RECONNAISSANCE ON ASHOK’S HEADQUARTERS

Since it was still relatively early in the afternoon, Garth hopped an intercity cab to Guillfoyle’s headquarters located on the other side of Central. The way of the world being as it was, the likelihood that Guillfoyle himself, rich, powerful and almost certainly a gamehead, would be there fell into the no chance category; if the man was anywhere, it would be in the Arena, watching God soldiers eat each other alive.

Having Guillfoyle there would make things simpler, but during the finalization of his plans, Garth had automatically organized his plan under the assumption that Ashok would need to be forced. After he worked Ashok over to find out the nitty-gritty, Garth was going to scan the man’s face in and the offer the Portsiders some information they couldn’t afford to miss, thereby assuring that both the ‘siders and their ‘mortal’ enemies the Devil Nuts ran into one another.

With Central City being the seat of power for Chairwoman Doans, who ran not only Hospitalis but the entire Latelian system, the level of God soldier protection there was higher than anywhere else, which made the real estate very costly. And well worth the cost, too; since the Guillfoyle Building was home to all of Ashok’s primary labs and research facilities, Guillfoyle banked on the fact that God soldiers could be deployed there in under five minutes. Any rabble-rousing anti-Capitalists who took into their heads to vent against the money-hungry Guillfoyle Firm would find themselves in very rough company in less time than it took to organize the handing out of angry placards.

That news didn’t sit well with Garth, nor did the fact that, as a direct result of Doans’ military cutbacks six years, there were more ex-God soldiers employed directly by local law enforcement officials than ever before. It didn’t make Garth feel at all comfortable to see ex-soldiers walking the beaten path wearing police blue instead of Army green. Pundits put the Chairwoman’s relationship with the Commander General as the cause for the new deployment standards, while others claimed that Doans didn’t trust the civilian police force as far as she could throw them.

Whatever the case, businessmen like Guillfoyle did whatever they could to have their headquarters situated anywhere in Central regardless of cost or feasibility, relying on the fact that any attack on Central soil was instantly classified as an attack against the government leaders, making the response extremely out of proportion to the actual level of danger.

Doans’ growing unpopularity, military cutbacks, and growing tension in the underclasses had given Guillfoyle a perfect, relatively cost-free solution to his own defense concerns. By placing his facilities on Central soil, he had been given the chance to focus the bulk of his security measures internally. No doubt the Guillfoyle Building was a fortress.

Garth glared at the squat, ten storey building with deep loathing. Even if the Guillfoyle Building wasn’t elbow to elbow with a courthouse and a Ministry building, the damned thing was going to be impossible to slip into unseen; the squat structure was built from four inch thick duronium plating wrapped around some of the most explosive-unfriendly materials available. For purposes of secrecy, his plans hadn’t involved the use of explosives or other overtly destructive measures, but that had been his decision. Being unable to have that option rankled.

Garth moved to a park bench thirty feet from the main entrance and plopped down. A few bystanders looked curiously at him but said nothing. Smiling cordially to an elderly couple who zoomed through the small park like speedwalking freaks, Garth began the tricky process of trying to scan the fortress without getting caught.

As expected, the joint was solidly packed with a plethora of security devices and other contingencies that the ambient circuitry of his prote couldn’t identify. It was entirely plausible that right now, inside the building’s security center, a tiny red light was going off and huge lasers were being pointed at his head. Garth shrugged his concerns off and pulled the ambient circuitry back as far as he could without losing all of his slender monitoring threads. Within seconds, the prote tagged more than fifteen thousands spEyes, some of which were covering the access roads and walkways leading into the small plaza from the main streets.

Although he was sorely tempted to, Garth knew he couldn’t risk logging onto the spEye feeds; operating on super-paranoia mode, the espionage specialist didn’t like how quickly all those miniature cameras had popped up on his system. Rather, he dialed his prote’s relay node control down to the bare minimal, and, operating from a single node, sat back to watch the transmission frequencies zipping back and forth through the air above his head.

Patience was a virtue, and slightly less than fifteen dull minutes later, Garth caught sight of a very quick ultra-frequency transmission that vanished from the node he was using and into the ether rather than being relayed to Guillfoyle’s private nodes. A nano later, a confirm transmission generated from the same one-time frequency emitter was sent back through the node and into the cluster of spEyes, where it vanished.

