Gone Tomorrow

painted flat white. Same size, same proportions. It had another door, which I guessed led onward, either to a fourth room or a stairwell. I crossed to it and eased it open.
    A stairwell. No paint, beyond an ancient peeling layer of institutional green. I closed the door again and checked the office furniture. Three desks, five cabinets, four lockers, all gray, all plain and functional, all made of steel, all locked. With combination locks, like the cells, which made sense, because there had been no keys in the agents’ pockets. The desks held no piles of paper. Just three sleeping computers and three console telephones. I hit space bars and woke up each screen in turn. Each one asked for a password. I lifted receivers and hit redial buttons and got the operator every time. Extremely conscientious security. Painstaking, and consistent. Finish a call, dab the cradle, dial zero, hang up. The three guys weren’t perfect, but they weren’t idiots, either.
    I stood still for a long moment. I was disappointed about the combination locks. I wanted to find their stores and reload the dart gun and shoot the other two agents with it. And I wanted my shoes.
    I wasn’t going to get either satisfaction.
    I padded my way back to the cells. Jacob Mark and Theresa Lee looked up, looked away, looked back. Classic double-takes, because I was alone and I had the dart gun in my hands. I guessed they had heard the noises and assumed I was getting smacked around. I guessed they hadn’t expected me back so soon, or at all.
    Lee asked, “What happened?”
    I said, “They fell asleep.”
    “How?”
    “I guess my conversation bored them.”
    “So now you’re really in trouble.”
    “As opposed to what?”
    “You were innocent before.”
    I said, “Grow up, Theresa.”
    She didn’t answer. I checked the locks on the cell gates. They were fine items. They looked high quality and very precise. They had milled top-hat knobs graduated with neat engraving all around the edges, from the number one to the number thirty-six. The knobs turned both ways. I spun them and felt nothing at all in my fingers except the purr of slight and consistent mechanical resistance. The feel of great engineering. Certainly I didn’t feel any tumblers falling.
    I asked, “Do you want me to get you out?”
    Lee said, “You can’t.”
    “If I could, would you want me to?”
    “Why wouldn’t I?”
    “Because then you’d really be in trouble. If you stay, you’re playing their game.”
    She didn’t answer.
    I said, “Jake? What about you?”
    He asked, “Did you find our shoes?”
    I shook my head. “But you could borrow theirs. They’re about your size.”
    “What about you?”
    “There are shoe stores on Eighth Street.”
    “You going to walk there barefoot?”
    “This is Greenwich Village. If I can’t walk around barefoot here, where can I?”
    “How can you get us out?”
    “Nineteenth-century problems and solutions, versus twenty-first century expediency. But it will be difficult. So I need to know whether to start. And you need to make up your mind real fast. Because we don’t have much time.”
    “Before they wake up?”
    “Before the Home Depot closes.”
    Jake said, “OK, I want out.”
    I looked at Theresa Lee.
    She said, “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.”
    “Feel like sticking around and proving that? Because that’s hard to do. Proving a negative always is.”
    She didn’t answer.
    I said, “I was telling Sansom about how we studied the Red Army. You know what they were most afraid of? Not us. They were most afraid of their own people. Their worst torment was spending their whole lives proving their own innocence, over and over again.”
    Lee nodded.
    “I want out,” she said.
    “OK,” I said. I checked the things I needed to check. Estimated dimensions and weights by eye.
    “Sit tight,” I said. “I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
    First stop was the next room. The three federal agents were still out cold. The main guy would stay that way for eight solid hours. Or maybe much longer, because his body mass was less than two-thirds of mine. For a bad second it struck me that I might have killed him. A dose calibrated for a man of my size might have been dangerous for a smaller person. But the guy was breathing steadily right then. And he had started it, so the risk was his.
    The other two would be waking up much earlier. Maybe fairly soon. Concussion was unpredictable. So I ducked through to the