by J. N. Chaney
I walked through the gates and into the park where I first met the crew. Evelyn was sitting with a hot drink and enjoying the cool air. Her gaze was into the sky and she sat placidly for some time. It was odd to see her like this; all my previous experiences saw her closely guarded. Here, she seemed almost . . . delicate? Vulnerable? Like there was something about life that didn’t apply to her in that moment.
I paused, uncertain if I should interrupt her tranquility. Whatever proximity she determined for her personal space had already been breached and she fixed me with a small grin. “Alphonse, lovely day, isn’t it? So perfectly clear.”
I understood that countersigns were sometimes necessary in work, but this struck me as conversational over code. “Not too cold but a notable lack of heat,” I hazarded.
She laughed, confirming my suspicion. “Not everything is meaningful. Sometimes we say what we mean because we mean what we say.”
I sat down next to her. “I think I do better with hidden meaning. Any meaning. Everyday banter seems to be about passing time, not communication.”
She laughed again. “Alphonse, if there is one thing that I hope you learn from our little interactions, it is a healthy respect for the importance of biding time and taking up space. Though, if I could glean meaning like you do, I might reconsider. Let’s head inside.”
I paused as she stood up. “I thought you might want to stay for a bit.”
She scooped up her cup. “I prefer my quiet moments to be done alone. Two isn’t silence, it is a conversation waiting to start, continue, or end.” She walked up to the stoop and waved an ID chip to the scanner. There was a beep and the door opened. She paused in the doorway and waved me in.
Evelyn led me to her apartment on the third floor. “If you’re wondering, Remi’s place is at the end of the hall. Easy access to the stairs and the roof. He’s always been ready to leave, considers it a virtue.”
She opened the door and invited me inside her one-bedroom apartment with a joint kitchen and living area. The door to the bedroom was closed. The kitchen was a cherry red color and the living area was done in creams and soft whites. There was an opulence to the décor that was further set off by the opalescent lighting.
Evelyn watched me inspecting the place. She gestured to a seat. “Please sit down and take it in. No reason to stand like an idiot. Can I get you anything?” She didn’t wait for an answer before walking into the kitchen.
The kitchen was separated from the living area by an island and a low shelf, which created a small window into the area. Glassware hung from hooks in the intervening space, so that all I could really make out from movement in the kitchen was distorted shapes and morphing colors. For being an open space attached to the other room, it was surprisingly separate visually.
The place was above reproach in the cleanliness category. Not a speck of dust floated in the air. Nothing was smudged or darkened with use. The furnishings were functional but not particularly comfortable, and the seat I sat in felt stiff and ill-used. The material appeared expensive but lacked that broken-in quality. The place seemed almost clinical, if the clinic catered to an upscale clientele.
The floors were dark and looked to be either natural wood or a good re-creation. The lighting was automatic, brightening and dimming as Evelyn made her way back from the kitchen. She carried a silver- and gold-trimmed tray with a few cakes and cookies on it. She set it down and went back to the kitchen again, returning immediately with a second tray containing cups and a kettle of hot liquid.
I had brought a drink with me, almost more as a prop than a necessity. I looked at it and noticed how inferior the plastic cup seemed in the surroundings.
Evelyn sat across from me in a wing-backed chair. Modern materials but in an antique style. It gave her a commanding presence, almost like royalty.
She poured herself a cup of the liquid and one for me.
“I like to live, Alphonse. Unlike my brother, bless his simple needs, or Remi and his one-foot-out-the-door approach. A person’s home is a sanctum. A place they can feel closed to the world and open to themselves.”
I nodded, but I didn’t understand the sentiment. I had lived in a small room at home and a series of blank spaces since. I didn’t infuse my personality into my surroundings any more than I did my clothing.
Evelyn sipped her beverage and held the cup carefully in her hands without resting it on her in her lap. “Tell me, Alphonse. What do you see in me through my apartment?”
“I see that you don’t live here. You spent a fair amount to upgrade the place from the stock model. The floors in particular must have been both costly and taken some effort convincing the building owner to allow it. From what I’ve seen of Winston’s apartments, the layout is identical. Or was. You added the kitchen island and the shelving. The lack of wear indicates you spend almost no time in this room. The lock on your bedroom indicates that you find whatever is inside to be more worth protecting than out here.”
She gave me an appraising look and sipped at her beverage. I hazarded a sniff and was hit by the strength of it. Some kind of herbal tea with a liqueur infused in it. I sipped it and was surprised it mostly tasted like sable berry. I continued, “The services you just put down also show little use but a high price tag. You have gilded your cage, but you aren’t certain you want to live in it. Is it a reflection of a want? You wouldn’t bring clients here. It is bad business to reveal so much or to be so vulnerable.”
She took another sip and then set the cup down on the silver service. “It is a want. A place that I more imagine myself in than believe in. I am far too busy planning to spend any real time here. You’re so good at the little things, aren’t you, Alphonse? You see through people and their actions. Nothing escapes that quick mind. “
I caught myself looking at my shoes. “I’m just explaining what I know. You asked the questions.”