Garth wanted to know how many would-be thieves had been caught with their pants down by that tricky little bit of deception. Garth waggled a finger at the Guillfoyle Building, scolding its security personnel for doing their jobs so well. They were actually making him work for a change. Garth devised an avatar sufficiently complex enough to survive alone for two or three minutes before returning ‘home’, parked it in a safe section of the spEye’s node with orders to track the frequency, and waited.

While the avatar sat silently in the node, , Garth polished up his Big Plan. He was pretty damned proud of it, especially since he was flying by the seat of his pants. Getting the Portsiders and the Devil Nuts together in the Space Port was going to be a big blast, in more ways than one –the enmity shared between the two gangs was so intense that there was no way they’d ignore the chance to get rid of the enemy, even if they were in the space port. It was important, but not necessary, for the two rival gangs to cause as much of a disturbance as they could; if they had at it like there was no tomorrow, it would be that much easier for officials to write off the Meadowlark Lemon’s destruction. Getting the gangs together on the space port involved forcing Ashok Guillfoyle to extend the Portsider method of protection to the Devil Nuts, but Garth was fairly confident that the businessman was going to be very accommodating. Once he got Huey out of his moorings in the ship –and he still didn’t have any idea how he was actually going to pull that off-, both Portsiders and Devil Nuts would find themselves on the receiving end of a spaceship going supercritical on their asses. Hopefully by the time the God soldiers arrived, Garth would be able to use the devastation caused by Meadowlark Lemon going up like a Roman candle and the gang war as a distraction to get Huey away.

“Wait a minute.” Garth smacked his head. He didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him! All this time, he’d been trying to come up with his own way to sneak Huey off the port without tripping any alarms when Ashok Guillfoyle had to have already done the work; Garth wasn’t sure how The Man kept the ‘siders off the port’s radar, but he was damned sure that Ashok didn’t have enough juice to hide an AI without using some kind of actual delivery device. All it would take is some extra convincing on his part to get Ashok to part with said machine, and then all would be hunky-dory. And if Guillfoyle wasn’t very helpful, the on-site investigators would discover an incontrovertible link connecting him to the Portsiders and their repeated attempts to take the life of an honest Offworlder-cum-Latelian named Garth N’Chalez.

The one part Garth didn’t really dig was the part where he got hurt.

Because his presence was officially logged at the highest levels when he went to visit Huey, Garth couldn’t afford to not be there when the ship exploded; no official in Latelyspace would for one second believe that an Offworlder wouldn’t use the sudden, unexpected gang war happening outside his spaceship as a chance to free his triply-damned AI. Therefore, Garth needed to be there when the God soldiers showed up, and he needed to be sufficiently inside the ship’s blast radius when he was discovered so it would look like he’d tried to get away. It was risky, yes, and had a great many ‘if-then’ probabilities lurking in the corners, but it was all Garth had to work with, now that the Portsiders were after him. Huey needed to be freed tonight, or not at all.

The prote chimed and drew out a map showing a remote access station where the spEyes’ visual and audio feeds were being relayed to; it was two blocks away, operating out of a building that was, according to the data retrieved by the ever-improving avatars, closed for renovations.

Garth headed in that general direction, careful to make sure that nothing about his cadence or body language gave him away. Security personnel might know he was up to something, but until he actually did something that gave them an excuse to come out guns blazing, their responses were limited. unless he started acting up before he got out of the plaza, the worst a Guillfoyle guard could do was kick him down the block and into someone else’s neighborhood.

As Garth headed towards the hidden relay center, he suddenly realized something that’d been lurking in his subconscious mind like a sneak-thief; there were more restaurants, cafes, diners, eateries and sandwich shops per square mile in Port City, and presumably all of Hospitalis, than any other city he’d ever been on. They were everywhere, and from the looks of the ones he passed on the way somewhere else, not one of them was worried about going out of business, because the menus posted on doorways and auto-flashed to his proteus were notoriously lacking in ‘Happy Hour’ pricing. Garth found himself imagining that the citizens of Latelyspace ate much like hobbits did, with three breakfasts, two lunches, dinner, supper, twelve teas, desert, snack, late-night munchies and a pre-dawn nosh, and all probably because long ago genetic scientists hadn’t had the forethought to ensure their trickery with the genome wasn’t hereditary; none of the planets in the Latelian system had heavier than normal gravity or any of the other environmentally forced excesses that would force pilgrims to grow so tall and broad on their own, so it was that or nothing.

Either that or the people just liked to stuff their faces at every opportunity.

