“I believe the garbage has already been inventoried.”
6
While Lia DeFrancesca was in a general sense en route to London, the route was rather circuitous and included a climb down a nearly sheer cliff at a nature sanctuary in New York’s Hudson Valley. The cliff itself wasn’t much of a problem for Lia, who had done much harder climbs with full combat gear during the Army Special Forces Q, or Qualifying, Course, which she was one of the few (if not only) women to complete. But Lia was making her descent in decidedly unmilitary attire — a skirt that stopped some inches above the knees, and a pair of black heels, which went well with the skirt but not the rocks.
It did not help that her runner — a Desk Three officer monitoring her progress via a satellite link from the Art Room, Deep Black’s special situation center deep within OPS 2—thought the situation rather humorous. Lia could hear Jeff Rockman’s high-pitched giggle in her ear as she shifted her weight on one of the ledges, her backpack leaning precariously off her arm.
“I’m going to put you in a skirt and see how you like it,” she growled at him.
“You’re the one who didn’t want to wait for the next guard change, when you could have walked right down the main road,” said Rockman. “‘Let’s take the shortcut,’ you said. ‘Bring it on,’ you said.”
Lia glanced to her right and saw a middle-aged man and woman walking down the path toward her, at the moment oblivious to her. She continued to descend, unable to do anything to reinforce her modesty. As she stretched for a fresh foothold, she heard the faint yet distinct sound of over-stretched panty hose giving way.
“Son of a bitch,” she complained as the stockings ran halfway up her left leg.
“Well!” said the woman, stopping just below her.
Lia looked down. She was now only eight feet above the path. “Get the hell out of my way,” said Lia, kicking off her shoes.
“What?” demanded the man.
“Move or catch me,” Lia told them as she leaned down. She intended to grab onto the footholds but missed and so did, in fact, practically jump on them. She rolled as she hit the ground; naturally her skirt hiked in the process.
Disgusted, she got up and reached into her backpack for a substitute pair of panty hose.
“Hanes Her Way. Satisfied?” she snapped as she reached up to change.
The couple started to back away. Lia rolled off the panty hose, exposing her sensible cotton to the fauna. She put on her shoes and began walking up the trail, which led to a gravel road.
“Turnoff in another hundred yards,” said Rockman.
Lia could hear him through a small device implanted in her skull just behind her ear. His voice was like a whisper in her head, audible only to her. The microphone and an antenna array were embedded in her jacket.
“Any more surprises?” she asked. “And I’m telling you, I’m not swimming a moat.”
“There’s no moat,” Rockman assured her. “Just the cameras and the physical security, plus the fence.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Lia continued up the path, slipping her handheld computer from her jacket pocket and using its GPS function to find the exact point where she was to go in the woods. The small computer looked like a Palm PDA, the sort of device a traveling businessman might use to keep his schedule and contact information. But the NSA version had a wide range of capabilities, thanks to its capacious onboard memory and four processors that, ten years before, would have been found only in a supercomputer. It hooked into the Desk Three communications system, allowing it to accept downloads of satellite views and other information. The Art Room beamed her a situation map showing her position overlaid on a diagram of the facility she was approaching. She got her bearings and returned the handheld to her pocket.
Lia could see the security wall of the research building through the trees on her left as she turned. She had to walk along a very precise path about five feet wide — the gap in the coverage of the facility’s perimeter cameras. Fortunately, the woods were cleared, and even with her heels on she found it easy going.
“There poison ivy here?” she asked Rockman as she got near the wall.
“Got me. Leaflets three, let it be,” he added.
“Learn that in Boy Scouts?”
“I doubt there’s any poison ivy,” said Telach. “Hold at the wall. There’s a jeep just starting a sweep.”
Lia leaned against the smooth concrete, listening. Rockman had tapped into the facility’s security system and was watching the video feeds as they were presented to the security desk. The high-tech system was controlled by a computer, which had made it relatively easy for the NSA snoops to break into.
Not that they wouldn’t have found a way if it were more difficult. The FBI was still at least twelve hours away from obtaining a subpoena allowing it to review all of Dr. Kegan’s experiments here. In the meantime, Desk Three’s standing mandate to preemptively gather intelligence against potential terrorist threats would be used to covertly examine the facility’s computer records for anything untoward.
While she waited, Lia took what looked like a bunch of small, flat spoons and a lipstick holder from the inside pocket of her jacket. Unscrewing the top of the lipstick holder, she slid one of the spoons into the slot and held it against the wall. As the truck roared past, she pressed the end of the lipstick holder and fired the spoon into the wall about head high. When the truck was gone, she used the small handhold to hoist herself up and then over.
“What’s going on?” Rockman asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked, taking out her compact and lipstick — the real one — and seeing to her makeup.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m smoking a joint.”
“The patrol will be back in two minutes. You want them to see you?”
“God, Rockman — why the hell do you think I’m wearing a skirt?”
Lia walked in a diagonal across the perimeter road toward a garage building, once more treading in a black spot of the compound’s defenses. At the building, she opened the pack and took out her tiny Kahr, a custom-built pistol so small it could be palmed. Removing her handheld computer and a package of cigarettes, Lia took off her jacket and rolled it into a ball, sliding it into the backpack. Then she slid the ruck into an empty garbage can and put the lid on.
“You hear me?”
“Barely,” said Rockman.
Lia adjusted her belt. The com system sent its signal from the belt to the jacket; the signal was low-power and worked in discrete bursts so that it was extremely difficult to detect.
“Now?”
“Still low.”
“All right, hold on.” She took the backpack out and put it behind the garbage can rather than inside. “How’s that?”
“We’ll fix the levels here,” said Telach. “Get into the building. You have three minutes.”
“Stay to the left of that driveway,” added Rockman.
Dating from the early seventies, the Drumund University Research Site/Hudson Valley Division Laboratory had been designed to be heated by solar energy. Two years after it opened, however, the trustees belatedly realized the system maintenance and electricity for the pumps cost five times the amount an old-fashioned gas- burning furnace would. The high-tech system had been scrapped in favor of an oil burner, but the large roof arrays with their water panels remained. Lia headed toward one now, climbing up a narrow metal access ladder to a mechanical door at the outside. There were two locks on the door: the first took five seconds to pick; the other was considerably more stubborn, giving way to her small file in just over thirty.
Lia pulled the door open slowly, checking to make sure no one was there — the area wasn’t covered by the security cameras. Stepping onto the metal catwalk inside, she pulled off her belt and stuck it in the door, maintaining her connection with the com system.
