by Timothy Zahn
“Chewie says we’ll watch the back,” Lando said, looking down and trying to orient himself after too many rapid changes of direction. The Lulina Crown … there it was. “Rachele, is there any way to boost the range on these things?” he asked, lowering the electrobinoculars for a quick look at the zoom control.
“Try turning the clarity control all the way up and raising the contrast,” Rachele suggested. “That should help.”
“Thanks.” Lando made the adjustments. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what he’d started with. “Bink?”
“Looks like they’ve landed,” Bink reported.
“I think I see your spotters now, too,” Zerba added. “They’ve left their roof and are heading across toward the hotel.”
“I see them,” Bink confirmed. “Those are really nice boosts.”
“Easy, kiddo,” Dozer said. “You be a good girl, and when all this is over you can pick out one of them for your very own.”
“Like we’ve got room for one of those aboard our ship,” Bink muttered. “Though I guess I could store it in Tavia’s cabin.”
There was a faint and unintelligible comment from somewhere in the background. “Tavia says there’s already too much of your stuff in her cabin,” Rachele relayed. “She says if you want to bring a boosted landspeeder aboard, you should start by cleaning out your wardrobe closet.”
“I need every one of those outfits,” Bink said primly. “Just because she never goes out on the town—”
“Hold it,” Lando put in. In the distance behind and beneath them, a group of windows at the rear of the Lulina Crown had just brightened. “I’ve got fresh lights in the windows. About a third of the way up, midway from either end.”
“Can you tell which floor?” Rachele asked.
Lando squinted, trying to count as the airspeeder moved steadily farther from the hotel. “Looks like the sixth,” he said. “It’s a little hard to tell—there are a bunch of trees in the way.”
“Probably a WilderNest garden,” Eanjer said. “That’s a small park with various types of trees and other plants, often wild ones that you don’t usually see inside cities, the whole thing ringed by tall crescent or twistbark trees. Hotels with multiple buildings like to put them in the centers of their complexes.”
“Checking the sixth floor now,” Rachele said. “Let’s see … yes, that entire center section is an eight-room suite. Bink, you seeing anything?”
“Nope,” Bink reported. “Not on the sixth or anywhere else. If they’ve got any rooms on this side, they’re being coy about it.”
“They must really like parks,” Dozer commented. “I’d think the outside rooms would have a better view.”
“I don’t think a view is what they have in mind,” Bink said thoughtfully. “Rachele, any chance of getting us a room somewhere near that suite?”
“I’ll try,” Rachele said. “No promises, though—with the Festival coming up, pretty much every room in the city was snatched up weeks ago.”
“Are we done out here?” Lando asked.
“Yeah, we’re done,” Han confirmed. “Everyone head on back. Time to figure out our next move.”
To the complete lack of surprise of everyone—except possibly Rachele herself—Rachele did indeed get them a room.
Though it wasn’t exactly what Bink had hoped for when she’d turned Rachele loose on the job. She’d envisioned a room she could use as a base of operations for breaking into the place. Something right next door or, even better, something directly above or below. But even Rachele’s computer wizardry and network of high-level connections could only do so much.
Still, if the place wasn’t perfect, it could have been a lot worse.
“Is that it?” Tavia asked, stepping up to the window beside her and brushing a stray lock of her black hair behind her ear.
“That’s it,” Bink confirmed, gazing across the little pocket park at the other building. Two of the suite’s windows were blocked by the trunks of the big trees lining the greenery, but the rest were clear and visible.
“At least you’re not going to be rappelling down to it,” Tavia said. “Not from here.”
“You’re right on that one,” Bink agreed. Of all the aspects of Bink’s job that Tavia hated, watching her sister slide down the side of a building on a thin syntherope line was probably the part she hated the most.
Not that this would be a whole lot better, at least not from Tavia’s point of view. Still, swinging from tree to tree on a grappling harness wasn’t as bad as that long, barely controlled fall from a rooftop.
