BETA - Project Avatar, page 31
“Have it your way,” Cecilia said grudgingly. “What a bunch of heartbreakers my whole family turned out to be! I’m the only one in the bunch with even a speck of responsibility.”
“We’re lucky to have you.”
“Even a molecule,” Cecilia added emphatically. “Listen to me, girl. You are not—get that? Not!—allowed to get yourself killed. And you will call me by Sunday.”
With a sinking feeling, Dee repeated her hollow promise. Then she pried a good-bye out of Cecilia, and they hung up.
She checked the dead drop and found Abe’s response. Lygia was fine and had informed him of the failed rendezvous. She skipped over some histrionics about how worried he had been and how glad he was to hear she was okay. At the end of all this, he gave her what she needed: an address in Ipanema—the alternate site for a meet with Lygia.
Dee stood up and paid, then went outside and hailed a cab.
She spent the next hour in dense traffic. The Avenida Atlantica was an endless line of buses, and even on the back streets, the cab could progress no faster than walking speed. Ronaldo was right, she thought to herself.
At last, the taxi let her off in front of a skinny, sooty, anonymous-looking cinder-block apartment building. Its balconies faced the cliffs, not the sea, and any potted plants or statuary were hidden behind skeins of laundry line.
Dee found her address, apartment 5, listed beside a buzzer button with no name in the brass slot beside it. When she pushed the button, no voice came through the intercom, but the security gate buzzed immediately, letting her in. She hesitated and then realized that Lygia must have been watching her approach the building.
Lygia Magela turned out to be a slight, birdlike woman, both shorter and older then she seemed from a distance, up on Corcovado. She answered the door with a nervous, guilty look at Dee, then glanced up and down the corridor. She waved Dee inside, shooing her before her with both hands as she might a dawdling child.
She bolted them into a small, cozy apartment on the second floor. “My grandmother has owned this apartment forever and ever,” she said in fairly good English. “I don’t think anyone knows that I stay here sometimes, so we should be safe. If you were not followed?”
Dee assured her that was unlikely, but Lygia didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was busy looking Dee over. In fact, she reached out and grasped her gently by the shoulders and turned her around for a three-hundred-sixty-degree examination.
“This is a beautiful dress. I wish I could wear clothes like this.”
Dee blushed and smiled. Then she said, “Lygia, it’s very kind of you to see me, especially under the circumstances. I’m sure that Abe told you I’ve come to Brazil to find out about XCorp do Sul?”
“Yes, but he didn’t say why. Here, come over and sit down.”
“Thank you. I can’t tell you all the details, but I think XCorp is trying to steal some software. It’s commercial software, but they want to use it for some sort of military purpose. They believe I have a copy of it, and they’ve sent some people to steal it from me. We have also uncovered details of a . . . an operation that we believe XCorp might be involved in. I must verify whether they’re involved and whether it has anything to do with the software they’re trying to steal.”
Lygia accepted this information with a slight narrowing of her placid black eyes. She gave Dee a pointed look and conspicuously avoided asking whether she had a copy of the fateful software.
“This sounds very much like an affair of XCorp do Sul,” she said, with restrained venom. “This is a company that has been involved with some terrible things. You know, their office in Centro is very secure. Like a government installation. You can’t just walk in there and start asking questions.”
Dee nodded. “It wouldn’t do me any good, anyway—I imagine it might even get me killed. I need to find the name of someone in the company who knows answers, and then I must arrange to confront him privately. Of course, he wouldn’t just hand over such information—unless his life depended on it.”
Lygia’s eyes widened incredulously. She leaned back and gave Dee a slow, exaggerated look up and down. “But . . . this sounds very dangerous.”
“Well, yes. Even so, it’s less dangerous than waiting around until assassins come after me again.”
Lygia smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand and muttered something rapidly to herself in Portuguese. “So you will need a gun.”
Dee dropped her eyes to the carpet. She had finally accepted this obvious fact, but since she had no idea how to obtain one—or, for that matter, use one—she had put off thinking about it.
Lygia stood up and removed a seascape painting from one wall, revealing a small safe behind it. She worked the combination and then reached with a handkerchief into the small, dark chamber behind the thick steel door and extracted an improbably large semiautomatic pistol. She was careful not to get fingerprints on it.
“This gun, it belonged to my grandfather. He is dead now, and I don’t think it was ever registered. Here, this box has some ammunition.”
“I can’t carry that!” Dee gave a dry laugh at the absurdity of the notion. “What is it?”
“Go on, take it. It’s American. It’s a fifty-caliber Desert Eagle. Remember, if you shoot it, you must hold it with both hands. I shot it once out in the countryside, at my grandfather’s ranch, and it nearly broke my arm.”
Dee glumly accepted the gigantic handgun, which weighed about as much as an unabridged dictionary. “I don’t even think I can lift it in one hand.” As she tucked it away in her shoulder bag, she thought wryly that at least Beta ought to be pleased.
“The man you must talk to is Moacir Botelho,” Lygia said. “He is a director at XCorp do Sul, and I think he is always involved in the military and the government contracts. He has a bad reputation. Very . . . how do you say this? Unsavory? His home is in Leblon. It is large and easy to find. I’m going to mark it for you on this map, right here.”
