Barnhart glanced at the others, angled his chin toward the steps, and started to climb them.
They followed him up without hesitation.
Lightning ripped into the street lamp on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Narrows Avenue just as Nick Roma’s car turned off Shore Road in that direction. His face registered surprise as the sodium bulb flared brightly and then blew in terminal overload, sprinkling the road with its jagged, smoking remains. On the Lincoln’s radio the voice of Michael Bolton dissolved into snaps, crackles, and pops.
“Son of a bitch,” the driver muttered.
In the backseat, Roma stared out his window. All along the avenue, spindly winter-bare trees swayed in the wind roaring off Gravesend Bay.
He shot a glance at the dash clock.
“It’s almost eleven-thirty,” Nick said edgily. “What the hell’s taking you so long to get where we’re going?”
“It’s this fucking weather,” the driver said. “I take it any faster, our wheels’ll be all over the road.”
Roma responded with an indeterminate grunt. He wondered if Marissa would be wearing that short, white lacy thing he’d given her last week. Wondered how fast he would peel her out of it once he stepped through her door. God, God, he was so coiled with tension, so wound up with need, he didn’t think he’d be able to wait until they got into bed. Maybe later they would take a bath together, bring one of his bottles of wine with them…
“Shit!” he said abruptly, slapping his leg in frustration. What was wrong with him? The wine. He’d forgotten the goddamn wine at the club.
He glanced over his shoulder at the sedan following behind them, glad he’d instructed his bodyguards to stick close until he reached Marissa’s. At least now they’d have a chance to make themselves useful.
“Val, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward over the seat rest. “Call the others. There’s a plastic bag in my office, near the desk. It has two bottles of wine in it. Tell them to head back and get it, bring it over to the girl’s place, and ring her bell. I’ll come to the door and take it from them.”
Val nodded, took one hand off the steering wheel, reached for the flip phone in his pocket.
“And Val…?”
The driver briefly met his eyes in the rearview.
“Tell them to be quick about it,” Roma said.
“Our boy Nicky’s been living the high life,” Barnhart said quietly, angling his underbarrel flash into the plastic bag beside Roma’s desk. The light glinted off two bottles of red wine. “He’s got a couple bottles of Chambertin just sitting around in here.”
“And expensive cologne,” Noriko whispered. She was at the desk opening drawers, her hand feeling around inside them. “Seems to be it, though. There’s zip in these drawers. No papers, no pens, not even a stick of chewing gum.”
Barnhart stepped over to her, pulled one of the drawers completely off its tracks, and set it on the floor. Then he reached back into its empty slot, searching for hidden compartments.
Meanwhile, Nimec was moving along the walls, sliding his gloved hands over them, probing for a recessed safe or cabinet. The only hidden devices they’d found so far were Nick’s giant television, theater-quality sound system, and a VCR/DVD reader that fed both systems. Predictably, the disk in the hopper was the first Godfather movie. But there were no other tapes, no disks, nothing else in any way unusual. The office was a blank slate. They had been inside the room for five minutes, and Nimec wanted to be out within ten. So far they’d been lucky, having located the office almost as soon as they reached the upstairs landing — aside from the entrance to a stockroom, there weren’t any other doors along the short, dead-end corridor — and its lock had presented no more of an obstacle to Nori than the one downstairs. Still, there wasn’t a moment to waste.
Finding nothing immediately, Nimec paused, looking around. Even in the darkness, he could see that the place was fastidiously neat and clean. If there were squirrel holes, Roma would be careful to keep them well camouflaged.
His gaze fell on the mirrored wall opposite the door and he turned quickly to Barnhart, tapping his arm.
“Shine the light at the mirror,” he said, pointing. “Start over toward the middle.”
Barnhart nodded and swung the Benelli around.
As Nimec moved closer to the wall, Barnhart’s flash shone on the floor-to-ceiling panels, throwing starry winks of brightness into the room.
Nimec’s eyes slid up and down the wall. Gesturing with his hand, he silently directed Barnhart to shift the flash to the left, signaled him to bring it down a little, then sliced his palm through the air in a halting gesture.
“You see that?” he said in an excited whisper. “Hold it steady. Right there.”
Barnhart nodded again. With the beam hitting the panel straight on, he could see a tiny area, no more than a half inch in diameter, in which its surface seemed to be transparent, as if there were a chipped or bald patch on the reflective layer behind it. Then he realized the spot was a perfect circle — much too perfect to be any kind of defect.
Nimec was practically standing flat against the mirror now, pressing down on it with the heel of his hand.
At the same moment that Barnhart realized he was looking at a two-way mirror, the panel opened out into the room, almost like the door of a medicine cabinet.
“My, my,” he said, training his light into the cubby behind it. “What have we here?”
Nimec knew there was no need for him to answer. What they very obviously had was a covert video-recording system — a surveillance camera and portable duplicating unit for creating automatic backup tapes. The blank round eye of the camera was lined up with the transparent part of the wall mirror and pointed directly into the room. Roma might not keep written records of his various dealings, Nimec thought, but that clearly did not mean he was without any records at all.
He stood there looking into the hollow space. On a shelf below the electronic components were three or four scattered videotapes and a sheet of color-coded adhesive labels. The cassettes themselves were unlabeled.
“Looks like he hasn’t gotten around to cataloging his latest epics yet,” Nori whispered. She came up behind Nimec, her laser-dazzler against her leg. “Wonder what’s on them.”
“I think that’s something we need to find out,” Barnhart said.
Nimec hastily snatched the tapes off the shelf, put them into his duffel, then ejected the tape that was in the camera and dropped it in with them.
“Come on.” He snapped the panel shut and turned toward the others. “We’d better get out of—”
The sound of an approaching vehicle clipped off the end of the sentence. The three of them exchanged quick, anxious looks. They could hear the sound of tires crunching on fresh snowpack. It was close, very close, maybe right outside the building. Then the engine shivered into silence, doors slammed, and there were voices. Coarse male voices out in the street.
Nimec crossed the room, stood to one side of the window, and peered cautiously around the frame. There were two men downstairs near the club’s main entrance, the dark outlines of at least two more in the car’s front seat. One of the men on the sidewalk wore a brown military-surplus bomber jacket with a fleece collar. The other had on a long tweed overcoat. Both were huge. He recognized them instantly, just as he did the vehicle in which they’d arrived. They were Roma’s thugs, the bunch who had been flanking him when he left the building half an hour earlier.
As Nimec stood watching them, the pair that had gotten out of the car turned toward the entrance, then strode under the awning and were blocked from sight.