“Wow,” Kell said under his breath from somewhere behind the two women. “And you just moved us in here?”
“It wasn’t that hard,” Rachele assured him. “I noticed the couple who were supposed to move in here tonight are registered with the Wilderness Order, so I arranged for them to be offered a free safari in the Megrast Preserve down in Ancill Province. Simple, really.”
Kell shook his head in amazement. “I still say wow.”
Bink felt her lip twitch. Kell could be as impressed as he liked, but he really should stop being so vocal about it. There were enough swelled egos in this business as it was.
She sent a casual look over her shoulder at the others milling around the room. Maybe Winter would be willing to give him a few lessons on playing things cool. The white-haired woman was clearly just as impressed at Rachele’s achievement as Kell was, but was hiding it a lot better.
“Trouble?” Tavia murmured.
“No, it’s fine,” Bink murmured back.
Theoretically, it was. Solo was a pretty good judge of character, mostly. So was Mazzic, even if Bink didn’t always see eye to eye with him. If Mazzic said Winter and Kell were okay and Solo accepted that judgment, then they probably were.
But there was something about the two recruits that bothered her. Kell struck her as way too young, not just in age but also in experience and mental toughness. At the same time, she could see unnamed ghosts lurking behind his eyes. Something unpleasant in his past was driving him, maybe farther than he was really equipped to go.
Winter, oddly enough, was almost the exact opposite. She wasn’t much older than Kell, but her eyes held a startling depth of age and maturity. She had a natural poise, too, the kind of grace and self-assurance that Bink could also see in Rachele. Did that mean Winter, like Rachele, was a member of some world’s aristocracy? And if so, what in the Empire was she doing with a gang of thieves? Was she in it for revenge?
“Here,” Solo’s voice brushed into Bink’s musings. She blinked the thoughts away and found him holding out one of Rachele’s fancy electrobinoculars. “Rachele says we’ve got until tomorrow afternoon to get out of here. You think you can get us in by then?”
“Of course,” she said, taking the electrobinoculars from him. If there was one thing she’d learned in this business, it was to never tell a client you couldn’t do something.
Turning back to the window, pressing the electrobinoculars to her eyes, she got to work.
There wasn’t a lot to see over there. And what there was wasn’t very encouraging.
But it would be possible. Not easy, but possible.
She lowered the electrobinoculars and turned back around. In the intervening minutes, the rest of the group had found chairs or couches to sit on and were talking in low voices among themselves. “Here’s the deal,” she announced, walking over to the empty seat beside Rachele and sitting down.
The room went suddenly quiet.
“The hotel’s windows have built-in security systems, but the occupants seem to have disabled them,” she continued. “That means—”
“They disabled the security systems?” Kell asked, frowning.
“Central security systems are way too easy to slice into,” Tavia told him. “Especially hotel systems, which aren’t exactly known for sophistication. Our friends over there were probably afraid someone would take over the systems and use them to spy on them.”
“Which we absolutely would have,” Bink agreed. “You’ll also note they picked a sixth-floor suite on the garden side of the building, with big trees that would hamper any attempt to get to their windows via airspeeder. Both of those bespeak a certain paranoia.”
“Sounds about right for people who deal with Villachor,” Eanjer muttered. He was sitting a few meters away from the others, staring broodingly across the park, his left hand absentmindedly massaging his misshapen right hand through the medseal wrapping.
“And having disabled the hotel’s version of security,” Bink continued, “what could be more natural than that they would set up their own?” She waved toward the suite. “Their first line of defense was to bolt a set of transparisteel plates onto the inside of the normal glass of the windows. The good news on that is that the plates aren’t very thick, so I should be able to use a mono-edge wheel to cut through whichever one I want.”
“Or you could just use Zerba’s lightsaber,” Dozer suggested. “Be a lot faster.”
“Well, there’s just one teeny little problem with that,” Bink said. “Their second line of defense is a set of power sensors.”