Whatever the case was –genetics or an insatiable appetite- Garth had no problem in hunkering down for linner when he got close to his objective. In preparation for the morning’s combat, he hadn’t eaten anything heavy to avoid being sluggish in the ring and during lunch with Naoko, he’d been too nervous to eat much at all. With one of his immediate goals right across the street from an appealing-looking restaurant, Garth took the chance to stuff his face; he had it on good authority that the rest of his night was going to be filled with running around being shot at, so a little respite before then was well in order.

A pretty waitress in an indecently short miniskirt asked if he wanted to be seated near one of the big Screens so he could watch recaps of the Contest’s progress so far. Garth declined with a shudder, and pointed at one of the window booths. The waitress smiled prettily and hauled him along in her effervescent customer service net to the very one he’d indicated.

Garth sat down, hoping he didn’t look to eager to be sitting at the window; if Guillfoyle could pull enough strings to outfit an illegal relay station in the middle of downtown Central without upsetting anyone, he could damned sure afford to pay people to ‘work’ in the eatery across the street.

Smiling calmly, Garth scanned the drink menu and decided to order a carbonated bevvie, praying to whatever Gods the Latelians hadn’t killed yet that he for once got something that at least bore the hint of being a soda. Much like hamburgers and French fries, soda pop was not a culinary concept that ‘people of the future’ understood very well. At all. The waitress, just call me ‘Missy’, vanished in a swirl of perfume and indecently short shorts, leaving Garth to his own devices for a few seconds. He took the time to complete the quick but thorough examination of the building that the station was housed in. As local information stated, the building itself was undergoing extensive modifications so it could be properly zoned for commerce; the exterior of the structure bristled with the almost proto-typically haphazard skeleton of scaffolding, while men in bright red hardhats did whatever it was that they were supposed to do in the execution of their duty.

From his spot in the booth, Garth could see not only the men working on the scaffolding, but people on several floors tossing junk out windows and up and down the street on both sides for about block in either direction. He had a perfect view of the entire operation.

Si Missy returned with his drink, which turned out to be a non-alcoholic champagne. Rather than send it back, Garth made a big show of enjoying the effervescent drink, even though he would have rather clawed his own eyes out. He picked a few items from the menu at random, dropped a dazzling smile on Missy as she left and considered his next move.

Obviously the relay station was only temporary. The area wasn’t high class, but even the blindest civilians would notice something was funny about The Building That Was Never Done; sooner or later the construction would have to be finished, and when that happened, Guillfoyle’s employees would need to move on to the next location –if, that was, they were simply sneaking a room while the work was being done. If not, then at least part of the construction effort was being done to ensure that the building itself was far more structurally sound that it would normally be.

That was not a particularly happy thought, so Garth buried it under a mouthful of fizzy apple flavored champagnella. Far better to imagine that Guillfoyle was running a black op station and that the building in front of him wouldn’t be any tougher to break into than the average kindergarten.

As he sat there, Garth counted fourteen dusty laborers wandering in and out and around the building unimpeded. Either security was very lax because they thought they had nothing to worry about or the entire area was blanketed in spEyes like the Guillfoyle Plaza.

Garth took another sparing sip of his champagne knock-off and did a spEye search. Other than five in the restaurant and a few hovering at the intersections a block away on either side, his prote didn’t pick anything up. The arrogance of a system built on complete control gave Garth a headache. He’d been on planets where the most sophisticated thing the natives had surveillance-wise was their own two (or three, or four, or twelve) eyes that were harder to case. Sure, he was being watched all the time, but as long as he remembered that he was being spied on, all he needed to do was not screw up.

Whistling the theme to Mission: Impossible under his breath, Garth logged on to one of the million public servers and began a casual search for Public Domain documents for buildings in the area. A few times he was asked for personal information concerning his reasons for the material –bargain basement security protocols designed to eliminate petty thieves and other criminals who’d no doubt already come up with the brilliant idea of trying to steal blueprints off the network. When that happened, and it was quite frequent thanks to the area he was interested in, Garth used his massive fortune as either a pry bar or a bludgeon to inveigle his way deeper into the world of information. Every now and again he ran into an avatar that wouldn’t budge, and those he glad-handed off to Sa Herrig’s proteus in the hopes that the banker turned PA would fob them off with stories about an Offworlder’s crazy interest in Conglomerating.

Just when Garth managed to dig his way into a server that had the blueprints he sorely needed, Missy arrived with his randomly picked food and an amused look on her comely face; obviously she thought felt her only customer was mildly insane to have ordered two full entrees and a dessert all at the same time, but to her credit, she said nothing. Missy delivered her edible pay load and vanished. Garth, who was hungrier than he’d realized, dug immediately into the ice cream –as a firm believer in the ‘waste not want not’ philosophical school of culinary delights, he could no more let his ice cream spend a third of a second melting than he could ignore Naoko Kamagana’s eyes.

