"He's on his own."
The army platoon in camouflage fatigues and assault rifles had continued on up the stairwell now, and Tiny had caught his breath, but his face was still just as red as when he'd come tumbling back in here with a hundred pounds of precious objets A'art bouncing on his back.
Andy Kelp looked at that face and didn't particularly want to disagree with it, but he just felt somebody ought to defend Dortmunder and it didn't look as though either Stan or Howey was interested in the job, so that left it up to him.
"Gee, Tiny," he began.
"Enough," Tiny said, and lowered an eyebrow in Kelp's direction.
Kelp closed his mouth. In truth, he couldn't really blame Tiny, because what had just occurred pretty well had to be connected somehow with Dortmunder's activities up in the tower, and if Dortmunder was going to knock over this kind of hornet's nest he really should give his partners a little bit of advance warning.
Here's what had just occurred: It was nearly six in the morning, they'd finally broken into the last store on twenty-six, being Kobol Kobol, and Tiny was taking yet another load of booty away. He'd carried the hundred pounds' worth in two plastic sacks down the stairwell and had reached the landing at the eleventh floor when all of a sudden he heard a door clang below him, and then the sound of a lot of boots on the metal stairs, and voices, and a whole lot of people were coming up. He couldn't see them yet, but he knew there was a whole crowd of them, and he knew they were climbing those stairs at a good steady rapid pace, and he further knew there was absolutely no way for him to make it down to the seventh floor and out of the stairwell before those people reached seven from below.
So he did the only thing he could do: He turned around and ran back up the stairs. And because he didn't dare leave the plastic bags full of booty for these new arrivals to find, he ran from the eleventh floor to the twenty-sixth floor carrying them on his back.
And when he made the turn at the landing on the twenty third floor was when he first heard the second group coming down from above. Two groups in a pincers movement, and Tiny in the middle. He kept going, carrying one hundred pounds up two hundred twenty-four steps as fast as he physically could go, and even Tiny Bulcher flagged under that strain and had slowed considerably by the time he reached twenty-six. The guys below were no more than two flights away by then, with the ones above somewhat farther off.
What they were doing, they were double-checking the remotest of possibilities. Security down in the basement remained absolutely one hundred percent positive no one had gone in from the stairwell to any other floor (another man was on duty now at the dial that had made trouble earlier), so if the fellow they knew as Smith somehow or other had managed to get out to the stairwell, he would still be there.
Therefore, one platoon had gone down to the lobby in the elevator that had brought the security chief upstairs, while another platoon had entered the stairwell on the seventy-fourth floor, just outside the Margrave offices, and now they swept both up and down, looking for signs of forced entry (just in case Security in the basement had its head up its behind), hoping to squeeze Smith between them, and damn near finding more than they'd bargained for.
Tiny burst into the corridor at twenty-six, dropped the sacks in the corner, didn't even notice the long black cane turning into a bouquet of flowers in Andy Kelp's hand midway down the corridor, and hissed at him, "Everybody shut up!" Then, while Kelp hot footed away to make everybody shut up, Tiny ran back out to the corridor, reassured himself that Wilbur Howey had left the security panel neat and trim and looking undisturbed, and risked a quick look over the railing at the guys coming up. Which was when he saw the camouflage uniforms and the assault rifles, and made his guess that there were seven guys, maybe eight, in that platoon.
And more coming from above.
Back into twenty-six he went, silently shut the door, and leaned against it, listening, while Kelp and Stan and Howey came out of Kobol Kobol at the other end of the corridor and walked silently down to stand near Tiny and watch and wait and wonder.
They all heard the boots go by. Tiny opened the door a few seconds later, and they all saw the boots-paratrooper style, with bloused camouflage pants-legs tucked into them-tramping on up out of sight to the next landing. They all listened with the door open, and heard the two groups meet and talk things over, though the echo in this metal stairwell was too severe to make out any of the words. Then they heard both groups thump away upstairs, slowly fading, and that's when Tiny shut the door and faced the others and announced that Dortmunder could now consider himself on his own.
