"Laura Anne Gilman - Retrievers 01 - Staying Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Laura Anne)

markedтАж the ceiling. Wren scanned upward, squinting against the overhead light, and let out a soft
triumphant "hah!" There, up on the ceiling behind her, by the door. A faint streak, difficult to find even if
you knew where and how to look for it. Wren did a rough calculation and decided that if you followed
the end of the streak down and at an angle, it would point directly to where the northeast cornerstone
was laid.

"Now, how did you get up thereтАж and is it worth my time to go up and check you out?"

Probably not, she decided. Maybe later, if need be. But for now, the evidence was enough. Nobody
was going to go up there and erase it, after all. Not without leaving even more trace for her to follow.

Something beeped. Rafe excused himself, going off into the far corner to talk into his walkie-talkie. He
looked upset. Somebody must have seen him snatching the water, she thought with an evil grin.

Nodding to the morning guard at his station, she stopped so that he could compare the code of her
temporary security pass against the list in the computer.

"Anyone else come in last night with a visitor's pass?" Overlook nothing; assume the perp was either
insanely clever or astonishingly dumb. You never knew when a simple question could get you an
important answer.

"Nope. Heard there was a problem last night?" The guard was a short black guy in a standard-issue
polyester blue jacket and tie a shade darker than Rafe's. Although the tie might have been silkтАФhe
looked like a guy who would upgrade when possible. He sat the long security desk like a command
center. Which, based on the number of blinking lights and constantly-changing screens set into the
five-foot-wide surface, it was. Like something out ofStar Trek , only without the nifty beeps and pings
and whirring red alerts. This console was sleek and silent, even when a knob flicked red. He glanced at
it, flipped a switch, and corrected whatever the problem was, all without taking his attention off her.

"You asking me, or telling me?" Wren asked. She heard the hardness in her voice, and winced inwardly,
trying to tone it down a little. Don't antagonize the witnesses, you idiot! A slight cock of the head to the
right, like the bird she was nicknamed for, and a faint smile that could be mistaken for encouragement
softened her words.

It worked enough to take the edge off his initial reaction. "They told me there was going to be a full-scale
shakedown later today. That says trouble."

She nodded, shifting her weight slightly to convey interest, and a willingness to hang around and listen to
him for as long as he wanted to talk.

"And it had to be last night," the guardтАФhis name tag read BlairтАФcontinued. "'Cause when I came in
this morning, Joe had already gone off shift, and there were two guys here in way-too-expensive suits,
working the desk instead of him. And here you are, full clearance pass, asking to see my log book. So,
you with FullTec?"
 The name was familiar from her predawn briefing materials. FullTec was the name of the company that
had installed the security system for this building back when it was built in 1955, and rewired it every ten
years or so thereafter. She'd checked them out online, too. They'd been ahead of their time even then,
and were still riding the cutting edge of security technology now. No building wired by them had ever
been broken into, held hostage, or otherwise menaced. The upper level executives who gathered for
multibillion-dollar conference calls rested easy in a FullTec building. Said so right on their Web site.