Dark Time: Mortal Path (31 page)

She and Yanmeng picked food from the cartons delicately with chopsticks. Amaro used a plate and fork, dumping parts of three cartons on top of the rice on his plate. Attacked from three sides, the food didn’t stand a chance.

A
maro cleared away the remnants of the meal. “Great food. Trust a Chinese man to find the best Chinese food in town.”

“Hardly.” Yanmeng sniffed. “It was the best in a three-block radius. I didn’t feel like going any farther.”

Maliha’s fortune cookie said YOU WILL BE LUCKY IN LOVE
.
She slipped it into the pocket of her robe without letting the others see it.

In the living room, Yanmeng slid in a fluid movement to the floor, into a lotus position. Amaro stretched out full length on one of the sofas, and Maliha curled up in a soft upholstered chair.

“You first,” Amaro said.

She took them through her invasion of ShaleTech. She included the safe and the control room, and minimized her narrow escape. She said nothing about meeting Jake in the barn—she still didn’t know what to think of that herself.

Her heart was saying
Jake Jake Jake
and she told it to shut up.

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2009-08-25 02:50

She talked about Cocomo, her encounter with Subedei, and what little she knew about Project CESR. “Well, that’s a thorough debriefing. Unless you’d like to question me for hours now with a bright light shining in my face.”

It wouldn’t be the first time.

“How’s your leg?” Yanmeng asked. She’d mentioned that Subedei had put a throwing star in her thigh.

She pulled up her robe to look at the wound. It was clean from the shower, and she’d pulled the smoothly sliced edges together with a few butterfly bandages. She pressed a finger next to it experimentally and found that it hurt quite a bit. Ignoring pain was a plus in her business.

“No problem. I’ll be fine in a day.” She looked up to find both of her friends with their heads turned away. “Hey, what’s the deal? It’s just a cut. I’ve had much worse.”

“It’s, uh, the location of the cut,” Amaro said.

“Prudes.” She lowered her robe. “What have you got?”

“I’ve been digging for information on Project CESR,” Yanmeng said. “Two words keep turning up in the same sentence.
Energy
and
national security
. That’s as far as it gets.”

“That fits with Cocomo being involved, since he was with the DHS,” she said.

“I’ve been going over the photos you took in Greg Shale’s office,” Amaro said. “I want you to see some of them.”

He went to the table, and the other two followed to look at the slideshow he’d prepared. A ledger page filled the laptop’s screen. Yanmeng slipped on a pair of reading glasses, reminding Maliha that her friend was getting on in years—something she didn’t like to contemplate.

“I compared these records with the company’s annual report that goes to shareholders and its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the ones that don’t have the glossy pictures like the annual report,” Amaro said. “ShaleTech should issue a pair of rose-colored glasses with every report they mail out. They’re reporting that profits from the sale of electrical, gas, coal, and nuclear power-control systems are at record levels.”

“What are power-control systems?” Maliha asked.

“Motor controls. Circuit breakers. Transformers. Computers that manage substations and the software that goes with them. Things that go inside power stations that nobody knows or cares about except the people who work there.”

“So those rooms I saw on the monitors are real control rooms somewhere.”

Amaro nodded.

“In reality ShaleTech has a major new competitor that is siphoning off a good share of the market.

The phony ledgers are claiming that ShaleTech has retained most of the market share now held by the competitor, Youngman Systems. ShaleTech is operating in the red. I wonder how many people know about it.”

Amaro put up a succession of photos on his laptop that showed the interiors of clean, white rooms.

He stopped at one and pointed at it with a pencil. “See that clock on the wall there? If Maliha was in Greg’s office between two and two thirty in the morning”—he looked at her and she nodded—“then this room in the photo is in the Pacific time zone. There are a few other small clues in the photos to indicate they’re scattered around the country. Clues like food wrappers and soda cups from regional restaurants.

For example,”—he flipped through several more photos and stopped at one with a blue-and-white soft-drink cup visible outside the room through a window. He tapped at the image of the cup—“Culver’s restaurants are mostly in the Midwest.”

