“How? It sounds like you’d be detected.”
“Not the way I’m planning on getting in. Get off here.”
Derrick was pointing to the Duke Street exit on 395.
“I thought you said we were going to Crystal City,” Carl said.
“We have some stops to make.”
“What for?”
“Supplies. Westbound please.”
“Where are we stopping?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you,” Derrick said. “This is top secret. Above top secret. It’s like double-secret probation.”
“Would you stop bullshitting a bullshitter?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
“Fine. You see that big orange sign up ahead?”
Derrick pointed to the large sign, which had an even larger boxy store behind it, with a massive fake facade.
“No,” Carl said. “Not there.”
“Yes, Dad. Turn in there.”
“Anywhere but there.”
“I’m sorry. We have no choice.”
“Can’t we go get shot at again? That was more fun.”
“Dad, just make the turn.”
Carl appeared to still be fighting the instruction. Then he gave up, eased over into the left-turn lane, and put on his turn signal.
As he pulled into the parking lot, Carl just sighed and muttered, “The goddamn Lame Depot.”
* * *
They purchased the most expensive glass cutter they could find—which, at the Home Depot, meant they had just been separated from $6.98.
A Hart twenty-one-ounce milled-face steel framing hammer— whose weight Derrick liked the moment he picked it up—was their big-ticket item, at $25.97.
Next, and perhaps mostly importantly, there was a window squeegee ($3.79) and a bottle of Windex ($3.17).
And then there was the impulse buy: a vintage twill hat with the Home Depot logo that Carl Storm absolutely insisted on acquiring, as a memento of his first—and, he hoped, last—trip to the hardware mega-store. That was another $11.36.
Altogether, with 5 percent Virginia sales tax—because, hey, state legislators have to eat, too—it came to $53.83.
Next it was on to REI, the outdoor store, where things got a little more expensive. In short order, Derrick racked up a $716.88 tab while Carl rolled his eyes.
Then it was on to Crystal City, which quite literally towers over its more famous neighbor to the north. When members of the US Congress, in their infinite ego, decided that nothing in the nation’s capital should be taller than the building where they spent their work time, they passed the Height of Buildings Act of 1910. As has often been the case when Congress decides to meddle in something, they screwed up: by regulating the height of buildings based on the width of the street outside them, rather than setting an absolute limit, they enabled the local Catholic diocese to outdo them in the 1950s, when it built the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. In addition, by limiting the height of buildings within the district, they doomed it to the lack of affordable housing and outward sprawling development pressure that continues to plague the region today.
Nevertheless, those onerous and byzantine height restrictions did not cross the Potomac River to the west. And so when Crystal City began booming in lockstep with the size of the federal government in the 1970s and ’80s, it did so upward, not outward.
Which was why the building where Kevin Bryan lived was, at 312 feet, actually taller than the US Capitol. And that was where Derrick asked his father to stay parked on the street outside.
“All right. I should be about an hour or so,” Derrick said. “Would you mind getting us some sandwiches? I’m starving.”
Carl grunted.
“Fine. Just stay here then. I’ll be back.”
His father grunted again. Ignoring him, Derrick grabbed his gear out of the trunk, donned a vest lined with useful pockets, slipped the two Polaroid pictures inside the vest, and began making his way out. But not to the building where Bryan lived; instead he made his way to an identical one that was just across a narrow street.
Carl pressed the down direction on the Buick’s passenger side window power button. For a moment, there was only an agonized grinding noise. Then, slowly, the window began to lower.
“Hey, where are you going?” Carl said. “I thought your boyfriend lives in that one.”
“He does,” Derrick said. “That’s why I’m going over here.”
Carl frowned. “There’s got to be a quicker way.”
“No,” Derrick said. “There’s not. Not without getting caught. Just sit tight.”
He disappeared into the lobby of the neighboring building. Laden with his recent purchases, which he had stowed in a mesh bag he bought from REI, he walked up to the security guard.
The man was young and smartly dressed, with short brown hair and earnest blue eyes. Storm sized him up for an eager-to-please type, a guy who would have been at home in the mountains of New Hampshire, running a summer camp for kids.
His name tag identified him as Devin Clifford.
“Can I help you?” Clifford asked.
“You sure can, Mr. Clifford,” Storm said, as if he was one of those campers, putting a big smile behind it. “Do you have a newspaper by any chance?”
“A newspaper?” Clifford asked. “Today’s? Or . . .”
“Today’s, yesterday’s, last week’s, doesn’t matter,” Storm said, taking the Windex and squeegee out of the mesh bag and waving them in the air. “I’m with the Streak-Free Window Company. I’m here to clean some exterior windows on the twenty-second floor. But I forgot to bring newspaper with me. And you know what that means.”
Clifford looked confused.
“Streaks,” Storm said, as if he would rather be subjected to the bubonic plague and repeated viewings of the entire Real Housewives franchise.
“You have to understand, my company has the Ultimate No-Streak Guarantee™,” Storm continued, somehow managing to pronounce it in a way that communicated the trademark. “If we leave streaks, we not only have to refund a hundred and twenty percent of the customer’s fee, but we have to—”
Storm stopped, apparently too traumatized to continue.