“Thank you so much, Lygia,” Dee said. “But then I had better go. You’ve already taken more than enough risks for me.”
With a felt pen, Lygia made a dot on a tattered map, and then handed the map to Dee. Then she shook her head ruefully and, muttering in Portuguese, made the sign of the cross in the air between them.
Chapter 31
At three in the morning, the sound of revelry was still rolling up the hills from the sidewalk bars and nightclubs of Leblon. But the streets around Dee were silent, and she did nothing to break the stillness as she walked briskly up the empty sidewalk of a winding road lined with the sumptuous retreats of the rich.
She looked like someone who belonged: a well-heeled young lady in a festive and elegant gray maxi, toting a fashionable (if a bit scuffed) black leather shoulder bag and a slightly incongruous sports duffel in matching charcoal gray. A young lady returning to the mansion of her rich father or husband after a night’s recreation in Leblon.
“Twenty more meters,” Beta said in her ear, in its usual matter-of-fact tone.
She was so nervous, she feared she might lose her footing and stumble on the sidewalk. For that reason, she strode firmly and kept her face a blank mask of aloof self-assurance.
“Are you sure I have to do this?” she whispered, her voice wobbling a little.
“Current activities maximize the probability of achieving your stated objectives,” Beta replied. “Have your objectives changed?”
“No,” she grumbled.
“You are now in front of the Botelho property. Seek concealment in a deeply shadowed location.”
Dee glanced around surreptitiously. No one was on the sidewalk, and all the houses along this lengthy block were fronted with tall security walls and hedges. Quite a contrast with the desperate poverty of the favelas, not far away.
A huge, spreading fig tree a few yards ahead offered plenty of shadowy cover between the sidewalk and the high brick wall surrounding Moacir Botelho’s mansion. She walked up to the tree casually, looked around one more time, then took a furtive sidestep into the shadows behind it.
That was it. Now she was committed.
She had barely unzipped the sports bag when a black Land Rover roared up the street and passed within a couple of yards of her hiding spot. Steel caging was bolted over its front windshield and rear window. Dee couldn’t read the logo on the door, but Lygia had warned her about the private security patrols. The residents of wealthy neighborhoods in Brazilian cities often hired paramilitary security teams to patrol their neighborhoods, sporting automatic weapons that they were notoriously eager to use.
When the Land Rover had disappeared around the bend, she unzipped her dress and shucked it off in a single smooth motion. Then, rolling down the sleeves and leggings of the jet black Lycra bodysuit she wore underneath, she folded the dress into the bag and pulled on a pair of black gloves and a ski mask.
“This is stupid,” she whispered, pulling on the mask. “I feel like I’m dressing for Halloween.”
“I don’t understand the command. Would you like to hear a menu?”
“No. I’m climbing the wall now.”
“Advance to the top of the wall and look over. Do not advance farther until surveillance is complete.”
It was easy scaling the twelve-foot wall, chimneying between it and the roughly noded trunk of the fig tree. In a few seconds, she was perched on the wall, with her two dark bags slung across her back. Up here she was just another shadow, part of the darkened foliage.
“It’s exactly as you said,” she told Beta quietly. “The security fence is maybe seven or eight feet away, parallel to the wall. Lots of barbed wire at the top. But I don’t see the dogs.”
The immense yard was well lit with halogen lamps, and behind it stood a beautiful Victorian mansion with a mansard roof. To her left she could see a swimming pool, croquet lawn and behind it, an expansive rose garden. The dog run was obvious enough: the sod between the outer wall and the security fence had a path beaten into it several inches deep, from their restless pacing.
“Oh! Now I see them. They’re coming this way.”
Two immense and rather bored-looking mastiffs came around the corner of the fence, trotting their familiar trail and presumably looking for something entertaining to tear to shreds. They didn’t seem to have noticed her yet.
“Administer the soporific.”
Dee was already fishing around in her bag. “I’m way ahead of you.” Pulling out a large plastic bag of raw meatballs, she opened the bag, flung the meatballs over the wall, and ducked back down into the shadows.
For the next twenty minutes she waited, forcing herself to relax until she was quite certain the dogs had settled down for a snooze. What lay ahead was going to be hard enough without the worrisome prospect of being dismembered by ferocious animals. The minutes crawled by impossibly slowly, but without incident.
“I’m going in.”
She looked over the wall and saw one of the mastiffs lying on its side, looking dead to the world. Rolling her legs over the top of the wall, she dropped lightly to the well-trodden ground. As she landed, the huge dog made a low grunting noise, and she froze in terror. Turning slowly, she looked at the huge shape behind her. It was still lying on its side, asleep, its enormous paws making rhythmic little running movements. She had just calmed down when the sound of Beta’s voice in her ear gave her another jolt.
“Turn left and advance 17.3 meters. Do not touch the four-hundred-forty-volt fence for any reason.”
All this nagging irritated Dee, but she was too terrified to respond, even in a whisper. She knew that the fence had a vibration response system and that touching it would trigger the building’s alarms. Inside the fence, the yard was surely free of optical motion sensors, because the dogs were always out on patrol. Plenty of light filled the runway and if anyone happened to be looking through the windows or monitoring security camera footage, she was right there for them to see.