“Downers Grove. There’s one right here in the western suburbs.”

They both looked at her.

“What? I like them. If you’ve never had a ButterBurger, you’re in for a treat.”

Yanmeng’s nose wrinkled. “This from the woman who’s eaten in the world’s finest restaurants?”

“I’ve also eaten roasted camel’s feet. I’ll take a ButterBurger over those any day.”

The conversation deteriorated from there. Maliha left the two of them arguing about the weirdest foods they’d eaten and went to bed.

She was still unaccustomed to waking up with someone else in her condo—two someones.

When she left her bedroom in the morning, Yanmeng was doing a martial-arts workout in the living room. Amaro was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, eating croissants, and reading the
Sunday
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2009-08-25 02:50

Tribune
. When he saw her, he pointed to his cup of coffee.

“Jesus Christ! Did you know that your coffee has been through the bowels of some jungle animal?”

“The secret’s out.” He’d evidently found an unopened package of coffee in the cabinet and read the description. “You’ve been drinking Kopi Luwak for a long time, you know, and thought it was good.”

He sniffed. “I bought some decent coffee at the market downstairs, and a convenient way to make it, too. No need for mess and measuring.” He sounded like he was parroting the clerk. “And I guarantee no animal shit it out before I brewed it.”

She glanced over at the countertop. Her coffee things had been shoved aside, and there was a one-cup-at-a-time brewer in their place.

“The coffee comes in pods. I bought Hazelnut Crème. Want a taste?” He offered her his own cup.

Maliha was tempted to pick him up bodily and toss him into the hall. Instead she walked into the kitchen, pushed the new machine out of the way, and started her own coffee brewing.

“If you don’t like the new coffee, you can just say so. My feelings won’t be hurt.” Amaro frowned in spite of his words.

Yanmeng, supposedly absorbed in his exercise, had a big smile on his face.

“I’ll just leave this here,” she gestured at the stainless-steel invader on her counter, “for you to use when you visit.”

“Well, that’s pretty fucking clear.” Small puffs of red had appeared on Amaro’s cheeks. “You didn’t even try it. Don’t expect me to do you any more favors.”

She sat down and bit into a buttery croissant. At least he’d gotten them from her usual bakery.

“I want to talk about getting back into ShaleTech,” she said between bites. “There’s more for me to learn there. I believe there’s a lot more behind that security door than that one small control room.”

She drew a sketch on the back of the bag Amaro had used to bring his treasures home from the market. From memory, she drew the plan for the seventh floor of the building, starting from the elevator area where the guard’s desk was. On the left side of the hallway leading from the elevator there were numerous doors, most of them with glass to see inside. She drew the positions of several labs that she’d seen through the small windows. The dojo and the dining room filled out the end of the left side of the hallway.

Yanmeng came over and stood beside her, and she picked up the unique smell he had after exercise, which she’d noticed all the way back when she’d first sparred with him. He didn’t smell like the usual male sweat. Instead it was a smell like freshly turned earth, damp from a spring rain and now lying in the sun.

Even if Yanmeng lived to be an improbable 125 years old, that was just fifty years from now. That was about the time elapsed since she’d ceased to be Ageless and set her feet on the mortal path.

I have never let people be close to me, or me to them, until now. How will I deal with it when a
friend I love dies?

Impulsively, she put her hand on Yanmeng’s arm. He looked at her with a question in his eyes, but she just shook her head a little.

Not good to dwell on such things, especially now. I may not outlive him, and it would be Yanmeng
doing the grieving, and Amaro and Rosie. And Hound. Jake, too?

That was such a foreign thought that it froze her in place. Emotion must have shown on her face, because Yanmeng reached out and caressed her cheek.

“All right, you two, cut out the mushy stuff. Or let me in on it.” Amaro tapped the diagram Maliha had drawn on the paper bag. “What’s on the other side of the hall?”

