Dragonback 03 Dragon and Slave (17 page)

But then, as Uncle Virgil had been fond of saying, tricky was the
Morgan family middle name. "Okay," he said, shutting off the computer.
"Time to switch to Plan B."

"Which is?"

"You'll see," Jack said, standing up and glancing over Gazen's
desk. A small but distinctive paperweight caught his eye. Easy to
carry, and something Gazen would definitely miss. Perfect. Picking it
up, he dropped it into his pocket.

"What is that for?" Draycos asked as Jack started for the door.

"A souvenir of our visit," Jack said. "Come on, we've got work to
do."

"Where are we going?" Draycos asked as Jack eased the door open a
crack.

"To the kitchen," Jack told him, looking carefully outside. No one
was in sight. "I just hope they haven't gotten started on breakfast
yet."

"The kitchen?" Draycos asked, sounding confused. "Why?"

Jack smiled tightly. "I'm hungry."

The kitchen was deserted when Jack and Draycos arrived. Deserted
and dark both, with only a handful of small night lights showing.

"The food supplies will be back in the pantry," Draycos pointed
out as Jack wove his way carefully through the maze of shadows.

"I was kidding about being hungry," Jack told him. His stomach
growled. "Mostly, anyway."

He stopped beside the recipe desk, and the corner-mounted recorder
he'd seen on his first trip through the place. "This is why we're
here," he said, pulling the recorder from its attachment.

"What is it?" Draycos asked.

"A recorder," Jack said, turning it toward one of the lights for a
better look. "Video and audio both. I figure there's no reason to let
that camera in Gazen's office go to waste."

He glanced around, looking for tools. A butter knife and seafood
fork would probably do, he decided. "Watch the door," he ordered
Draycos, heading for a stack of silverware drawers. "Let me know if you
hear any movement over by the slave stairs."

There was a surge of weight on his shoulders as the dragon leaped
out from the back of his shirt collar. Silently, he padded off toward
the door.

The recorder was a simple, off-the-shelf model, with few
complications and not a single shred of security. It took Jack only a
minute to take off the outer casing, strip the guts out of the gadget,
and put the casing back together. Reattaching the empty shell to the
desk, he put the recorder equipment into his pocket and headed for the
exit. "Finished," he called softly. "Draycos?"

He rounded a preparation island and stopped. There was the door
straight ahead, a wide, dark shadow against the pale white kitchen
walls. The dragon was nowhere to be seen. "Draycos?"

"Here," the other called from somewhere to Jack's left. "Come and
see."

Frowning, Jack followed the voice. Behind a large food warmer, he
found Draycos standing against the wall. Above his head was a wide,
flat gray box set into the wall at Brummgan eye-level. "Trouble?" Jack
asked.

"Just the opposite," Draycos said. "I was scouting and found the
box you see above me. Do the words on it say what I believe they say?"

Jack stepped close and squinted at the box. In the dim light the
lettering was hard to make out. "Spare . . . spare something," he said.
"Spare . . .?"

"Spare keys?" Draycos suggested.

Jack felt his heartbeat pick up slightly. Spare
keys
?
"This is definitely worth a look," he agreed. Pressing his back against
the box, he held a hand out to Draycos. The dragon put a forepaw on it
and melted up his sleeve. There was the usual shifting on his skin as
he leaned out over the box door.

And there was it was again: the same odd sensation Jack had felt
outside Gazen's office. As if the dragon were somehow slipping . . .

Another wiggle, and he was back. "There are six rows of hooks
inside, with five in each row," he reported. "Each hook is labeled, and
holds one to three keys."

"Any alarms?"

"None that I could see," Draycos told him.

Jack looked at the side of the box, noted the simple-looking lock
that held the lid in place. This seemed way too good to be true. "I
guess they figured hiding it back here was enough," he said. "Could you
see the labels?"

"Not well enough to read," Draycos said.

"Well, keys are always worth checking out," Jack said, pulling out
his lockpick. "Let's get this thing open."

