End of the Century (52 page)

This looked like the scene where the two characters who have been growing closer to each other, all along, finally bond, trapped together in a confined space for a long amount of time. This looked like that scene, but it wasn't. Alice and Stillman were in the closet, in the dark, for long hours, but they weren't Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in a closet in
How to Steal a Million
, or Loni Anderson and Frank Bonner in an elevator on
WKRP in Cincinnati
, or John Ritter and Don Knotts in a meat locker on
Three's Company.
They were a teenage runaway epileptic and a self-professed former spy who lived in a hole in the ground.

Alice realized that they might just have discovered all of the common ground they were going to find. There might not be any more possible avenues for connection. The gulfs that separated them—in age, in experience, in temperament—might be insurmountable, after all. There was no way of telling.

“I'm not going to tell you that you've got nothing to feel guilty about,” Stillman had said. “I expect you've already been told that more times than you can count. You don't need anyone else's permission to forgive yourself, love. You can do that all on your own. And until you're ready to do that, there's nothing anyone else'll be able to do for you, more's the pity.” He paused, and Alice could hear him breathing. “For what it's worth, though, that guilt you're shouldering, the crimes you think you've committed? They aren't a patch on what I've got on my own back, love. Not a patch.”

Then he fell silent and didn't speak again. Alice realized he was probably waiting for her to say something. He would be waiting for a long time.

By nine o'clock, the building would have mostly emptied out, if this was a typical workday. It was time for Stillman and Alice to go to work.

Stillman had set a routine running in the security servers. At nine o'clock, on the dot, the system would respond as though it had experienced a significant spike in voltage coming in from the utility mains. The electrics in the building would flicker, while surge impedance systems handled the transient voltage. Of course, there would have been no spike, but only a careful cross check of the building's records with those of the utility provider would prove it. And no one would think to check, since at that precise moment the security servers would switch from the live CCTV feeds from the cameras throughout the building to cached hard-disk recordings from the same cameras, twenty-four hours before. The date codes in the timestamp wouldn't match, of course, but the hour and minute would, and with any luck no one would notice the discrepancy until Stillman and Alice had finished their business and were gone.

The fire doors on the central stairwells were alarmed, of course, but were a matter of relative ease to baffle. Then it only remained for Alice and Stillman to mount the stairs, climb from the twenty-seventh floor to the thirty-fifth, get around the motion detectors in the gallery, and they were home free.

That was the plan, at least.

The fire door on the thirty-fifth floor was locked, which was surely a violation of safety regulations. Stillman identified it as a UL 437 rated high-security cylinder lock. He then took a bump key from his pocket. Specially cut, the key slid right into the lock. Then Stillman tapped it, just hard enough, and the pins inside the lock popped apart and the door opened.

“Okay, love,” Stillman whispered, pocketing the bump key. “Here's where it gets a bit tricky, right?”

The routine that Stillman had planted in the security servers had taken care of the security cameras in the hallway downstairs and allowed them to climb the fire stairs without tripping any alarms, but now that they had reached the penthouse level, they would have to tread more carefully. This floor was largely given over to Temple's gallery, if the architectural plans were any indication, and the motion detectors in the gallery were on a separate system to the rest of the building.

Fortunately, there were no security guards patrolling the upper floors. Only Temple and his personal guests were allowed access. So long as they didn't run into Temple himself, and managed to avoid setting off the motion detectors, they had better than even odds of making it out unscathed. And if the popular press was to be believed, Temple was still out of the country at the moment, so there was little chance of that.

The problem was getting around the motion detectors, of course.

Stillman had explained that it wasn't like Alice had seen in the movies. There was nothing to duck or slide under, no handy infrared beams to illuminate with a quick spray from an aerosol can, nothing to bounce back with mirrors. The upper floors of the Glasshouse instead used volumetric motion detectors, which saturated the space with microwaves, leaving virtually no dead spaces behind.

That was where a little bit of MI8 spy science came into play. It wasn't magic, but might as well have been.

