horizontal mortar seam. She hooked the safety tether to the piton with
a carabiner, then untied herself from the main line.
The moment it was free, Graham Feeled up the rope.
Climbing this face of the building was proving easier than scaling the
front on Lexington Avenue. Not that there was a greater number of
setbacks, ledges or footholds here than there; the distribution of those
was the same. However, the wind was much less fierce on the side street
than it had been on Lexington. Here, the snowflakes that struck her
face felt like snowflakes and not like tiny bullets. The cold air
hugged her legs, but it did not press through her jeans; it didn't pinch
her thighs and stab painfully into her calves as it had done earlier.
She had descended ten floors-and Graham fivesince they had seen
Bollinger waiting for them at the window. Graham had lowered her to the
yard-wide twenty-eighth-floor setback and had rappelled down after her.
Below that point there was only one other setback, this one at the sixth
floor, three hundred and thirty feet down. At the twenty-third level,
there was an eighteen-inch-wide decorative ledge-quintessential art
deco; the stone was carved into a band of connected, abstract bunches of
grapes-and they made that their next goal. Graham belayed her, and she
found that the carved ledge was large and strong enough to support her.
In less than a minute, powered by his new-found confidence, he would be
beside her.
She had no idea what they would do after that. The sixth-floor setback
was still a long way off; figuring five yards to a floor, that haven lay
two hundred and fifty-five feet below. Their ropes were only one
hundred feet long. Between this ledge of stone grapes and the sixth
story, there was nothing but a sheer wall and impossibly narrow window
ledges.
Graham had assured her that they were not at a dead end.
Nevertheless, she was worried.
Overhead, he began to rappel through the falling snow. She was
fascinated by the sight. He seemed to be creating the line as he went,
weaving it out of his own substance; he resembled a spider that was
swinging gracefully, smoothly on its own silk from one point to another
on a web that it was constructing.
In seconds he was standing beside her.
She gave him the hammer.
He placed two pitons in the wall between the windows, in different
horizontal mortar seams.
He was breathing hard; mist plumed from his open mouth.
'You all right?' she asked.
'So far.'
Without benefit of a safety line, he sidled along the ledge, away from
her, his back to the street, his hands pressed against the stone.
On this side of the building, the gentler wind had formed miniature
drifts on the ledges and on the windowsills. He was putting his feet
down in two or three inches of snow and, here and there, on patches of
brittle ice.
Connie wanted to ask him where he was going, what he was doing; but she
was afraid that if she talked she would distract him an he would fall.
