Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(18)
He patted his belt and his eyes went wide.
“Thanks, man! It must have fallen off when I got out of my car. You just saved me a trip to HR. You know they dock your pay, like, fifty bucks if you lose one of these things.”
“Happened to me last month,” I told him. Ahead of us, the automatic door whirred open. I stopped in my tracks, snapping my fingers. “Speaking of forgetting, I left my presentation in my trunk.”
Pixie had worked her magic in the back of the van, spinning the Wardriver’s electronics like a mad DJ at an all-night rave.
“Easysauce,” she said. “These cards are just encoded magnetic strips, no RFID or anything. About as hard to clone as a Holiday Inn room key.”
The console whirred and spit out a blank white card. She turned and held up her iPhone, tethered to the electronics with a slender white cable.
“Say cheese.”
She snapped my picture and fiddled in a Photoshop window on one of the flickering monitors. A few minutes later, a color copy of the kid’s ID—with my face in place of his—slid from the printer. Pixie handed me a pair of scissors and a pot of Elmer’s paste.
“Here. Arts and crafts time. Cut that out, slap it on the new card, and you’re good to go. Your name’s Marvin Staniszewski, and you work in accounting.”
Just stealing Marvin’s ID and going inside would have been a lot faster and easier, but the second the kid noticed it was missing he would have squawked to management—who would cancel the card and issue him a new one, leaving me with a useless chunk of plastic. This way, Marvin would go about his day, blissfully unaware that his doppelg?nger was opening doors all over the building. If security reviewed the access logs they’d know something was up, but if I played my cards right they’d never have a reason to.
I finished pasting the ID together and gave it a hard look. It would never pass close scrutiny. Then again, nobody in an office building ever looked twice at these things. As long as I looked busy and kept walking, I should be in and out like a ghost. I clipped the tag onto my belt.
“Here.” Pixie passed me a briefcase I’d picked up at the local thrift shop. “I stocked your goodie bag. Everything you’ll need to rig the tap. When you get in there, you’re going to want to find the IT department. The server room shouldn’t be too far away. Watch out for the IT guys. If they see a stranger fiddling with their tech, they will want to know what you’re doing there.”
“Wish me luck,” I said. I stepped out of the van and into the belly of the beast.
The lobby was just like I remembered it. Spacious, marble-floored and lined with overstuffed powder-blue armchairs. The security camera was where I remembered it, too, and I made sure to keep my face tilted away as I strolled under its sweeping eye. I worked to keep my movements slow, natural, relaxed. Nothing to see here, just another anonymous face in the corporate crowd.
Where would they put the company’s electronic nerve center? Server rooms meant heavy equipment and heavier connections to the utility grid. The closer to the ground, the better. I slipped past the receptionist’s desk and started my search on the first floor. Smooth sailing until I passed a couple of guys loitering in the hall and caught a chunk of their conversation.
“—understand why they’re worried, after what happened to the Silverlode. They’re saying it was some kinda ecoterrorist thing.”
“Yeah, but dogs? I mean, that’s gotta be some kind of violation of our rights, right?”
“It’s an at-will state, dude, we don’t have any rights. Besides, you’re just afraid they’re gonna sniff out that joint in your pocket—”
Of all the security measures Lauren Carmichael could have taken, this was the weirdest, which made it the most troubling. Why dogs? Did she actually think I was going to slip a bomb into the building? She didn’t care about civilian casualties, but that wasn’t my style at all. I puzzled it over as I took a shortcut through the data-entry department. Rows of fabric-walled cubicles filled the long and open gallery. Typists, hard at work around me, didn’t even look up as I passed through the room like a ghost.
I froze in my tracks as the answer to the riddle walked in the far side of the room. The security guard, a stubble-haired bull in a black uniform, didn’t worry me. The Doberman with him, though, padding ahead on a leather lead, made my heart skip a beat.
When I first met Emma, I immediately knew what made her different from Caitlin. Caitlin was what we called an incarnate: her “body” was literally made out of raw accumulated energy, condensed and congealed, a trick only powerful and talented demons could pull off. Emma, on the other hand, was a hijacker. She found a vulnerable body and possessed it, imprisoning the original owner in some dark corner of her own mind while Emma wore her flesh like a tailored suit.
I had a lot of experience with hijackers.
The faint scent of sulfur and swamp water, something I caught in my gut more than my nose, told me exactly what Lauren had done. The Doberman wasn’t just a Doberman. He had a hijacker of his own, and the demon under his fur was sniffing for magic.
Dogs, the guy in the hall had said. Plural.
On the bright side, most demons weren’t in Caitlin or Emma’s class, either in terms of power or smarts. One that allowed itself to be bound into the body of a dog was probably close to the bottom of the infernal food chain. On the other hand, my chances in a fight against an eighty-pound Doberman? Not so good. My chances against that same dog juiced up on dark magic, plus his handler, and the revolver riding on his handler’s hip? Nonexistent.