Despite the deafening clang of the alarm, despite the hissing of the halon gas, despite my growing sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in this steel-reinforced coffin, I forced myself to focus. To think.
It wasn’t easy. I was steadily growing more and more woozy from breathing the halon, and I couldn’t stop coughing. My body was desperately craving oxygen.
What Merlin had done wasn’t, in fact, stupid. Setting off the fire alarm should have triggered the automatic unlocking of the vault doors. That’s how it should have been, and probably what the fire code required.
But this setup privileged security over safety. Our failure to enter the right code in the secondary panel meant we were locked in, whether that was against the fire code or not.
When I was a teenager living in the town of Malden, north of Boston, my friends and I used to hang out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, a used-car dealership owned by one of my buddies’ fathers. There I learned, from a repo man, how to pick locks. I also learned the rudiments of electrical wiring, the stuff engineers learn in school. And I knew that the secondary alarm panel had to be connected to some kind of relay switch that triggered the relocking bolts. It didn’t take me long to find what had to be the relay. It was a white-painted metal box about four inches square, mounted to the wall next to the door. Unobtrusive. Easy to miss. These relays always have an electromagnet inside, and the magnet either closes a switch or opens it. And that, right or wrong, was about the sum total of what I knew about relay switches.
Connected to the relay was white-painted electrical conduit about half an inch wide, which ran along the doorframe, then straight up to the ceiling. That had to be the power supply.
I handed Merlin the brown folder so I had both hands free. “Let me have your magnet,” I said.
Merlin, no surprise, seemed to get why I wanted it. I’m sure he knew a hell of a lot more about mechanical engineering than I did. “You think—?”
He handed me the oblong chunk of rare-earth magnet. Neodymium, he’d said. It was extremely strong, but was it strong enough? I took it and knelt down. I pulled open the metal box and saw, as I suspected, a copper coil inside. The guts of the electromagnet. Then I placed the neodymium magnet on the exterior of the box and waited.
And nothing happened.
My chest had grown tight, and I was short of breath and light-headed, and my heartbeat had begun to speed up, not from adrenaline either.
“Nice try,” Merlin said. “But the fire department should be here soon.”
What I did next was out of desperation. I took out the Glock I’d stolen from Curtis Schmidt’s house. I stood up, gripped the gun two-handed, and cocked it. My head was swimming.
“Heller, you’re not serious.”
“Stand back,” I said.
I fired a round into the wiring conduit on the doorframe.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the bolts ka-chunked open. I grabbed the door lever and pulled it open. We both dove forward, out of the halon, and gulped air. I stumbled a bit, unsteady on my feet. I could hear sirens in the distance, which meant they must have been close to the building.
Merlin pointed toward a door marked STAIRS. We ripped off our masks so we could breathe better.
And we ran.
57
I screwed up, Nick,” Merlin said.
“It was a good idea,” I said. “It didn’t work. That’s not screwing up.”
“No, I don’t mean lighting the paper on fire. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, I left the folder behind.”
“Oh.” I paused. “You did, huh? Yeah, that’s a screw-up, all right.” I felt a surge of hot anger but did my best to conceal it. Merlin looked so dispirited that I added right away, “But not a tragedy. We got the name and her location. We have Ellen Wiley and Upperville, Virginia. I remember that much.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding unconvinced.
We walked down a dark, wide street, moving from pool to pool of yellowish light cast by the sodium-vapor street lamps. Traffic was light, but not nonexistent. It was a little after four in the morning. Dawn was still a few hours off.
Merlin’s mistake had put added pressure on us — “us” being me, Dorothy, and now Mandy Seeger, since I thought of Mandy as being part of our team. Not only had we set off the fire alarm and damaged the strong room door, but at some point soon, someone in the firm would find the misplaced Slade Group file folder, and that would start a clock ticking. The fact that the file had been isolated and removed from the secured file cabinets would tell them it was probably important. That would point a blinking neon arrow at Ellen Wiley’s name. Maybe they’d alert her that someone might be coming for her.
Because someone was.
I allowed myself five hours of sleep. That was about the minimum I could operate on with my cognition fairly intact. At ten in the morning, Dorothy, Mandy, and I gathered in the living room of my hotel suite. I’d given her the name of Slander Sheet’s owner, Ellen Wiley, and she’d made a call to an old friend at The Washington Post.
“So it’s Ellen Wiley, huh?” she said. “Amazing.” She was reclining in one of the big lounge chairs, one leg tucked under the other. She was wearing black leggings and a white button-down shirt. She wore her wavy hair up. I couldn’t decide if she was a redhead or a brunette with coppery highlights.
“The shadowy owner herself,” I said. “What do I need to know about her?”
Mandy was looking over a sheaf of paper. “My friend at the Post pulled a file on Wiley and e-mailed it to me. She’s an interesting case, Ellen Wiley. Extremely rich — a tobacco heiress. She inherited a big chunk of the Philip Morris tobacco fortune. She’s got homes in Upperville, Anguilla, Scottsdale, and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. I’m pretty sure Upperville is her chief residence. A huge estate on two thousand acres in horse and hunt country. She’s a big patron of the arts. Gives a lot to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville. Divorced three times, each time married to a younger man. She’s not a recluse, exactly, but she’s extremely publicity-averse. She stays away from the press.”
“So why does she own Slander Sheet?” Dorothy asked.
Mandy riffled through the file. “That’s a mystery.”
“I need to see her up close. I want to ask her some questions. I’m fairly good at sussing out liars.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“So where is she now? How do we find out?”
Mandy smiled.
“At her estate in Upperville.”
“You’re sure?”
“She’s hosting a fund-raiser tonight for wounded veterans at her house.”
“So tonight’s out. We go to see her tomorrow.”
“I say we go tonight. You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t wounded. Who’s ‘we’?”
She smiled again. “You need a date.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“What’s ‘invited’?”
“I like your style,” I said.
58
The drive to Upperville took a little more than an hour, straight down 66 west and then up north to Route 50.
I wore a suit — I had nothing fancier with me, of course, than the suit I’d worn on the way down from Boston — and Mandy wore a white zip-front peplum jacket over a matching skirt. She also looked like she’d spent some time putting on her makeup. She looked terrific, sophisticated and attractive.
I drove, and we fell into easy, companionable conversation. We talked for a while about her time working for The Washington Post, and about my time in Iraq and Bosnia. She seemed to enjoy bumping up against the barrier of what I couldn’t talk about. I could see what a relentless reporter she must be. She told me about all the research she’d done on Justice Claflin when she was writing the piece about Kayla, and I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing her other files with me.