Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“I don’t mean to belittle what you’ve done, Rita,” Harry said. “But I do think you were awfully lucky to get into the com center your first day out.”

“Harry,” Holly said, “Rita manipulated her way into that building—there wasn’t a lot of luck involved. Can’t you give the woman credit?”

“I’ll do better than that,” Harry said. “Rita, I’m giving you a pay grade promotion, just as soon as we get back to the office.”

“Thank you, Harry,” Rita said sweetly.

“We interrupted you; go on.”

“The upstairs looked like the back room of a big bank, or a brokerage house. Everybody had a computer terminal and a phone headset, and they were all talking at once, like at a stockbroker’s. There was almost no paper upstairs. Everything is done on the computers, I guess, and they’ve got major capacity, more than we’ve got in Miami. These guys work like machines, and they only work six hours a day.”

“How do you know that?” Harry asked.

“I saw the work schedule on a bulletin board. There are shifts from six A.M. to noon, noon to six, and six to midnight. That’s all I had time to see.”

“Were there any women in evidence?”

“Just Carla and me. Everybody else was a guy.”

“What else did you see?”

“When we came downstairs I came to the end of a hallway and found a big steel door with a security keypad and a palm-print analyzer and a sign saying they’d shoot any unauthorized entrant.”

“That squares with what the construction guy had to say about the basement he built,” Harry said.

“The place is like a fortress,” Rita said. “Thick walls, armored glass in small windows, air conditioners on the roof, not out back, where they might be accessible to tampering. Did I mention that all the computer operators were armed?”

“Weird,” Holly said. “Armed computer operators.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Harry said, “unless they’re trained to make some sort of last stand.”

“Like Waco?” Holly asked.

“Don’t say that word,” Harry said with a shudder. “I was there.”

Holly shook her head. “You can’t pay people to do a Waco, they’ve got to be motivated by some cause.”

“Maybe,” Rita said, “they’re trained to hold the building until everything in it can be destroyed.”

“Now, that makes sense,” Harry said. “The only other building you were inside was the country club?”

“Yes, but only the men’s locker room,” Rita said.

“Anything unusual there?”

“It was a locker room, Harry. There were a lot of dirty towels. I found out about the other buildings from Carla, though. She’s worked there for three years, and she’s cleaned every building on the place at one time or another.”

“And what did she have to say?”

“All the other buildings are normal, except the com center and the security office. They’ve apparently got a real arsenal at the security office, too—lots of weapons. Oh, and all the houses have big walk-in safes, concealed, usually in a library. At least, it sounds like all of them—Carla has seen three.”

“Did you get any chance to see what we think might be gun emplacements?”

Rita shook her head. “I only saw what I could see from the bus, which was houses, the country club, and the village shops.”

“All right,” Harry said, “what have we got here in the nature of a crime?”

“We’ve got the tampering with state criminal records and probably perjury on seventy-one license applications,” Holly said.