Kelp considered friendship. Then he considered reality. What could one lone man do up there against what was apparently some sort of organized army? Nothing. But if Andy Kelp on his own, without the rest of the string, were to go up and try to help Dortmunder out of this, what could two lone men do against that same army?
"It's a pity," Kelp said sadly, and turned the bouquet back into a cane.
EXODUS
"Lie down with wolves, you get up with toothmarks."Frank Ritter sat at his desk in the corner office suite of Margrave Corporation and studied this addition he'd just made to his commonplace book. Was that truly an aphorism? Possibly it was merely a low-level epigram or even, God help us, just a joke. Ritter didn't like crossing things out in his commonplace book, it made for a sloppy appearance, but this particular statement, well… On the other hand, it wasn't inaccurate, as his current situation-and the inspiration for the remark-demonstrated. The wolves were the five dozen mercenaries he had employed to ease his irritation vis-a-vis General Pozos of Guerrera; and the toothmarks? Bullet holes in the assembly room door. Several broken seats in there as well, and sixteen men on the injured list (the kneed victim recovered). None needing hospitalization, happily, but all with broken bones and all unavailable for the punitive strike.
Shattered morale among the building's own security forces, there was another tooth mark And from the grim tone in Virgil Pickens' voice this morning, when he'd requested a meeting with Ritter, there were further toothmarks to come.
It was now not quite nine o'clock on Sunday morning, and Ritter, as usual, had been up for hours. ("The first arrival gets the best seat.") Family business had kept him at the Glen Cove estate out on Long Island until nearly eight, when the helicopter had flown him in to the pad at East Twenty-third Street, where his car had been waiting to take him through empty Sunday morning Manhattan streets to his own tower. Here and there in high-floor windows of the office buildings along the way lights had gleamed, and Ritter felt a kinship: We are here, we are working, we are not making excuses.
"The deadline," a laughing executive at a company social event had once unwisely remarked to Ritter, "is when you have to have your alibi ready." Not a Ritter-style aphorism; that executive, if he still laughed, did so with some other corporation.
One single firm rap at the door, military-style. There was no secretary available here on Sunday mornings, unfortunately, but this could only be Pickens arriving, precisely on time, so Ritter put away his commonplace book with the wolf line intact and called, "Come in."
The man himself entered, burly and thick-bodied, but neat as a pin in his pressed and creased camouflage fatigues.
"Good morning," Ritter said, and gestured at the easy chair across the desk.
"Have you had coffee?"
"I've had lunch, sir," Pickens said, and remained standing.
"Sit down, man, you'll give me a crick in the neck."
So Pickens sat, uncomfortably, on the edge of the chair, knees together, hands on thighs, as though waiting to see the dentist.
Ignoring this overdone Spartan effect, Ritter said, "We've lost a lot of men, have we? And the war isn't started yet."
"Some limited casualties," Pickens agreed.
"Nothing we can't live with."
"Sixteen men!"
"Twelve, as a matter of fact," Pickens said.
"The boys with the broken jaws have all been wired
, they'll be coming along."
Ritter was astounded.
"With broken jaws?"
"You don't squeeze a trigger with your mouth," Pickens pointed out.
"And none of them speak the language down there, so there won't be that much to talk about. And a man with a wired jaw is a fearsome thing to look at anyway; good for psychological warfare."
Could Pickens possibly be pulling his leg? Ritter peered at the man, but nothing at all flawed his military correctness.
"So," Ritter said, "you'll be going down with forty-eight men instead of sixty."
"We could probably do the job with forty," Pickens answered.
"We've still got a comfortable cushion. No, sir, that's not the problem, that's not why I requested this conference."
More toothmarks, Ritter thought, and asked, "Then what's the problem?"
"Smith."
"The interloper, yes." Ritter sat back in his swivel chair, brooding.
