The Agent's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

would not tell her why.
    The silence of his thoughts was pierced by
the ringing of his cell phone. He reached for it on the passenger
seat. “Hello, this is Evan,” he said.
    “ Where are you?” said the
voice at the other end.
    “ I will be there in a few
minutes,” he said. “Tell them that they can start without me if
they want.” He hung up and threw the phone back on the
seat.
    Hadron Systems is located in a ten-story
glass tower on the edge of downtown Dallas. It moved to that
location forty years earlier from Washington D.C. when the company
won a substantial contract to provide satellite terminals to the
U.S. Air Force. Satellite communications were in their infancy
then, and the chair of the Senate Armed Services committee was from
Texas. He wanted that money spent in his state.
    Evan and Laura used to live in an apartment
down the street from the company, but when Melina was born, they
migrated to one of the many suburban bedroom communities north of
town. It was a long drive, but his hours were irregular, so the
traffic wasn’t too bad.
    Evan pulled into a parking structure, parked
his car, and walked into the main lobby of the Hadron Systems
building. He had an office on the seventh floor, but that is not
where he was headed.
    That is because he did not technically work
for Hadron Systems.
    He strode through the lobby, past the
security desk and the elevators and then ducked into a short
hallway. At the end of the hallway was an unmarked black glass
panel the size of a door, but without a knob. He pulled a magnetic
card from his pocket and waved it in front of a small black box
mounted adjacent to the panel. There was a beep, and the panel
opened inward. Evan stepped inside.
    “ Good morning, Mark,” Evan
said to a man in a dark suit seated at a small black desk. The desk
was in the middle of a room the size of a small living room, and
the room was empty except for the desk. There was nothing hanging
on the light gray walls.
    “ Morning to you, Evan,”
the man answered back.
    Behind the desk was a larger version of the
earlier black glass panel, again with no markings and no knobs.
Evan walked past the guard and up to the panel.
    “ Name?” a synthesized
voice bellowed from a speaker above the panel.
    “ Evan Roberts,” Evan said
as he stared at the panel.
    Five seconds passed. “Voice pattern
confirmed,” the synthesized voice said.
    The black panel slid to the side to reveal
another smaller room, about the size of a bathroom. Evan entered,
and the panel closed behind him. The room was brightly lit, but it
was empty and three of the walls were bare finished wood. On the
fourth wall, there was a small two-foot square metal panel. In
front of the panel, on the floor were the outlines of feet.
    Evan stood on the feet outlines and faced
the metal panel. “Authorization sequence,” he said.
    The panel extended out from the wall and
lowered to become a small shelf. Embedded on it were two small
black cylinder eyepieces like the kind used to see through a
telescope. On either side of the two eyepieces, there were the
outlines of hands. Evan placed his hands within the outlines and
looked into the eyepieces. A synthesized voice spoke to him from
the ceiling.
    “ Fingerprints.
Confirmed.”
    “ Bone geometry.
Confirmed.”
    “ Iris scan.
Confirmed.”
    “ Weight.
Confirmed.”
    “ Identity Verified. Access
granted.”
    Evan straightened up and stepped back, and
the metal panel moved back into its position on the wall. The
lights dimmed, and he could feel the room begin to move. The room
was an elevator, and it moved downward at a rapid pace. So much so,
that there was a slight sense of weightlessness as the elevator
plunged. There was no sound in the room except the loud, muffled
sounds of gears and pulleys doing their job. After a short time,
the sound lessened, and Evan could feel the elevator begin to slow.
The gears and pulleys made less and less noise until the only sound
was the click of the