She smiled. “I asked what you saw reflected. You didn’t ‘know’ any of that before a few minutes ago when you walked in. These are not hunches. You are keenly determining what pieces of information to accept and which ones to reject. It is uncanny how well that ability serves to cut through the illusions people have set forth.”
I tried to sip more of the herbal tea, but the first sip left me feeling flush. “I don’t know. I just see how people work. I thought it was obvious. I just assumed I was doing a bad job of hiding things. Doesn’t everyone notice details? Don’t they just choose to say nothing?”
Evelyn leaned forward in her wing-back chair and took a cookie between her ruby-colored fingernails. “It’s like the sensor array you saw on the last job. That wasn’t something Remi was commenting on. It was something he missed. And I’ve known him a long time. He is meticulous. Still, that is twice now that you have outdone him. I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t breed some animosity, yes?” She concluded her statement with a crisp bite of cookie. The few crumbs that fell, she caught in her other hand and brushed back onto the tray.
I put down the herbal tea and took a cookie of my own. “I’ve noticed people don’t like my observations. They seem angry or afraid when I state the obvious.”
She sat back in the chair again, the high back casting shadows over her delicate face. “You scare them because you see through them. You take apart the artifice of their armor and leave them exposed. For civilians, that is quite uncomfortable. For operatives and thieves, it is you making their worst apprehensions come to light. We live in clouds of deceit that are supposed to protect us. Nothing seems to protect them, or us, from you, Alphonse.”
I felt even more flushed. The tea didn’t agree with me or Evelyn’s words. Either way, I was feeling poorly.
She seemed to notice my discomfort. “You have value, Alphonse. I’m not meaning to make you feel badly. Even though you have so much natural talent, you still have much to learn about people and the world. Remi tells me you like the excitement of exploring options, of confronting challenges?”
Her crystal blue eyes twi
nkled as she spoke and there was a hungry quality to her demeanor. I ate a cookie and tried to settle down. “It was exciting. During the job, I was alert for what I hadn’t yet noticed, for things we didn’t think of in the original plan. There was a quality to it, not the unknown but of things yet to be found. If that makes sense.”
Evelyn poured herself another cup of tea. “It makes perfect sense. You need to unravel the knot, to solve the puzzle. A lot of people get frustrated by the unknown. They prefer the easy answers. We use that to our advantage in planning jobs and hiding in plain sight. Would you like to get better? To face bigger challenges?”
I took another sip of the tea and nodded. “It’s why I’m here.”
“Good. Good.” She got up and went to her coat, then she produced a pad from a pocket and sat down again. “We have another job lined up. Let me run the details past you, we’ll see what you come up with.”
I sat back with my cup and took a breath to focus. “All right.”
She fixed me with an easy smile and grabbed another cookie. Each time she reached out, I marveled at how light her fingers were. How precisely they gripped the treat, firm but without breaking it or causing it to shed crumbs as it moved through the air.
She spoke quickly then, reciting the details with a disdain as if they bored her. “A wealthy fellow divorced his wife. It was a messy affair with more than a few cross words and untold damage to reputations in the process. The wife moved out of the estate and left behind heirlooms linking her to old money from generations and worlds ago.”
Evelyn scowled a bit as she continued. “The husband, angry and petty like men of his means tend to be, sold these heirlooms for next to nothing out of spite. Fast forward a few weeks and the happy couple reconciles.” Her face flashed with even more disdain as she carefully ate her cookie. “The oldest of wealth rarely splits for long, so these things are to be expected. What isn’t expected was that the new owner of the heirlooms refused to sell them back.”
I nodded again in a way I realized I was doing to placate but not to understand. None of the described behavior seemed rational to me.
“Greed is a motivator, Alphonse. Never underestimate man’s desire for more,” she said, a slight curve forming on the tip of her upper lip. “Pride is also a factor, and often that pride will trump greed. It is the rock-paper-scissors of human motivation and desire. The new owner was so impressed with himself over his accomplishment that he refused to sell, even above the stated value. The pride he felt at besting his financial rival outweighed his desire for added wealth. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
She wiped her fingers off above the tray and set aside her tea, then turned the pad on. “So, we were hired to retrieve the items for half of what the new owner would have been paid for their return.” She gave another upturned smile. “Tell me what you see.”
She handed the pad over, and I browsed through the three pages. A floorplan of the estate, a blueprint of the surrounding utilities and access ways, and a list of vendors that supplied the estate with services and personnel. The last page was a breakdown of the plan so far with notes detailing additional insights. I handed the pad back.
Evelyn took it from me. “Trouble with the pad?” She looked concerned as she checked the screen.
“No,” I answered, simply. “I reviewed the information to my satisfaction.”
She didn’t react, only poured herself another cup of tea. “May I?” She gestured at my cup and I nodded.
