Above the door was a security camera that trained down on the inside of the elevator car. Smacking it to the right meant that it could only see the right half of the car. I stayed on the left, where the control panel was, and punched in 32.
There was blood on the butt of the Ruger. I rubbed it off on my pants leg. And then looked down. Suddenly I’d become cavalier about blood. I did not enjoy this about myself. Taking a deep breath, I tried to remember who I was before this whole thing started. I came back to myself, a little bit.
The elevator pinged at 32. I stepped out carefully into darkness. The rest of the building was, of course, empty.
Brom’s map was in my head. I was below everything he’d detailed for me, and I looked up, measuring the relative position of everything above me.
It was a new building. And Brom’s powers of description had given me the idea. New office buildings tend to prize flexibility. So what they do is build the framework and hang the walls from the framework, using adhesive wainscot to fix them to the floor. It allows the owners to change the structure of their office design. There have been stories of people in high-risk jobs coming to work in the morning to discover that their little office is entirely missing—workmen have come in the night to take out the walls and change the workplace design.
Plasterboard and plastic. Paneled ceilings. Stuff that breaks and cuts.
I broke a couple of locks and moved around until I found some desks and chairs. The clock was running in my head. My unconscious guy with the phantom shits would be given ten minutes, if I was lucky. And if the bastard didn’t wake up first. I didn’t have a lot of time, and past history made it disgustingly clear that I had no luck at all. Working as quietly as I could without wasting time, I stacked chairs up on a desk for a makeshift ladder, and got under the ceiling. It was a gridwork of metal strips with plastic panels. The panels were just laid on. I pushed one up. There was a space, maybe a couple of feet, between this ceiling and the underside of the next floor up. Trunks of wires ran here and there. The dust would’ve choked a regiment. I prayed to anything that might be paying attention that the metal frame held my weight, and lifted myself up.
I spidered myself over the plastic panels, keeping hands, knees, and feet on the metal struts. Everything creaked and groaned a little, but held. Good. I moved along the space like the world’s most retarded crab, trying to keep the map straight in my head. Eventually, I picked my spot, and turned myself around so my back was supported by the metal. From my jacket, I took the sharpest knife I could find in Brom’s kitchen. It had taken a good thirty minutes, late in the afternoon, picking through all his shiny, pricey kitchen equipment, most of which had never been used. He only bought the best stuff, beautiful selections of samurai-quality handmade carbon-blade cutting tools. I’d taken this one to a fine edge on a ceramic whetstone he’d left out on display without ever touching, and tested it on various of his possessions. There was even a half-inch gully in his marble countertop.
I put it into the underside of the floor. It did not exactly cut like butter. I wriggled under the pommel of the blade and put both hands into it, pushing upward, terrified the extra force would put me back through the ceiling and on to the floor.
The blade punched through. I started sawing, as fast as I dared. This stunt was both clever and staggeringly stupid. There were fair odds that someone was up there watching the end of the knife bobbing up and down like the fin of a drunken shark.
Within a couple of minutes—and, at that point, it was two minutes too long—I’d sawed a flap in the upstairs floor. Scoring a diagonal between the end of both cuts, I squirmed back to the corner and pushed. It was stiff. Without the scoreline, it would have groaned. But it folded along the score, and cracked. Audibly cracked. I grabbed the edge of the floor, cutting my palm, and pulled myself up in panic.
No one there. Music leaked in from beyond the closed east door of Islip’s outer office. The west door led to his inner office. The music must’ve masked the sound of the flooring cracking. I almost cried at the thought that I’d finally had a bit of luck.
Pulling myself out of the crawlspace felt like dragging myself free of quicksand. I went straight to the west door and checked it for alarms. It was clean. I pulled out the other things I’d lifted from Brom’s house and quickly jimmied the old-fashioned lock on the door. It clicked open.
Islip’s office looked like an old English drawing room, with silky wallpaper, ornate gilt-framed oil paintings of military men on horseback, and antique high-backed armchairs. On the wall behind the desk was a big oil portrait of a pirate with a beard you could lose a dog in pouring boiling oil on what I presumed were seagoing taxmen. I lifted it off the wall to reveal the safe.
And, of course, it was the picture that was alarmed.
Chapter 54
I invented five new swearwords in six seconds.
Dashing to the door, I jabbed the jimmy into the lock, immobilizing it. A chair went under the door handle. I ran back to the safe. It was electronic. Brom had told me it was an old-style dial-tumbler design. I went down and peered at the numeric keypad at an angle. The most-used keys pick up more dirt than the others. But this damn thing was new. In my pocket, I had some talc lifted from Brom’s kitchen that I’d wrapped in a square of kitchen paper. I unwrapped it and blew a little over the keypad, and then blew lightly at the keypad itself. One, five, six, and eight looked like they’d attracted more powder than the others, which meant they were slightly stickier, which meant they’d been used more. I hoped.
Someone banged on the door.
I started tapping in variations on 1568. It took me five or six goes before I noticed the little LED display on the face of the safe.
ALARM-LOCK.
The damn thing immobilized when the alarm went off.
With the alarm still beeping away, the element of surprise had kind of faded away a while back.
So I took out the Ruger and shot the safe.
The
