 |
 |
|
|
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] point for now, and came back out of the office to the secretarial area. Carol, could you pull out a few things for Mr. Jeffreys, Garsten said to the brunette who had been there when Corfe went in. He handed her the list that he had jotted down. Then the phone rang in the office behind him. That s probably somebody I ve been expecting, he told Corfe. Excuse me, but I ll have to leave you. Carol will show you out. And with that, he went back into his office and closed the door. Busy guy, Corfe commented, casually taking in the surroundings while Carol rummaged in her desk and on a shelf behind. It can get hectic. This is nothing, really. . . . Oh, it looks like I m out of MTL4s. I ll see if there are any left next door. Back in a second. She went out into the hall, and Corfe heard her call something to Lisa. The other chair in the room was still empty. Corfe was left Page 111 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html on his own. He blinked. Breaks like this didn t happen every day. In that case, all the more reason to make the best of them when they did. He looked around frantically. A wooden cabinet of drawers stood by the wall behind the desks, below several shelves carrying books, journals, card indexes, and various office accessories. Between the cabinet and the far corner was a worktop with storage below for stationery supplies and assorted boxes. Stooping and peering in, Corfe saw there was an awkward-to-reach space back in the corner, where several cleaning cloths, several old binders, a broken Rolodex, and other odd items had been pushed in a jumble. He reached inside the bookstore bag that he was carrying and produced from it another, folded bag containing the mecs that he had brought with him to hide. The package included two telebots and an assortment of tools, besides the several smaller models that he and Kevin had agreed on as a minimum initial task force. He dropped onto one knee and placed the bag at the back of the space, out of sight behind the other things, and straightened up again quickly. There were enough books left in the bag that he was still holding to leave it unchanged in outward appearance. When Carol came back, he was back by the door, admiring a print of a 19th century schooner. Corfe returned to the van, which he had left in a parking lot a few blocks away. From a console inside it, he activated one of the smallest mecs in the package that he had left behind, and in the course of the lunch hour was able to direct it up onto the worktop, and from there to a recess in the mounting bracket of a wall lamp, high up in the room where it would be unlikely to be noticed for the rest of the day. He then changed channels to activate another mec, and placed that one among the leaves of a potted plant on top of a file cabinet on the opposite side of the room. The second also contained an acoustic system that a couple of the engineers at Neurodyne were experimenting with, adapted from Kevin and Taki s models, and could thus pick up sound. Corfe left their transmissions on auto record and went off on foot to spend the afternoon amusing himself in the city. From the positions that Corfe had selected, the two mecs commanded a clear line of sight to both of the secretaries terminals and keyboards. The result was that by the time Corfe collected the van and left toward the end of the afternoon, he had not only successfully infiltrated the devices needed to commence the operation tomorrow, but he also had on tape the full sequences of codes and passwords for accessing Garsten s system. He also had an audio record of a lot of gossip and personal secrets between Garsten s two secretaries some of it quite entertaining, but nothing immediately relevant to his purpose. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Kevin peered into a deep, crawl-size passage with floor and sides of streaky yellowish metal plastered with globs of oily mud. The ceiling consisted of massive, square-cut slabs of the same metal, set at varying heights along the length of the passage. All but the one nearest to him were wedged with props sawn exactly to length from pieces of paperclip. Reaching in with an arm, he braced one of his steel-jointed hands underneath the last pin of the lock in the old two-drawer file cabinet in Taki s workshop, and moved it upward in its guide, stopping every few inches at least, what seemed to him to be inches to work it experimentally to and fro and from side to side. He felt the friction reduce suddenly, and the lateral play increase. The top of the pin was at the shear line, where it would normally be positioned by its particular notch on the key. Unaided human fingers wouldn t have felt the change without years of training and practice. But to somebody mec- size, it felt like a boat lifting onto the water as it was pushed off a beach. Kevin used the scale that he had marked on a steel sliver to measure the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |