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The bus stopped half a dozen times to let off people. Finally, it drew to another stop, and a security guard got on. “You two,” he said, pointing to Carla and Rita. “Come with me.”
The two women got off the bus, and it drove away, leaving them with the guard at the side of the road. Rita could not see any buildings.
“Hands on top of your head,” the man said.
Rita followed Carla’s example and allowed herself to be searched. The guard got a good grope of her breasts and leered at her. She tried to appear demure.
“Get in the car,” he said, pointing to a Range Rover.
Rita opened her mouth to ask where they were going, but Carla grabbed her arm and shook her head. She kept quiet, as the Range Rover drove down a thickly wooded lane for a quarter of a mile and pulled into a parking lot. Rita’s heart leapt. Ahead of her she saw a huge satellite dish, and to her left was a two-story building with very narrow windows. It looked like a cross between an office building and a jail, she thought.
“Everybody out,” the guard said. He led the two women through the front door of the building and into a small reception room. A hard-looking man in civilian clothes checked their names on a list and looked carefully at their ID cards, comparing their faces to their photographs. That done, they were buzzed through an opaque glass door and into a hallway. “You cleaned here before, didn’t you?” the guard said to Carla.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“You know the drill, then. You tell the new babe here what to do. I want you done in two hours.”
“Yes, sir,” Carla said. She turned to Rita. “Come with me.” She led the way down the hall to a utility closet and handed Rita a roll of plastic trash bags. “There’s offices up and down this hallway,” she said. “You start at this end, and I’ll start at the other. Empty all the trash cans and shredders into the bags and bring them back here to the closet. I’ll show you where to put them then.”
“Shredders?”
“Shredding machines, for papers, you know?”
“Okay,” Rita said. She went to the nearest door, which was open, and rapped on the jamb. “Cleaning lady,” she said.
A man was working at a desk; he waved her in.
Rita found the wastebasket, emptied it, then went to a shredder, which sat on top of a plastic bin. She removed the top, set it on the floor and empted the bin into her bag. “Thank you,” she said, smiling.
The man didn’t even look up, just waved.
She repeated the process up and down the hallways. The offices were all identical—a steel desk, a filing cabinet, a chair, a wastebasket and a shredder. Each had a phone on the desk; some had copying machines. There was nothing on the walls of any of the offices, no pictures, no diplomas, no calendars, nothing. She went back to the utility closet and Carla showed her to an outside door with large plastic garbage cans outside. They dumped the trash bags, then each got a vacuum cleaner, and they vacuumed the offices and the hallway.
“Now, upstairs,” Carla said. She led the way up the staircase through a door and into a large room that appeared to cover the whole of the second floor, with a row of offices along one side.
Rita’s mouth fell open, and she closed it quickly, heading for the nearest wastebasket. The room was full of desks, each with a computer terminal. At the rear, reaching across the width of the room, was a row of large computers. She reflected that the computer room at the Miami field office of the FBI was a third the size of this. As she emptied each wastebasket she glanced at the computer screen on the desk. There was no time to read anything, but she saw, on various screens, spreadsheets, documents being written, columns of figures, and, on one desk, a full-color Mercator projection map of the world with red dots placed on at least two dozen spots around the globe. What appeared to be satellites were superimposed on the map. She noted the absence on every screen of anything resembling a market tape running. No commodities were being traded here.
Rita and Carla took out the trash bags, then returned with the vacuum cleaners. As Rita pushed hers around the floor, she began looking at the men at the desks. Each of them wore a telephone headset and a pistol in a holster. When they had finished vacuuming, Carla gave her a dust cloth, and they went from desk to desk, office to office, wiping down every surface. Each room was nearly identical to the ones downstairs—same furniture, same lack of anything personal on the desks or the walls. The windows were no more than six inches wide and tinted green. Carla estimated that the glass in each was at least two inches thick.
As they left the second floor, Rita noticed a bulletin board with work schedules posted on it, but she could get only the briefest of glances at it.
They returned to the ground floor. Rita turned a corner and came up against a steel door. Next to it was a keypad and a glass surface with the outline of a hand drawn on it. A sign on the door read, ACCESS TO THE LOWER LEVELS IS BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. ARMED RESPONSE.
Rita and Carla were picked up on time and taken to the country club, where they cleaned the men’s locker room, but Rita saw nothing out of the ordinary there, except for four or fiv
e men carrying weapons. They had their lunch outside, and Rita gently pumped Carla for information about what she had seen while cleaning there. At three o’clock, the bus returned the workers to the parking lot, searching each of them as they got off.
Rita drove away in her terrible old car, checking her mirrors and driving an erratic pattern to be sure she wasn’t followed. Finally she allowed herself a deep breath and a smile. She had gotten away with it.
CHAPTER
50
H olly sat at Jackson’s dining table and listened to Rita’s report. Ham had joined the group, and was intent on what she had to say. Harry Crisp was thrilled at his agent’s prompt success, and kept saying how lucky she had been.
“Doesn’t sound like luck to me, Harry,” Holly said.
“Thank you, Holly,” Rita said, smiling at her.
