A black Lincoln came along the street, turned off onto the parking strip, and drew up beside the cruiser. Corfe stared at it, now totally confused. It was too much of a coincidence not to be the same Lincoln that he had seen drive away ahead of the van. What in hell was going on?
A red-haired man in a brown parka emerged from the Lincoln. The officer who appeared to be the senior of the two, whom the other called Des, got out to talk to him. There was a brief exchange that Corfe didn’t catch, accompanied by gestures in his direction. Then the two who were outside the car walked up to the house. The man in the parka opened the door, and Corfe saw him switch off the alarm panel in the entrance foyer. He disappeared inside, Des following.
Well, yes, Corfe thought to himself: If the mecs had triggered an alarm that he’d failed to spot, it made sense that it would have alerted the security company. But how had Garsten’s security company known about the van? He still couldn’t understand that part.
Unless . . .
He felt sick suddenly, as something that should have been obvious all along finally occurred to him.
“Officer?” The officer still sitting in the driver’s seat turned his head. “Could you tell me the name of the security company that this person is from?”
The officer checked a notepad clipped on a rest between the front seats. “An electronics company out Redmond way takes care of it—Microbotics.”
Of course! Corfe groaned and slumped back in the seat. Garsten worked for Payne. No wonder Corfe had failed to spot any internal alarm systems when he was in there. If he’d stopped for a moment to think that Microbotics might be handling Garsten’s security, he would have guessed there would be nothing obvious. Sophistication was their business.
And if Payne was the one behind this, that was where they would have taken Michelle.
“They’re the ones who’ve got her,” Corfe said.
“Who?”
“Microbotics. The owner of the company has a house across in Bellevue. That’s where she’ll be—and the van. We’re at the wrong place.”
The officer eyed him skeptically in the mirror. “Security companies don’t snatch people off the streets. They’d call us. Do you know who the owner of that outfit is?”
“Sure, Martin Payne. I used to work for them. I just told you, that’s where she is.”
“Oh, you don’t say?” The officer’s tone carried a note of conviction that fell somewhat short of total.
The two who had gone into the house reappeared. The man in the parka stayed by the door, while Des came back to the car. “Nah, it’s clean inside, Greg. Nobody.” He waved a hand at Corfe. “There isn’t anything in there like what you said. You wanna come and see for yourself?”
Corfe shook his head wearily. “It’s okay. I know.”
“He says we’re at the wrong place,” the officer who had stayed in the car said.
The one outside called back to the house. “It’s okay. You can close it up.” Then, to the car again. “What?”
“Now he thinks the Microbotics security people grabbed her. He says they took her to Martin Payne’s house, in Bellevue.”
Des reached inside the car and lifted the radio handset off its hook. “Oh, man,” he sighed resignedly. “Here we go for the weekend. Let’s just wait in there for a minute, okay? I gotta get instructions on this.”
The DNC software only communicated with the mec control subsystem. It couldn’t access the phone lines, the e-mail, the Internet, or any other means Kevin could think of for possibly getting a message to the outside. He tried again to activate any of the mecs around him in the lab with the idea of using one of them to call Emergency on a regular phone, but it was no use. Every channel was dead. He would have sobbed with the fear and frustration if he could. But he had no bodily sensations or feelings, no impression of possessing physical extent in space. Although he could still think and move virtual limbs in mec-software visual space, his connection to the external world was suspended in a kind of limbo—an electronic sensory deprivation tank. He felt emotions inside, but there was no way to express them.