seemed like hours. 'I'm all right. My foot slipped. I'm okay now.'
'][)on't look down.'
'I didn't. I won't.'
He sought the next rung, stepped to it, continued the descent.
He felt feverish. The hair was damp at the back of his neck.
Perspiration beaded his forehead, jeweled his eyebrows, stung the
corners of his eyes, filmed his cheeks, brought a salty taste to his
lips. In spite of the perspiration, he was cold. He shivered as he
moved down the long ladder.
He was as much aware of the void at his back as he would have been of a
knife pressed between his shoulder blades.
On the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger entered the maintenance
supply room.
He saw the red door. Someone had put down the doorstop that was fixed
to it, so that it was open an inch or two. He knew immediately that
Harris and the woman had gone through there.
But why was the door ajar?
It was like a signpost. Beckoning him.
Alert for a trap, he advanced cautiously. He held the Walther PPK in
his right hand. He kept his left hand out in front of him, arm extended
all the way, to stop the door in case they tried to throw it open in his
face. He held his breath for those few steps, listening for the
slightest sound other than the soft squeak of his own shoes.
Nothing. Silence.
He used the toe of his shoe to push up the doorstop; then he pulled open
the door and walked onto the small platform. He had just enough time to
realize where he was, when the door closed behind him and all the lights
in the shaft went out.
At first he thought Harris had come into the maintenance room after him.
But when he tried the door, it was not locked. And when he opened it,
all the lights came on. The emergency lighting didn't burn twenty-four
hours a day; it came on only when one of the service entrances was open;
and that was why Harris had left the door ajar.
Bollinger was impressed by the system of lights and platforms and
ladders. Not every building erected in the 1920s would have been
designed with an eye toward emergencies. In fact, damned few
skyscrapers built since the war could boast any safety provisions.
These days, they expected you to wait in a stalled elevator until it was
repaired, no matter if that took ten hours or ten days; and if the lift
couldn't be repaired, you could risk a manually cranked descent, or you
could rot in it.
The more time he spent in the building, the deeper he penetrated it, the
more fascinating he found it to be. It was not on the scale of those
truly gargantuan stadiums and museums and highrises that Hitier had
designed for the 'super race' just prior to and during the first days of
World War Two. But then Hitler's magnificent edifices had never been
realized in stone and mortar, whereas this place had risen.
He began to feel that the men who had designed and constructed it were
Olympians. He found his appreciation strange, for he knew that had he
