“Dru?” asked Dryke.
“No change.”
“What?”
“No change?”
“Ramond?”
“Nothing is happening here, Mr. Dryke.”
“This is bad. This is very bad,” warned Loren. “Maybe we ought to wait until we know it’s clean.”
“Goddamm it, he’s gone,” Dryke fumed, reaching for the door. “We’re too late.”
“Oh, man—”
Dryke touched the controls and received a shock—the door was unlocked.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, staring. “Dru?”
“No change.”
“Not even a fagging burglar alarm?”
“Nothing.”
Dryke puffed out a breath. “No one else comes in,” he said, and stepped through the doorway.
Inside the Fuller were the ordinary private places of a man of some means, but few affectations. A gentleman’s kitchen, tidy and highly automated. A morning-facing breakfast nook, with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside the windows. A working study dotted with motion toys and engineering models. A dark bedroom with an empty, neatly made bed.
Stinger in hand, Dryke moved warily from room to room, wrestling with a mixture of heart-thumping fear and squeamish embarrassment, waiting for a nasty surprise and fearing he had already received it. The house felt empty, like a set piece, a fabrication.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “Loren—check the garage.”
In a moment he had his answer. “Got one Avanti Eagle and one Honda SD-50, as registered.”
Dryke swore. “Then where is he? Does anyone have anything?”
“Could have been picked up by someone,” Loren said. “You want some company in there?”
Frowning, Dryke tipped the shield of his helmet halfway up. “I suppose. Liviya, baby-sit the Pursuit, will you?”
While he waited, Dryke drifted back to the study, the most interesting room. When Loren joined him, he was sitting in the chair at the comsole, playing with a model of a self-lifting crane.
“Bastard got away from me again,” he said, his voice almost emotionless.
“I did a space inventory on the way through—not a very good house for playing hide-and-seek.”
“No. And I’m tired of that game.” Frowning, Dryke discarded the model on the desk. “I guess we can have Dru take a look at this, anyway.”
“Somebody’s going to have to come pick me up,” Dru reminded.
Under the weight of Dryke’s disappointment, it seemed like a major decision. “Liviya—no, better keep the flyer here. Ah, who’s in Unit Four?”
“Zabricki.”
“Just a moment.” Loren leaned closer and peered at the com-sole. “Dru? You still showing traffic on the lines into here?”
“Sure,” she answered. “The same background stuff—ad frames, financials, junk fax. Intermittent but steady.”
Puzzled, Loren swung his head toward Dryke. “Where’s it going to? This system’s not logging anything.”
“What? There must be an AIP trashing it.”
“Even that would show as activity.”
Loren and Dryke stared at each other for a long moment. Then Dryke stood and flipped his shield back down into place.
“Zabricki, Dru, stay put,” Dryke said. He raised a questioning eyebrow at Loren. “Where?”
“Down,” said Loren. “Has to be down.”
“Let’s find it.”
“Look for natural seams, inside corners. I don’t think there’s any wall volume unaccounted for. Probably in the floor.”
“Kitchen,” said Dryke, his eyes lighting up. “Parquet floor. Come on.”
The seams were almost perfect, the door almost invisible. It filled the rectangular space between the pedestal counter and the sink cabinets along one wall. Dryke stood looking down at it with hands on hips, chewing on his lower lip.
“How much do you want to bet there’s another way in?” Loren asked. “Tunnel to the woods? To the garage?”
Dryke shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s not here.” He sighed. “What do you think, voice command? Through the house AIP?”
“Probably.”
“And what else?” Dryke scanned the kitchen. “A lot of control contacts here. Some unlikely combination —”
“I can’t imagine them taking the chance of someone trying to make some toast and raising the door instead.”
“And I can’t imagine him not building in a safety net. AIPs can be corrupted.”
“We can force this,” Loren said. “There’s a power chisel in my skimmer.”
“No,” Dryke said, walking to the sink at the middle of the rectangle. “If we force it, the files are sure to be dumped.” He turned on the cold water and splashed a double handful on his face. “It wouldn’t be anything you could do by accident.”
“It wouldn’t be anything that would open it while you’re standing on it,” Loren said with a grin.
The water still running, his face still wet, Dryke stared sideways at the other man. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said slowly. He touched the sweep contact on the wall behind the sink and watched as the faucet head swiveled in a circle to sweep away particles loosened by the ultrasonics. “But all you’d need is a little interlock, a pressure sensor—”
As the sweep cycle ended, Dryke stepped back from the sink, retreating past the edge of the door. From there, stretching out across the countertop, he could barely reach the contact behind the sink. But he could reach it.
With a faint whir, the floor began to rise, the first few centimeters straight up, then canting toward Loren. Dryke jumped back and stared.
“He must have longer arms than I do.”
Loren was marveling. “Son of a bitch. How did you know where the switch was?”
“Because I know him better than I want to.”
The panel stopped rising when it made a sixty-degree angle with the rest of the floor. Beneath it was a lighted passage, a carpeted stairway.
“Stay here,” Dryke said to Loren, and started down.
He descended the stairs cautiously, the edge suddenly back in the game. Halfway down, he crouched for a peek into the room below.
Where the walls should have been, he glimpsed a golden-red desertscape, a flash of light on water, the brilliant greens of a fern-filled rain forest. The whole chamber was a tank, ten meters across, with earthscape murals playing on the shell. At the center was a large-scale table display, an interface controller with its multicolored screens, a curved desk.
And, in the high-backed chair beside the desk, a man. He was facing the stairway and looking directly at Dryke.
“Lila, begin,” said the man in the chair.
His breath still caught tight in the binding of his surprise, Dryke descended the last few steps as an automaton. The man in the chair had but a passing resemblance to Jeremiah—his face beardless and too lean, the