He had the lock popped in ten seconds flat. Even with the
out-of-the-way location, he thought dryly, whoever had been in charge
of extra keys must not have read the Chookoock family security manual.
Taking half a step back, he swung back the door.

And was slammed suddenly and violently backward as Draycos leaped
out between him and the box.

He flailed for balance, but the shove had been too hard. Gurgling
helplessly in his throat, he fell back onto the tile floor. "Draycos!"

"Stay down," the dragon said sharply. He was crouched beneath the
box, his long neck twisted as he peered cautiously up at it. "I heard a
spring twitch as you opened the door, and then a click. A trap may have
been activated."

"Oh, great," Jack muttered. Keeping low to the floor, he skittled
around to the wall beside the box. Then, gingerly, he eased himself
upward.

One look was all it took. "There was a trap, all right," he said.
"But it's already been sprung. Have a look."

Carefully, Draycos straightened up. "There," he said, his tongue
flicking out to point at the hinge side of the box lid. "There is the
spring I heard."

"That's the trigger," Jack agreed. "And there's the trap, that
little hole between the first and second row of keys. See it?"

"Yes," Draycos said. "I assumed it was merely a defect in the
material."

"It's supposed to look that way," Jack said. "It's the lens of a
security camera, set to go off as the door is opened. One of us just
got his picture taken."

Draycos muttered something evil-sounding under his breath. "My
fault."

"Don't blame yourself," Jack told him, peering at the disguised
lens. Probably a remote camera, with a light-pipe system carrying the
image through the wall to somewhere else. "That kind of trigger is hard
to detect. Especially when you're looking at it with the box closed the
way you K'da do."

"It is still a disaster," Draycos said in a low, pain-filled
voice. "I have failed."

"Let's not panic yet, okay?" Jack said. "You said you heard the
click when the camera went off. When was that, exactly?"

"It closely followed the sound of the spring," Draycos said
slowly. "I believe I had already gone back to my three-dimensional
form, hoping to protect you from any deadly weapon."

And to take the full impact of that weapon on himself? Probably.
Typical K'da warrior thinking. "So you think you'd already come out
when the camera fired?"

"Yes, I am certain," the dragon answered. "I was between you and
the box at the time."

Wedged in rather tightly between Jack and the box, too, as Jack
remembered it, "So you were pressed up against the box," he said.
"Blocking most of the light. And with, what, your back to the camera?"

"Most likely my right shoulder," Draycos said. "I was twisting
that direction, but did not yet have my back to the box."

"So in other words, they haven't got a picture of Jack Morgan with
his fingers in the candy dish," Jack concluded. "All they've got is a
close-up of a K'da scale pattern."

"But surely they will not be able to identify it," Draycos said
hopefully. "No one here has ever seen a K'da."

"We're assuming that, yeah," Jack said grimly. "Problem is, we
don't know for sure. We
do
know that these guys supply Brummgan
mercenaries to whoever the Valahgua are working with. What if they're
not just suppliers, but also partners?"

"If so, they may show the picture to the Valahgua," Draycos said.
"You are right. We must destroy that picture."

"If we can," Jack said, glancing over his shoulder at the kitchen
clock. They were running dangerously low on time. "First things first.
As long as we're here, let's take a look at these keys."

The labels had, of course, been printed in Brummgan script. But
someone had thoughtfully added hand-written translations in English and
Dynsci, probably for the benefit of slaves for whom one of the Orion
Arm's major trade languages was more familiar.

And as Jack ran his eyes over the labels, he realized that the
lack of security here wasn't nearly as big a mistake as he'd hoped.
Most of the keys were to meat lockers, or pastry storage areas, or even
one to a freezer temperature control. If they'd tipped off the Valahgua
for this, they'd paid a pretty high price for pretty cheap goods.

Then he spotted a single small and oddly-shaped key on one of the
hooks in the bottom row, looking almost like an afterthought. Leaning
down, he squinted at the label.

And smiled tightly. As Uncle Virgil used to say, at least until he
had decided it was safe to swear in Jack's presence—"Bingo," he
murmured.

"What?" Draycos asked.

