The plan, such as it was, proceeded apace.
Regan accepted the friendly advice to visit the museum’s gift shop. She breezed through, zeroing in on the cheapest and tackiest displays while her billowing green cape came within micrometers of disaster on the edge of the delicate glass sculptures she hurried past. She managed this with an amount of clumsiness that took an inordinate level of talent and grace to pull off.
Just when the clerk who trailed in her wake had recovered from a near-miss involving a wire wine rack outfitted for display purpose with several very real bottles, she managed to knock over a barrel of children’s bouncy balls containing images of famous sculptures. In the act of graciously helping the clerks corral the ninety-nine percent efficiency polymer spheres, she managed to cause several more incidents of comparatively minor damage and major confusion before being politely thrown out.
She then remarked to nobody in particular that she was feeling a bit peckish and headed not for the museum’s seven-star dining room but for the “A La Carte” cafe on the ground floor, where the National Palace’s less wealthy guests went for only somewhat outrageously priced deli sandwiches and salty snacks.
Regan took her tray and made her way down the line.
Under a placard that read “Gourmet Coffee” were several plastic buckets full of little multi-faceted beads ranging in color from amber to rich, dark brown. Other patrons took one and put it in their coffee mug, where a modulated pulse from the cash register would cause the crystals to expand into steaming, fragrant liquid.
Regan skipped the cup entirely. She grabbed a couple of beads from a variety of buckets and put them on the side of her tray. She went straight past the croissants, the sandwiches, and the other cold fair. Instead, she went for the soups.
These were prepackaged in compressed cylinders… little circular tins that would, when opened, telescope upwards as the contents were freed from the artificially compressed crystalline structure they’d been stored in. They worked on the same principle as the coffee beads, in fact, though the packaging was still a bit bulky as most of them had chunks of meat, potatoes, and assorted vegetables in them. Regan selected a tin of plain tomato soup.
“Those each make one cup of coffee, uh, sir,” the cashier said of the beads when she was ready to pay. All the museum personnel recognized Regan on sight, by her physical profile.
“Oh, sure an’ I know that,” Regan said. “These are souvenirs, like. No need to activate them.”
“Souvenirs?”
“Can’t get ‘em back home, ya know?” Regan said. “Anyway, I don’t think they care for me in the gift shop.”
The cashier rang the purchases up without further comment, and Regan held up the signet ring with her credchip in it.
“Thank you for dining at the National Palace,” the cashier said when the transaction registered.
Regan swept the coffee beads off her tray and stuck them into her pocket before she got a seat. When she got to the table, she gave every appearance of having difficulty working the top of her soup tin. She twisted in her seat, obscuring the food container with her cape while she skillfully removed a plate from the top and disabled the activation mechanism. She then popped the lid off, added the coffee beads to the top of the crystallized soup, put the lid back on, fiddled with the mechanisms some more, and then replaced the plate.
“Hey,” she said, tossing the modified soup can on the counter. “This one’s defective, like.”
“I’m sorry, sir, would you like another?” the cashier asked. She tried to pop the top, but it wouldn’t move.
“Nah, I’m fine,” Regan said. “Just chuck it in the bin for me, will ya?”
“Sorry about that, sir,” the cashier said, obligingly dropping the container into the trash can behind the counter. “We’ll zero that out from the transaction.”
“Well, if you must,” Regan said. “Ta, then. I think I’ve had enough o’ the museum life for today.”
In the operations room, Selmar’s was the loudest sigh of relief at these words, though not the only one.
“Stay on her,” he said. “Nobody stands down until that son of a bitch is off our premises.”
But Regan made a beeline for the doors, nodding to the uniformed attendant at the exit who thanked her and politely bade her to come back soon.
“Never is good,” Selmar said. “I want to know when she’s off the premises.”
A short time later, the security chief reported, “She’s clear… she’s hopped a scooter.”
“If anybody doesn’t need me, I’ll be in the bath. If anybody does, I’ll be unav…”
The unmistakable sound of an explosion on one of the monitors’ audio feeds cut that sentence, and Vin Selmar’s bathing plans, sadly short.
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