Dagger Key and Other Stories

I began to study the plans of the security system I had designed for her. It was likely that she had made modifications, but I doubted she would have had time to install an entirely new system. Once inside I could lock the house and prevent her from escaping, but she would then retreat into the panic room and call the police. Of course I could cut her lines, jam her outside communications, and I could override her alarms and counterfeit an all-is-well signal to the private cops that patrolled the neighborhood. That would leave us in a stalemate—Amorise in the panic room and me standing by the door. But a stalemate might be all that was required. My actions might convince her that I would not do her bidding…not this time around. Afterward I could take a short vacation, or a long one, and let Wooten handle the fallout. One way or another, though, I intended to make a statement with Amorise.

The house was a twenty-eight-room structure of gabled gray stone facing the water—in the moonlight it had an air of somber opulence, like a hotel for vampires. Amorise had not tricked up the external security, and I was able to penetrate the grounds without difficulty. It was after one in the morning, and I watched the house from amid a stand of old-growth firs, dressed in burglar black, my breath smoking in the cold damp air. In my pockets were a freon spray, a scrambler, a laser torch, and an ultrasonic whistle. I had coated my skin and clothing with an agent that would dissolve macrowebs on contact—I had set several booby traps utilizing such webs and I could not be certain that Amorise had not altered their locations. There were a couple of lights on downstairs, but I believed that was for show. I doubted anyone was awake. Keeping to the shadows, I made my way to a side window. When lifted by an intruder, the bottom of the window would, once weight was placed upon the sill, extrude a hidden blade and slam down with the force of a guillotine. It was exactly as I had created it, not modified at all. I deactivated the mechanism, and after I had climbed inside, I overrode the alarms with my palm console and locked the house down. This all seemed far too easy. I switched on my penlight, bringing bulky sofas, a pool table, and an oriental carpet up from the shadows, and scanned the immediate area for electronic activity, finding none.

I had made my entrance into a smallish game room, but the living room beyond was as big as the lobby of a grand hotel, with a marble fireplace, five groupings of chairs and sofas ranging its more than one-hundred-foot length. The air was scented by a half-burned cedar log in the hearth, and the area was filled with security devices, all coded so as to prevent remote disabling, each keyed to ignore those people whom its detectors registered as familiar. I moved into the room and a cleaning robot—a flat black shape capable of prospecting for dust beneath the furniture—came trundling across the carpet toward me, spitting blue tongues of electricity. I jumped aside and immobilized it with a freon spray. As I went forward, I was attacked by a lamp cord of so-called “intelligent plastic” that tried to garrote me, whipping up into the air like a flying snake. I immobilized it as well. Most of the security devices in the room were centered about a vault set in the left-hand wall—I gave it a wide berth and continued on cautiously, a scanner in one hand, laser torch in the other, searching for any potential threat. I managed to negotiate the room without further incident, but as I stepped out into the main entryway, at the foot of a curving marble staircase, one of the larger cleaning units, a domed white shape the size of a wastebasket, hurtled at me, visible in the moonlight spilling through the windows flanking the front door. I eluded its rush, and as it turned back toward me, I swung the laser torch over the top of the dome, where the control package was housed, burning a seam along the right quadrant. It kept coming. I held the torch steady, burning smoking lines across the entirety of the machine, but in the instant I disabled it, it succeeded in brushing against my leg, transmitting a shock that threw me onto my back and left me stunned. I lay for a moment, gathering myself. Apparently Amorise had been able to make more significant changes than I had believed possible. I wondered why I wasn’t dead—the unit I had just disabled carried a lethal voltage. Then I had a revelation: Amorise must have reduced the charge. She could not afford to kill me. Not, at any rate, until I produced the Text. I felt suddenly foolish. What was I doing here? I could thwart Amorise’s intentions simply by leaving town. It was only my anger—Villon’s anger, I thought—that had brought me to the house.