Christopher Brookmyre Read Online Free PDF Page B

unloaded what was beneath their saddles. Armand, she noticed, unloaded nothing from the cargo sled. Lex's batbelt had a specially designed velcro-fastening cradle for her laptop, holding it out of the way, across her back. This meant she was less encumbered by it when moving, but it required detaching the utility harness altogether when strapping the PC in or taking it out, unless someone else was there to help. She was asking for just such assistance when Bett told her to stick the machine back in her skidoo.
    'We won't be requiring any remote access from here on in. If necessary, you can grab a terminal directly. You do have your tools on removable storage.'
    This last was most definitely a statement, not a question. Indeed, she did have the code she needed on a USB stick, but it wasn't what was on her laptop that she was worried about missing. It was the two hundred gigs of free space on the hard drive. Removable storage was the issue, and whether she'd have room to store what she intended to remove.
    Bett set the pace. They advanced slowly, strung out in a wide line, stopping two hundred metres from the fence, or 198.678m according to the rangefinder. All but Som got down and lay prostrate, leaning up on elbows to look ahead. Gadget Geek was about to deploy. He placed an aluminium tube down in front of him on the snow, then drew a modified grenade launcher from a quiver across his back. Resting on one knee, he slid the top half of the tube away from the base, inside which nestled six of his self-designed and
    -constructed Flying Eyeballs. He loaded four, one by one, into the breech and levelled the weapon to his shoulder. Meanwhile, his colleagues were snapping open hand-held LCD monitors, each about the size of a compact makeup mirror. The Flying Eyeballs, as he had explained (at length, in detail and on an unwearied number of occasions), were a means of creating an instant, covert CCTV system without setting foot in the subject area. They consisted of a tiny digital camera, crucially containing no moving parts, and a lens constructed from the same synthetic material as prescription contacts. Crucially, because the device had to withstand being fired several hundred metres through the air by a grenade launcher, plus the effects of rapid deceleration associated with being slammed into its target surface at the end of this flight. For analogue devices and glass lenses, this sort of treatment was largely contra-indicated, to use one of Bett's favoured terms. It wasn't highly recommended for digital ones either, to be fair, and not all of them survived the trip. However, their chances were greatly improved by the round rubber housing that gave rise to the Eyeball part of their name, and more so by being suspended in a thick, gloopy, adhesive resin inside a fragile outer shell. The shell shattered on impact, releasing the resin, which dried instantly on contact with air, theoretically securing the rubber eyeball where it landed, but in practice working better on sloped roofs than plumb walls. The camera was weighted and balanced within the Eyeball so that it would tilt and right itself by gravity up to forty degrees, the lens protected from the resin by a tube-shaped plug that could be popped off by remote once the device was in place. The only thing Som had so far been able to do nothing about was the whole thing hitting a wall or roof lens-side first, which was why he always brought at least a dozen. He fired off three of the four he'd loaded, readjusting his weight and position as he aimed at different potential vantage points. Then he scuttled around to the side of the compound and began again. Lex checked her LCD, toggling through the views. A lucky night: only one lens-to-wall, one DOA and two nestled on rooftops beneath four inches of snow. Six shots resulting in two functioning cams, giving a pretty good triangulation on the main paths through the compound. There'd been times when Som had cracked off a full complement