Maliha brought herself back to the discussion. She drew Greg’s office and the control room on the right side at the end of the hall, opposite the dojo and dining room. She finished with an arrow from the elevator to the control room on the right side of the hall. “There’s nothing here. No doors. Not so much as a mouse hole.”

“So you think that almost the entire length of the hall is connected to the back end of the control room, and not accessible any other way?” Yanmeng asked.

“Yes.” Maliha’s brow furrowed as she thought about her time in the building. “When I was in the ventilation system, there were no branches that headed in that direction. I’m sure of it.”

“So there’s a self-contained area of the building there, with its own heating and cooling and probably water, too,” Amaro said.

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“And electrical supply, probably,” Yanmeng said. “Do you know if the private area extends the full height of the building, up and down from the seventh floor?”

Maliha shook her head. “No way to know. There are windows on those floors, looking at the building from the outside, but that’s an elaborate setup there. They could be dummy windows, just leading to an internal hallway or atrium space.”

Amaro’s eyes gleamed. “Holy cow. A secret building within a building.”

“I have got to see this place,” she said.

“Since you blew the door off the control room, there’s bound to be much heavier security there now,” Yanmeng said.

“There has to be an entrance other than the control room. Or I should say, an exit. What if there was a fire or the control room was taken over by hostiles?”

“We need a blueprint of the building,” Amaro said. “That’s Kane County, isn’t it?”

Maliha nodded. “Check public records. Another approach might be to look into who cleans that section. Dusts the desks, empties the trash.”

“We’ve got our work cut out for us today,” Yanmeng said. He went over to the kitchen counter and pointedly poured a cup of the coffee Maliha had brewed.

Amaro’s lips pinched together. “I’m sticking to Hazelnut Crème. At least I know where a damn hazelnut comes from.”

M
aliha crossed her legs, a tough thing to do with any degree of modesty in a short, tight dress, but she wasn’t aiming for modesty. She was in the office of Victor Carding, the owner of SecureClean, Inc.

Victor’s eyes shifted between her breasts and her thighs.

“I’m sure you appreciate the position I’m in, Mr. Carding,” Maliha purred.

He’s thinking of me in a different position, though.
“The board won’t approve a contract with SecureClean unless I verify the trustworthiness of the employees,” she continued.

She’d approached the owner with a lucrative offer for a cleaning contract for a new building under construction about ten miles from ShaleTech. The building was real; her connection with it wasn’t.

“I should think a list of our clients would be sufficient reference. We work in the most secure buildings in a six-county region.”

Among them, ShaleTech.

“I’m aware of that.” Maliha slowly recrossed her legs. “Our needs are comparable to, say, Nanoscale Instruments, Laymont International, or Shale Technology Services. How are the crews assigned to those systems verified?”

“The crews for Nanoscale and Laymont are screened for trustworthiness. ShaleTech has a higher standard. One thing to keep in mind is our low turnover rate among employees, far less than industry standard. We recruit with long-term retention in mind, and the pay and benefits are outstanding in this field. Our crews have years of experience and reliability under their belts.”

“It sounds like our needs match ShaleTech’s. Would our crew be the same people used in ShaleTech, or would you be recruiting new staff for our building?”

“There might be some minor overlap of staff until we could ramp up hiring. A few highly reliable supervisors, some handpicked staff, perhaps. I’d say there would be an overlap period of eighteen months or so. It takes that long to get the security clearance needed. You did say you’d be sponsored by the Department of Defense, correct?”

“Right. Then we’d be getting the least-experienced people, the new hires, rather than the most experienced. I don’t think that would be acceptable to the board. Can you siphon off some of the ShaleTech staff permanently?” Maliha leaned forward and placed her hand on the desk, making sure Victor got a good look down her dress.

“That might be possible.” There was a catch in his voice, as though he were agreeing to something else.

“Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ll need a list of the ShaleTech crew. The board might like to investigate them and ask for those who meet our specifications.”

“We’d have to be farther along in contract negotiations for something like that, Ms. Ball.” He tugged at his shirt collar with one finger. “The more that I think about it, I believe we wouldn’t be able to provide 106 z 138