As Garth funneled the cold desert into his mouth, he realized Missy stood just out of range, watching him channel into his food, a look of rapt amazement on her face. He shrugged, belched softly, and shoved the empty bowl out of the way. He moved on to the steak and veggies next, cutting into the enormous slab of meat with the grace of someone who didn’t want to try and shove the whole thing in his mouth but wasn’t overly concerned with any individual piece, so long as he could fit it in without choking.

Another waitress sprouted next to Missy and they began chatting with one another behind raised hands. Soon after that, the bartender joined them, only he had no interest in pretending to be doing something other than blatantly staring at The Eat Machine. He was joined by another waitress and one of the chefs, and they quickly began making small bets on when the weird Offworlder was going to choke to death and who was going to give him mouth to mouth when it happened.

Garth made a big show of finishing off the steak and veggies quickly before moving directly on to the salad. Ordinarily, he wasn’t a salad guy, but the Latelian diet was pretty heavy on the proteins, so extra roughage was needed to shake things up. The salad went down almost as quickly as the ice cream had. Garth rested his head on the back of the padded booth and let out a slow rumbling belch that shifted all the food in his gut down a level. Now that his attention wasn’t devoted to stuffing his face, Garth could hear but not quite understand the frenzied, whispered conversation ten feet away. He heard Missy tell the group that she had to see to her customer now, she would find out.

Missy moved up to the table, eyeing the scene of epicurean devastation before her. She’d never personally seen someone eat like that in her life, though some of her co-workers had God soldiers in their families and claimed the Offworlder ate like one of them.

“Hi.” Garth smiled at Missy again, this time feeling like he was an adult speaker invited to a preschool class. Tiffany was staring at him with this sincere look on her face. “Something wrong?”

Missy felt like running away. Her friends were stupid. This sa wasn’t Latelian, so he couldn’t be a God soldier, and even though the bartender, Demarcus, thought he’d seen the man in the highlights, he had to be wrong. “A…are you in the Contest?”

“Uhuh.” Garth took a sip of his bubbly bevvie, instantly deciding that he would never drink anything that tasted like horse ass again, especially if it was apple flavored. Garth didn’t think he’d ever be able to look at an apple in quite the same way ever again. “W…were you fighting in the augmented heavy?” Missy asked.

“I sure was, I mean, I am, yeah.”

“Oh, Ok.” Missy flushed scarlet, scooped the empty dishes into her arms and hurried away as quickly as she could without breaking into a run.

Shaking his head at the average level of weirdness around him, Garth went back to his search. He paid for the privilege of accessing the blueprints for all the buildings in a two block radius, and spent a minute or two looking each before retracing his steps, as though he wasn’t really sure what he wanted. Planning to spend another ten going over each of the blueprints carefully, he dumped most of the buildings off the list. Midway through the second set, Missy came back to see if he wanted anything else, so Garth ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich.

Once Tiff disappeared, Garth resumed his search, this time narrowing the blueprints to the building across the street and one a block and a half in the other direction. Both were very similar as far as location and foot traffic were concerned, so if anyone was monitoring his search, they’d see nothing amiss with him spending a great deal of time poring over the schematics.

Coffee and sandwich came, and rather than break his concentration this time, Garth thanked Missy absentmindedly while continuing his work.

Never one to take offence, Missy nodded politely and made to leave when she realized that her strange Offworlder customer was so absorbed in his prote that he didn’t even know the table carried Sheet functionality. Rather than interrupt him again, Missy tapped a few buttons on her own proteus to activate the table, then left.

Feeling stupid, Garth moved his coffee cup out of the way and watched the data pour onto the table’s glassy surface; Missy was going to get one hell of a tip, that much was damned certain. And if it weren’t for the fact that all other women had ceased to exist because of Naoko, he’d probably make a pass at the pretty waitress. Things were the way they were, though, so with a shrug, Garth turned his full attention back to the waiting blueprints. Working through the small holographic display of his proteus was always slow going; using the large table as an up-close-and-intimate Screen enabled Garth to show both sets of prints at the same time, and in no time at all, he’d completed the laborious task of committing both buildings to memory.