“You sure?” Lando asked. “Usually power sensors are set up out of sight.”
“I’m positive,” Bink said. “The ripple pulse in the glass is unmistakable. You bring anything with a power cell within five meters of any of the windows and you’ll trigger alarms from one end of the suite to the other.”
“Cute,” Dozer grunted. “No way to disable them, I suppose?”
“Not from out here,” Bink said. “But I think we’ve got a manual crank drive for the mono-edge.” She looked at Tavia. “Right?”
“Yes,” her sister said, her mouth set in a thin, unhappy line. “How exactly were you planning to get close enough to use it?”
Bink braced herself. Tavia was not going to like this. “It’s going to have to be tree to tree,” she said. “Harness and manual grapples.”
Tavia’s thin lips compressed a little tighter. “Manual grapples don’t set as solidly as powered ones.”
“It’ll be okay,” Bink assured her. “I’ll just make sure I have a good anchor on whichever tree I’m swinging from. If the grapple fails, I can just pull myself back and try again.”
“How about using powered ones halfway across and then switching to manual?” Rachele suggested. “You should be able to use power along this building and at least halfway along the side set of trees. As long as you switch to unpowered before you get close to the suite you should be all right.”
“Not worth the effort,” Bink said. “Powered grapples are an integrated system. I’d have to strip off the harness, leave it draped over a branch or something, and pick it up on my way back. Besides, that five-meter range I quoted on the power detectors is only a guess. They may have focused detectors aimed in random directions that have two or even three times that range. I’d look pretty stupid if I reached the window to find half a dozen men with blasters waiting patiently for me to get there. Don’t worry—the manual system will work just fine.”
“Let’s say it does,” Lando said. “Once you’re there, then what?”
“Ah,” Bink said, lifting a finger. “That’s actually the easy part.” She lowered the upraised finger to point over her shoulder out the window. “Smack in the middle of that room over there is a Jaervin-Daklow floor safe. Probably bought here in the city—it looks new. They’re big, heavy, nearly impossible to break into, and have a touch-pad coder that’s virtually impossible to slice.”
“Unless?” Solo prompted.
“Unless you can see the pad while the code’s being entered,” Bink said, feeling a mischievous smile tugging at her lips. “Our friends over there were smart enough to set up the safe facing away from the window so no one could watch from, oh, say, right here.” She flicked a finger against her forehead. “What they weren’t smart enough to realize was that the room’s inside wall is facing the safe from less than three meters away. And said wall has a fresh gloss-white coat of paint.”
For a moment the room was silent. “You’re joking,” Zerba said.
Bink shrugged. “You turn sticks into butterflies and change clothes faster than people can blink,” she reminded him. “Jedi could supposedly lift rocks with their minds and make people forget their own names. We all have our specialties. This one’s mine.”
“The individual button lights on a keypad are never exactly the same,” Tavia said. “Differences in the emitters, plus bits of dust and finger oils, all shift the color and optical texture a bit. When one of the buttons is pushed, that light is blocked and the pattern on the wall behind is changed.”
“What do you need to work it?” Solo asked.
“I need to be at the window when they start keying in the code,” Bink said. “The rest is just reading reflections.”
“And shadows,” Tavia added. “If we can figure out whether the operator is left- or right-handed—and we usually can—the way the shadows shift when he hits individual keys can also be read.”
Bink rolled her eyes. “Tavia, you’re not supposed to tell people how the trick works,” she said mock-severely. “They’ll lose all respect if they know how simple it is.”
“Yeah, that’ll happen,” Solo said dryly. “When can you be ready?”
Bink looked at Tavia. “Two hours?”
Her sister didn’t look happy, but she gave a little nod. “Two hours,” Bink confirmed, turning back to Solo. “If Villachor has another late-night visitor, and if our friends across the way are invited, I can be by the window when they get back. After that, maybe half an hour to get in and crack the safe, see what’s inside that’ll tell us who they are and what they want with Villachor, then ten more minutes to seal up again.”
