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But all of them-all of the good ones, at least-have two other things, and you can rely on them being there every single time.

They have a housekeeping staff, and they have a maintenance staff.

They have to. Otherwise, they can't call themselves a hotel.

It took us until three minutes to three to reach the Watergate, and because Alena had bought new clothes at Abercrombie amp; Fitch on Wisconsin, and because I didn't look that ratty to begin with, no one paid us any attention at all when we walked into the lobby. It wasn't crowded, but it was busy, and it was easy to pass without drawing notice, just a couple looking at the famous hotel, the woman carrying a natty, new backpack over her shoulder, the man with a small duffel in one hand.

We spent nine minutes walking through, admiring the decor and using the opportunity to scope out the hotel security. Once we'd made the guards and the cameras we headed for the elevators. Nobody stopped us because nobody had a reason to.

We went down, not up, and when the elevator stopped we got out like we knew where we were heading, moving down a slate-gray cinder-block corridor lined with laundry carts and pieces of broken furniture stacked atop one another. There were signs posted saying that this area was for employees only, and there was a bulletin board near where we'd exited with various notices posted, some of them official, some of them not. I stopped long enough to scan the board, and not finding what I wanted, moved on.

At the end of the corridor was a T intersection, and another bulletin board. We could hear the sounds of the hotel's engines working away, the physical plant nearby. The Watergate has two hundred and fifty rooms, and when it's hot, every one of them that's occupied is running its air conditioner. That's a lot of stress on the compressors, and it makes a lot of noise. Add to that the demands for power to all of those rooms, and to the kitchens, and the laundries, and the common areas, and the front desk, and it's amazing that more things don't go wrong in such places.

There was another corkboard, outside a locker room, and while Alena glanced through the door to confirm it was for the housekeeping staff, I found what I was looking for, thumbtacked beneath an admonishment to always wash my hands. It was the master room list, prepared each morning for the housekeeping staff, and it indicated which rooms were in use and which ones weren't, and in some hotels, it would even list the last name of the occupying party. The Watergate's list wasn't that generous, confining itself to providing room numbers and a notation as to whether they were occupied or not.

I heard a jangling of keys, glanced to my left to see a Latino man maybe in his late forties coming our way down the corridor. He was wearing a gray maintenance uniform, baggy on him, a radio on his belt beside his ring of keys, and I saw a lanyard hooked to his belt loop, disappearing inside his left rear pocket. He glanced our way with curiosity, but he didn't say anything. Class is a factor in hotels, and more often than not housekeeping and custodial services are handled by recent immigrants. The last thing a new arrival wants as he works his new job, trying to build a new life, is trouble.

The hallway was narrow, and he had to squeeze to get by, and as he did I reached out with my right hand and caught the clip on his lanyard between my thumb and index finger, squeezing to free it from his belt loop. It came loose, and I snapped my wrist up, and the key card the lanyard was holding came free from his pocket. I made the move as quick and sure as possible, and once I had it, I stuffed the card into my own pocket, the lanyard after it.

If he knew he'd just been pickpocketed, he didn't show it, and he didn't stop.

Alena moved back to my side, and I indicated the list, and she pulled it from the board. I glanced after the man who'd passed us by once more. He was heading for one of the service elevators, and he wasn't looking back, so I checked the direction he'd come, and saw a second locker room. While Alena scanned the papers she'd freed from the corkboard, I peered into the room, and confirmed it was the men's locker room, and that it was empty. No one was within. If the shift hadn't changed at three, then it likely wouldn't be changing until four, at the earliest. I stepped inside, pulled Alena in after me, and closed the door.

Here's something else you can count on in hotels. They have security in the lobby, and maybe they have a security office on the ground floor, or in the basement, or in the subbasement. But that's it. Where the worker bees congregate, they don't have cameras; certainly not in the locker rooms.

"Anything?" I asked her.

She was scanning the list quickly. "There are over one hundred suites."

"It'll be marked, it'll have a notation of some sort. 'VIP' or a star or something."

She grunted her agreement, kept scanning the pages. While she did so, I moved along the lockers. Most of them were padlocked closed, but a couple weren't, and in one of the unlocked I found a maintenance jumpsuit that I thought I could squeeze into. I pulled it free and bundled it up, stuffing it into my go-bag.

"They're marked with a star, you were right," Alena said. "There are four of them."

"Unoccupied?"

"Two."

"It'll be one of those," I said.

She glanced from the sheets to me, worry in her eyes. "You're so certain."

"He blocked two and a half hours for this on his schedule. He's the featured speaker; he's the main attraction. They're catering to him, they'll have a suite for him to rest or get some work done, whatever, but he sure as hell isn't going to stand around outside the banquet hall waiting to be called and they're not going to ask him to, just in case the dinner goes long. They'll call him when they're ready. He'll go down then."

A slight smile played at the corner of her mouth. "All right."

I pulled the key from my pocket, handed it to her.

"Hurry back," I told her. She was gone for thirty-seven minutes, during which time three things happened.

The first was that I got out of my pants and into the maintenance uniform. It fit, but only barely, and I had to leave the front unzipped. I swapped shirts with one from my go-bag, a plain white T, then took a moment to drop it to the cement floor and rub up some dirt. Then I put it on.

The second thing was that Panno called. The reception was bad, the phone giving me almost no signal.

"He's on his way to the hotel." His voice was choppy with static.

I checked my watch. "Can you beat him here?"

"Not easily."

"Try," I told him, and hung up.

The third thing was that the day shift began to file in, making for their lockers. I caught a couple of eyeballs, including one from the same man whose pocket I'd picked.

"How you doing?" I asked him.

"I'm all right." His accent was thick, more Central American than Mexican.

I offered him my hand, smiling. "Jerry," I said. "Nice to meet you."

"Ramon. You're new?"

"Just starting tonight. Don't know where half of anything is."

One of the other crew, in the midst of changing, laughed. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"They didn't even give me orientation," I said, keeping it cheerful. "Figure I get that after my first check?"

"If you're lucky," another one said. "Let me get changed, I'll show you where everything is. My name's Monte."

"Man, Monte, that would kick ass," I said. "Seriously, I'd appreciate that more than you know." During the course of my orientation I picked up a radio, a toolbox, and a can of WD-40. Then I went to use the bathroom, and parked myself on the toilet until I heard the last of them leave the locker room. I made a lot of noise with the toilet paper, flushed, and came out to find I was alone in the room. I moved my new toolbox to the nearest bench, popped it open, and checked the supplies. Most of them didn't interest me, but there was a rag, stained but dry, and I stuffed that in the breast pocket of the coveralls.