The Devil's Code

if a car came from the outside, and the eye was blocked, the door wouldn’t come back down—and whoever had just driven into the garage would probably notice that. So we needed the hinged cover.
    All of that was easy enough: we’d both done something like it in the past. But the wait was a killer. During the week, when we were scouting the place, a car might come out or go in every fifteen minutes or so. The longest we’d had to wait was a half hour. This time, we had to wait for forty-five minutes, but we lucked out. When the door finally went up, the car was inside the garage, heading out.
    I put the radio to my mouth, and said, “Up yours.”
    Green came back: “Sounds good to me.”
    I pulled the straps for LuEllen’s black bag over my back, and got to my knees. The brown Town Car cleared the garage and started around the approach drive, the door still up. As it began to exit, LuEllen pushed the speed-dial button on her cell phone. When the car disappeared, LuEllen whispered, “Go.”
    We went. As we crossed the drive, she said into the phone, “George? Is this George?” Then, “Don’t tell me this is a wrong number, buster . . .”
    The guard at the reception center, on the other end, eventually hung up, but by that time we’d walked thirty feet across the garage and were sheltered behind a concrete pillar at the freight elevator. The elevator doors were shut, but opened when we pushed the call button. A roof light came on, and I reached up and covered it with the black bag until LuEllen got the doors closed.
    “Hatch,” she whispered.
    I made a hand stirrup, as I had for Lane back in Jack’s house, and LuEllen stood up in it and pushed the elevator hatch askew. LuEllen peered up the elevator shaft with the night glasses. Looking for an infrared motion detector or anything else that might trip us up.
    “We’re clear,” she whispered, and pushed the hatch up out of the way. I boosted her through, handed her the bag, and followed behind. Using the light of two needle-flashes, we put our Jumar climbers on the cable, replaced the hatch, and started up in the dark.
    A five-minute climb, eight floors. Hanging off the elevator door at Corbeil’s floor, LuEllen first took the stethoscope out of her pocket, and listened. Nothing. Then she dialed the next number on her speed dial—Corbeil’s apartment. Again, no answer. She patted me on the shoulder. I had her mechanical door-openers ready. I forced the jaws between the doors, and we pried the doors open. LuEllen did a quick peek with a mirror, then clambered into the hallway. I was five seconds behind her, with the bag.
    The hallway was arranged like many rich people’s hallways—so that the rich people would encounter each other as seldom as possible. A vestibule at the main elevator branched into two hallways, one for Corbeil’s apartment, one for the other apartment that shared this entry floor.
    Both hallways made a sharp turn just off the vestibule. When we crawled out of the service elevator shaft, we were already on Corbeil’s side of the floor, but too far down the hall, past his door.
    We went back to his door and LuEllen took the jaws from me and forced them between the door and the steel doorjamb. Then she attached a steel wheel, like a small steering wheel, to a square screw-end at the top of the jaws, and moved behind me so I could turn it. The mechanical advantage was huge: the big wheel must have spun five or six times for every quarter-inch that the jaws opened, but nothing could stand against them. Slowly, slowly, the door moved; then suddenly, popped.
    LuEllen had moved around so that she was below me, facing the door, a heavy utility knife in her hand. When the door popped, she shot inside, making for the closet where we thought the alarm console was fixed. As she did that, I began uncoiling 150 feet of climber’s rope from the black bag.
    As I did it, I was counting to myself. Some of the alarm systems give you as much as two minutes to punch your code into the key pad. Some of them give you less. As soon as she’d gone into the apartment, the keypad began a slow beeping. Then she was into the closet. I stepped in behind her and pushed the door shut.
    Twenty seconds. I could hear a scuffling sound, a ripping sound, then quiet, except for the beep-beep-beep-beep and then beeeeeeeeeeeeee. Thirty seconds. The pad was dialing out. Damnit. The shortest possible delay. LuEllen appeared in the doorway, black-on-gray. “We’re