If not, if they didn’t get there in time, what would the guards do next? Would they put in an alarm right away? Since the visitors were supposed to be cops, they might be a little more careful, a little more cautious. They might get in touch with the guard in the vault anteroom. They might send somebody to alert the other three cops up here, the ones assigned to the security detail for the astronauts. They might get in touch with somebody Tom and Joe didn’t know about, down at the street level. There were a thousand different things they might do, and Tom and Joe could be pretty sure they wouldn’t like any of them.
They hurried, but it still took a while to travel the rest of the way to the reception area, and when they got there only one guard was behind the counter. It was the same one who’d been here when they’d first come up. He looked at them now, and he was very nervous and trying not to show it. They angled across toward the elevators, and he called over, “Where’s Mr. Eastpoole?”
Tom gave him a smile and wave of the hand. “In his office,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”
Joe pressed the down button for the elevator.
The guard couldn’t keep the nervousness from affecting his voice. He pointed at the laundry bag Tom was carrying and said, “I’ll have to inspect that bag.”
Tom smiled at him and said, “Sure. Why not?”
Joe stayed behind, by the elevator doors, while Tom walked over to the counter and set the laundry bag atop it. The guard, losing some of his nervousness because they were acting as though nothing was wrong, came down the counter to look into the bag. As he was reaching for it, Tom nodded toward the screens down on the far wall. He said, “The guy in the vault anteroom. Does he have a set of screens like that?”
The guard looked over at the screens. “Sure,” he said.
“He can see us?”
The guard gave Tom a warning look. “Yes, he can,” he said.
Joe, back by the elevators, was watching the screens very carefully; all of them. The guard in the anteroom was still reading his Daily News. On one of the office screens, the other guard from out here suddenly appeared, moving fast. He wasn’t quite running, and he was apparently headed for Eastpoole’s office.
Tom, still talking in a conversational tone of voice, said, “Well, if he can see us, I guess you don’t want me to show a gun.”
The guard stared. “What?”
“If I show a gun,” Tom told him, “he’ll know something’s wrong. Then I’ll have to kill you so we can take off out of here.”
From his position by the elevators, Joe called to the guard, “Take it easy, pal. Don’t get anybody upset.”
The guard was scared, but he was a professional. He didn’t make any large moves that the anteroom guard might see on his screen. Holding himself in tight control, he said, “You’ll never get out of the building. You’ll never make it.”
Joe said, casually, “It isn’t your money, pal, but it is your life.”
“Come around the counter,” Tom said. “You’re going out with us.”
The guard didn’t move. He licked his lips and blinked, but he had guts. He said, “Give it up. Just leave that bag on the counter and take off. Nobody’ll chase you if you don’t have the goods on you.”
An elevator arrived. Its door sliding open prompted Joe’s next remark. “Come on, pal,” he said. “Don’t waste time. We’d rather do it the easy way, but we don’t have to.”
Reluctantly, the guard moved, going down to the flap at the end of the counter, lifting it, stepping through. On the anteroom screen, the guard could be seen still reading his paper. He hadn’t noticed yet that the reception area was about to be left undefended. When he did, he’d know something was wrong, but it would still take him a minute or two to figure out the right procedure to deal with the situation. He’d try to call Eastpoole, he’d try to call the reception area. He wouldn’t want to leave the vault, just in case the whole thing was a stunt to lure him out. His indecision would give them time.
The elevator was empty. Joe was holding the door open and watching the television screens. Tom was carrying the laundry bag again, and watching the guard.
“If you take a hostage,” the guard said, coming out from behind the counter, “you run the risk you’ll have to shoot somebody.”
He meant himself, and all things considered he delivered the sentence very calmly. Joe said to him, “Just get in the elevator.”
The three of them stepped into the elevator, and Joe pushed the button for the first floor. The door closed, they started down, and the guard said, “You can still get out of this. Go down to one, leave the bag with me, take off; by the time I get back upstairs you’ll be gone. And you won’t have taken anything, so who’ll be looking for you?”
They already knew the answer to that, far more than he could guess, but neither of them said anything. Tom was watching the guard, and Joe was watching the numbers showing which floor they were passing.
You couldn’t hear the parade in the elevator at all. It had Muzak in it, playing some melody they both recognized but neither of them knew the name of.
The guard said, “Listen. With a hostage, you’re risking a shoot-out. Plus kidnapping, it’s technically kidnapping.”
The elevator was passing the fourth floor. Joe reached out and pressed the button marked 2. The guard looked at that and frowned. He didn’t know what they were doing, and his bewilderment shut him up. He didn’t have anything else to say at all.
The elevator stopped on the second floor. Joe reached over, plucked the guard’s pistol out of his holster, and said, “Move.”
“You aren’t going to—”
“No, we’re not,” Joe said. He was snappish and in a hurry. “Just move.”
The guard stepped out. They made as if to follow him, but when the door started to slide shut they stepped back again. The guard was turning, open-mouthed, as the door finished closing and the elevator descended to the first floor.
“Christ,” Joe said. He took off his hat, showing big beads of perspiration high on his forehead. He used the hat to smear his prints from the guard’s pistol, then put the pistol on the floor in the rear corner of the elevator. As he straightened, the elevator stopped, the door opened, and the lobby floor was in front of them.
Clear. They were ahead of pursuit, and if they just kept moving briskly along they’d stay ahead of it.
They walked out across the lobby, Tom carrying the laundry bag. They pushed through the doors and went out to the street, and the parade crowd was beginning to break up. Some paper was still floating down from windows in the upper stories, but not much.
It was tougher to get through the crowd this time; the convenient empty lane between crowd and building fronts had gone, swallowed up by the generalized movement of the crowd away from here.
The pursuit would be slowed just as much, they had to keep reminding themselves of that.
They reached the arcade, and it too was full of people now, though not quite as bad as the street; they moved through at a good pace.
The squad car was right where they’d left it, just as it was supposed to be. A lot of people were milling around, but none of them were interested in two cops. Tom paused by a wire trash can at the curb. He held the laundry bag by a bottom corner, and quietly upended it into the trash can. The typewriter paper fell out, and the weight of it all together in a pack drove it down through the crumpled newspapers and cigarette packages and paper cups, halfway out of sight.
They moved on toward the squad car. Tom squashed the laundry bag into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket. They got into the car, Joe behind the wheel, and drove away.