“But here it goes again,” she finished. “What do we do now?”
“Try to find a way out,” Walt said evenly. “Any suggestions?”
“Don’t look at me. It was everything I could do just to get us in here.”
He grinned, and Teri had to admit that she didn’t know where the humor had come from. It was something she wouldn’t have had two weeks ago, before Gabe had come back. She might have cried then, or she might have grown tired and lain down and fallen asleep. But she wouldn’t have been able to laugh. Not in the best of circumstances.
“Can you pick the lock?”
“They took my backpack with my tools.”
She hopped down from the desk and pulled out the middle drawer. A tray had been built into the front span. It was filled with pens and pencils, rubber bands and paper clips, old pennies and a couple of letter openers. She plucked out a paper clip.
“How about this?”
He looked up from the lock. “You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Okay.” She dug around a moment longer and brought out one of the letter openers. It wasn’t anything fancy. Not one of those engraved ivory-handled things or even an antique sterling pewter opener. Just an everyday straight-and-narrow stainless steel letter opener. That was all. “What about this?”
“No,” he started to say. Then he caught himself. “Well, let me take a look at it.”
Teri passed it to him.
He turned it over in his hands a couple of times, as if he were trying to get a feel for what it might actually be able to do. “Even with the tapered end, it’s too big to pick the lock,” he said thoughtfully. “But then, picking a lock isn’t the only way through a door, is it?”
“It isn’t?”
“You better hope not.”
[135]
Jake put aside his checkbook. There was too much going on tonight, and D.C. had told him no more screwing around. He hated the idea of losing more than a hundred dollars to the bank, but he hated the idea of losing his job even more. He could always pull out his checkbook and have another go at it tomorrow.
The nearest monitor flickered from the room with the sleepers to the room with the two boys. One of the boys was sitting up in bed, his face pale, a pillow pulled into his lap. The other boy was barely visible out of the corner of the camera. Jake sat forward. It appeared the kid had gotten out of bed and moved to the door. He was pounding against it with his good arm, his hand coming down again and again and again.
Jake flipped an audio switch.
“Help! We’re in here! Please! Help!”
He flipped it off again.
Christ, what next?
He sat back again, and moistened his lips, which had begun to chap a couple of days before. The question he had to wrestle with was this: would this be something D.C. would need to know? He didn’t think so, though he had to be careful. He hadn’t made a report when Amanda Tarkett had taken the kid out of the room for the first time, and everyone knew how that had turned out. Sometimes the little things you didn’t think mattered much mattered more than you could ever imagine.
Still, Jake didn’t think this was one of those. At the very worst, the kid might scream himself raw. He certainly wasn’t a threat to break out. Not with that door. It was as solid as they came. Even screaming the way he was, it was debatable that anyone might actually hear him from the other side.
The monitor flickered and changed to a view of the lab, where Dr. Childs was hunched over the console of his electron microscope. Jake let the image change without trying to freeze it. He would keep an eye on the basement whenever it came around, but he wasn’t going to bother anyone about some kid throwing a tantrum. It was hardly grounds for an emergency.
The monitor flickered again, from the lab to the conference room on the second floor this time. All was quiet.
[136]
The door opened on the other side of the room, and Childs looked up from his work, disappointed to find that he hadn’t escaped D.C. after all. The man came through with Mitch at his side, where he seemed to have been permanently attached.
“Got a problem,” D.C. said, pulling out a nearby chair and plopping down. “That Knight woman and her boyfriend showed up. We’ve got ’em downstairs, locked in an office.”
“Oh, Christ.”
D.C. glanced at Mitch and they were like two hungry vultures contemplating their next meal. Jesus, Childs thought. They want to kill them. He looked from D.C. to Mitch, trying to find something in there that might assure him he was wrong. But these eyes—they had lied before, many times before, and effortlessly. They had learned to keep their secrets.
“You aren’t thinking about—”
“Lighten up, doc. We aren’t going to hurt anyone.”
“Not unless we have to,” Mitch added.
Childs looked at him, then said, “Your fangs are showing, Mitch.”
“All right, kids, break it up.” D.C. slid his chair up against the side of the console. He braced an elbow on the beige corner and leaned against his arm. “Listen, I don’t know how to say this except straight out: it’s over, doc. It’s been one hell of a roller coaster ride, but it’s time to get off now.”
Childs slumped back in his chair. He had known this was coming, he had prepared for it, but all the same, after twenty years, after coming so close… “All I wanted was to find a way to keep people from aging.”
“Hey, we gave it a good shot.”
He looked up from his muse, hating the faces that met his gaze. These guys—they were idiots. They didn’t understand any of this. Not a single, solitary word of it. Mitch with his folded arms and that crooked little scar over his eye. D.C. with that cocky little grin and his who-gives-a-fuck attitude. It was just a game to them, a chance to play cops and robbers. They didn’t appreciate any of it.
“Hurts, huh, doc?” Mitch said, thoroughly enjoying himself.
Childs glared at him.
“Listen,” D.C. said. “We’ve got to clear out tonight.”
[137]
It certainly helped to be on the right side of the door. In this case, the door swung into the room, which meant the hinges were on the inside and accessible. Where there were hinges, Walt had learned years ago, there was a way out.
He muscled the pin out of the middle hinge, using the tapered end of the letter opener. The pin popped with sudden surprise. It glanced off the door, fell to the carpet and rolled under a nearby chair. The door shifted instantly and slanted off center to the left. Walt caught it and wrestled it aside.
“Bring along the Scotch tape and a handful of business cards, will you?”
“Already got ’em.” They had found the business cards in the top right-hand drawer of one of the desks. A single card placed over the lens of a camera and secured with a little Scotch tape was as good as a can of spray paint.
“Where now?” Teri asked, sticking close to him as they moved down the hall.
“Back to the basement,” he said. “That’s where they’ve got Gabe.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they moved us out of there as fast as they could.”
Teri could have sworn the stairway had been on the other side of the building, behind them. But apparently she had turned herself around. Up ahead, she saw a gray metal door blocking the end of the hall. Like the door downstairs, it was marked with a sign that said: STAIRS. Above the sign was the number: 2.
Walt held her up. “How ’bout we take the elevator this time?”
“Only one of them goes to the basement.”