CHAPTER 21 #2
I let Kranz take the key off my throat and I didn’t fight him for it, because the key had to reach this room ahead of me. A man like Thorne doesn’t destroy a thing he can still use, and my whole plan was to stay usable for one more morning.
They put a photograph in front of me in Red Hook, and I have it behind my eyes and I’ll keep it there.
He was holding his left side with one hand and breathing in the very top of his chest, because the bottom of it was broken.
Both wrists were banded raw where the ties had gone on.
I built the road that photograph came down, and there was no version of this where he did not pay part of the price.
Thorne took his coat off the stand. “Your technician is alive.”
“I am aware of what he is.”
“That was a decision somebody made in a hurry,” he said. “I have decided to let it stand.”
He held the door open for me, because he always does. “Then I will walk you down myself, and you will be very careful with my morning.”
While his back was turning I took the gray key out of the dish on the corner of the desk, where Kranz had dropped it on his way out. The hairline in it opened the pad of my thumb as my hand closed, and I let it open. I put the fist and the key and the blood into my right pocket, beside the casing.
The car was waiting on our floor, because nobody else in the world wanted it. He put a key into the barrel below the buttons and turned it, then pressed B2, and the button lit and stayed lit.
“You have a very calm face for a woman going to a basement with me,” he said.
I watched the panel instead of him. “I have a calm face at depositions. This is only a longer deposition.”
“You will find the room cold,” he said.
“I have been in it before, Mr. Thorne.”
The floor numbers came down and I let myself ask it. “Does anybody else know that we’re down here today?”
“Nobody at all, which is exactly why today suits me,” he said.
We went down through the whole building without stopping, which had never happened to me in that elevator. My ears changed twice on the way. The blood had gone tacky against the key, and I could feel my own pulse ticking in the cut, and I kept the hand shut.
Sub-level two smells of nothing at all, which is the strangest thing about it. The air is scoured and bone-dry, and it leaves an edge on the back of the tongue like a struck coin. Cold comes off the suppression cylinders ranked along the wall, a dead cold with no weather in it.
The first mantrap took us one at a time, and the solenoid knocked in the frame.
The door behind me pulled itself shut, and then came the delay tone, which runs on long enough that a person begins to think.
Thorne waited it out with his hands at his sides.
He looked settled enough to stand there until Monday, and I’d hoped for a little less of that.
The inner door released and he stepped back to let me by. “After you.”
“You first, because the list reads in order and you are on the door and I am not,” I said.
He went, and the second mantrap did what the first had done, and I liked it a good deal less. Then we were on the floor itself, in the roar of the cooling and a flat white light with no hour in it.
The Tier One cage stands in the middle of that floor like a kennel built for something valuable.
Galvanised mesh, burred at every weld, and when I steadied myself against it, it printed a grid of small squares into my palm.
Inside were the racks, one terminal on a shelf at standing height, a reader beside it, and a black pad where a person puts a thumb.
“The token reads at the shelf,” he said. “The door will not open again until the read completes.”
I let my hand stay on the mesh. “I wrote the note that made this firm buy the second mantrap.”
“I remember that note,” he said. “It cost me a great deal of money.”
“It was a good note.”
He looked at the second door with something close to affection. “It was an expensive one. You have cost this firm more than any lawyer in it.”
“I have not finished spending it.”
An empty building is the cheapest room on earth to kill a woman in.
Nobody badges through a lobby on a Saturday and nobody rides that elevator.
The only record of my ever standing on this floor is a log his own people keep.
On Monday the market opens, and the floor on eleven fills up, and there are two hundred people in this tower who would every one of them have to be explained afterwards.
I needed Monday, so I stalled, politely and with citations.
I turned the token over in my pocket without bringing it out. “The reader wants a thumb before it wants a token.”
“Then give it a thumb,” he said.
I showed him the cut instead. “I opened this on a filing cabinet, and this reader has always been fussy about blood.”
“Try it anyway.”
I tried it, and the pad thought about my thumb and then declined it. The terminal put a line of gray text on the screen about a failed presentation. I read that line out loud to him twice, because reading things out loud is a thing lawyers are permitted to do at any speed they like.
“There’s a lockout after three attempts,” I said. “I’d rather not spend one of them here.”
He put his hands in his pockets. “Then spend one of them here.”
I put my palm on the shelf and found it too high. “The shelf is set for a taller person than me.”
“Then move the terminal along its rail, and do not take all day over it,” he said.
“I’d also like the session opened under my own credential and not the firm’s,” I said. “The firm’s leaves a different record.”
He let out something that came very close to a laugh. “You are stalling beautifully, Ms. Verdugo, and I have all the patience in the world.”
“You have never had patience, Thorne. You have only ever had money that moves.”
He heard the name land without the mister on the front of it, and he turned and looked at me properly for the first time since the office. Whatever was in his face then was very near to pleased.
“That is the first time you have used my name,” he said. “I wondered how long the manners would hold.”
I gave him nothing back for it. “It’s Saturday. There’s nobody down here to be formal in front of.”
He almost smiled, and then he did not, and he opened a hand toward the shelf. I wiped my thumb on the inside of my coat and set it on the pad again, slowly, so that it would take a long time. Behind us the cage door interlock clicked over once.
Then the delay tone started, and that tone means one thing only.
Somebody had already come through both mantraps and was standing in the last of them, waiting on a lock.
My chest went light, and I got my hand off the pad and my back to the racks, and I looked at the door, and I didn’t care what my face was doing.
The door cycled, and I turned around with Luca’s name already in my mouth, and it was Ivo Kranz who stepped through it.