She hesitated, then said, 'We can climb down.'
T 'No.'
'We can't use the stairs. He'll be watching those.'
'Not this.'
it won't be like mountain climbing.'
I His eyes shifted quickly from left to right and back again.
'No.'
'We'll have the ladder.'
'And we'll climb down thirty-one floors?' he asked.
'Please, Graham. If we start now, we might make it. Even if he finds
that the maintenance room is unlocked, and even if he sees this red
door-well, he might not think we'd have enough nerve to climb down the
shaft. And if he did see us, we could get off the ladder, leave the
shaft at another floor. We'd gain more time.
'I can't.' He was gripping the railing with both hands, and with such
force that she would not have been surprised if the metal had bent like
paper in his hands.
Exasperated, she said, 'Graham, what else can we do?
He stared into the concrete depths.
When Bollinger found that Harris and the woman had locked the fire door,
he ran down two flights to the thirtieth floor. He intended to use that
corridor to reach the far end of the building where he could take the
second stairwell back up to the thirty-first level and try the other
fire door. However, at the next landing the words 'Hollowfield Land
Management' were stenciled in black letters on the gray door: the entire
floor be T RK longed to a single occupant.
That level had no public corridor; the fire door could be opened only
from the inside. The same was true of the twenty-ninth and
twenty-eighth floors, which were the domain of Sweet Sixteen Cosmetics.
He tried both entrances without success.
Worried that he would lose track of his prey, he rushed back to the
twenty-sixth floor. That was where he had originally entered the
stairwell, where he had left the elevator cab.
As he pulled open the fire door and stepped into the hall, he looked at
his watch. 1 S. The time was passing too fast, unnaturally fast, as if
the universe had become unbalanced.
Hurrying to the elevator alcove, he fished in his pocket for the dead
guard's keys. They snagged on the lining. When he jerked them loose,
they spun out of his hand and fell on the carpet with a sleighbell
jingie.
He knelt and felt for them in the darkness. Then he remembered the
pencil flashlight, but even with that he needed more than a minute to
locate the keys.
As he got up, angry with himself, he wondered if Harris and the woman
were waiting here for him. He put away the flashlight and snatched the
pistol from his ocket. He stood quite still. He studied the darkp
ness. If they were hiding there, they would have been silhouetted by
the bright spot farther along at the alcove.
When he thought about it, he realized that they couldn't have known on
