Part 2 (2/2)

'We've got a work order to install this Lisp box,' Bob explained. 'Can you just sign at the bottom here? Thanks.' He showed her the invoice the Keyworth Computers woman had given them, now attached to a plastic clipboard. 'OK, where do you want it?'

'The compute centre is on the first floor,' said the receptionist. Peri coughed behind her hand, checking that her moustache was still in place.

She helped Bob lug the box to the computer room, both of them following the receptionist, who seemed perfectly comfortable with the whole thing. Thieves were hardly going to roll up and give the company free machines, were they?

Peri wondered if they could have left out a step and just arrived with a cardboard box full of bricks. But then, they wouldn't have had the paperwork or the official company logo on the carton.

And then he and Peri were alone in the 'compute centre'.

It was quiet and noisy at the same time, full of the hum of air conditioning, and cold enough to make the tiny hairs on Peri's arms p.r.i.c.kle. The room was white, spotless, filled with neat rows of big grey boxes.

'I'd better get working,' said Bob. They wheeled the wobbling trolley down a row of machines, until he found one he liked.

'What's gonna happen when someone comes along and discovers this brand-new machine they didn't order?' said Peri.

'We're doing them a favour,' said Bob, extracting an artist's knife from the pocket of his overalls. 'This baby is top of the range. Hi-res graphics display. Stereo sound. A mouse!

Who's gonna complain?'

Peri sighed. It was all annoyingly familiar being dragged into unlikely and hazardous situations by someone with too much confidence and not enough interest in explanations. It must be some Freudian thing she had. Or maybe all the Doctor's friends were like this.

While Bob worked, Peri paced the perimeter of the computer centre, hoping to find a locked door, a NO ENTRY sign, something suggesting secrecy. There was a closet full of big computer tapes in metal canisters, but it wasn't even locked. As she walked along the rows of boxes, Bob appeared and disappeared from her line of sight. From time to time she heard him banging and thumping, or muttering to himself.

The constant noise of the room whited out most sounds: Peri saw, but she didn't hear the sliding doors swish open. She ducked behind one of the computers.

'What are you doing here?' said the woman's voice crisply. It wasn't the receptionist. Peri had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who it was. She heard a bang and crash as though Bob had dropped something.

'I understood this was an urgent order, ma'am.'

Peri peeked out from her hiding place for a moment. Swan was examining the invoice on the clipboard. This is it, Peri thought, there was never any way we could have got away with this, I'm wearing a fake moustache, for G.o.d's sake. She was tempted to rip the thing off right away so at least she wouldn't be arrested in drag.

But Swan didn't seem to find anything wrong with the invoice: She put the clipboard back down on top of the box where Bob had perched it.

And then she watched him set up the Lisp Machine. For the next forty minutes.

Peri thought of hiding behind the nearest door a closet filled with huge plastic bottles that reeked of noxious chemicals. She decided to stay where she was, crouched behind the tall grey box.

Her mind flashed forward to the consequences: kicked out of college, shot by the security guard, having to tell her parents. Having to keep running forever, never being able to go home. Somehow it was more frightening than ravening carnivores or rivers of lava. It was more real.

She could make a break for it. After so long in the Doctor's company, she was an expert at the mad sprint to safety. She could be out that sliding door and out of the building before anyone could stop het But that would leave Bob to be the fall guy.

'All done, ma'am,' she heard Bob say at last, rather too loudly Swan replied, but Peri couldn't make out what she was saying. , They spoke for a few moments; she got the impression Bob was stalling, not sure where the h.e.l.l Peri was or what she was going to do. She had no choice but to stay hidden until she saw Bob wheel the empty carton out of the compute centre, a stony-faced Swan at his heels.

She waited five minutes and then sauntered out of the compute centre. She took the stairwell by the lifts down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, and walked out a side door into the parking lot. Bob was waiting in the van across the street, craning his neck, looking for her. She forced herself to stroll across the road instead of bolting.

What she didn't know was: Sarah Swan stood behind a venetian blind on the second floor of the TLA building, the lens of her camera wedged between two of the slats. She adjusted the zoom. There. The young man was getting into his car and here came a second overalled figure, apparently out of the TLA building, crossing the street and joining him.

They exchanged a few words, and then took off. Sarah's camera clicked rapidly as she tried to grab an image of their numberplate. Any number would do a phone number, a social security number. Once Sarah had it, she had your fingerprints. She could find you, find out anything she wanted to know about you.

Sarah waited a few minutes, but the young couple had had a good scare: they wouldn't be back. She went downstairs.

'Back in half an hour, Alice,' she told the receptionist. 'I just have to take some film to the lab.'

20.

One.

Trina told me all about it at the bar that night. She's an English girl with a fetching lisp and even more fetching hips. We had been dating on and off for a couple of years, ever since I wrote a report on data-diddling by one of Keyworth's employees.

'Hey, Chickpea,' she said on the phone, 'Buy me a couple of drinks to help celebrate not losing my job, and I'll tell you all about it. Could be a good story.'

I'd come to the States five years ago after a magazine job in Sydney went sour. Two years in LA, not so far from home.

Then that little incident that sent me running for the east coast.

I'd been in Was.h.i.+ngton DC ever since, and I liked it there.

Was.h.i.+ngton is a beautiful bad apple, pretty and fresh on the outside, but when you bite into it, rotten at the core. It's a cesspool of poverty, crime, and drugs surrounded by green suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the two worlds separated by the giant loop of the Beltway. I've seen a grown man nearly panic when a wrong turn took us into a 'bad area' of town. When I first moved into a house in Vuginia, my next-door neighbour confided that he kept a shotgun in case pardon my language n.i.g.g.e.rs came from the city to steal his stuff.

I prefer the grid of streets at DC's core to the Disneyland of strip malls and bloated houses in the burbs. So did Trina, who had grown up in Cowgate. I fell in love with her the night I saw her wallop a h.e.l.l's Angel for making a mess of the bar she was tending. The guy was too dazed and embarra.s.sed to do anything but stumble out to his bike. The next day, Trina applied for the receptionist's job at Keyworth. 'I'm getting too old for this s.h.i.+t,' she told me. She was twenty-two.

We got a couple of steaks and a lot of Fosters and she gave me the story. When the courier didn't arrive, Trina quickly realised something was wrong, and she called TLA to find out what was going on. Swan checked up on the mystery delivery right away and and insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever happened. insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever happened.

'The thing I can't work out' said Trina, 'is that I called them right away to make sure the order was legit.'

'The fakes could have given you any number,' I said.

'Even a payphone number.'

She gave me a withering look. 'I checked the number against my own Rolodex, she said. 'It was genuine. In fact, I remember calling it a couple of times before.'

'Are you going to finish those mashed potatoes?' Trina shrugged. I helped myself to a forkful. 'They must have re-routed the call. They probably broke into the company's PBX and forwarded that number to their own phone.'

'So what the h.e.l.l were they trying to do?' said Trina.

'Swan thought they wanted to use the drive to hide a program on her systems. She went over it with a fine-tooth comb.'

'Once they got into the computer centre, they could have done just about anything. Stolen research. Slipped a Doctored backup tape in amongst the real ones so the computer would write them some big fat checks.

Trina shook her head. 'They checked all of that. They lost like a day's work making sure everything was the way it should be. Nothing got changed or stolen.'

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