Inescapable by Niall Teasdale

they got in. The question is, why did they bother?’
    Duncan sighed.
‘I’m still coming up with nothing.’
    ‘And I tend to
agree, but they went to a Hell of a lot of trouble to get in here
for no apparent purpose. No one does that. I’m going to go take a
look at where they would have got to once they got out of the duct.
I’ll keep you posted.’
    From the
hangar, she went down to the utility room where the duct let out
into the building. It was not entirely insecure, there were sensors
and grills and the top side vent was barred, but all of those could
be bypassed. Fox knew they could be bypassed by someone with the
right skills and tools, because she had followed the man who had
done it for her team. She stood looking up at the service panel
which could be swung out from inside and remembered the swift,
clean deployment.
    ‘Are you okay,
Fox?’
    Fox turned her
gaze down at Kit, standing there with a look of concern on her
face. ‘I’ll be fine once I’ve stood here for a minute and wallowed
in misery. Then I’ll push it all out of my mind and get on with the
job, and think nothing more about it until I can allow it.’
    ‘You can do
that? Just… decide not to feel.’
    ‘I had to learn
to do it, before Dallas. I’m not a natural killer. If I went into a
combat situation thinking about the people I might have to kill… So
I learned to turn off my emotions, my compassion. It came in useful
when I ended up doing police work.’
    ‘I can imagine.
Why do you let yourself feel the pain at any time? Why are you
allowing it now?’
    ‘It’s not
obvious?’ Fox gave her a bleak little smile. ‘I think people are
often more defined by their pain than their pleasure. If I turn
that off, keep myself free of the pain, I end up no better than the
people I hunt down and arrest.’
    ‘Oh… It is
obvious when you say it like that.’
    ‘Let’s get
moving. Give me a schematic of the rooms near this location and
their purpose, if you have the data.’ Fox watched as the wireframe
appeared in-vision. The structure was the same as the one she had
infiltrated in Dallas, but the utilisation of the rooms was not
identical. ‘Offices across the corridor?’
    ‘Yes, largely
administrative.’
    Fox turned and
walked out onto the grey corridor. Two metres to the right and
across the way was a door which she knocked on and then opened. A
woman blinked at her from behind a desk which had half a dozen
virtual monitors racked up over it.
    ‘Can I help
you?’ the woman asked.
    ‘I’m Fox
Meridian. I’m investigating the break-in a few days ago.’
    ‘Oh, you’re
with Palladium. Yes. We were informed. I’m Evangeline Norris. I’m
the network supervisor here.’
    Fox’s lips
pursed. ‘The network supervisor? You administer the local network
from here?’
    ‘Local network,
communications to the MarTech backbone, peering… All that kind of
thing.’
    ‘I am going to
send a couple of robots down here to do some scans, Miss Norris,
and I’m going to need you to work from somewhere else for a
while.’
    Norris winced.
‘That’s such a bitch to set up. For security reasons, this is the
only desktop with the clearance for some things I need to do.’
    Fox nodded. ‘I
kind of thought you were going to say that. And it’s also why I’m
sure I need to go over this room with a fine filter.’
    ~~~
    ‘I have a telepresence
connection request from Sam,’ Kit announced as Fox lay on her bed,
reading.
    ‘Sam? Put him
through.’
    ‘Would you like
me to put you in more clothing in the projection?’ Kit’s gaze
flicked over the bodysuit Fox had stripped down to.
    ‘Sam’s seen me
naked. Sam’s seen me naked and drunk.’
    Sam, when his
image appeared beside the bed, was not wearing a shirt. Fox did not
read Chinese and was not really sure what the ideogram over his
right nipple was telling her today. ‘Fox, Kit, I hope your trip’s
going well?’
    ‘I’m sitting in
a bunker in an area the Pan-Islamic Caliphate