She showed him through a secretarial area with two desks. At one of them, a brunette was typing onto a screen. The other desk had a terminal too, although it was blank at the moment, the chair before it empty with a green cardigan thrown over the back. There were file cabinets along two of the walls, and a door leading through to what was clearly Garsten’s office. Here, Corfe decided. This would be the perfect place.
Lisa knocked, ushered Corfe through. “Mr. Jeffreys,” she announced. Garsten got up, beaming, and shook hands. He was short and ruddy faced, with straight, reddish hair brushed to the side college-boy style, and a close-trimmed mustache, failing completely to convey the sinister image that Corfe had half expected. More, if anything, he put Corfe in mind of a supermarket manager. Why, Corfe had no idea. As far as he could recall, he’d never met a supermarket manager.
The line Corfe had prepared was that he’d been invited to go into partnership in a boat-hire business and wanted to check on the legal requirements and implications before giving an answer. He had called his old friend Ray Young, the Vancouver ferry captain, the evening before, and as a result had been able to come armed with some plausible questions revolving mainly around liabilities, tax credits, insurance, and investment write-offs. He and Garsten talked for about twenty minutes. At the end of the interview, Garsten scribbled down the references to some pamphlets and guides that he thought it might be useful for “Jeffreys” to take away and study, and suggested they fix another appointment when he’d had a chance to go through them. They agreed to leave things at that point for now, and came back out of the office to the secretarial area.
“Carol, could you pull out a few things for Mr. Jeffreys,” Garsten said to the brunette who had been there when Corfe went in. He handed her the list that he had jotted down. Then the phone rang in the office behind him. “That’s probably somebody I’ve been expecting,” he told Corfe. “Excuse me, but I’ll have to leave you. Carol will show you out.” And with that, he went back into his office and closed the door.
“Busy guy,” Corfe commented, casually taking in the surroundings while Carol rummaged in her desk and on a shelf behind.
“It can get hectic. This is nothing, really. . . . Oh, it looks like I’m out of MTL4s. I’ll see if there are any left next door. Back in a second.” She went out into the hall, and Corfe heard her call something to Lisa. The other chair in the room was still empty. Corfe was left on his own. He blinked. Breaks like this didn’t happen every day. In that case, all the more reason to make the best of them when they did. He looked around frantically.
A wooden cabinet of drawers stood by the wall behind the desks, below several shelves carrying books, journals, card indexes, and various office accessories. Between the cabinet and the far corner was a worktop with storage below for stationery supplies and assorted boxes. Stooping and peering in, Corfe saw there was an awkward-to-reach space back in the corner, where several cleaning cloths, several old binders, a broken Rolodex, and other odd items had been pushed in a jumble. He reached inside the bookstore bag that he was carrying and produced from it another, folded bag containing the mecs that he had brought with him to hide. The package included two telebots and an assortment of tools, besides the several smaller models that he and Kevin had agreed on as a minimum initial task force. He dropped onto one knee and placed the bag at the back of the space, out of sight behind the other things, and straightened up again quickly. There were enough books left in the bag that he was still holding to leave it unchanged in outward appearance. When Carol came back, he was back by the door, admiring a print of a 19th century schooner.
Corfe returned to the van, which he had left in a parking lot a few blocks away. From a console inside it, he activated one of the smallest mecs in the package that he had left behind, and in the course of the lunch hour was able to direct it up onto the worktop, and from there to a recess in the mounting bracket of a wall lamp, high up in the room where it would be unlikely to be noticed for the rest of the day. He then changed channels to activate another mec, and placed that one among the leaves of a potted plant on top of a file cabinet on the opposite side of the room. The second also contained an acoustic system that a couple of the engineers at Neurodyne were experimenting with, adapted from Kevin and Taki’s models, and could thus pick up sound. Corfe left their transmissions on auto record and went off on foot to spend the afternoon amusing himself in the city.