Read Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves for Free Online

data theft, and remove the data from the facility. Agents from Department M, and possibly other ECSS operatives, would be set on his trail. Some would be the hunters, others acting as obstacles, all trying to prevent him from delivering his package. Those agents were bein g tested, too, but not as stringently as Holger. According to the scenario, the hunters would have no special informa tion about his destination, but Holger knew better than to expect that. There would be someone waiting for him at the de livery point. There would be at least one confrontation.
    A thrill of anticipation ran through him. He was ready! So why wait? The real world was out there. He palmed open the door. Monitor screens on the workstations lining the room went blank as he entered. They would have been keyed to go to standby on the door's activation, as a security measure. He didn't mind. He had made a sufficient gain: by not announcing himself, he hadn't given his two testers a chance to get away from the console they were using, thus making it easier for him to select the correct one.
    "Ah, good evening, Agent Kun."
    Gilmore smiled the idiotic smile that made his bald head look like an overgrown infant's. His juglike ears bobbing above the collar of his white lab coat added to the caricatured scientist r fleet. Just from looking at Gilmore, one would never suspect that the man was near the top of his field—not with that idiot grin—but Holger knew better than to accept appearances.
    Take Major Chartain's appearance, for example. Though Chartain wore the uniform of the French Legion Etrangere, complete with the European Coordinated Military Forces rank tabs on his collar and the ECMF wreathed eagle shoulder patch, the major was no soldier. Holger knew that Chartain had been military once, but not with the Legion. Now, like Holger, he was an agent of the Secret Services. Chartain's tight smile and economical nod were all the acknowledgment the major gave to Holger's arrival.
    "You're a bit early," Gilmore said. "We weren't expecting you for a few more minutes."
    "1 didn't want to be late. Can we get started?"
    "Nervous?" Gilmore asked.
    Holger didn't bother to answer.
    Gilmore's smile faded. "Yes, well, I don't see why we can't get started. The first part requires that you retrieve a preselected datafile. You remember the file's identity code?"
    Pointless question. Holger never forgot the details of a briefing. "Westwind," he said.
    "Good." Gilmore beamed again. "Shall we proceed?"
    Holger shouldered his way past the testers to the console and stood, staring down at it, hands in the pockets of his greatcoat. This was not a simple workstation; there were two keyboard, and a host of specialized input devices. He took his left hand out of his pocket and ran it across the keyboard and the other controls. So easy to tell which Gilmore had manipulated last. Too easy. Gilmore should have used a virtual control surface instead of allowing the trace heat of the psych's hands to identify his workstation. Holger dispensed with the tedious task of entering the protected file zones and simply keyed in a standard recall sequence, bringing the workstation back to life. Several subscreens appeared on the monitor. None carried the data he sought, but he hadn't expected that they would. He patched to the facility's server, called up the search program he'd prepared, and set it loose using Gilmore's access authority.
    "Excellent," Gilmore commented. "I'll be collecting from Dagastino. He bet me that you wouldn't rely on thermal imaging to select the console."
    Holger didn't care about Gilmore's bet. Anyone with the psych's credentials should know that heat was something you felt rather than saw. If Dagastino didn't know better than to bet against the psych, he was as stupid as Sp—
    What was he thinking about? He had no time for idle speculation. He needed to concentrate on the job at hand. Yes. Do it and be done with it. Get free of the facility and back into