"A key to the slave hotboxes," Jack told him, taking the key and
dropping it into his pocket. "And since it says hot
boxes
,
plural, I'm guessing it opens all of them.
That
could be
extremely useful."

"They will notice the loss," Draycos warned.

"Only if they look really closely," Jack said, shifting one of the
spare keys onto the now-empty hook. "This ought to make it less
obvious."

"What about the camera?"

"We'd have to take the whole box off the wall to see where the
optic line goes," Jack said, closing the door and relocking it. "And
then we'd have to trace it to the camera itself. We'll just have to
hope no one bothers to check the pictures every day."

"But if they do—"

"Then we may be in trouble," Jack cut him off harshly. He didn't
like this any more than Draycos did. But there wasn't a knitted,
purled, or darned thing either of them could do about it. At least, not
right now. "Or not. I doubt there are any Valahgua here in the
house—you'd probably have smelled them if there were. And a close-up
view of K'da scales isn't going to be very helpful to anyone else."

"Perhaps," Draycos said reluctantly. "What now?"

"We go back to Gazen's office," he told Draycos, heading for the
door again. "And hope he's not getting up extra early this morning."

Getting the recorder set up took longer than Jack had expected.
The cable feed from the security camera vanished back into the wall a
short distance from Gazen's office, and it took him and Draycos several
precious minutes to track it into the conference room next door.

Once there, though, things went quicker. From the inside of a
handy ventilation grille, Draycos dug a short tunnel into the soft
material to the point where the cable ran through the wall. Wiring the
recorder into the circuit, Jack stashed the device out of the way and
resealed the grille.

"You realize, of course, that this communication cable is one of
the wires we punctured earlier," Draycos pointed out.

"That's okay," Jack assured him, brushing the last bits of
telltale dust from beneath the grille, trying to spread it evenly
across the floor. "They'll fix it as soon as they realize they're not
getting a picture. Probably have it back up in an hour."

"And then?"

"That camera has a perfect view of Gazen's keyboard," Jack said.
"We come back tomorrow and retrieve the recorder, and we ought to have
a complete record of what it takes to get into the Chookoock family
computer system."

He felt a ripple across his skin as the dragon shook his head.
"Sometimes you amaze me, Jack."

"With my creativity?"

"With your sheer nerve," Draycos corrected. "Who else would use an
enemy's own security system against him?"

"Oh, pretty much any thief worth his bail money," Jack said with a
tight smile. "That's how we do our job."

"How you
did
your job," Draycos corrected. "You are
reformed now."

"Right," Jack muttered. "Sure couldn't prove it by me."

He stood up, brushing the remaining dust off his hands as he
surveyed the area. Not perfect, but good enough. Stepping to the door,
he opened it a crack and peered out.

He'd pushed his timing just a little too far. Across the big entry
chamber, he could see muted lights and hear a quiet commotion coming
from the kitchen. The breakfast crew, apparently, had started work.

"The way to the stairway is still clear, if we hurry," Draycos
murmured in his ear.

Jack swallowed. "Let's go."

Luck, or K'da warrior fortune, was with them. The slave activity
was confined to the kitchen, and most of the residential area was still
asleep. They ran across only one Brummga already on the move, and
Draycos's ears caught his footsteps in time for Jack to duck out of
sight behind a large decorative planter. Two minutes later, they were
back in Her Thumbleness's room.

"And now?" Draycos asked as Jack lay back down at the foot of the
snoring Brummga's bed.

"We try to get some sleep," Jack said, stretching out on the hard
floor and closing his eyes. "I've got a feeling this is the most
comfortable we're going to be for a while."

Jack had hoped to get in at least a couple of hours of sleep
before the roof fell in on him. But he'd been asleep no more than half
an hour when he was jolted awake by the slamming of the door against
the wall. He'd barely pried his eyes open when rough Brummgan hands
grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him to his feet.

"Hey," he protested, blinking his eyes against the glare of light
spilling in from the hallway. "What's going—?"

One of the Brummgas cut off the question with a slap to the side
of his head. "Quiet, slave," he growled, slapping Jack again to
emphasize the point. "Come."