"He still hasn't been found?"
"That's one of the worrisome parts of it," Pickens said.
"But, to begin with, where did he come from? Who's he working for?
Then, after that, how'd he get in? Of course, I myself let him into these offices, but how did he get to that public hallway out there at that hour of night?"
"Hiding in somebody else's office until everybody went home for the night," Ritter guessed.
"We share this floor with three other firms, you know."
"Still," Pickens said, "who's he working for? But the most important thing is, where is he now?"
"Escaped," Ritter suggested.
"Reporting at this very minute to somebody five miles from here."
Pickens shook his head, an unimaginative but stubborn man.
"No, sir," he said.
"Smith never got off the seventy-fourth floor of this building. At least, not downward. Building security says so and my men say so."
"But you haven't found him."
"No, sir, not on this floor." If Pickens were uncomfortable about the subject he was raising, it showed only in an increased stiffness and precision in his bearing.
"He didn't go below this floor, and he isn't on this floor, and that's the situation, Mr. Ritter, as it now pertains."
"I'm not sure I follow you, Pickens," Ritter said.
"Here's the question I've been asking myself, sir," Pickens told him,
"for the last few hours. Who turned off those lights?"
That's when Ritter saw it coming. But he didn't want to see it coming, and he didn't want to make Pickens' task any easier, so he said, "Some confederate of Smith's, I suppose."
"All right, then, sir," Pickens said. Those "sirs" were getting thick on the ground as Pickens neared the crux of his complaint.
"So now, sir," he said, "we have two people mysteriously disappeared.
And one of them knows these offices well enough to find the right circuit-breaker in the right circuit-breaker box without a whole hell of a lot of lead time. Sir."
"Then that's the situation," Ritter said.
"Two disappearing people is no more difficult to believe than one disappearing person.
It's impossible either way."
"Not impossible, sir," Pickens said.
"Unlikely maybe. But I haven't yet run across anything in my experience that turned out to be impossible."
Damn Pickens! It was clear now that he wouldn't volunteer the next step, that he'd remain perched on the edge of that chair, well pressed and correct and buttoned up tight, until Ritter asked him, if it took a hundred years.
"All right," Ritter said at last, reluctantly.
"I take it you have a theory."
"A possibility, sir," Pickens said.
"The only thing I can think of that makes the impossible possible in this particular case."
"And it is?"
Pickens took a deep breath.
"I assure you, sir, " he said, "it is never my wish to pry into any other man's personal affairs. We all have our family tragedies, family problems, and they're nobody's business but our own."
Irrelevantly wondering what sort of family problem an automaton like Pickens could have, Ritter said, "Get to the point, man."
"You have a daughter, sir, as I understand it," Pickens said, "living on the top floor here."
So here it was.
"Yes, I do," Ritter said, wondering just how common that knowledge might be.
"I understand she has some sort of problem," Pickens went on.
"I don't know what. It's not my business to know what. But I believe she's there."
"She's there," Ritter agreed. He spent a millisecond considering whether to explain the case of his daughter Elaine to this man, decided the fellow could go to Hell first, and said, "She's confined to that floor, for her own good, for personal reasons of my own."
Pickens showed a calloused palm in a traffic-stop gesture.
"Not my business, sir. But I wonder, sir, if this daughter of yours might not have come down these here interior stairs into Margrave last night and had some hand in the events taking place."
"Definitely not," Ritter said.
"I already told you, she's confined there, locked in. I have private guards up there to see she doesn't leave."
Pickens was unmoved. He said, "Mr. Ritter, I'm sorry, but that's the only direction left. Smith is no longer on this floor. He didn't go down. That leaves only one alternative."
"It's simply not possible," Ritter insisted.
"The security between here and the top floor is of a much more sophisticated nature than in the rest of the building, it would be far easier to go down from here than up. Have you seen the spec books?"
"Which books would those be, sir?"
Ritter got to his feet, his body full of tension, pleased at the opportunity to move, to work off some of the pressure accumulating inside.
