There was a quick way he could check, though. He pointed his camera lens toward the sconce. Since it didn’t house a light, it should have appeared dark on his screen, or, at the most, there might have been some slight residual heat from the dying flowers.
But while the flowers were all but dark, there was a small gray dot near the base, indicating some kind of power source.
He switched the camera to normal and zoomed in on the base of the ornament. It looked like there was a small hole near the bottom, facing the door to apartment 04-21. His angle was bad, so he couldn’t be sure.
Before moving in for a better look, he reengaged the heat sensor and turned the camera toward apartment 04 -21. The image was almost completely dark. There was only one grayish hint of heat, about the size of a baseball, but that was it. Perhaps a solitary lamp or some other small electronic device.
He shot off a couple quick pictures in case there was anything his eye wasn’t seeing but could be teased out by Orlando on the laptop later, then moved the camera to the left, scanning the rest of the apartment. More darkness, this time complete. No heat signatures anywhere. Odd, he thought. There should have been more. He shot off another photo, then put his camera away.
“Update,” Quinn said.
“Still outside,” Nate said. “One of them’s on the phone.”
“If the police show up, fall back, but stay within radio range.”
“Okay.”
Quinn squeezed himself against the wall and moved toward the ornament. When he was only a few feet away, he lowered himself into a crouch and crept underneath it.
There was definitely a hole near the base. It was a small round recess no bigger than the end of a pencil eraser. It was designed to look like a slot for a screw, but that’s not what it was. From his angle, Quinn could just make out a reflection of light on glass.
Quinn shoved his hands into his pockets, looking for anything small enough to slip into the recess. A piece of paper would have been perfect. But he had nothing. He took a quick glance along the floor, but it was clean.
As he turned to look at the recess again, his eyes were drawn to the orchids several inches above it. He smiled, then reached up carefully and plucked a couple of petals off the nearest flower.
He hesitated a moment. He’d come to the point of commit or leave. He’d already spent more time in the building than he had planned, but he knew he couldn’t leave without seeing what was on the other side of that door. If this was the room Markoff had been pointing to—and the signal seemed to be saying it was—Quinn had to check.
He rolled one of the petals into a cylindrical shape roughly the size of the opening on the sconce, then simply stuck it in the hole and folded the end over to completely cover the lens.
“One of the guards is going back inside,” Nate said.
“The security room?” Quinn asked.
“No. The west tower.”
Quinn frowned. “Does he seem like he was in a hurry?”
“No. It looks like he’s returning to his rounds.”
“All right,” Quinn said. There were eleven floors in the tower. It might be a half hour before he made it to the fourth floor.
Quinn glanced at his watch. Thirty seconds had passed since he’d obscured the camera’s lens. Nothing had happened.
He waited an additional thirty, then stepped across the hallway to the door. He scanned the doorjamb top to bottom, looking for any apparent security device, but found nothing.
He next turned his attention to the locks.
There were two: a deadbolt and the lock in the knob. Both looked solid and new. Quinn pulled out his lock picks, then leaned down to get a better look. He moved the pick and tension wrench toward the keyhole of the deadbolt. The wrench slipped into the hole a quarter inch, then stopped. Quinn tried to move it around, but it would go in no further.
“What the hell?” he said.
He set the tools on the floor and retrieved his flashlight, aiming the beam into the deadbolt’s keyhole. The problem was the hole wasn’t a keyhole at all. It was a fake, made just deep enough to give the appearance it was an actual slot for a key.
Quinn moved the light to the hole on the doorknob. Same story.
“Son of a bitch,” Quinn said.
“What’s going on?” Nate asked.
“Not now,” Quinn said as he put his lock picks away.
He placed his palm on the door and gave it a gentle push. Solid. But not wood solid, something more. There was no give in the door at all.
As he started to run the possibilities through his mind, there was a muffled
He looked to his right. The hallway continued on for another forty feet, then turned again. Perhaps there was another staircase around the corner. There was no way he could make it back to the one he’d used without being seen.
