Chapter 4
Chapter Four
KAZIMIR
I have covered every wall of the studio in blueprints.
The Rothko stares at me from the easel like a disapproving parent. I've pushed it into the corner to make room for the thing that matters now: the architectural skeleton of a Kensington penthouse. It belongs to a man who caught me stealing and let me go because he found it amusing.
The blueprints came from the Royal Borough's planning archive.
Digital, poorly encrypted, accessible to anyone with a library card and a willingness to lie about being an architecture student.
The penthouse occupies the top two floors of a converted Victorian mansion on Palace Gate.
Renovation completed eighteen months ago under a shell company called Perun Residential Holdings.
The man names everything after a war god.
I've pinned the floor plans to the wall with paint-stained thumbtacks and drawn over them in red marker. Entry points. Exit routes. Camera placements---estimated from the electrical plans, because the power draws tell you where the hardware lives if you know how to read the grid.
The front door is impossible. Biometric lock, lobby concierge, CCTV in the lift and both stairwells. The service entrance feeds into a corridor monitored by the building's shared security system. Every ground-level window is alarmed.
But the roof.
The roof is beautiful.
The adjacent building---a five-storey residential block---shares a party wall with the mansion.
The gap between its roof and Kazimir's terrace is eight feet, with a four-foot drop.
The terrace itself is walled in glass panels that the renovation plans describe as frameless structural glazing, 12mm toughened.
Toughened glass is designed to resist blunt impact. It will stop a brick. It is not designed to resist a carbide-tipped cutter applied with patience to the silicon seal at its base.
I can get in through the sky.
I step back and look at the wall. The red lines form a path.
Up the fire escape of the adjacent building.
Across the roof. Over the gap. Onto the terrace, through the glass, and into the penthouse.
From there, the private rooms are on the upper floor, accessible by an internal staircase that the blueprints show but don't detail.
That's where the keycard data will be. The server. The financial records. The intel Killian actually needs.
I pull out my burner phone. I should call Killian.
I should tell him what I'm planning. I should hear his voice go flat and cold the way it does when I'm about to do something suicidal, and then I should listen to him forbid it, and then I should do it anyway.
At least he'd know where to find my body.
I don't call him.
This isn't about the keycard anymore. This is about the man who caught my wrist, traced my pulse, and sent me into the rain carrying nothing but a bruise in the shape of his hand. The look on his face when he said little thief. He wasn't angry. He wasn't threatened. He was interested.
He thinks I'm a curiosity. A pretty toy that stumbled into his world.
I'm going to walk into his home, take what I need, and walk out. And when he finds the empty space where his secrets used to be, he'll know the toy has claws.
I pull on my jacket and go shopping.
The gear is improvised. I am not Killian and I do not have access to whatever paramilitary supply closet he keeps in the basement in Boston.
Black jeans. Black hoodie. Climbing gloves from a bouldering shop in Hackney, rubberized palms for wet surfaces.
A carbide glass cutter purchased with cash.
A flat steel pry bar, eight inches, slim enough to fit inside my waistband.
A head torch with a red-light setting. A roll of electrical tape for the unexpected.
No weapons. Weapons are for people who plan to get caught.
I take the Tube to Gloucester Road and walk.
The streets get progressively quieter and richer until terraced houses give way to mansion blocks and the pavement looks like someone has licked it clean.
Kensington at night is a graveyard with better lighting.
The money that lives here doesn't walk. It is driven.
I find the adjacent building. A residential block. No concierge. The fire escape is on the east side, a black iron structure bolted to the brickwork in a zigzag that runs from the alley to the roof.
The bottom ladder is retracted. I need to jump.
The rain starts as I'm gauging the distance. Because of course it does. London doesn't have weather. It has a vendetta.
The first ladder rung is nine feet up.
I back up. I run. I jump. My fingers catch the bottom rung with a metallic clang that sounds like a gunshot in the silent street.
I hang there for three seconds, rain hitting my face, arms burning. I wait for a light to come on in a window, a curtain to twitch, a voice to shout.
Nothing. Kensington sleeps the way the rich sleep---deeply, insulated, trusting that the world will still be theirs in the morning.
