He began to sweat with frustration and maybe a little anxiety. Jack remembered Milkdud saying that old buildings with old elevators had the easiest doors to open. Well, this former hotel was an old building, so why—?
The twine resisted his pull—the hook had caught something.
He sent up a prayer to the goddess of building hackers: Please, let this be the lever.
He tugged and saw the doors move—just a fraction of an inch, but enough to tell him he was in the right place. Pulled a little harder and the doors spread farther, allowing enough space for Jack to slip the screwdriver through. He let go of the string and used the screwdriver to lever the doors open until he had room for his fingers in the gap. He slipped them through, then forced the doors apart. Once past a certain point, they opened the rest of the way on their own.
The open elevator shaft yawned before him. Thick cables ran up and down the center of the shaft, their coating of grease reflecting the glow from the caged incandescent bulb set above the doors.
Jack poked his head into the shaft and looked down. Bulbs lit the way into the dimness below. He couldn't see his elevator car, but the other, marked with a "2" on its roof, waited midshaft about ten floors down.
He looked to his right and found what he wanted. Between the two sets of doors a row of rusty metal rungs had been set into the wall. They ran the length of the shaft.
He pocketed the screwdriver, the hook, and the twine. He grabbed a rung, placed the ridged rubber sole of his work boot on another, lower rung, and swung out into the shaft. He brushed against a spring switch along the way and was startled by the ding! of the elevator bell.
So that's what makes it ring.
He would have expected a more sophisticated system, but then again, these elevators were antiques.
He grabbed the lever and pushed down to close the doors, then began the short climb to the top floor.
Brady's floor.
No problem opening the elevator doors from this side: A simple push on the lever admitted him to floor twenty-two.
The only question was whether or not he was alone up here. The lights were on, but that didn't mean much. He listened. Not a sound.
Jack closed the doors but left the screwdriver between them. He stepped through the deserted receptionist area and crossed the office, passing Brady's huge desk as he made his way toward the living quarters.
He tried the door—locked. He knocked, a series of triplets, waited, then repeated. No response. He pulled out his cell and dialed the "personal" number Brady had given him last week. A phone began to ring on the far side of the door. On the fifth ring a voice—not Brady's—told him to leave a message. Jack was reasonably sure Brady would have answered a call at this hour.
So… nobody home. But that could change any minute.
Jack turned and hurried to Brady's desk.
4
"All quiet on the Western Front?"
The TP in the lobby kiosk jumped as if he'd heard a shot. He dropped his newspaper and blanched when he saw who was speaking.
"Sir!" He shot to his feet. "You startled me, sir!"
"At ease," Jensen said, holding back a laugh.
He rarely used the elevator when he traveled from his office to the lobby. He'd found it much faster to take the stairs from the third floor. He'd eased through the stairway door at the south side of the lobby and silently made his way toward the security kiosk. He'd wanted to see how close he could get before the TP on duty realized he wasn't alone.
It had been easy. Too easy. The TP, whose name was Gary Cruz, had been so engrossed in the Sunday paper's sports section that Jensen had had to announce himself.
Jensen should have been angry, but he was too pleased with his own stealth to take Cruz's head off.
"Everything under control?"
The TP nodded. "Only one mouse in the house."
That wasn't unusual, even at this hour. A certain number of FAs would stay late or come in early to study, or catch up on assigned duties, or simply spend time on the Communing Level. The busiest after-hours periods tended to be Friday into Saturday, and Saturday into Sunday. The early hours of Monday usually found the Temple deserted. Except, of course, for the security detail.
"Thought he was a homeless guy at first," Cruz added.
"You're sure he wasn't?" This TP had better be damn sure.
"His card read him out as LFA, so that explained his looks."
"A lapser?" A sour note chimed in Jensen's head. "What's his name?"
Cruz sat and tapped at his keyboard. "John Roselli, sir. Came in about twenty minutes ago."
Roselli… he knew that name. He knew all the lapsers. He kept an eye on them to make sure they were complying with their punishment. But that wasn't the only reason. He'd kept a special watch ever since Clark Schaub. He'd been depressed because he thought his LFA designation was unjust—they all thought that—and killed himself.
A Dormentalist suicide was news under any circumstances, but when it happened in the Temple itself, and when the member did it in such dramatic fashion, it created a field day for the press. And not just rags like The Light—all the papers.
Schaub had seated himself in the center of the Great Room on the twenty-first floor, removed a straight razor from his pocket, and slit his own throat.
Covering it up had appeared impossible at first, but Jensen found a way. The only witnesses had been devout Dormentalists and they took a vow of silence to protect their Church. Jensen and Lewis and Hutch moved the body to a grove in Central Park. A police investigation listed Schaub as murdered by an unknown suspect. The case remained unsolved.
"Where'd Roselli go?"
Cruz checked his screen again. "Straight to twenty-one."
Shit. Like any other LFA, Roselli thought he'd gotten the shaft. He'd always struck Jensen as pretty stable, but you never knew. And the last thing Jensen needed now was a replay of the Schaub mess.
"Access the cameras up there. Let's see what our lapser is up to."
Cruz complied with practiced efficiency, alternating between mouse and keyboard. But as he worked, his brow began to furrow; a puzzled expression wormed onto his face.
Jensen didn't like that look. "What's wrong?"
"I can't find him."
"Well, then he must have left the floor."
Cruz pressed a button under one of his screens. "Not by the elevators. They haven't moved."
"Check the stairwell doors."
Jensen's mind raced. Each floor had access to the north and south stairways, but the doors were monitored. Access to the twenty-second floor from the stairways was blocked by password-protected steel doors that would have been at home in a bank vault.
"No record of either being opened."
"Then rerun the tapes, damn it. Let's see where he went when he left the elevator. No, wait. Do the elevator first."
Like a giant Ti Vo, the security computer stored each of the digital feeds on huge hard drives that made them accessible at any time.
Jensen moved behind Cruz and waited as he fiddled with the monitoring system. A bank of eight small screens arced across the inner front of the kiosk, just below the counter. Images from each security camera were supposed to rotate through the screens. The rotation had been halted while Cruz accessed specific cameras.
"Coming up on screen eight," Cruz said.
The black-and-white image of an elevator interior lit the screen. Car 1 blinked in the upper-left corner; a digital clock ran in the upper right. The camera showed the knit-capped head of a scruffy-looking guy staring at his shoes. Jensen got a glimpse of beard but never the face.
According to the clock, Roselli stepped off the elevator onto twenty-one at 11:22:14. Something about the way he kept his head down bothered Jensen. But no problem. The other cameras would provide a good head-to-toe look.