“So what’s wrong with both of us?” Larry asked.
Lyn’s room contained twin king-size beds and was as luxuriously furnished and fitted as every other part of the house. She
was supposed to be sharing it with somebody called Donna, who hadn’t arrived yet. Inside, she took off her bikini and put on a shirt and shorts. Then she stood by the window thinking for a while.
There was a datagrid screen in the room, but she didn’t want to make any calls since there was a good chance it was bugged. Anyway she didn’t need to if she wanted to get out because Clifford Benson’s people had aheady anticipated that. Inside her shoulder bag in the closet was a microelectronic transmitter that looked like a powder compact but would send out a signal when she unlocked a safety catch and pressed a disguised button. If she pressed it once, a CIA agent would call the house within seconds, posing as a brother with news of a family emergency and stating that a cab was on its way to collect her. If she pressed it three times, the two agents in the airmobile parked a mile down the road from the front gate would arrive in under half a minute, but that option was for use only if she got into real trouble. But she didn’t want to get out just yet. The house was empty and quieter than it would be at any time for the rest of the weekend. There would never be another chance like this for a look around the place with little risk of being disturbed. She sure-as-hell wasn’t going to chicken out after a couple of hours with nothing to report, she told herself.
She took a deep breath, bit her lip nervously, walked over to the door, inched it open, and listened. Everything seemed still. As she let herself out into the passage a half-stifled giggle came from behind the door opposite. She stopped for a second; there was no other sound, and she moved quietly on toward the central part of the house.
The passage led through a small den into a large, central, open room that rose the full height of the building, one side a sloping wall of glass panels facing the rear of the house. The room was elbow-shaped, thickly carpeted, and had a sunken floor in front of a large fireplace of brickwork, with areas of raised floors around it angling away to openings and stairways which gave access to other parts of the house.
Muffled voices and kitchen noises were coming from one of the corridors, but she didn’t detect any sign of Sverenssen’s domestic staff in her immediate vicinity. She slowly examined the furnishings, ornaments, the pictures on the walls, and the fittings overhead, but found nothing that looked out of place. After pausing to
replay her mental model of the layout, she picked out a narrow corridor that seemed to lead toward the office wing and followed
it.
Eventually, after exploring the system of rooms that the corridor brought her to, most of which she had already seen in the course of the quick tour that Sverenssen had given her, she came back to what seemed to be the only door anywhere that opened through into the office wing. She tried the handle gently, but it was locked, as she had expected. When she tapped it with a knuckle, the sound it produced was flat and solid, even from the parts that looked like ordinary wood panels. They might have been wood on the surface, but there was a lot of something else underneath; that door had been put there to keep out a lot more than just drafts. Without a rock drill or an army demolition squad, she wasn’t going to get any farther in that direction, so she turned to go back to the center part of the house. As she began moving, she recalled one of the sculptures that she had seen in the central room. It hadn’t really struck her at the time, but now as she thought about it again, she realized that there had been something vaguely familiar about it. Surely not, she thought as she tried to visualize it again in her mind. There was no way it could be possible. She frowned, and her pace quickened a fraction.