I pull myself up. My shoulders scream. My core shakes. I am strong the way climbers are strong---wiry, functional, powered by adrenaline and the absolute refusal to let go---but I am not graceful. Killian could do this in silence. I sound like a wet cat fighting a drainpipe.
The fire escape zigzags up five storeys.
The iron is slick. By the third landing, my gloves are soaked through and the rubberized grip is starting to slide.
I climb by feel. Hands on rails, feet on grating, one flight and then the next.
The city opens up beneath me---first the alley, then the rooftops, then the amber sprawl of Kensington stretching toward the park.
The roof is flat. Gravel and puddles. The rain is falling sideways now, driven by a wind that wasn't there at street level. The gravel shifts under my feet like it's trying to decide whether to hold me or dump me over the edge.
I cross to the party wall. It's a low parapet, maybe three feet, and beyond it is the gap.
Eight feet. I measured it on the blueprints. Eight feet of empty air between this roof and Kazimir's terrace, with a four-foot drop to the terrace surface.
In daylight, dry, with a running start, I could clear it without thinking. In the dark, in the rain, on gravel, with a wind that's pushing me sideways and a rucksack on my back and the knowledge that the ground is five storeys below me.
I think about Killian. About the way he'd grip my shoulder and say something that was supposed to be reassuring but always sounded like a threat. Don't die, Rory. I'd have to explain it to the family.
I back up ten paces. I set my feet.
I run.
The parapet hits my shins as I launch. I am in the air. The rain is in my eyes. The gap is a black mouth beneath me. My body knows before my brain does that the distance is wrong---I'm short, I'm falling, the terrace edge is rushing toward me at the wrong angle.
My hands hit the railing.
My fingers lock. My body slams into the glass wall below it.
The impact drives the air from my lungs in a grunt that I feel in every rib.
My feet dangle. My shoulders are on fire.
The rain pours down my arms and into my gloves.
The metal is so slick that my left hand slides an inch before I clamp down hard enough to feel the tendons in my forearm creak.
I hang there. I breathe. The city hums below me, indifferent.
I pull myself up and over the railing and land on the terrace floor on my hands and knees. Gasping, dripping, alive.
The terrace is wide. Stone tiles, outdoor furniture under canvas covers, a row of potted cypresses standing like sentries in the dark. The glass wall of the penthouse rises in front of me---floor to ceiling, seamless. The interior beyond it is a void.
I crouch behind one of the cypresses and wait. My breath is ragged. My arms are shaking. The rain drums against the canvas covers in a rhythm that sounds like applause.
No alarms. No lights. No movement behind the glass.
I pull the glass cutter from my rucksack.
The silicon seal at the base of the panel takes four minutes to cut.
The carbide tip bites into it with a whisper---a thin, continuous sound, like a fingernail being drawn along the edge of a page.
I work from left to right, keeping the pressure even, feeling the blade catch and release as it moves through the sealant.
When the cut is complete, I press the pry bar into the gap and lever the base of the panel outward.
It gives an inch. Two. Enough.
I slide through the gap on my stomach, the glass cool against my back. I am inside.
The penthouse is dark. Deeply, deliberately dark.
Not the darkness of a room with the lights off---the darkness of a space that was designed to be a shadow.
The floors are polished concrete, and my wet trainers make no sound on them, which means they are heated.
Warm floors. Cold room. The air is still, heavy with cedar and leather and the mineral weight of old stone.
The kind of atmosphere that old churches have, built for silence and the slow contemplation of power.
I switch on the head torch. Red light bleeds across the room in a narrow cone.
The space is enormous. Open-plan, with the terrace wall on one side and the city visible through the rain-streaked glass like a painting in amber and grey.
The furniture is minimal---a long sectional in dark fabric, a low table, a single lamp that isn't switched on.
No photographs. No personal objects. No evidence that a human being lives here.
Except for a crystal tumbler on the side table with a finger of amber liquid still in it.
Bourbon. The glass hasn't been cleared. He was here recently.
I move through the room with my hands at my sides and my weight on my toes. The red light sweeps across surfaces: a kitchen built from black stone and steel, a corridor leading to what the blueprints call bedrooms. At the far end, a staircase.