“If you were the chairman of the board of Selvern, or Sony, or GE, or AG Renault, I still could not give you Lisa Tambor’s address. I can contact her myself and explain any proposition you wish to make to her, but in all fairness I must tell you I think we’d both be wasting our time. I doubt there’s anything you could offer her that we haven’t already.”

“You might at least tell her of Selvern’s interest,” Eric said lamely. It would be dangerous to insist any further. “If she expresses an interest we can go into details. I’ll be in Nueva York for another couple of days.” This was said to follow form. Clearly Lisa Tambor had given up modeling permanently. But they had to go through the motions.

“Fine. If she expresses a desire to pursue the matter further we could set up a meeting. How can I contact you?”

“You can’t. I’m moving around quite a bit while I’m here. Friends one day, relatives the next. You know. How about if I get back to you around, say, Tuesday next?”

“Very well. I should have an answer for you then. I advise you to contact your people out west and tell them of this conversation, though. Then maybe we can sit down and do some real business.” She rose and leaned over the desk to shake his hand. As she did so he was startled to see something else in her eyes. Her handshake was not at all businesslike.

“And if you’re not busy tonight, John, perhaps you’d like to have dinner with me? I know a Fine Peruvian restaurant uptown that serves a mean huachinango asado.”

“I’m sorry,” he said hastily, “I’m already committed.”

“I’ understand.” Her disappointment was plain. “Perhaps sometime next week. Meanwhile I’ll see if I can make contact with Ms. Tambor for you.”

“That’s all we can ask for. And I promise, if you don’t have any luck with her, Selvern will take another look at your list.”

“Fair enough. I hope you enjoy your visit to Nueva York, Mr. Frazier.”

“Thank you. I intend to.”

His mind worked furiously as the robocab took him back to his hotel. He had plenty of time to think because the vehicle took an intentionally roundabout route.

It was obvious that he wasn’t going to get Lisa Tambor’s home address out of Candlewaif or anyone else at the agency. He could try bribing a nonexecutive. The receptionist, for example, might have access to the necessary Files. She might also be an honest employee who valued her job with such a prestigious concern. That would bring police in and he could hardly risk that. Not while carrying a false identity and an altered credit card.

During his visit he’d looked for security measures. He didn’t see any but didn’t doubt they existed. Nor did he doubt that he could solve them, as he’d solved Polikartos’s. It wasn’t like he was planning to break into Winston’s or Konstantin’s.

The most difficult part was slipping past the human guards stationed in the tower lobby. It was just before midnight when he strolled into the building and headed for the elevators. The guard eyed him obliquely, turned away when his console showed that the visitor had, as expected, punched the button for the third floor. There was a late-night Szechuan restaurant on the third floor.

The elevator’s front doors would open directly into the restaurant. Eric had no intention of confronting a smiling maitre d’. He stopped the elevator between the second and third floors while he worked rapidly with the elevator’s programming. It resumed its rise a moment later and did indeed stop at the third floor. But it was the back door that opened, not the front, admitting him to the long service hallway.

Security would show that the elevator had made its proper way to the third floor. It would not show which doors opened upon arrival. Soon it was on its way down again, taking late-night diners to the lobby level or underground parking.

Eric turned and walked up the empty, dimly lit corridor. There were no surveillance cameras here. A short walk brought him to a fire stairway, and he started the long climb toward the seventieth floor. He couldn’t use the elevators. There was a chance the service lifts were monitored as closely as those intended for use by the public.

There was no surveillance camera in the seventieth floor corridor either. Apparently the building’s tenants had confidence in their ground-floor security and individual warning devices. Few intruders, however, had Eric’s electronic expertise. The frosted doors of the agency didn’t fool him for a minute, though the system, which might well have been manufactured by one of Selvern’s many subsidiaries, was elegant and subtle. The beautiful glass doors functioned as a pair of enormous, flat fiberoptic systems. A steady signal ran through both doors from roof to floor. Any unauthorized parting would trigger the alarm.

He had no intention of forcing the portal. It took him a few minutes to locate the keybox hidden in the doorframe on the lower left-hand side. With his pocketful of miniaturized, specialized equipment he had no trouble bypassing the key circuitry.

