Joseph Finder - Vanished

“Less than that, Eeyore.”

“Not a lot less. Anyway, we get four tries before we go into penalty mode.”

“And then?”

“Then a five-minute lockout before we can try again.”

“So let’s hope we guess right. What about the manufacturer’s tryout combo?”

“It’s 1-2-3-4-5-6.”

“That’s not it, then. You’re just going to have to try randomly.”

As far as I knew, there were no six-digit numbers that Koblenz had any obvious connection to-his house number had four digits, the number of the office building had five, the suite number had three.

“Right. Great.” He hissed in a breath. “All right, here goes.” He punched in one sequence.

And nothing happened.

“Try again,” I said.

He punched in another sequence.

Nothing.

And a third time. Nothing.

Merlin gritted his teeth and entered another sequence.

Then something happened. But not what we wanted. The red LED light flashed. On, then off, with a ten-second delay between flashes.

“Crap,” he said. “Now we have to wait five minutes.”

“No. Try spiking the solenoid.”

He shrugged, gave me a dyspeptic scowl, and twisted the keypad off the safe door. It’s meant to be easily removed, so you can change the battery. He pushed on a couple of clips, releasing a plastic cover, then pulled out the black rubber membrane. This exposed a circuit board and a row of eight tiny metal posts.

Then he took a nine-volt battery from his bag and clipped on a pair of leads. One end he held against the leftmost post. When he touched the other lead to the top right post, there was a crackling sound and the smell of electronic components burning.

And nothing else. It didn’t unlock.

“That’s it,” he said. “We’re screwed now.”

“Try the drill.”

“I thought you wanted nondestructive.”

“I want the card,” I said. “At this point I want it any way we can get it.”

“If you told me in the first place, I could have brought in a thermic lance.”

“What, from the Ocean’s Eleven prop room?”

“No, man, it’s for real. Cuts through concrete and rebar steel and everything. But it’s huge, and you need an oxygen tank.”

I was about to tell him to try the drill anyway, despite the long odds, when, out of the murky darkness of Koblenz’s inner sanctum, a tiny red light winked at me from high on the wall near the ceiling.

“You see that flashing light?” I said.

“Yeah,” Merlin said impatiently. “Told you, that’s the penalty mode light. Means we gotta wait five minutes.”

“No. Up there.” I pointed.

He looked up.

Saw the blinking red light.

“ Damn it, Heller.”

“What?”

“PIR. Passive infrared.”

A motion detector.

“We gotta get out of here,” he said, his voice rising.

“What’s going on?” Dorothy called from the desk right outside.

“We just set off an alarm,” I said.

His guys are probably already on their way,” Merlin said.

“Oh, good Lord,” Dorothy said.

“ Move it,” Merlin said. “Let’s go. Won’t take them more than ten minutes to show up, I bet. Damn it to hell!”

“No,” I said. “We’re not leaving here with nothing. Dorothy, how much more time do you need?”

“I don’t know-three, four minutes. But I can’t rush it.”

“Don’t rush,” I said. “Get that thing in there and clean things up so they can’t tell we’ve been here.”

I swung the flashlight beam around Koblenz’s office, saw the built-in ventilation system beneath his windows. Raced over to it and flipped open the control panel.

“What the hell are you doing?” Merlin said. Perspiration had broken out on his forehead. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Calm down,” I said. “This is why we have the backup procedure.” The air-conditioning had gone off for the evening, as an energy-saving measure, but I switched it back on and turned the fan on full blast. Then I adjusted the louvers on the front of the unit so that air was blowing up at an angle, rattling the papers on top of the file cabinets and the credenza. On top of the credenza were a large rubber plant and a smaller jade plant. I tipped over the jade plant. The plastic pot went in one direction, the plant and its clump of earth went another. Then I took a pile of papers from the credenza and scattered some of them to the floor.

“What the hell?” Merlin said.

“Establishing a plausible explanation,” I said. In reality, the gust of air probably wouldn’t be strong enough to tip over the jade plant, but Koblenz would probably accept it. Especially since nothing would appear to have been stolen. He’d focus on the real anomaly, which was why his AC had gone on in the middle of the night. But he’d dismiss that as a malfunction in the building’s ventilation system. People always blame technology.

I pulled out the four disposable cell phones, found the one that I’d labeled in Sharpie marker with a big number “1.”

“All right,” I said. “Here goes.” I hit the preset number on the first cell phone.

I couldn’t see the result right away. I didn’t need to. The incendiary devices we’d jury-rigged were rudimentary, but the effect would be dramatic. Not that we wanted to burn the building down; not at all. We just wanted to make it look that way.

Inside each Whole Foods bag was a simple contraption: a cell phone wired to a relay, a nine-volt battery, the filament from a chandelier bulb. Phone rings, bulb filament gets hot, sets off a mixture of sugar and potassium chlorate inside a smoke grenade. That in turn sets off the plaster-of-paris and aluminum-powder mix, which we’d poured into a flowerpot and let harden. That mixture would get incredibly hot. It would actually burn underwater.

Basic explosives training; nothing fancy. But within thirty seconds, the entire lobby would be filled with smoke, billowing from a blazing hot fire. Hot but contained. And extremely dramatic. The smoke would pour out of the building.

Even before I made it to the window and saw the clouds of grayish white smoke in the moonlight, the building’s smoke alarm started clanging.

Dorothy announced, “All set.” She adjusted the keyboard on Eleanor Appleby’s desk, restoring it to where it had been before she tinkered with it, then she stood up.

“The fire trucks should be here in five minutes,” I said. “We’d just better hope none of our Paladin friends is closer than that.”

“I thought you said it would take the Paladin guys ten minutes,” Dorothy said.

“That was an estimate.”

“You didn’t know? You were guessing ?”

“An educated guess.”

“Heller, why didn’t you tell me that?”

I didn’t reply. The answer was simple: It was a gap in the plan I was hoping to just finesse. I was hoping for good luck. But if I’d told them that, I’d have been doing this alone.

For the first time, I was nervous.

Our escape plan rested entirely on the likelihood that the firefighters would get here before the Paladin guys. Once the fire department arrived, they’d secure the scene and allow no one to enter. But if Paladin got here first, they might well decide to race upstairs, smoke or no smoke. It was entirely possible that they’d connect the two things-the motion sensor in Koblenz’s office going off and an apparent fire raging in the lobby-and conclude that their office had been the target of vandals. Then they’d be all the more motivated to rush up here.

I could hear the sirens, louder and closer, heard the shouts and the braking of the trucks and the clatter of the equipment as the firemen jumped out, and I heaved a sigh of relief.