Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m such an idiot, but I left my key in my room. It’s under my wife’s name, Megan Kimball in Room 220?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Could I bother you for a driver’s license?”

I patted the side pockets of my jeans. Shook my head.

She smiled. “No worries.”

She tapped at her keyboard and put a plastic blank into the machine, then handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

I knew that Megan Kimball was at dinner in the restaurant, sitting at her father’s table. That meant there was no one in her room. I took the elevator to the second floor and found 220. Stood for a moment outside the door, listening. Then I tapped my key card against the sensor. The green light clicked on, and I pushed open the door.

Room 220 was a suite, the same size as Sukie’s. I knew its layout already. I noted the sliding glass doors to the balcony off the living room. The floor-length drapes were half drawn. A crescent moon suspended in the dark sky shone watery light into the room.

And then I heard an electronic beep and the room door coming open.

I slipped behind the drapes and tucked my body in against the glass of the window. Was it housekeeping, with the evening turndown service? At night they would probably draw the drapes all the way. I stood there breathing silently and then heard a woman’s voice saying, “Lactaid, Lactaid, Lactaid.”

It was Megan. She’d forgotten something.

I waited. If she decided to pull open the drapes, or close them, I’d be caught. It would not be easy for me to explain what I was doing in her room. Hiding behind the drapery.

About another minute went by, and then I heard the door shut again. She had probably just left, though I couldn’t be sure. I waited for another full minute and then emerged from behind the drapes.

She wasn’t there.

I’d left the black backpack on the floor a few feet away. Had she come into the living room she would surely have noticed it.

I grabbed the backpack, slung it over my right shoulder, and returned to the balcony. Slid open the glass doors. The air outside was noticeably warmer than the air-cooled inside. The water was a thousand feet away, down a gentle sandy slope, but at night it seemed closer. A soft breeze was blowing. Then I looked up and saw the balcony of the room directly above: the presidential suite.

Less than ten feet above my head, but more than I could reach, even if I jumped. From the backpack I took out a nylon rappelling rope and all the rest of the equipment: some carabiners, a waist harness, and a titanium overhead anchor, proof tested to twenty-two hundred pounds. I’d set it all up in advance in Sukie’s suite. I tossed the anchor up, and on the second try it hooked over the steel railing on the balcony above with a metallic clang.

I waited a moment, just to make sure that sound hadn’t been heard within the presidential suite — if anyone was in there, which I doubted. Conrad, I knew, was downstairs in the restaurant.

Sliding the ascender up the rope, I stood up and then moved the second ascender. With two healthy pulls, I was hanging on the rope, dangling up in the air, nearly level with the balcony railing. Now I was looking directly into the presidential suite, into a room with a large table. I grabbed the railing and swung my legs over, landing on the balcony.

As far as I could tell, I hadn’t been seen by anyone on the ground. I decided to leave the rope in place. It was risky, but it was my only way out of there. I couldn’t leave the presidential suite through its front door, outside of which sat the security guard.

There was a good chance, I knew, that the sliding doors here might be locked. That would have been unfortunate.

I would have had to climb down and abandon the plan.

But they weren’t; they slid smoothly open, and I was inside.

The room was dark and quiet.

I stood listening for a moment. I heard no one in the suite, just the breeze from outside, some distant music from down the beach. The slight hum of the honor-bar refrigerator. I pulled the glass doors closed, and it got even quieter. Most of this room was taken up by a coffin-shaped conference table. Would Conrad sit in here? Or elsewhere in the suite? I had to assume this room was one possibility. I had enough devices.

Walking around the room, I selected the device I wanted to plant on the ceiling above the conference table. It looked like a smoke detector, but it contained a GSM bug. So as soon as it detected sound, it recorded and stored it, compressed it, and then sent it out in a burst every thirty minutes. I climbed onto the conference table, squeezed a little Superglue, and the thing stuck firmly to the ceiling, right above the head of the table. Underneath the table I plugged in a power strip that also contained a GSM bug. The strip looked like it belonged there.

I paused, listened again. Conrad was downstairs at dinner. Was there anyone here? Did he travel alone, or had Natalya accompanied him? What if she was asleep in the master bedroom? Was there security inside the suite as well as out?

I had no idea what to expect: I saw only the deep darkness of a hotel suite. I switched on my little Maglite and ventured farther down the corridor and came upon a living room with a large TV. This looked like a comfortable place to have a conversation. Another spot where Conrad might confer, either on the phone or in person. Here I planted two devices, the fake smoke detector on the ceiling and an electrical plug converter, a white cube, the kind you see in Europe. This too had a SIM card inside, was powered by the electrical current it was connected to, and worked the same way as the fake smoke detector: triggered by ambient sound, it would start recording and would send compressed sound files every half hour. I plugged that in between the lamp plug and the wall outlet. It was unobtrusive and looked like it belonged there, even though the lamp plug, of course, didn’t actually need a converter.

When I was finished, I switched off my flashlight, stopped, and listened. I heard a cart pass by in the outside hallway, and I froze.

I waited, listening.

Then a doorbell chimed, a knock at the door and a voice: “Housekeeping!”

She was here for turndown service, which meant turning down the bed linen and preparing the bed, maybe leaving a chocolate on the pillow. I almost called out, “Not now, please,” until I realized that the security guard outside the room would take notice that someone was inside a suite that was supposed to be unoccupied. And that would not be good.

But the door she was knocking on was thirty feet from where I was standing, and she was about to open it.

Noiselessly, I raced across the carpet out of the room, down the hall, toward the conference room that opened onto the balcony. I pulled closed the drapes, then slid open the glass doors behind them and slipped out to the balcony, closing the door behind me.

I looked out, looked down and to either side. I didn’t see anyone out there. Not yet. Nobody had seen me climbing up the rope from the second floor. Probably no one would see me climb down the same rope. Kimball Pharma had taken over the hotel, and nearly everyone associated with the company was downstairs at dinner.

The problem was that I couldn’t leave the ropes and titanium anchor and carabiners in place once I returned to Megan’s balcony. If I did, they’d be spotted by hotel security and/or management at some point in the night. In the morning light, for sure. That would raise questions about the security in the presidential suite. It would send up an alarm. And rappelling down, using the rope, necessarily meant leaving the rig in place. So I had to take the rope with me, in the backpack, and climb down some other way.