“What?” Clifford asked.
Storm leaned in and whispered: “We have to do it again, in the nude. Get it? Like we’re streaking? I had to do it once. My third job, I left streaks. And believe me, after that, I said never again. First of all, I got my, y’know, caught in a carabiner.”
Clifford reflexively crossed his legs behind the desk. Storm’s voice had returned to normal volume.
“Then once you get up there, it’s even more humiliation. Do you know what it’s like to have your junk suspended two-hundred-something feet in the air, just flopping around in the breeze for everyone to see? It’s like . . . it’s like . . . Well, it’d be like if you were forced to do this job in the nude.”
Unsure if Clifford looked suitably horrified, Storm finished it off with: “And your mother lives in the building.”
Clifford immediately reached below the desk and brought up that day’s edition of the Washington Post. “Here,” he said. “Take it.”
“Great,” Storm said. “Do you need a bypass key for roof access or anything?”
“Yeah, let me take care of that for you,” Clifford said, walking over to the elevator and pressing the button. Storm whistled innocently while they waited for a car. When it arrived, Clifford eagerly plunged his round bypass key into the panel, then punched the button for the roof.
“No streaks, okay?” Clifford said.
“No streaks,” Storm promised.
Storm was soon riding in solitude up to the roof. When he walked out, he was twenty-four stories above street level. He went over to the edge and peered down to see his father’s Buick, in all its straight-lined glory, still parked in the same spot.
So much for sandwiches. Storm ignored the gnawing in his stomach
and got to work. The sun was down but the lights of the city gave him enough illumination to see what he was doing as he began unpacking his bag.
Once he had everything laid out, he grabbed the C.A.M.P. USA Wing 2 traveling pulley he had bought from REI and threaded an entire seventy-meter length of 9.5-millimeter Mammut Infinity dry rope through the wheel. Then he secured one end of the rope to the skyscraper’s railing, tugging on it with as much strength as he could muster to make sure it held.
Next he tied the other end of the dry rope to the handle of the hammer. An expert with knots of all kind—nautical, climbing, ranching, and otherwise—Storm used a slipped buntline hitch, which he greatly preferred over the standard buntline hitch, because the slipped version wouldn’t jam on him.
Having just created a do-it-yourselfer’s grappling hook, he was now ready for the tricky part: hurling it over to the other building and getting it to catch on that railing.
Storm was not entirely unfamiliar with ropework. Briefly confused by the notion he was meant to be a cowboy, Storm had worked a summer at a cattle ranch in his early twenties. He had gotten a great tan and some new muscles. He had also learned just how average he was going to be at his job if he decided to make a living as a rancher.
But if there was one appreciable difference between the cows he lassoed back then and the building he was now trying to rope, it was that at least the building wasn’t moving.
He peered at his target, which was about sixty feet away. Getting the hammer’s tines hooked onto the railing wasn’t good enough. He didn’t trust the grip of two short slices of stainless steel. His goal was to get the rope itself wrapped around the railing— with the hammer anchoring the rope.
The throw would have to be perfect. He began swinging the rope over his head, letting that twenty-one-ounce hammer out slowly, building more and more centrifugal force with every foot of rope he let slip through his hand.
When he felt he had both the momentum and aim perfect, he let go of the rope and watched the hammer sail through the night air.
He knew almost immediately he had too much behind it. The hammer went high over the railing, then landed with a barely audible thud on the roof. Storm hoped it might snare on the railing post when he dragged it back. But, no, it passed in the middle.
Try number two went short, hitting against the side of the building. The third try hit the railing, but too squarely: The hammer bounced off.
Number four was long again. Number five was short.
It was on his sixth try that Storm got it just right. He watched with satisfaction as the hammer twirled around the railing, like an Olympic gymnast doing giant swings on the parallel bars.
He gave his end of the rope a series of hard tugs from several different angles, until he was sure the improvised grapple was going to hold. Then he tied off his end, as tight as he could get it to go, to eliminate slack. The last thing he wanted was to get stranded in the middle of a droopy rope and end up having to climb hand over hand the rest of the way.
After slipping his legs through the Arc’teryx AR-395a climbing harness he had just acquired, he hooked himself to the pulley. Then he attached a second safety rope. If the hook on the other end didn’t hold, he’d become a human pendulum, smacking into the side of the building with tremendous force. Many climbers had been killed that way in the mountains. But he’d have a better chance of surviving that than he would the three-hundred-plus-foot plunge he’d be facing without the safety rope.
He grabbed the pulley with both hands and slid it back and forth across an arm’s-length arc. Then he gathered the mesh bag, which contained the remainder of his gear.
Storm was an experienced mountaineer, a man who had climbed the north face of the Eiger in under four hours, a man with multiple 20K summits on his resume. But there was still that moment of truth when you were facing a chasm—whether it was across a crevasse or across two buildings—when you simply had to decide to trust your ropes.
Some climbers reported relishing the thrill. In Storm’s experience, those were the climbers most likely to end up leaving the mountain in a body bag.
