‘It’ll be just this door,’ Parker told him. ‘There isn’t any reason to link it with the entrance up at the front, so it isn’t part of a whole system, there’s nothing else to hook up to it.’
Marcantoni nodded. ‘That sounds right.’
Parker said, ‘Since it’s just this one door, there’ll be a keypad on the inside, and we’ll have thirty seconds, maybe forty-five seconds, to short-circuit it.’
Kolaski said, ‘I’m very good at that, that’s a specialty of mine.’
‘It’s yours,’ Marcantoni told him.
Parker said, ‘What it means is, he’s got to be able to get in there fast. Once you start playing with it, the countdown starts.’
Marcantoni gave the door lock a look of contempt. ‘This? A sneeze and it’s open.’
‘Then go sneeze, Tom,’ Kolaski said, taking out his own canvas pouch of tools, saying to Angioni, ‘Hold this open for me, will you?’
Marcantoni looked around to see that everybody was in agreement and ready, then bent over the lock. He worked with concentration and speed, then pushed the door open, stepped back, and said, ‘Go, Phil.’
Kolaski stepped through the doorway, followed by Angioni holding up the opened tool pouch. A small pale keypad was mounted on the wall to the left of the door, near the lock. Four Phillips-head screws held it in place. Kolaski chose a tool, spun the screws loose, chose a tool, popped the top of the keypad cover loose so that it flopped forward and down to hang from its wires, chose tiny alligator clips, put them on the connectors at the back of the keypad, stepped back, said, ‘Done.’
Angioni laughed as Kolaski put his tool pouch away. ‘I love a showboat,’ he said.
‘It’s just talent,’ Kolaski assured him.
They stepped through into a space that wasn’t entirely dark, since it was spotted with red exit signs, one over the door they’d just come through. They were at a T intersection of hallways, one going left and right, the other straight ahead, exit signs over the doors at the far ends. Closed or open doors were spaced along the halls.
Angioni said, ‘This doesn’t look like a jeweler.’
‘It isn’t,’ Kolaski told him, ‘it’s a wholesaler. It’s more about offices and salesmen, not display.’
Parker said, ‘What we want will be toward the front.’
They walked down the hall ahead of them, seeing ordinary offices through the open doorways they passed. The door at the end of the hall swung inward, and when they opened it they read on its other side NO ADMITTANCE. That made Kolaski laugh: ‘Comin outathe No Admittance, that’s somethin new.’
Directly in front of them, beyond the No Admittance door, were three large messy desks mounted with computers and phones and reference books and stacks of sales and tax forms, flanked by extra chairs. These desks faced outward, away from them, toward a broad sales or display floor, where display cases mingled with smaller desks and cashier stations. Globe lights hung low all around the room from a high metal gridwork; these were all switched off, but lights gleamed within display cases here and there, enough to dimly illuminate the room.
Angioni, grinning at it all, said, ‘This is the place, all right.’
Williams said, ‘Does the doorman out front get to see in here?’
‘No,’ Marcantoni told him, ‘there’s a solid metal door comes down over the entrance at night.’
‘So it’s all ours,’ Kolaski said, ‘so let’s get to it.’
They all had rubber or plastic gloves, which they now pulled on. Before this, Marcantoni had done most of the touching, except for when the tables were moved, and he and the others had wiped prints away as they went, but from now on that wouldn’t be possible. They all pulled supermarket plastic bags from their pockets, two each, and started moving through the display area, picking whatever attracted their eyes.
The displays were different from those in a retail store. They gave as much space to manufacturers’ brochures and specifications as they did to the items being offered for sale. Two or three of the cases contained only different kinds of small gift boxes for jewelry, and one other presented a great variety of clasps and hooks and pins.
But most of the cases contained value. Wedding and engagement rings; bracelets, necklaces, brooches; gold money clips shaped like dollar signs, pound signs, euro signs; watches that would cost retail as much as a midsize car.
The six moved among it all like the gleaners who come through the field after the main harvest, picking and choosing only the best of what was on offer, breaking the glass that was the final barrier in their way. It had taken them more than three hours to get in here, but only twenty minutes before all twelve bags were full, looped to their belts so their hands were still free.
‘A good night,’ Marcantoni said, and grinned at Parker. ‘I told you you’d like to stick around.’
‘You told me,’ Parker said.
Going back, they paused while Kolaski reclaimed his alligator clips, replacing them, now that he had the leisure for it, with a simpler wire connection. Then they moved on, letting that spring-mounted door close behind them as they trotted down the stairs to the parking garage, across the broad concrete floor tinged green from the stairs sign behind them, through the nearly empty storage room, and back into the tunnel.
Now they needed the flashlights again. Marcantoni still had his, and Mackey now had the other. They shone the lights ahead, and the air floated with dust, like mist over a swamp.
‘Now what?’ Marcantoni said.
They walked forward into the tunnel, smelling the dry chalky dust, feeling the grit of it in their noses and mouths. Ahead, the mountain of rubble was back.
They stopped to look at it. Maybe the vibration of their passage had done it, or just the new movement of air from both doors being open at the ends of the tunnel, but something had caused a further fall from above the