It was a drag to have his mind crammed full of an extra building, but the course he’d set dictated a very important need; if, by some miracle, he either failed or got busted later on for the break-in, Garth would be able to prove that he had spent a long time poring over two sets of blueprints, and, relying on his intent to Conglomerate, he should be able to ‘prove’ that everything was circumstantial and nothing more. Obviously the lie wouldn’t stand up to a full inquest, but if it got to that point, there would be more important things to worry about than a break-in.

The limited information from public servers concerning the building’s state of repair had been verified and expanded upon by the realtor’s office the blueprints came from -the structure was going through more than simple renovation; it was being gutted from the inside out. Everything except the super-structure, air-conditioning and elevator shafts were slated to be removed, and this was of enormous benefit to Garth. There’d be chunks of plaster, walls, partitions, old office furniture and all manner of waste laying around, forming natural fire breaks and cover should an actual fight break out. With the rest of his night already forming up to involve the mother of all engagements, Garth personally hoped everyone he came across would lie down and promise to be good, and by crawling through the ventilation system and up elevator shafts, he stood a good chance of avoiding any complications.

By using the unguarded passages and byways and avoiding major areas of construction, Garth felt positive he’d be able to make his way to the room at the far end of the third floor, which was where the relay station had to be located; according to the blueprints, that room was one of the old security stations, a logical choice for Ashok to set up operations.

Garth had his plan, he had a full stomach, and soon, he’d be doing what he was born to do:

Kick up shit and cause trouble.

Garth took another mouthful of coffee, located the computerized bill, paid it and tipped Missy a solid thousand credits. She was involved with another table, which was nice; when the big gratuity came through on her prote, Tiff wouldn’t be able to chase him around the restaurant.

There wasn’t any way to know whether or not most of the construction workers, who were busily tearing up the fourth floor at the moment, would suffer from Spontaneous Heroism and leap to the aid of the hidden agents in their midst; hopefully if some of them did decide to throw in, it wouldn’t take too much to dissuade them from being stupid. Garth didn’t have any desire to rough up innocent civilians, and so long as they stayed civilians, everything was going to be groovy.

Garth kicked up a heel on the corner up from his target and rested his back against the wall. Before entering the building, the most important thing to make sure of was that no one could call out for help; the untimely arrival of Guillfoyle security teams and any God soldiers would put an end to his little adventure before it even got started. He accomplished that chore by logging in directly to the nearest relay node’s operating system. It was a risk to act so openly, but there was no other way to get the job done short of physically hacking into the equipment, and there wasn’t enough time; he’d programmed an avatar to automatically erase his footprints in the network, and combined with Lady Ha’s puissant hack, he was reasonably sure he wouldn’t get caught. It took a few minutes to locate an empty block of space in the bandwidth that he could hijack, and when he did, Garth loaded in a route-bot that would endlessly cycle all the calls coming through to that local server through half a dozen others in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the area of effect covered just over a block, which meant all anyone would have to do was walk five minutes in either direction to connect to another station and that would be that. Intrepid proteus users wouldn’t even need to do that; all that was strictly necessary was to put in a request to the prote OS for a manual switch. Roughly ninety-nine percent of all the proteus users in the area wouldn’t even notice the delay or think to question the lack of service thanks to the apparent shortage of bandwidth because of the gameheads. All it would take, though, was one complaint, one nosy busybody, to demand someone look into the problem.

And then it would be game over. If the surreptitious route-bot was discovered, no amount of lying or carefully laid cover story would protect him from punishment. Garth pushed those thoughts out of his mind and headed across the street, then walked directly in front of the building to get a feel for the place. He stopped at the next building, and popped a squat on the stoop to reconsider his plans.

Walking past his target had revealed a serious implication that he couldn’t have noticed from the restaurant, or from his perch down the block.

The constructions workers were going about their chores in virtual silence. Beyond the occasional ‘coming through’ or ‘watch out, pal’, the dozens of men did their jobs with fascinating precision.

How was it possible that on the planet where the Contest was being held, more than thirty gruff looking men covered in plaster and the sweat of a hard day’s work had nothing to say about the first day of Eliminations? In his own time, Garth had obsessed about different sporting events to take his mind off the grim truth that his job was not a fun one and he hadn’t come across any reasons since landing to make him think it should be otherwise on Hospitalis. Even in the restaurant there had been a continual buzz of ‘did you sees’ and ‘I couldn’t believe it’s’ as patrons and employees shared their personal views on how the game was going to go. This made the guys working on the building either a statistical anomaly of such bizarre proportions that all the laws of probability were violated in such a way that the universe was soon to detonate or they were hardcore agents doing one hell of a job in pulling a fast one.

