The polished brass sign proclaiming the offices of phillip a. garsten, attorney at law was mounted on the wall by the door at the top of five stone steps leading up to what had formerly been a spacious, single-family town residence in the First Hill district, close to the Seattle University campus between Twelfth Avenue and Broadway. The house had been restored to an immaculate condition as a property investment, painted pale yellow with white trim and a red tile roof. It stood set back from the street behind a white picket fence and secluding screen of shrubbery, giving it an air of permanence and dependable confidentiality becoming of the profession.
Corfe arrived thirty minutes after leaving Michelle in Chancey's diner and coffee shop. He was carrying a tan leather document case and a white plastic bag bearing the name and logo of a local bookstore. The bag looked heavy, stretching the grips as it hung in his hand. He pushed the door open with an elbow and went through. The entrance hall was opulent enough to bespeak success and competence, but not to the point of daunting a potential client contemplating the likely bill. The main furnishings consisted of a redwood office suite and brown brocatel-upholstered chairs, set against a background of beige velveteen overdrapes and a shag carpet with wood inlaid surround. A receptionist faced him across a desk equipped with paper trays, appointment book, computer terminal, and a sign saying that her name was Lisa.
"Good morning," she greeted, smiling. "What can we do for you?"
"Oh, hi. My name's Jeffreys. I called fairly late yesterday afternoon. I think it was you that I talked to."
"Yes, I rememberto see Mr. Garsten. You want to set up a boat business, right?"
"Well, to know a little more about the preliminaries of what would be involved, anyway." Corfe's eyes wandered around, absorbing the surroundings. "We made an appointment for eleven-thirty. I guess I'm a little early."
"Sure, I've got you down. Mr. Garsten is running slightly behind time this morning. Would you mind taking a seat in the waiting room? I'll buzz through that you're here."
"That's fine."
Lisa showed him across a hall and through a glass-paneled door into a room containing several easy chairs, a couch, and a couple of low tables with stacks of magazines. She invited him to make himself at home and be comfortable. He said he'd prefer to stretch his legs and stand. She said that would be fine, assured him it wouldn't be too long, and left.
Corfe wandered about the room, pausing near the door to register the layout of the hall and corridor outside, and the doors opening off. The waiting room had a window seat with doors below that might suit his purposealthough there was an external latch that could prove a problem if somebody closed it later before leaving for the weekend. There was a space in a corner behind one of the chairs that was unlikely to be checked; and feeling with a foot told him there was enough clearance underneath the couch. It really was that simple. He could accomplish his task and conceal the mecs right now, spend the rest of the time chatting innocuously, and then leave. The only trouble was, no terminal to the computer was located in the waiting room. That could make things difficult if the only access lay in other rooms that would possibly be locked. Better to keep his options open until he'd had a chance to see more. He went back out into the hall and asked if he could use a restroom while he was waiting. Lisa directed him along a passage leading to the rear of the house.
On the way, he passed two rooms with terminals on the desks inside. Beyond was a photocopying area with shelves of cardboard boxes and stacked paper, and a metal hanging-file cabinet with more boxes piled on topall of them good possible locations also.
Naturally, the package that Corfe had brought contained the mecs that he and Kevin thought would be the most useful. There was always the chance, however, that as the weekend unfolded they might need to send in additional models to perform some specialized task, or for whatever other reason. A further objective of Corfe's visit, therefore, was to reconnoiter possible entry points. For obvious reasons, they didn't want to go disturbing any outside doors or windows.
On the way up to the house, he had noticed a grille low down on the side wall, that looked like a vent to the basement; that was a possibility. Now, in a room at the rear outside the restrooms that looked as if it might have once been a laundry, he found a blanked-off pipe that could have been a dryer vent.
On his way back to the front of the house he deliberately took a wrong turn and discovered a coffee lounge with a wood stove and a pipe going up through the ceiling. If all else failed, there would be a chimney somewhere outside that a can-size mec would surely be able to reach without too much difficulty. Before he could investigate further, a clerk appeared from a filing room next door and directed him back to reception. Lisa was waiting in the front hall to say that "Mr. Garsten will see you now."
She showed him through a secretarial area with two desks. At one of them, a brunette was typing onto a screen. The other desk had a terminal too, although it was blank at the moment, the chair before it empty with a green cardigan thrown over the back. There were file cabinets along two of the walls, and a door leading through to what was clearly Garsten's office. Here, Corfe decided. This would be the perfect place.
Lisa knocked, ushered Corfe through. "Mr. Jeffreys," she announced. Garsten got up, beaming, and shook hands. He was short and ruddy faced, with straight, reddish hair brushed to the side college-boy style, and a close-trimmed mustache, failing completely to convey the sinister image that Corfe had half expected. More, if anything, he put Corfe in mind of a supermarket manager. Why, Corfe had no idea. As far as he could recall, he'd never met a supermarket manager.
The line Corfe had prepared was that he'd been invited to go into partnership in a boat-hire business and wanted to check on the legal requirements and implications before giving an answer. He had called his old friend Ray Young, the Vancouver ferry captain, the evening before, and as a result had been able to come armed with some plausible questions revolving mainly around liabilities, tax credits, insurance, and investment write-offs. He and Garsten talked for about twenty minutes. At the end of the interview, Garsten scribbled down the references to some pamphlets and guides that he thought it might be useful for "Jeffreys" to take away and study, and suggested they fix another appointment when he'd had a chance to go through them. They agreed to leave things at that 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 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 secretariessome of it quite entertaining, but nothing immediately relevant to his purpose.