As she filled the cup, I said, “Your plan won’t work.” I picked up my tea and took a sip.
She leaned back in the chair, letting the shadows strike across her face and build what I assumed was an intentional intimidating appearance. “Why do you say that?”
I put the tea down and pushed it slightly away from me. “Your plan counts on being able to disable the security with your usual Klemtite Essentials tools. However, the house was retrofitted with equipment from Dynamic Security Services, which also offers off-site monitoring. They’ll notice the interference and dispatch live countermeasures.”
“So, what do you suggest?”
I replayed the information in my head again. “DSS uses live countermeasures, but they still have monitoring systems. If you get someone inside the monitoring station to look the other way, through bribes or cutting them in on the take, that will delay interference. A well-placed guard can make all the difference, I would wager. Do this during the new owner’s wedding anniversary next week and you can use the confusion to your advantage. He won’t let his wife wear the jewels because they are a conquest more precious than she is, which will leave them isolated and an easy grab.”
Evelyn turned off the pad and tossed it to another chair. “You pulled that all from the information I showed you?”
I nodded.
“Very good, Alphonse. I must say, I am impressed,” she admitted. “And that is exactly how the job played out when I did it.”
I reran the dates in my mind, realizing that they must have been doctored. “You already did this assignment?”
“Yes, a bit of fiction for your benefit. We did this job six weeks ago. Remi got some silly girl to look the other way at the monitoring station and we had a thirty-minute window before supervisors looked in on the unanswered alarms. The owner blamed his wife and they had quite the row. Winston walked out with the goods in a gift bag. It wasn’t scanned on the way out because it would have been rude to suspect guests.”
I nodded. One detail struck me as needing a follow-up, but I couldn’t put it all together. “Why did you ask me to look at it if you didn’t need the help?”
Evelyn stood up and cleared the trays. “You wanted a puzzle and training. This let me provide you with both.”
She came back out to the room and grabbed her coat. “I have other plans for you from here.”
I stood up and met her at the door. “What’s the real job?”
She flashed her quirky touch of a smile. “Something so much grander, Alphonse. Something they’ll tell stories about.”
13
I saw Evelyn several days later. Again, she met me outside and led me up to her apartment.
I took a seat in the same place as before and Evelyn sat across from me on another couch. She placed a pad in front of me and turned it on. “No chatter or refreshments this time, Alphonse. We’re pressed for time. I need some details from you on this next puzzle and then I’m off to make some other preparations. We’re looking at a corporate apartment housing a young engineer. We need to get information off her pad about a project of interest to a client.”
I reviewed the information on the pad carefully. The first section was a floor plan for a corporate apartment, the next, a bio of the corporate engineer, Olivia Weng. The last was notes about the local accesses and utilities. Unlike the previous challenge, no additional notes from the crew were listed.
What struck me immediately was the layout of the apartment. It was roughly the same as the one we were sitting in. There was a bedroom and bathroom to one side and a central living area. The biggest difference was that the kitchen area was self-contained through a pair of doors. Most of the living space had cubicle-style baffles attached to create a type of office.
The personnel file on Weng expressed that she was a brilliant engineer and prodigy. She had moved through schools quickly and collected an impressive list of degrees before finishing her third decade. She was also an extreme introvert and agoraphobe. The apartment was the same one she had been living in since she had arrived on Meridian.
I turned the pad around to Evelyn and walked her through my thoughts. “This apartment has been heavily retrofitted. The separate kitchen doors and the office components were put in by the corporation she’s currently working for. This means that they need to keep contaminants from the kitchen from interfering with their network hardware.”
Evelyn nodded and jotted notes in the pad.
“The rest of the complex isn’t too different from
this place, with lines of apartments on either side as well as above and below. She’s an agoraphobe, so living wedged in the middle of other apartments feels the most confined and therefore the safest. This makes infiltration difficult because all the routes in require going through a separate space.”
Evelyn took a few more notes and then faced me. “We could always rent one of the adjacent apartments. That would give us an easy route in.”
I shook my head. “No, the corporation either thought of that or lucked into full occupancy. All eight adjoining places show current leases. The route in is through the service lines.”
I took the pad and slid the input to the services page then traced along a particular route for the fire suppression. “This line is old, installed when the building was initially constructed, and then later removed.”
I flipped back to the floor plan. “See here, the corporation put in their own high-volume fire suppression. This means the old lines connect but don’t do anything. We can snake a line through and install cameras in all the previous fixtures.”
Evelyn gave me her little smile. “Ah. We don’t take the data out, we just record the homebody genius at work and get everything we need without lifting anything. No theft makes it easier to cover our tracks. Good work, Alphonse.”
I nodded. “This will allow us to avoid running into whatever security might have changed in the other apartments. From her file, Weng is highly detail-oriented. If we entered and duplicated information, she would notice the tiniest thing out of place. Her passwords will also likely be based on esoteric knowledge and difficult formulae that would restrict access.”
