At the St. Regis the desk clerk left his post for a moment and went into a back room. As he closed the door behind him, he heard a loud noise from the front desk. He opened the door to find a cloud of smoke and a closet door lying atop the desk. He looked around and found no corpses, then he picked up a phone from the floor and called security.
Elise followed Bob’s instructions: she turned up for work exactly when she did every day and did the things she always did. She distributed the mail, newspapers, and magazines, then went back to her desk and waited to be called in. She was not called in.
At lunchtime she ate half her sandwich and watched the Thomases and Damien leave, then she went into each office, starting with Henry’s. She peeled off the tape on the bottom of the bug and placed it under the center drawer of each desk, then followed suit in Hank’s and Damien’s offices.
She had one more device to plant: the master unit, which controlled the bugs, received their transmissions, and sent them to a secret website on the Internet. She placed it under a colleague’s desk, two desks away; then she went back, switched on her iPhone, and opened the new app Bob had installed. It was disguised as a calorie counter. She switched on the master and the three devices, and the app ran a check on each, confirming that they were operational.
Then she finished her sandwich.
Just after three PM Elise was called into Rance Damien’s office.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
“Why didn’t I get a Times this morning?” he asked.
Before she could answer, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in!” Damien shouted.
A man in coveralls, carrying a toolbox, walked in. “May I sweep now, Mr. Damien?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“I’ll get you a Times,” Elise said and fled the office. She went to her desk, opened her handbag, found her iPhone and went to the calorie app. As quickly as possible, she switched off the base unit and all three bugs, then she grabbed a Times and hurried back into Damien’s office. “Here you are, sir.”
But he was already reading a Times. “That’s all right, I found it on the floor.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.” As she closed the door she looked back to see the electronics man, wearing earphones and walking around the office, with some sort of wand in his hand.
“Any luck?” Damien asked the man.
“I got a single beep, but it didn’t recur. Probably some trash from a passing car or truck down on the street,” the man replied.
“Okay, wrap it up,” Damien said.
“Yes, sir.”
Elise went back to her desk and watched as the man went from office to office. No alarms were raised.
At her desk in New York, Viv Bacchetti took a call from Atlanta. “Yes?”
“We had a bomb delivered to Jamie Cox at the St. Regis this morning,” a man said.
“Good God! Was she hurt?”
“Lane and Ida got her out early. She had a noon thing in Palm Beach. No one was injured at the hotel. The bomb went off in a closet near the front desk.”
“Get hold of Lane,” Viv said. “Tell her what happened and to shake up all of the day’s plans. Go to plan B and, if necessary, plan C.”
“Right.”
Viv put down the phone and breathed deeply until her pulse returned to normal.
39
Stone said goodbye to Viv and put down the phone. He didn’t need to think long before calling Dino.
“Bacchetti.”
“It’s Stone. Have you spoken to Viv?”
“Not yet. I got a message, but I haven’t had time to return her call.”
“When you do, she’s going to tell you that somebody delivered a bomb in a box of flowers to Jamie in Atlanta.”
“Was she hurt?”
“Fortunately, she had already left the hotel.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I’ll call the Atlanta cops.”
“I’m sure Viv or the St. Regis has already done that,” Stone said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Dino, I know you’d like to take the time to sew this case up seven ways, but I think we’re all out of time. The Thomases are just going to keep going until Jamie, Sherry, and Elise are all dead. Maybe me, too.”
“You have a point.”
“I think it’s time to go to the D.A. with what you’ve got.”
“Well, let’s take a look at that,” Dino said. “Sherry has a dark story to tell, but nothing that would get a conviction in court. Whatever Jamie knows, the world knows already, so there’s no point in trying to kill her. So all we’ve got is Elise. If the D.A. will get us a warrant based on her story, we’ll go with Bob Cantor’s idea and use his new equipment to bug everything they say. Then maybe we can get a conviction on some attempted murder charges.”
“Back up there a minute,” Stone said. “They’ve already shot Sherry in the head and show no inclination to stop trying. A couple of hours ago they were still trying to kill Jamie, and sending a rank amateur like Elise in there to bug the place could get her killed, too.”
“We could wire her up, so that what she overhears can be recorded.”
“And if they search her, she’ll never leave the building alive. What you’ve already got, though, is the conversation Elise heard about them trying to kill all of us, and that, combined with whatever she might have heard before, might be enough to get a conviction.”
“Well, she’d be a damned fine witness,” Dino said.
“Then go see Ken Burrows.”
“All right,” Dino said. “I’ll try to get in there this afternoon.”
“Good idea.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. The hospital detail just called, and Sherry can be released today. They want to know where to send her on a stretcher.”
“To my house,” Stone said. “We can make her comfortable here, and I’ll hire a nurse to administer her medications and to be here in the event of an emergency.”
“Okay. You’d better get the place ready for her.” Dino hung up.
Stone called in Joan. “We’re going to have a visitor today, and she’ll be staying with us for a week or two. She’ll be arriving on a stretcher.”
“This is Sherry, then?”
“Right. Ask the housekeepers to get Peter’s old suite ready for her and to make room for a hospital bed. Then ask my doctor to recommend a private nursing service and a place to rent a hospital bed.”
“Is she going to need a lot of monitoring devices?”
“If she does, we’ll hear about it before she arrives.”
“Okay, I’ll get right on it,” she said.
Rance Damien, out of an abundance of caution, was reviewing the personnel files of the five secretaries who worked on the executive floor. He stopped when he came to a name: D’Orio. That was the maiden name of Elise Grant’s mother. He buzzed Elise, and she came in.
“Have a seat, Elise,” he said pleasantly. She did so. “I was just reviewing everybody’s files for vaccinations, and I see that your mother’s maiden name is D’Orio.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“Where was she born?”
“In Italy, but she came to this country when she was only three years old.”
“Did she speak any Italian?”
“She once told me that her mother and father wanted the family to be American, so they had a rule of speaking only English at home. Both my grandparents already spoke English, and they didn’t want my mother to be at a disadvantage when she started school.”