was lit brighter, but he still wore Mike Tyson’s face like a mask. The reports from the other guards hadn’t been much help—none had noticed it was a different black man, except in retrospect. The usual guy was skinnier, one had said. The thief might have had a beard, or he might not have. They each claimed he had a limp, but Enda was waiting to see proof of that for herself.
Tyson trailed the four cylindrical robots’ slow path along the corridors, but Enda left them. She walked into the building’s foyer, where four security guards stood behind the desk. One of them made eye contact and Enda started. He was real, surrounded by three AR colleagues. He stood at his approximation of attention and nodded at Enda as she approached. She lowered the opacity on her playback and the other guards turned ghostly.
“The woman at the gate warn you I was coming?” Enda asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard said.
Otherwise you’d still be playing on your phone.
“Were you working that night?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Anybody from that night still work here?”
“In light of our failures, the company has had to aggressively restructure.”
“ ‘Aggressively restructure,’ huh? That’s a new one.”
“Yes, ma’am. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, I’ve already read the reports,” Enda said.
She walked out the building’s front door and into the courtyard that filled the space between buildings. The rain streaked cold down Enda’s face as she crossed to the grocer. The ceiling was burnt black in patches, and broken windows had been boarded up with plywood. Remnants of police tape littered the support struts, rustling gently in the breeze.
Enda watched Tyson and the robots proceed through the building as though she had X-ray vision. On the fourth floor skybridge Tyson stopped and looked down, as if he could see Enda standing there.
Enda took a few paces out from beneath the awning, trying to see what Tyson could see. A patch of the outer wall had been recently repaired but not yet painted. A car burst through the wall, front end already crumpled by the time it appeared inside the compound. Text labels hung from the car—make, model, year, VIN, registration, but none of it was important. It was a stolen car, too old to have any intelligent security systems onboard.
A small flood of people rushed around the car and into the complex. Some ran into the grocer, then fled, their arms laden with stolen goods. When they were clear, others flung Molotov cocktails at the business. Enda paced the scene for a better view of the pyromaniacs, but as she reached the far side of the figures they turned two-dimensional, flattened by the lack of cameras on the opposite side of the street. No doubt police could access those feeds, but Enda would have to do without.
She unpaused the playback and put it up to triple-speed as she walked back inside. She crossed the foyer and nodded at the overly alert guard, then hit the elevator call button. Before the car could arrive, Tyson dropped through the building to ground level, and approached the security guards at the main operations desk.
“Could you step aside?” Enda asked the real guard. Puzzlement crossed his face, but he didn’t ask any questions.
The same three AR guards stood at the desk, but now they were joined by a woman. She was a well-dressed, upper-management type, brought on scene by the arson.
Tyson spoke to the woman and the guards, and left. It was a strange gamble, talking to security in the middle of a burglary. Braggadocio, or something else? Enda dropped the playback speed to real-time, and followed Tyson as he walked calmly away from the desk, rounded the corner, and began to run.
She could see it clearly, the limp the guards had mentioned—right leg, possible knee injury or lower-leg prosthetic. Enda recorded the man’s stride and flicked that to Natalya as well, unsure of what resources she might have for gait detection.
She followed Tyson up the elevator and watched him incapacitate a guard. He ferried the man into Lee’s apartment, which he accessed with a small round device. Enda stood outside Lee’s apartment, also tagged with police tape, and watched Tyson vanish as he reached the threshold. There were no cameras inside the apartment, nothing for the virt recording to re-create.
She skipped ahead until Tyson emerged through the closed door, and trailed him downstairs and outside to the maintenance access.
He loaded the cleaning cart back into the van, and drove slowly past police