“I’m the Magnificent Nelly. I’ll never tell.”

“She bragged to us,” Sal said softly from around Jack’s neck. “Thanks, Mom. Next time, I get to do it.”

They made the stairwell with no problem. The lock there fell to Penny’s and Mimzy’s work. The door opened, and the threatened alarm did not go off. There were cameras in the stairwell, but Nelly needed less than a minute to seed them all with a snapshot of nothing, and off they went.

Fifty flights of stairs was going to take some time. Kris hated to lose that time. Still, so far their intrusion was unnoticed. She listened in on the corporal’s comm device. No one had called him to warn him of incoming traffic. Kris’s legs began to complain of the workout, but at least the worst had not started.

Stairs went by, flight after flight. It was almost boring.

Then everything changed!

Lights started flashing. Alarms beeped, rang, and made all sorts of racket.

* * *

Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile and Agent Rick Sanchez arrived only a minute behind agents Leslie Chu and Mahomet Debot. What they found was a mass of confusion, rapidly going in circles and accomplishing nothing.

“Are you sure about those fingerprints?” a man with captain’s rank on his collar asked Leslie. “My girl took them, and she’s real good about fingerprints. They never come back smudged or anything.”

“Sir,” Leslie said, and it did not sound respectful in any way, “I have copies of the prints. They’re not smudged. The forms are empty. Empty for all three.”

“Diedre, you did take their prints, didn’t you?”

“I did, sir. I saw them in the computer. They’re there. Just look.”

So everyone did, and there certainly were fingerprints in that computer. Somehow, they had stayed there and not been sent from that computer out for processing. And when Diedre sent them again, the computer assured them they were sent. Again, nothing arrived at the central fingerprint database for check.

“That can’t happen,” the captain insisted.

“Nelly’s at the bottom of this one,” Leslie said with a wide Girls Rule grin.

“Have you advised Security Central at the Tower that you have a breach?” Foile asked.

“Until a second ago, all we had was this little girl’s claim that we had a problem. I didn’t have any trouble. No, I have not called Central.”

Foile glanced around. On a desk, he spotted a red phone with SECURITY CENTRAL stenciled on it. He picked it up and got an immediate, “Yes.”

“This is Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile of the Wardhaven Bureau of Investigation. Your outer security perimeter has been breached by a three-person team headed by Princess Kristine Longknife. You may want to go to an alert.”

Before he finished his suggestion, an alarm started beeping, and a red light began flashing, both on the phone and from a device above both doors.

“Now you gone and done it,” the captain muttered.

“Yes, I have,” Foile said, then turned back to the phone. “I have a team of four investigators. May I be admitted to Security Central?”

“I’ll have to check with my supervisor,” came the response, and the phone went dead.

Foile scowled at the phone. “I think we’re going to have a jurisdiction problem,” he muttered softly to his team.