Joseph Finder - Vanished

I watched him disappear into the lobby. He was probably going up to the second floor to investigate further, whether by the stairs or the elevator. But I could tell from his body language that he’d already decided there was no crime in progress.

He didn’t lock the door behind him.

I didn’t think he would-it’s the sort of detail most people, even security guards, don’t think about-but if he had locked the door, then I would have gone to Plan B. Which was to wait until he’d left, gone back to the monitoring station, and then lob some more stress balls at the window.

And he’d come back again, annoyed at being pulled away from his book or his newspaper or his TV show, and he’d investigate again, but this time it would be more perfunctory. He’d be convinced that there was some mechanical glitch in the system. Eventually, after two or three callbacks, he’d leave the door open behind him. They always did.

But he’d just saved me a half hour or more.

I moved the Defender to the back of the building, then got out and crossed the narrow strip of lawn that I figured wasn’t covered by the CCTV cameras mounted on this side of the building. There are always blind spots.

I reached the southwest corner of the building, then risked a quick appearance on a security monitor-I had no choice-by sidling close to the building and slipping in through the unlocked door.

Of course, if it had been daytime, the Paladin keycard I’d filched from Don Taylor-swapped, really-would have gotten me in to both the building and the Paladin office suite on the seventh floor. But then the Paladin office suite wouldn’t have been unoccupied. And that wouldn’t have worked at all.

So I had another plan, one that required the help of my friends and a shopping list of supplies and some carefully coordinated execution.

And the one thing that you can’t buy or plan on or wheedle. The one thing you can never count on.

Luck.

Fortunately, I only had to hide in the utility closet off the lobby for fourteen minutes. The space was small and close, the smell of rancid wet mops and strong cleaning fluids overpowering. I heard the elevator doors ping, then open. The squawk of the guard’s walkie-talkie.

The click of his heels against the marble tile as he walked to the exit.

I waited another ten minutes. I wasn’t able to hear his car start up, not at this distance. But by the time I emerged, his car was gone.

He’d found nothing. He would blame it on errant technology, the bane of our existence. He’d done his job, and he’d served my purpose, and he wouldn’t be back.

Then I hit a preprogrammed number on my cell.

Three minutes later I unlocked the side door for Dorothy and Merlin.

“It’s the A-Team,” I said.

“I guess that makes me Mr. T,” Dorothy said.

“Wasn’t that show a little before your time, Dorothy?” I said.

“Honey, I watched it in reruns, come on.”

“Never seen it,” Merlin said, sounding cranky. He was carrying a couple of green clothlike recyclable shopping bags from Whole Foods, which held the improvised devices we’d assembled.

I placed one of them outside the lobby men’s room, where it couldn’t be seen through the glass doors at the front of the building. Then I led them through the lobby to the fire stairs at the back. The door was unlocked.

Each floor was accessible from inside the stairwells, of course-it’s a fire-safety law-so I was able to make a quick stop on the second floor to drop off the second device. When I returned to the stairwell, I noticed that Merlin was looking even more sullen, and I decided to say something.

“You’re having second thoughts.”

He nodded.

“It’s too late.” I gave him a steely stare, and he returned it.

Then I half smiled, and said, “Look, Merlin. There are no guarantees. We have a solid plan of action and a fallback, and at a certain point we just have to rely on luck.”

“Never believed in luck,” he said. The stairwell was dark and empty, and his words echoed hollowly.

“I think luck is essential. You can never count on it, I agree. But we don’t have much choice. Bail if you want to. I’ll understand.”

We stood there in silence for almost a minute. Dorothy looked from Merlin to me and waited.

Finally, he said, “I just want to be clear about something. This isn’t for you, or your brother, or whatever kind of revenge thing you’ve got going on. This is because I hate everything that Paladin stands for.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just to be clear,” he said. He turned and started climbing the stairs, and Dorothy and I followed.

She flashed me a furtive smile. “How many floors?”

“We’re going to seven,” I said.

“Why the hell couldn’t we take the elevator?”

She was just complaining for the sake of complaining. She knew that the stairs were at the end of the lobby farthest from the Paladin surveillance camera, which was trained on the elevators.

Neither Merlin nor I said anything as we climbed.

“I’m not doing the elliptical trainer for a week,” she muttered, breathing hard.

Then Merlin said, “The problem is, we’re all relying on your observations from one quick walk-through. You didn’t have a chance to get in there and really look around. We really don’t know what their full security setup is like.”

He was right: All we knew was what I’d seen. No keypad access at the door to Paladin’s offices. That was so the cleaning people could get in at night. Don Taylor’s keycard would get us right in, I expected.

That was assuming, naturally, that Carl Koblenz hadn’t gone into some state of DEFCON 1 alert after discovering that three of his professionals had been dispatched by a guy whose field skills he’d probably expected were pretty damned rusty. I hoped, and assumed, that he’d thought it through and decided that my response had been mere, understandable, self-preservation: I didn’t want to be taken in and questioned by three bad guys. Who could blame me?

He wouldn’t think to check his guys’ keycards to see whether they’d been tampered with. He wasn’t going to deactivate any of them. That I was sure of. He’d never expect me to come back in the middle of the night.

At least, I didn’t think so, and one way or the other, we were about to find out soon.

In terms of surveillance, there appeared to be a single CCTV camera in the lobby outside their main office door, fixed and not pan-tilt-zoom. Another camera inside, in the receptionist’s area. No other visible surveillance cameras. It was possible that they were monitored live somewhere, but that wasn’t likely. That would be overkill for an office that mostly handled administrative stuff. I’ve done jobs at corporation headquarters that had more than two hundred security cameras and maybe three monitors. Live monitoring at night, for a small office like this, was almost unheard of.

We stood at the door to the seventh floor. I pushed the crash bar, opening the door an inch or so. Enough to confirm that it wasn’t locked from inside.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” I said. “It’s a crapshoot. You’re just going to have to rely on me.”

Merlin sighed, long and loud.

Dorothy made a sarcastic mmm-hmmm sound. “Then we’re all screwed,” she said.

Merlin was the first through the door. He wore a black ski mask, which made him look like a small-town bank robber. He quickly found the surveillance camera, mounted on the wall outside the Paladin office, then carefully aimed a laser pointer at its lens. The tiny laser beam would dazzle the camera’s sensor, temporarily blinding it so that it would see only a white blur.