She jogged a few paces along the length of the fence, hunched over in a furtive attitude even though she knew rationally that hunching didn’t help anything. She stopped.
“Advance another 1.6 meters.”
She took two more steps.
“You are now twenty centimeters south-southwest of the relay switchbox,” Beta told her.
Dee dropped to her hands and knees, fished a garden trowel out of her duffel bag, and started digging as fast as she could. About a foot under the surface of the soil, the trowel blade tapped the corner of a metal box. Hyperventilating a bit with anxiety, she exposed the top of the box, and the two electrical conduits connecting to it from either side. Then, rolling out a cloth toolkit, she selected a screwdriver and quickly opened the metal lid.
“I’ve got it open,” she hissed, looking around the yard. So far, it seemed, no one had noticed her.
“Open the plastic junction box. Remove the black wire, then the red wire. Be sure to remove the black wire first. Then exchange the wires and make sure they are seated firmly.”
The plastic junction box was easy enough to find. It was right there, with most of the alarm system’s wires running in and out of it. Dee popped open the lid and shined a penlight into the clump of wiring.
“That was red first?”
“Be sure to remove the black wire first.”
“I’m just messing with you. There, it’s done. Now what?”
“This section of fence is now in bypass mode and can be safely touched. Advance another 5.5 meters along the fence.”
Dee gathered her things and obeyed, making her best guess on the distance. After she had gone a few steps, it was obvious enough where Beta wanted her to be. A juniper tree on the other side of the fence created a blind spot where none of the security cameras could see her. She felt a wave of relief as she crouched down behind it.
Taking a small pair of bolt cutters out of the duffel, she began snipping the chain-link fence. It proved to be much harder work then she would have thought, and each link popped apart with a horrific twang. She could see the doghouse now, and the other mastiff, lying on its side in front of it, breathing deeply. With each snap of wire, she looked at each of the massive dogs. But from the look of it, they might have been able to sleep through an artillery barrage.
“I’m going through.”
“Advance along the fence toward the main building, using vegetation for cover wherever possible.”
Dee wiggled on her belly through the small breach in the fence, got to her feet, and sprinted across the brightly lit edge of the lawn to a bed of flowering shrubs. She half walked, half crawled through the shadowy space behind the greenery until she came to the edge of the building.
Crouching in the shadows, she craned her neck up and looked for the best route of entry into the house. Behind an ornate fence about fifteen yards to her left, in the pool area, a man dressed in black was prowling around. He had a large gun strapped over his shoulder. She wondered how many security guards the house had.
“Access to the second floor is achievable using the window directly above you,” Beta instructed her.
Dee nodded to herself: she had been thinking the same thing. When the poolside guard had disappeared from view, she ran over to the side of the house. Using the drainpipe and ornamental stonework, she scrambled up onto the first-floor windowsill, then wedged a foot between the iron drainpipe and the wall and worked her way up onto the broad lintel on top of the window. From there, she tugged gently at a hinged, leaded window above her, on the second floor.
To her relief, it swung open easily. In a couple of seconds, she was up on its sill. She carefully placed her feet inside, then shifted her weight onto the carpet of the darkened hallway.
“You are now inside the building,” Beta said.
Resisting the temptation to make a sarcastic reply, she moved silently away from the window’s silhouetting light.
“While you are approaching the target, do not use speech recognition functions. Please use the keyboard.”
Dee hadn’t thought of that. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out her smartphone. She flicked on the screen and typed in:
Which way?
“Advance along the hallway with maximum stealth. Open the first door on the left, and report the function of the room,” Beta said in her ear.
She tiptoed to the first door, thinking these instructions over and wondering if she understood what “function of the room” meant. She pushed the door open a few inches, peeked inside, then typed,
Library
“Advance to the nearest door on the opposite side of the hall and repeat the procedure.”
She opened and closed her hands to quell their shaking. If she kept this up much longer, she was going to barge in on somebody. Even so, she crossed the hall and opened the door. She typed,
Office
“I am now entering calculation mode. Please wait.”
So Dee found herself standing there, in almost perfect darkness, on the second floor of a stranger’s home—a well-fortified and, by all accounts, a potentially violent stranger—waiting for her computer to finish some kind of unspecified calculation. The seconds ticked by.
“Comparison of 1.2 times ten to the fourth blueprints and floor plans indicates a seventy-four percent chance that the master bedroom is the third door on the left. There is an eighty-three percent chance that the occupant is alone. There is a seventeen percent chance of armed bodyguards on this floor. There is a ninety-two percent chance of armed bodyguards on the ground floor. Advance rapidly but with caution.”
Taking a long, deep breath, she told herself that the odds didn’t sound all that bad—probably at least as good as she had any right to expect. Still, it would be nice if something would occasionally come up a hundred percent certain, one way or the other.
She tiptoed along the carpeted hall and stopped in front of the third door. When she carefully turned the knob, it opened without resistance. The heavy door swung slowly inward without the slightest creak, on smooth hinges of oiled brass.