“What if Villachor’s already closed shop for the night?” Zerba asked. “If he sticks to schedule, he won’t have another meeting until tomorrow morning.”
Bink shrugged. “Then we do it tomorrow morning.”
“In broad daylight?”
“Not a problem,” Bink assured him. “There’s enough foliage out there to hide me from most people.”
“It’s the ones who aren’t most people I’m worried about,” Zerba muttered.
“I may be able to buy us another night here if we really need it,” Rachele said doubtfully. “It’ll be tricky, though.”
“Hold it,” Lando said, straightening suddenly in his seat, his eyes on the window. “Looks like they’re on the move.”
Bink turned around, craning her neck. The room’s light was on, with enough of a shifting shadow on the far wall to show that someone was over there opening the safe. She lifted the electrobinoculars to her eyes and focused in on the shadow.
Yes, it would work, she decided. She would have to be right up against the window to read the movements and decipher the keystrokes, but she was planning to be there anyway. The light and shadows shifted, marking the opening and closing of the safe door. The man back there emerged into view—
She stiffened. Only it wasn’t a man. The face that passed briefly through her field of view was green-scaled, with a mass of black hair tied and flowing down his back.
From somewhere in the area where Kell and Zerba were sitting came a sharp gasp. “Is that—”
“It’s a Falleen,” Eanjer confirmed, his voice grim. “What in the Empire is a Falleen doing here?”
“Take it easy,” Solo advised. But he didn’t sound any more thrilled than Eanjer did.
Or any more thrilled than Bink felt, for that matter. There were Falleen all over the Empire, of course, just like there were Rodians and Duros and even Wookiees. But this close to Imperial Center, the odds were unpleasantly high that any given Falleen would be working for—
“Take it easy?” Kell demanded. “Falleen mean Black Sun.”
“Not necessarily,” Winter said. Of all of them, she seemed to be maintaining the best semblance of calm. “Besides, Prince Xizor isn’t the only Falleen voice in the
galaxy these days. Most of them have nothing to do with Black Sun. In fact, there are groups who are actively trying to restore honor to the Falleen name by bringing him down.”
Chewbacca rumbled.
“Well, sure, most of those groups are probably on Vader’s payroll,” Solo agreed. “Doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”
“And I’ll bet they’ve got Xizor really worried,” Kell muttered.
“You’re welcome to bail if you want,” Zerba offered.
Kell set his jaw. “No,” he said. “Thanks.”
“If it helps any, I think there’s just the one Falleen in the suite,” Rachele offered, peering at her datapad. “Looking at the room-service records, I see only a single order per mealtime that a Falleen would be likely to choose. The rest of the food is more suited to humans.”
“How many humans?” Lando asked. “What kind of numbers are we dealing with?”
Rachele’s lips moved as she did a silent count. “I’d say ten to twelve, plus our Falleen.”
“Maybe the Falleen isn’t the one in charge,” Tavia suggested.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Dozer said. “If it’s Black Sun, the Falleen is definitely in charge.”
“From what I’ve heard, Black Sun has plenty of humans in its ranks, too,” Eanjer pointed out. “So if it is Black Sun, what does that mean for our plan?”
“Right now, nothing,” Han said. “We still have to figure out what his connection is with Villachor, and for that we still need a look into that safe. Bink?”
“I’m game,” Bink assured him, standing up. “And now, you’re all invited to take yourselves and your conversation elsewhere.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Kell insisted.
“Oh, yes, you are,” Bink said firmly. “I need to lay out and test my equipment, and I don’t want a bunch of big nervous feet walking all over it.”
“Besides, we all have jobs of our own to do,” Solo added, getting to his feet. “Rachele, what’s the hotel’s security like?”
“Not too bad,” Rachele said, again manipulating her datapad. “Looks like all you need to get up from the lobby is a keycard. There don’t seem to be any security holocams except in the lobby and meeting areas, either.”