A five-minute climb, eight floors. Hanging off the elevator door at Corbeil's floor, LuEllen first took the stethoscope out of her pocket, and listened. Nothing. Then she dialed the next number on her speed dialCorbeil's apartment. Again, no answer. She patted me on the shoulder. I had her mechanical door-openers ready. I forced the jaws between the doors, and we pried the doors open LuEllen did a quick peek with a mirror, then clambered into the hallway. I was five seconds behind her, with the bag.
The hallway was arranged like many rich people's hallwaysso that the rich people would encounter each other as seldom as possible. A vestibule at the main elevator branched into two hallways, one for Corbeil's apartment, one for the other apartment that shared this entry floor.
Both hallways made a sharp turn just off the vestibule. When we crawled out of the service elevator shaft, we were already on Corbeil's side of the floor, but too far down the hall, past his door
We went back to his door and LuEllen took the jaws from me and forced them between the door and the steel doorjamb. Then she attached a steel wheel, like a small steering wheel, to a square screw-end at the top of the jaws, and moved behind me so I could turn it. The mechanical advantage was huge, the big wheel must have spun five or six times for every quarter-inch that the jaws opened, but nothing could stand against them. Slowly, slowly, the door moved; then suddenly, popped.
LuEllen had moved around so that she was below me, facing the door, a heavy utility knife in her hand. When the door popped, she shot inside, making for the closet where we thought the alarm console was fixed. As she did that, I began uncoiling 150 feet of climber's rope from the black bag.
As I did it, I was counting to myself. Some of the alarm systems give you as much as two minutes to punch your code into the key pad. Some of them give you less. As soon as she'd gone into the apartment, the keypad began a slow beeping. Then she was into the closet. I stepped in behind her and pushed the door shut.
Twenty seconds. I could hear a scuffling sound, a ripping sound, then quiet, except for the beep-beep-beep-beep and then beeeeeeeeeeeeee. Thirty seconds. The pad was dialing out. Damnit. The shortest possible delay LuEllen appeared in the doorway, black-on-gray "We're good," she said, in an almost normal voice
"I'll rig the line," I said. I was drenched with sweat. I did industrial espionage, and went places where I wasn't wanted, but the big-time apartment break-in wasn't my style.
"Look at the rug," she said.
I looked down, in the light of her flashwe were leaving greasy tracks behind us. "Uh-oh." I stepped to the door and looked out in the hall. The tracks came all the way down the hall from the elevator, though they were harder to see in the subdued hall lighting. "Let's get the line rigged. We'll just have to take a chance that nobody'll see them."
Another unforeseen risk
We did a quick run through the apartment to make sure it was empty. On the way, I stopped for a few seconds to admire LuEllen's work with the alarm. She'd used the knife to cut a hole through the drywall to expose the alarm consolecouldn't just pull the wires out, because if you cut a wire, the security service would be automatically alerted. She'd then stripped the wire, clipped in bypasses, and then cut the wire between the two bypasses The top bypass silenced the keypad, the bottom one would keep the circuit alive, so the cut-wire call-out would never be made. She'd done it in about twenty-five seconds.
The suite that had worried us, the possible maid's suite, was just a guest room. The computer was in a small purpose-built office. "Don't stop," I said "Just walk on by "
The balcony ran the width of the apartment. We took a moment, surveying an adjoining balcony with the night-vision glasses, then carefully opened the door and listened I could hear what sounded like a radio or CD, but it was inside, contained. Above us, I thought. We looped the climbing rope around one of the support posts on the balcony, and coiled the rope so that a quick kick would launch it down the side of the building. If somebody came through the door, we could be on the ground in less than a minute, pulling the rope after us.
That done, we headed for the safe, which was nicely concealed behind a piece of wooden paneling. LuEllen said, "I'll do this, you get going."
I walked back and forth and around the room, leaving traces of the black grease, while LuEllen started pulling out her equipment. After leaving the tracks, I went back to the door, took off my pants, jacket, shoes, and the dirty kitchen gloves, and walked back to Corbeil's office in my shorts and socks.
LuEllen made a lot less noise than I'd feared. She was good at this, and what she was doing was more a cover than any serious attempt at the safe. As long as Corbeil concentrated on the safe, and not the computer, we'd be cool.
In his office, I shut the door and turned on the light. What I was doing was simple: I was loading a program that would spool anything he typed on the computer to a file on his hard drive. Another programone of my own designwould send the file to one of my online mailboxes, and then erase its tracks. The only question was, had Corbeil booby-trapped his computer with hardware of some kind, or software, to detect intrusion?
I spent twenty minutes trying to figure that out, and in the end, didn't. I didn't think so, but you can't be sure, not in twenty minutes.
As soon as my software was in, I checked the rest of the desk, found a couple of Zip disks, and copied them to my own Zip disks.
I was just finishing when LuEllen scratched on the door I turned out the light and opened it: "Almost done," I said.
"I need your help. Hurry, and get dressed."
In the study, LuEllen had done two things, she had taken her heavy bar, which had an edge like a razor, and had cut through the wall around the cylindrical safe. The safe was set in concrete, inside a steel frame that was probably bolted to the building beams. Around the cylinder flange, she'd fitted a five-sided, one-size-fits-all steel collar, with adjustable bolts
With that in place, she'd gone to the far wall and cut another hole, exposing one of the I-beams that held up the building. The beams had been covered with drywall, so exposing them was no problem. She'd slipped a steel strap around the beam, then hooked the strap to the collar on the safe, using what amounted to a large come-along.
The come-along was essentially a high-ratio pulley, with a four-foot-long handle and a three-foot pipe as an extension; the connection was a steel cable. She'd pumped the cable tight; so tight that I could have walked on it without bending it at all.
"The thing is, the safe is starting to move," she said. "The concrete is cracking up. I can hear it, but I've got so much pressure on it, that when it breaks free, it's liable to come flying out of the hole."
"Jesus."
"It won't fly farbut it'll hit like a ton of bricks. They'd hear it all over the building. I gotta stand right next to it while you pump."
So I pumped the handle of the come-along and she stood next to the safe, watching the concrete deform. "Starting to crumble. crumbling. crumbling. Stop."
I stopped, and she peered at the safe.
"Give it a little punch." I gave it a little punch, and suddenly, the safe came free.
"All right, all right."
Working as hard and quietly as we could, it still took ten minutes to work it the rest of the way free. When it finally came out, I staggered backward with it and dropped it on a couch.
"No way I can get that down the elevator," I said. "The goddamn thing's gotta weigh two hundred pounds. It'd pull me right off the cable."
"We can't just let it sit here. we've almost got it," she said urgently.
"LuEllen, the goddamn thing is like a two-hundred-pound car batteryI can haul it, but it's got too much weight in too small a package."