Her pulse fluttering in her temples, she raised the spyhole cover, peered outside….
And felt her stomach turn to ice.
Never mind how he'd sounded, none of the men standing in the walk outside — she could see four or five of them through the little two-way mirror — looked anything like police investigators. Their hair was long, their clothes sloppy, and their eyes…
Even had they been wearing bright silver badges and starched blue uniforms, their eyes would have given them away.
'Come on,' the one nearest the door said. 'Open up.'
She pulled away from the spyhole and inhaled shakily.
'Just a minute,' she said. 'I need to put something on.
The man slammed the door with his forearm.
'Forget the games,' he said. 'Open it.'
Her fingers harrowing her cheeks, Kirsten took a step backward across the living room.
''Open up!9' the man said, beating the door again, hitting it so hard she was afraid it might fly off its hinges.
Terrified, her breaths coming in sharp little bursts, Kirsten whirled and plunged through the apartment.
An instant later the door crashed open behind her.
The entryway through which the intruders had left the waiting room led to a short passage, which itself gave into another small, boxy room that was bare except for a computer workstation on the right, and a wall-mounted biometric scanner across from it beside a reinforced steel door.
'Lombardi' went straight over to the scanner. This was the part of the job that made him uptight. He'd been telling Turner the truth when he remarked that he was no technical wizard, and felt it would have been easy enough to steer the supervisor back into the room at gunpoint, force him to let the system take his readings, and in that way gain access to the vault. But the concern was that Turner might have triggered some discreet alarm had that been done. Caine's instructions had been explicit, and they'd been warned not to deviate from them under any circumstances.
Standing before the scanning unit, Lombardi raised his left hand to the level of the cameras designed to image his facial and iris characteristics, turning it so the artificial star-sapphire ring on his fourth finger would be visible to their lenses. Then, keeping that hand perfectly motionless, he placed his right hand flat on the machine's glass opto-electrical pad. Ordinarily this would both activate the unit and take readings of his fingerprint and palm geometry, which would then be converted to algorithms and matched to stored employee-identification data. But by an arcane process he did not quite understand, the specific star pattern on his ring would key a match with a simple data-string buried in the system mainframe's hard drive, which caused — or, according to Caine, was supposed to cause — the normal image-recognition sequence to be bypassed.
Lombardi held his breath and waited, one hand up, the other on the unit's clear glass interface, staring at its eye-level VDU. A red light had begun to glow beneath the glass, indicating the scanner had been activated by his touch… but if all was going as planned, the readings of its thermal sensors would be ignored by the computers.
Five seconds went by.
Ten.
He waited.
And then the words CLEARED TO ENTER appeared in the middle of the screen.
He exhaled, heard the faint click of the vault's lock mechanism retracting, and turned to his partner, who was already working open the heavy steel door.
They were in.
Kirsten ran toward the back of the apartment, hearing the door burst open behind her, hearing the men who'd been outside come pounding through the living room at her heels. She had only a vague notion of what to do, but it was all she had, and there was no choice except to go with it. If she could make it to the back door before they caught up, get into the building's central parking court, then maybe—
Suddenly a hand reached out from behind and snatched the sleeve of her blouse, pulling at her, yanking her backward. She stumbled, and almost lost her balance, but somehow managed to keep her legs underneath her, keep moving, carried by her own forward momentum. She twisted sharply as her pursuer tried to get his other hand around her, heard a loud ripping sound, and then was free of his grasp, racing across the room again, scrambling toward the door, a ragged streamer of cotton dangling from her arm.
'Hey!' he shouted. 'Stop, you bitch!'
Kirsten was within several feet of the back door now, the kitchen on her immediate right, the hallway leading to the bedrooms on her left. She lunged ahead, shooting her hand out in front of her, reaching for the doorknob, thinking she might make it, thinking she really might, when the man whose grip she'd managed to escape a moment earlier sprang at her in a flying tackle, the full weight of his body whumping into her, his arms clamping around her waist.
He spun Kirsten around and swept her in toward his chest, trying to get a firmer hold on her. Frantic, she snatched a glance past his shoulder, saw his companions rushing up through the living room, and thrust her hands out at his face, clawing at him, digging her fingers into his eyes.
That bought her a momentary reprieve. Emitting an animal yelp of pain, her attacker shoved fiercely away from her and covered his face with his hands, spinning in a blind semicircle, bowling wildly into the men behind him. At the same time, Kirsten flung herself at the door, clutched the knob, and tore it open.
Gasping for breath, a gale wind of terror and desperation roaring through her brain, she dashed out into the automobile court.
When the white-smocked techie first opened the door to the security office, the coffee she brought the guys every day at the same time balanced on a cafeteria tray in one hand, she simply couldn't credit her eyes. She stood there in the doorway, looking at the bodies and the blood streaming from the unrecognizable remains of their heads, the blood spattered everywhere in the room, the blood and strings of gristle covering the monitors on which closed-circuit images of the halls were still flashing through their preset sequences as if nothing eventful had occurred to disrupt the daily routine, and then suddenly the world went into a crazy tilt and the two coffee cups spilled from the tray and hit the floor where there was all that blood and gore and she opened her mouth wide and screamed, screamed at the top of her lungs
Screamed until long after half the people in the building had come running toward the office to see what in the name of God and his blessed angels was the matter.
Kirsten squatted on her haunches between two parked cars, trembling with fright, trying not to move, afraid the slightest sound would give her position away to her pursuers. She could hear their feet crunching on the asphalt as they moved up and down the aisles, searching for her amid the rows of slotted vehicles. There weren't as many cars in the lot as there would have been at night, when many more residents of the apartment complex would be home from work, but she would take what small blessings she could… and for the first time in her life feel grateful for the large government-sponsored housing developments that had virtually wiped out the city's traditional architecture.
More footsteps. Closer. She hugged herself, trying to think clearly through her fear. If she could manage to hide until someone came along either to leave or fetch his car… or perhaps inch her way around toward the driveway leading to the street, then maybe she'd have a chance to get some help…
Kirsten heard the crunch of another footfall, this one no more than two aisles down to the left of her, then an entirely different set a little further off to the right.
They were boxing her in on either side.
She stiffened, biting down on the fleshy part of her hand, stifling a mutinous scream. While part of her kept insisting that she give in to the urge, there was a more rational part that understood it would be the worst mistake she could possible make. If she screamed, they'd know exactly where she was, would be on her in an instant, well before anyone could come to her aid.
No, she dared not do it. Dared not make a sound. Dared not move a muscle.
The moment she did, Kirsten was sure she would be theirs.
The optical mini-CDs were stored in specially designed, alphanumerically-tabbed electronic 'stacks' lining the walls of the vault. Once inside, the pair of intruders had been able to locate the object of their search within