"Come along," he said.
The office containing the spec books was nearby, just down the hall, one of the small windowless rooms Pickens had looked at last night, this one lined with plain metal shelving stacked with various records, some office supplies, and shelf after shelf of ledger books filled with manufacturer's spec sheets on everything in use in this building from the heating plant to the water coolers. Among these were the two black unmarked ledger books filled with the specifications and details of usage of all the security systems in the entire Avalon State Bank Tower.
"Here they are," Ritter said, reached out for the books on a shelf just at eye-level, grasped them both with the spread fingers of one hand, lifted and pulled, and the books were so startlingly light that his hand jumped and he almost punched himself in the face.
As it was, the books spurted from his grasp and fell on the floor, opening flat, face up, lying there like accident victims, spreadeagled on their backs.
And empty.
Ritter stared at the books on the floor, black cardboard covers and gleaming metal rings. Empty!
"Sir? Something wrong?"
Ritter reached out, grabbed another ledger book at random.
Full. Another; full. Another; full.
Pickens said, "Sir, were those the security spec books?"
"Yes." Ritter's voice was suddenly hoarse; he cleared his throat.
"And all the information is gone, sir?"
Ritter stared again at the fallen books, and into his mind came an idea so forbidden that he refused to believe he'd even thought it: Maybe God is on her side.
Pickens said, "Sir, request permission to conduct a search of the top floor."
Ritter blinked at him.
"Granted," he said.
Wilbur Howey came out of the men's room with Scandinavian Man age Secrets under his arm and deep gray circles under his eyes.
Nevertheless, his step was light as he hurried down the seventh floor corridor to room 712, rapped on the wood in a secret pattern-two, then one, then one, if you must know-heard the lock click, and was admitted by Stan Murch, who looked a
t him and said, "All full inside."
"Say, don't I know it?" Howey answered.
"I had to come out here to shrug."
Howey squeezed past Stan, who shut and relocked the door and returned to his work, which was taking precious objects out of black plastic sacks and putting them on the receptionist's desk.
Seated in the receptionist's chair was Andy Kelp, who placed the precious objects in mailers of various sizes, ranging from small padded envelopes suitable for mailing books such as the one under Howey's arm up to cardboard boxes the store would mail a shirt in.
Some objects were too large even for these and were placed in a pile on the floor in the corner behind Kelp to be dealt with later, a pile that was already knee-high and steadily growing.
J.C. Taylor's office was, at this moment, a madhouse and a mess. It was a little after nine on Sunday morning, and in the two hours since they'd finished looting the stores on the twenty-sixth floor only a minimum amount of order had been brought from the prevailing chaos.
Full black plastic bags were piled everywhere, the mounds reaching head-height in some precarious places, and leaving only a twisty narrow route through to the inner room, where Tiny could be heard huffing and puffing, like the Minotaur in his cave.
Kelp looked up from his packing and said, "Aren't you Wilbur Howey?"
"You just bet I am," Howey told him.
"Howlin' Howey, ever ready."
"Then you're the guy over here working with me," Kelp told him.
"Where've you been?"
"Mother Nature called," Howey said. He was looking around, trying to find somewhere to put the book.
"The next time she calls," Kelp advised, "tell her to leave a message.
Look how much stuff there is here."
"Say, here I come," Howey said, edging past Stan and through the stacks of plastic bags and around the desk.
"Your troubles are over."
"Wonderful news," Kelp said.
A certain backlog had built up in Howey's absence. It was his job, once Kelp had put each object or group of objects in the appropriate packaging, to seal it with either staples or shipping tape and then carry armloads of completed packages to the next room. Unsealed packages now towered up like a model city on the receptionist's typing table, weaving and tottering, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Dumping the Scandinavian book in the wastebasket, as being the only place around to put it, Howey went right to work, taping and stapling, and soon had enough to tote a stack of them into the next room.
Good Behaviour Page 17
