Good Behavior (22 page)

Dortmunder would accept that. For him, morally ambiguous was a lot better rating than usual.

She looked alert, pointed to her own head:
Idea
. Pointed downward, then with both hands did fingers walking up steps.

“You mean, my friends will come up and get me?” Dortmunder considered this idea, matching it to the characters of his associates. “Well,” he acknowledged, “they will notice I didn't come back. And they wouldn't have all this profit and everything if it wasn't for me.
And
you.”

She spread her hands:
Ergo
.

“You could be right,” Dortmunder said, not wanting to shatter either of her beliefs; in rescue, or in the human race. Then he said, “How about a phone? Can we make a call?”

Sadly, she shook her head and made a listening-in gesture.

“Well,” he said, “that army's got to leave for South America sooner or later.”

She nodded, and held a hand up. Then she looked very wide-eyed, then pretended to sleep, then looked wide-eyed again, pretended to sleep again, looked wide-eyed once more, then did flapping motions with her arms.

“They fly away day after tomorrow. Monday.” Dortmunder nodded. “Of course, that still leaves building security and your private guards.”

She pointed at him, then did the fingers walking up the stairs.

“Oh, sure. And my friends.”

She pointed at her wrist.

“In the meantime …”

Covered her face with her hands, peeked out between the fingers, then pointed at him.

“… I should hide …”

Fingers walked up stairs.

“… until my friends get here.”

Big wide smile, hands stretched out with palms up.

“Simple. Uh huh.” Dortmunder made a smile.

33

“I'm gonna tell you one thing about Dortmunder,” Tiny Bulcher said. “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 d'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 hotfooted 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 fix, 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

34

“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-à-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 toothmark. 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.”