From Alice's backpack they withdrew two bundles of a flexible, clothlike material. They looked to be nothing more unusual than raincoats, which is what the security guards downstairs had taken them for on visual inspection. But they were so thin that, unfolded, they were larger than their small size when packed would suggest. And they were
not
raincoats, and hardly usual.

“Zip it up tight, love. Don't leave any wrinkles, or it'll spoil the effect.”

The cloaks were slightly elastic, and selected for fit, so that when unrolled and pulled over arms and legs, they fit snugly. Light and flexible like rubberized fabric, the cloaks were constructed of electromagnetic metamaterials. Only partially opaque to visible light, when Alice had the hood closed
over her face, she could still see reasonably well, her vision only slightly obscured, like looking through thin gauze.

“Ready to go?” Stillman checked the seams on her cloak, gave her a thumbs up, and then began to move slowly through the corridor towards the gallery, right into the space saturated by microwave motion detectors. “Remember, love,” he whispered, “slow and steady wins the race.”

Alice nodded and started after him.

The cloaks were designed so that microwaves could flow around them with scarcely any distortion, or so Stillman had said. It was all to do with the electromagnetic properties of the metamaterials used in their construction. When Alice asked where MI8 had come up with such futuristic gear, years ago, Stillman had casually explained that a sample had been found at the site of an “incursion,” and that the “boffins” at the Tower of London Station had managed to reverse-engineer it after a few years. It didn't have much application—an invisibility cloak that only made the wearer invisible to microwaves—until the widescale implementation of microwave-based motion detectors, at which point it had become
very
useful.

They had to move as slowly as possible to keep from tripping the vibration sensors in the walls, but after a quarter of an hour or so they'd crossed the corridor and reached the entrance to the gallery.

This door was even more heavily fortified than the one leading to the fire stairs. Titanium-reinforced steel, biometric identification pad, deadbolts as big around and as long as Alice's leg. No bump key would get them past it. This called for some more MI8 gadgetry.

On Stillman's wrist, beneath the fabric of his cloak, was a metal wristwatch, its outline clearly visible. He held his wrist up to the biometric identification pad, depressed a button on the side of the watch through the cloak, and waited.

“More technology from another universe, I take it?” Alice whispered.

“No.” Stillman shook his head, the movement masked by the opaque fabric of the cloak. “It's from this one, I'm afraid. Just from quite a ways in the future, is all.”

The pad bleeped, and the heavy deadbolts slid back.

“After you,” Stillman said with a bow, as the steel door swung open, soundlessly.

Alice wasn't sure what she was expecting. It wasn't this.

This wasn't a couple of paintings and a sculpture or two. This was a full-on
museum
. Alice wondered how one person, even a billionaire, could have gotten hold of so much stuff. Then, remembering the means he'd used to get the Vanishing Gem, she realized there weren't really many limits to what Temple might have gotten, or from where.

Aside from a central column, which contained the elevator shaft, conduits for water and power, the fire stairs, and the service corridor through which Alice and Stillman had just passed, the rest of the thirty-fifth floor was a large open space, bounded only by the outer walls of glass and steel. The floors underfoot were marble, the high ceiling tiled. The immense space, which could have housed a dozens offices, was filled with Temple's personal gallery.

Paintings hung on nearly invisible wires from the ceiling. Statues and pottery and weapons and books and parchments were displayed on waist-high plinths that dotted the floor every few feet. It was like a forest or a garden arranged by an insane gardener.

Some of the displays were under glass, but most were open to the air. None of the displays were labeled. Presumably, their owner knew what everything was. And, based on his reading of the architectural schematics and security logs, Stillman had deduced that Temple was the only person who ever came into the gallery. That was why the motion detection stopped at the steel door they'd just passed through. The logs showed no record of Temple ever bringing a guest to this floor, and no one from the security department or cleaning staff had entered the gallery since construction on the building was completed. There were no cameras, no motion detectors, no vibration sensors. Nothing but a lifetime of plunder, it seemed, all for the amusement of one man.