Of the two, the death of the Universe was more appealing. It was too big to go all at once, which would give him enough time to figure out a solution.

“Shit.” Garth muttered. He checked the time. Six o’clock was hurrying its way along, and that meant a replacement crew was also on the way.

“What to do, what to do?” Garth quickly logged back on to the different real estate sites he’d perused and paid another extortionate amount of money to look at the blueprints for the buildings on either side of his target. He was looking for anything that would help him out; adjoining ventilation shafts, forgotten secret passageways, interdimensional doorways, magical wardrobes. Anything that’d help him get into the building unnoticed –at least temporarily- by the work crew. Once he was inside, he could easily avoid most of the people by crawling through the shafts. It was just the getting there that was now complicated.

He found his answer in a smaller gap between rooftops on one side than the other. Garth killed the search, walked back down the way he’d come, and when there was a momentary pause between workers milling around out front, dodged up the stairs leading into the building on the left. Afraid to waste even one of his precious seconds, Garth grabbed the doorknob, twisted it savagely open –breaking the lock in the process- and slid in just as he heard the noisy clatter of someone exiting. He stood just inside the doorway, heart hammering, ears straining. No one shot at him.

Garth located an elevator and rode it all the way to the top, dismayed to hear that the quality of Muzak had actually succeeded in deteriorating over ten thousand years instead of getting any better. He exited the elevator at the top floor, took a sharp left, a right, went down to the end of the hallway and then took another abrupt left.

He loved having a near-perfect memory. Right in front of him was a huge –for him- ladder leading up to a heavily bolted trap door that led right to the roof. Garth stuck his head back around the corner to see if anyone was coming; whatever sort of office building he’d broken into didn’t seem to care much about security. Garth sat down, back against the wall. He tried to find any interior servers in the building and found none whatsoever. The building was absolutely, utterly cold.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Garth didn’t like it. He hadn’t met a person yet not wearing a proteus, and he hadn’t been in a single place yet that didn’t have at least one main system running the most rudimentary of networks connecting the occupants to the outside world. There were signs everywhere that the building was in use; from occasional dribs and drabs of litter like coffee cups and candy bar wrappers to the awful Muzak playing in the elevator, there was definite presence inside.

“Fuck.” Garth didn’t have any time to waste, especially since he didn’t have a clue as to how long he’d need to be in the Guillfoyle building. Sighing unhappily at his lack of Intel, Garth climbed the ladder, snapped the duronium chains after a few tries, and exited onto the roof.

Crouching low enough so that the building’s fortifications would hide him easily, Garth walked over to the side adjoining the secret relay node. His prote informed him the gap was a few centimeters short of ten meters from end to end. It was a distance he could easily cover if he took a running leap, but that wasn’t a good idea; there might not be any active sensors that he could detect with the prote, but then again, a two hundred pound man crashing onto the roof would make all kinds of noise. From what he could see, they’d spread a liberal layer of thistletrops –nasty razor sharp burrs that were caltrops magnified. A single thistletrop snagged on bare skin was damned near impossible to remove without the right gear; hundreds would kill, slowly and painfully. Anyone pole vaulting onto the roof would have a very short future.

“How very Spy vs. Spy.” Garth said drolly. Wasting precious time craning his head this way and that and using his proteus to take pictures, Garth at last determined that Guillfoyle’s agents hadn’t bothered to lace the entire rooftop with the ‘trops. Some thirty feet in, the deadly little burrs stopped. Rather than excite him, Garth was bothered further. Under ordinary circumstances, ultra-paranoid security agents would prefer to go the extra mile and be overly positive that everything was kept under wraps. They had to realize that there were people out there capable of jumping thirty feet or more with no problems unless …

“Fuck me sideways.” The building was being renovated, so any damage to, say, a section of ceiling in an empty office would go unnoticed. Anyone strong enough to jump past the ‘trops to the empty spot would go through the roof, and there was absolutely no way of telling what the bastards had left below.

That left him with Option ‘C’, his least favorite. It had the potential for the most noise, and left definite signs of intrusion, but unless everyone in the place fell unconscious so he could just stroll on in, there was nothing else he could do. Sighing miserably at the level of mistrust the Latelians shared for one another, Garth took aim at a likely target with his Stretch. He put three rounds through the window, hid his weapon, and waited. The five minutes he spent waiting for a suspicious guard/worker to check out the disturbance were excruciating. When no one in a hardhat or standard secret agent wear popped their head through the broken window, Garth declared Option ‘C’ a go.

Garth aimed himself for the window, then jumped, a Hail Mary on his lips.