Allegiance Read Online Free PDF Page A

protected by the same intruder grid she’d found in the office, with the same built-in weakness. Stretching with the Force through the transparisteel, she first shut off the grid and then tripped the catch. A minute later she was inside.
    The quarters were deserted, Glovstoak and all his people downstairs at the grand party. Still, Mara stayed alert as she moved silently between the rooms. The moff could easily have left a droid or two to watch over his private possessions.
    But droids could be scanned or reprogrammed, and Glovstoak apparently wasn’t willing to take that kind of chance. Instead he had chosen to rely on two highly sophisticated alarms on his concealed walk-in safe.
    Sophisticated from his point of view, anyway. The professional thieves the Emperor had brought in to instruct Mara in their craft would have laughed at both systems. Mara herself, not nearly so experienced, merely smiled and had both neutralized within ten minutes.
    After all the preliminaries, getting the safe itself open was almost an anticlimax. Two minutes later she pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside.
    One wall of the safe had been taken over entirely by data card file cabinets, containing the sector’s duplicate administration records. Interesting enough, certainly, but even if Glovstoak had been careless enough to leave a data trail that would show his alleged financial irregularities, it would take a small army of accountants to sniff it out. Instead Mara headed toward the back of the safe, looking for more personal items.
    And there she found the evidence she needed.
    For a long moment she gazed at the half dozen artworks sitting in the beam of her glow rod. At first glance the private collection seemed rather puny, especially considering the number of flats, sculptures, tressles, and volmans decorating the public areas of the palace.
    Mara wasn’t fooled. The pieces downstairs were grandiose but relatively cheap. More importantly, they were comfortably within the budget of an honest administrator of Glovstoak’s position.
    The six pieces in the safe were something else entirely.Any one of them would fetch upward of a hundred million credits from the galaxy’s wealthiest private collectors, no questions asked. Taken together, they were probably worth three times the value of Glovstoak’s palace and everything in it.
    Which meant that the Emperor’s suspicions were correct. Glovstoak was skimming the top off the tax revenues he was sending to Imperial Center.
    Picking up one of the flats, Mara turned it around. In the light from her glow rod the back surface appeared to be plain and unmarked. But there was a little thing art dealers did that Glovstoak might not be aware of. Tuning her glow rod to a specific frequency of ultraviolet light, she tried again.
    There it was: a complete listing of all the dealers and auction houses and brokers through whose hands the flat had traveled throughout its long history.
    Mara smiled. The dealers made these lists invisible to avoid introducing such crass commercialism into the carefully nurtured elegance of their world. Professional art thieves routinely obliterated the markings in order to make their new acquisitions harder to trace. Glovstoak hadn’t done that, which immediately told her he hadn’t obtained the art through a professional. Interesting.
    She made a note of the last listing—Peven Auction House, Crovna—and set the flat back where she’d found it. She made a similar check of two more of the artworks, then left the safe, closing the door and reactivating the alarms behind her.
    The trip down the wall was much easier and faster than the trip up had been. The solidified Stokhli spray would evaporate in another couple of hours, leaving no trace even if Glovstoak’s men thought to look.
    She was back in her gown, the rest of her gear hidden again behind its ground-level bush, when the office dooreased open a cautious crack. “Countess?” Deerian’s voice called