"They're blood-clotting agents," Vinnie said.
"Not this one. It's morphine. Did he like to shoot up?"
"Carlisle needed it for the pain when blood seeped into his joints."
"Into his joints? Now I've heard everything. The label on the morphine's from 1971." Tod looked tempted to put it in his pocket, then thought better. "Stuff probably doesn't work anymore. It's probably poison by now."
Balenger unzipped his Windbreaker and shoved the pistol into his shoulder holster. Kneeling, he studied the wires connected to the lever hooked over the trapdoor. "You might want to be in another room while I do this."
They didn't move.
Except Tod. "Guess I'm the only one with the brains to take cover." He went into the bedroom.
"If that thing blows up, I have a feeling it won't make a difference where we are," Cora said.
Vinnie knelt beside him. "Besides, how can we help if we don't see what you're doing?"
Balenger gave them a look of respect, then held his breath and pulled the wires from plugs on the lever. He exhaled and gently lifted the box's lid.
They peered over his shoulder.
"Plastic explosive." Balenger managed to keep his voice calm. "The detonator's pushed into a block of the stuff."
"The thing that looks like a short pencil, is that the detonator?" Cora asked.
"Yes. There's some kind of electronic device hooked to it. When the trapdoor rises, it flips the lever and brings these wires in contact with another pair of wires. That closes a battery-driven circuit and triggers the detonator."
"Can the electronic device be activated by remote control?" Vinnie asked.
"Don't know. It might also be programmed to blow up if anybody cuts the wires. The simplest tactic…" Balenger steadied himself. "… is to pull the detonator from the block of explosive."
"Maybe motion also sets it off," Vinnie said.
"Then we're back to where we started, and we wait to see if Ronnie can trigger these bombs from a distance."
"Damned if we do, damned if we don't," Vinnie said.
"We're damned, all right," Amanda said.
Balenger wiped sweat from his brow. He reached into the metal box, then hesitated and took off his gloves. Again, he reached into the box. Thunder made him flinch. Working to control his trembling fingers, he gently pulled the detonator out. He lifted the block of explosive from the box-it felt like putty-and set it a distance away.
Vinnie stepped back. "Isn't that dangerous to move?"
"You mean like nitroglycerin and the slightest jolt blows it up? No." Balenger dried his palms on his jeans. "Plastic explosive's stable. You can pound it with a hammer. You can throw it against a wall. You can hold a lit match against it. The stuff won't go off unless there's a preliminary explosion with enough heat to do the job." He pointed toward the block he'd put aside. "Right now, that's one of the least dangerous things in this hotel."
"I'm not encouraged," Cora said.
"Six to go," Balenger said with the tone of someone rolling a boulder up a hill. "If Ronnie can trigger these things by remote control, once we remove the explosives, only the detonators will go off. But even they have a kick. Stay away from them."
Urgency accumulating in him, he headed toward the bedroom to disable the bomb in there. "There's an elevator in the exercise room," he said to Amanda. "Does it work?"
"I don't know."
"Cora, you said you couldn't find keys for some of the rooms."
"Yes. The penthouse, Danata's suite, and a column of rooms from three twenty-eight all the way up to six twenty-eight."
"I think we know what's behind the doors to those rooms. The shaft for Carlisle's private elevator."
"All these lights," Vinnie said. "Maybe they can be seen from outside. Maybe someone will come and help us."
"No," Amanda said. "No one can see the lights. Ronnie bragged that the penthouse was completely blacked out."
Balenger cursed and hurried to the trapdoor in the bedroom.
"I watched what you did," Vinnie told him. "I'll work on some of the other boxes."
"Slow and careful."
"Bet on it."
"Tod?" Balenger shouted.
"I'm in the surveillance room watching the monitors!"
Balenger went to the door on the opposite side of the bedroom and peered inside. An array of screens showed green-tinted night-vision images.
Tod's facial tattoos were rigid with concentration. "Maybe we'll get a look at what this psycho's doing."
The top row of monitors displayed various angles of the hotel's exterior, but the rain was so dense that Balenger had difficulty seeing the outside walls and metal shutters. A lower row of screens revealed parts of the hotel's dark interior: the lobby, the collapsed staircase, the fire stairs, and the utility room, where a hidden camera was aimed toward the door through which they'd entered from the tunnel. The door was open, confirming Balenger's suspicion that Tod's group had failed to shut it after following their quarry into the building.
"So far all I saw were rats, a bird, and a freaky cat with three back legs," Tod said.
"The cat's beginning to seem normal." Balenger didn't recognize one of the interior images: a deserted garage area, where the camera was aimed toward a metal door.
"That must be where Ronnie comes into the hotel," Balenger said. He hurried back to the bedroom, where he disconnected the wires from the trapdoor's lever. He lifted the metal box's lid and separated the detonator from the explosive. "Two down."
"Three," he heard Vinnie say from another room.
"Four," Cora said from farther away.
"This is him," Amanda said.
Balenger wasn't sure what she meant. As rain pounded the roof, he looked up and saw her holding a framed photograph.
"Ronnie," she said, pointing at the photograph. "This is Ronnie."
46
Chilled, Balenger came slowly to his feet, fixated on what Amanda showed him. In the black-and-white photograph, an elderly man wearing a suit stood next to a young man wearing a sweater. The old man's broad shoulders would once have looked strong. His large chest would once have been solid. Despite deep wrinkles, his square-jawed face retained a suggestion of his youthful handsomeness. His full head of white hair reminded Balenger of Billy Graham in his later years. Indeed, everything about the old man, especially his piercing eyes, reminded Balenger of an evangelist.
"Morgan Carlisle," he whispered. "This is how Bob described him. Those hypnotic eyes."
In the photograph, Carlisle smiled, as did the young man next to him, who seemed barely out of his teens. A thin face, a thin body. Even his hair, which was trimmed closely at the sides and was thick on top, emphasized his thinness. Unlike Carlisle's eyes, the young man's were not expressive. Nor was his smile, which seemed entirely on the surface.
"Ronnie," Amanda said in disgust. Balenger studied the photograph more intensely. A dark, "wood-paneled wall in the background matched walls in the hotel. Despite the pleasure in Carlisle's smile, the elderly man kept a slight distance from the young man, his arms at his sides. The young man's sweater was a crew neck, a shirt collar tucked under it in a style Balenger remembered seeing in movies from the sixties. He had a plain face, soft at the cheekbones and the chin.
Amanda pointed. "This other man was Ronnie's father."
"Carlisle? No. He couldn't have been."
"Ronnie insisted that this man was his father."
"There's no record that Carlisle married."
"Which means nothing," Vinnie said from the doorway to the surveillance room. He and Cora had finished disarming the explosives. "The child could have been the result of an affair."
"But Carlisle was a watcher. A romantic fling doesn't seem in his nature."
"Unless one of the women he spied on gave him inspiration." Cora came into the room and looked at the photo. "Carlisle. So finally we get to see him. The monster responsible for the Paragon Hotel. How can anybody so twisted look so attractive? I bet this S.O.B. was irresistible in his prime. Those eyes. Finding a willing partner wouldn't have been difficult."