"Vattas 4 - Command Decision - Moon, Elizabeth_13" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

By now it was late afternoon, time for workers to be coming home. Most people would be thinking of
food or entertainment or both, and so might a businessman from offworld. He bustled across the street
and interrupted a waiter at the cafй. “Where can a visitor get some…you know…?”

The waiter glared at him. “Food, drink, or sex?”

“I was thinking, dinner and a show—music, dance, something like that. Anything but my hotel room.”

“The Zedaiyah Dinner Theater’s about six blocks that way—” The waiter pointed with his elbow.
“Please excuse me; I have customers…”

Rafe’s watcher was easily close enough to overhear, even if he didn’t have a spike-mike. Rafe turned
away and headed “that way,” stopping several times to ask passersby if he was going in the right
direction. He’d been to the dinner theater once as a child, when they’d had a special children’s holiday
program: something with fairies and unicorns and a wicked witch flying through the air. They’d been given
all the candy they could eat, and he had been heartily sick on the way home. The next year, he’d refused
to go. He hoped dinner would be better this time.

On the way, he called his hotel on the skullphone and asked the concierge to arrange a ticket for him; it
was waiting when he came to the ticket office. He went in, while his follower had to stop and buy a
ticket, and looked around. Tables arranged in steeply pitched rows around the playing space, which
looked much smaller now. Emergency exits there and there…restrooms male and female…a stairway to
the balcony level. The bar to one side, where the early arrivals were gathered at small tables or standing
by the polished bar. He headed that way, showed his ticket to the usher, and chose a tiny table in an
alcove.

Two hours later, replete with a surprisingly good meal, he was eeling out the emergency exit without
tripping its automatic alarm. The business suit and certain other elements of his disguise were stowed in
the men’s room, behind a ceiling tile over one of the stalls. Handy that Nexus society, founded on
communication, still believed in privacy to the extent of having some completely enclosed stalls in every
public restroom. He wore a camouflage skinsuit, and in the soft autumn mist that always came up after
dark he had no trouble passing unseen through the town streets, then along the private road to his
family’s home.

He knew every centimeter of the road, every bush, every tree, every place someone could hide, every
surveillance device and its range and sensitivity. He was prepared to confuse, to fox the scans, to disable
some completely if he must.

He was not prepared to find the place uninhabited and unprotected except by its fence and hedge…and
one very obvious police guard at the gate. He got in unnoticed, which he expected, and into the
house—the empty house, with only a few dim lights on and all surveillance gear disconnected. The
furniture was still there, the gleaming tiles of the kitchen, the long polished floor of the grand salon, though
the leaves of the ornamental tigis drooped and the soil beneath it was dry. Tall bookcases in the library
still held their books, both modern and antique. The music room still held the priceless grand piano, the
concert harp, the cabinets full of music scores and recordings. A pale irregular area perhaps one by two
meters marked the floor, visible even in the dim light.