The doors slid apart easily at his touch and he was careful to close them behind him. A flashlight led him to Candlewaif s office. He wasn’t surprised to find her cabinetry locked, though protected by far simpler devices than the fiberoptic system that guarded the entrance:

Quicksearch brought the file he wanted to life on the single terminal screen. He ran through active clients before locating the inactive file, soon found Lisa Tambor’s name. There was a Manhattan address, which he entered into his wrist terminal. Then he cleaned up, shut down the terminal, and rose to depart. It had taken less than half an hour from the time he’d entered the tower lobby. All one needed was a plan of action, a few modest skills, and a little luck.

Consequently it was a terrible shock to see the two uniforms quietly waiting for him in the reception area. One held a stun pistol loosely in his right hand while the other rested in the same chair where Eric had so recently thumbed through glossy magazines.

“Didn’t sound like you were doing any damage,” the woman in the chair said, “so we figured we’d wait for you.”

“Look, I can explain.”

“Everyone who breaks in can explain.” The man gestured with the pistol. “Let’s go downstairs. You’d be wasting your breath explaining to us.”

A stunned Eric stood motionless while the woman frisked him quickly and professionally. She hesitated a moment, eyeing his tools admiringly, but leaving them in his coat. She didn’t want to disturb the evidence.

As they left, Eric tried to penetrate the secret of the doors, wondering what he could have overlooked. He was positive he’d deactivated the alarm.

The woman behind him noticed his gaze, smiled thinly. “Oh, you doused the doors all right. A slick piece of work, that. What you missed was the carpet.” Eric looked over his shoulder but saw no bulges beneath the shag.

“Pressure-sensitive,” she went on, “which is why I don’t mind mentioning it. You can’t avoid it even if you know it’s there. Step inside and the alarm goes off down-stairs. To bypass it you’d have to remove the whole carpet, because the wires don’t run underneath. They’re part of the weave.”

Sure enough, a last backward glance revealed the occasional silver thread wending its way among the green and blue.

“Carpet plugs into the walls,” the guard explained, evidently enjoying his discomfort. “All the Harlem Towers use it. What I can’t figure out is what you expected to steal in there.”

“Never mind,” said her partner, ’Let the psych cops work that one out.”

Now that the initial shock of his capture had wom off, Eric felt the first stirrings of panic. His excuse for breaking and entering wouldn’t sway the judge’s sentence. Discovery of his altered credit/identity card would be enough to ruin his career and buy him a long jail term.

They were heading for the elevators. Over the center lift a lightbar glowed brightly. Its companions were dark. With only seconds remaining in which to save himself he reacted more from instinct than thought.

His wild swing took the guard in front of him completely by surprise. Eric didn’t look very threatening, and his cowed attitude was genuine enough. The stun pistol went flying. A shove sent the woman on her backside even as she was raising her own weapon to fire.

Then he was in the elevator cab, jabbing frantically at the buttons. There was no response.

The woman sounded tired as she called to him. “You’re wasting your time, sleek. Did you think we’d leave the lift free for you to use? We’re the only ones who can get you down.”

Frantically he thumbed the CLOSE DOOR button. The opposing panels promptly slid shut. He held the switch down while he poked dozens of floor numbers.

There was an insistent knocking from outside, hands slapping metal. Faint voices reached him. They were angry now, not exasperated.

“Open up, sleek. You’re only wasting our time, and yours.”

He pressed 80 and was rewarded with a whirr as the elevator started to rise. The block only extended to floors below the elevator, and why not? There was no escape in the other direction.

He could hear the voices of his pursuers fading beneath the cab. “Come down, sleek! It’s going to go harder on you!”

He ignored them. He could get out on any floor between seventy-one and eighty, but he couldn’t go down. Surely they’d post a guard on every stairwell, now that it was known there was an intruder loose in the tower. The same would go for every elevator, including the service lifts.

Doors parted to admit him to the top floor, then closed. The lift whined as the cab was called downward. Soon the floor would be swarming with security personnel as the alert was passed through the complex.

He still had his tools. He could break into another office, maybe one without a pressure-sensitive carpet, but that would only delay his capture. A quick search revealed a fire and service stairwell. He went up instead of down. There was a very simple lock at the top of the double flight of stairs.

The night air was shockingly cool. Off to the south he could see the office towers of Hoboken, to the east the dark strip that was Long Island Sound. Powerful heating and cooling equipment throbbed behind him. Close by was the dark shaft of Harlem Tower Six and further off, Harlem Tower Two. He stood there trying to recover his wind and wits until he heard voices from the stairway below.

“He’s got to be up here somewhere … we’ve checked the whole damn floor … everything’s tight …”

More than two of them now. That was to be expected.

“Don’t take any chances with this guy … might be unbalanced … watch yourselves …”