He double- and triple-checked his knots, carabiners, and harness. Once he was satisfied, he got himself perched on the edge of the building and readied himself for a ride on what was essentially an untested high-stakes zip line.
Then, with legs made powerful from six-hundred-pound squats, and with his eyes focused only on the other side, he launched himself.
* * *
Storm felt the wind in his hair and the updrafts from the city streets as the asphalt released the last of its heat from the day.
If anyone had happened to look up from the sidewalk at that moment, he might not have been able to make out the rope in the darkness. What he would have seen was the unlikely sight of a man who appeared to be levitating from one building to the next, like some kind of Jedi trick.
The entire trip, which took an hour to shop and prepare for, was over in seconds. Storm was just about out of momentum when he made it to the other side, giving him a soft landing.
He clambered up over the railing, happy to have something solid under his feet again. He left the ropes in place, in case he needed to exit the same way, then unhooked himself from the pulley.
It was time for part two of his journey, which was simpler from a technical standpoint, if no less dangerous. He extracted a Black Diamond ATC-XP belay device from his bag, gave it a little kiss, then got to work. Before long, he had tied both a main line and a safety line to separate parts of the railing and gotten his harness attached. Then he rappelled down to Kevin Bryan’s living room window.
The apartment was dark, as Storm suspected it would be. He took out the one purchase he had yet to make use of—the seven-dollar glass cutter—and, doing his best to ignore that he was dangling many stories up, began carving a hole for himself.
It took about ten minutes of determined effort, scoring and then re-scoring the same lines, but he eventually removed a section of glass large enough that he was able to clamber through the opening and into the apartment.
Kevin Bryan was not there.
But Carl Storm was.
He wore his Home Depot hat and a self-satisfied grin.
Derrick stammered, “How . . . How did you—”
“I did it old school. I pulled this down low over my eyes when I walked through the lobby,” Carl said, giving the hat a tug. “So you don’t have to worry about the cameras.”
“And the front door?” Derrick asked.
“I had my lock tools in the back of the Buick,” Carl said. “Took me about a minute and a half. There was a magnetic sensor, but I used a wire and some chewing gum to keep the circuit in place.”
“Nice job, MacGyver.”
“I told you there was a quicker way. You waste too much time with this action-adventure hero crap.”
THIRTEEN
HEAT
Nikki Heat didn’t stay long in her apartment. Her nascent attempt at a cleanup job quickly sputtered due to some combination of being too overwhelming and too emotional to consider tackling that evening. It was difficult to even breathe in there.
She changed out of her captain’s uniform and into fresh clothes, then stuffed a few outfits into a duffel bag. It was enough to last a few days, no more. At some point, she’d have to sneak into Rook’s place in Chelsea when he wasn’t around and resupply herself.
Then she got out, feeling ridiculous for locking the door behind her when it was clear The Serpent could get in anytime he wanted.
The only place she wanted to be even less than her apartment was the lobby of the building, which was still covered in the bloody remains of Bob Aaronson—and her name, that scarlet message from Aaronson’s killer.
The detective she had spoken to before nodded at her as she passed. She made noises about coming back later. If he noted that the duffel bag slung over her shoulder seemed inconsistent with that declaration, he didn’t say anything.
Unsure where el
se to go, she decided to head toward the only home she had left. She went back to the unmarked car she had parked near The Players Club, then pointed it toward the Twentieth Precinct.
Once in the detective bull pen, she was greeted by the familiar and comforting sight of Sean Raley, who was hunched over an extra-large monitor, doing his magic. He didn’t so much as look up when Heat entered, which was always a good sign. It meant he was locked in on something.
After depositing her bag in her office, Heat cruised up behind his shoulder and began hovering there. He appeared to be in some kind of chat room. Heat hadn’t even realized people used those anymore. It was like being transported to some pre-Facebook remnant of the early Internet.
Raley finally noticed her presence after sending a particularly long missive.
“Just about there,” he said, as if wherever “there” was should have been obvious to all. “With luck, I’ll give you a shout in ten minutes.”
Ten turned out to be more like thirty. Heat distracted herself with the nonsense on her desk until Raley’s face appeared at her door.
“Okay,” he said. “I got it. You want to come have a look?”
Heat followed the King of All Surveillance Media back to his throne room.
“Just so we’re clear, you said ‘any means necessary,’ and I took you at your word,” Raley said. “With how I had to acquire it, what I’m about to show you won’t come close to standing up in court. It also might have you feeling like you need hand sanitizer.”
“I understand.”
“Good. The One-Three has already done a good job going up and down the street, doing the usual canvass. The problem is, our perp did them one better. There were three cameras with various angles on the street outside your place. One was shot out by a BB gun. One was spray-painted. Another was hacked so thoroughly the owner couldn’t even log into his own computer. This guy was very thorough, and very determined.”
“So we’re dead in the water?”
“Not at all. I was just forced to resort to desperate measures.”
“How desperate?”
“Are you familiar with the Gotham Voyeurs?” Raley asked.
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