Three Fates

desire.”
    “Could work.” He turned his head so his lips skimmed over hers, came back to linger. “Definitely could work. Do the run for me. Sector by sector.”
    Could work, she realized, both ways. “I’ve done it for you, five hundred times already. I know what I’m doing, Jack.”
    “You’ve never worked this equipment before. Practice makes perfect, Irish.”
    She muttered curses, but obeyed. “I like the way you kiss me.”
    “That’s handy because I plan on spending fifty years or so at it.”
    “When I give a man an inch, that doesn’t entitle him to run the mile. Sector one. Alarms—silent and audible—up, motion detectors up, infrared up.” She keyed in codes she knew by heart now and scanned the readouts on her monitors. “Exterior and interior doors, secured and on-line.”
    She continued through the sixteen sectors that comprised Jack’s security system for Morningside.
    “Shut down alarms in sector five.”
    “Shut them down?”
    “Practice, baby. Take sector five down for ten seconds.”
    She let out a breath, rolled her shoulders. “Shutting down sector five.”
    He watched her fingers moving smoothly, briskly, over the keyboard. “There’s a beeping inside the sector. Should I—”
    “That’s normal. Keep going.”
    “Sector’s down.” She watched the clock now, counting off the seconds. At ten, she keyed in another sequence and watched the system come back up. “Alarm’s up in sector five.”
    “I told you ten seconds.”
    “It was ten.”
    “No, it took four to bring the system back up fully. So that’s fourteen seconds.”
    “Then you should’ve said—”
    “I said ten, so ten’s what I needed.” He patted her head. “Success is in the details.”
    She frowned while he opened his bag to give his portable equipment a final check. “If the whole place was shut down, how long to bring security back on-line?”
    “Now there’s a question. Standard alarms, exterior doors and windows, are instantaneous. Motion, infrared, interiors come on level by level. Four minutes, twelve seconds to bring it up to full scope and capacity. It’s a complicated system, with multi-layers.”
    “That’s too long, you know. There’s a way to shave it.”
    “Probably.”
    “I wager I could shave a full minute off that four-twelve, had I access to the entire system and the time to play with it.”
    “Looking for a job, Irish?”
    “Just saying,” she replied as she angled her chair away from him, “timing matters, after all. In all manner of things.”
    “Is that your way of saying my timing’s been off with you?”
    “It’s my way of saying I like picking my own time.”
    “Wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you shaved some of that off. I’m going to get the others.”

Twenty-three
     
     
     
     
    “A parking place, on the street. Upper East Side.” Jack shook his head. He was driving the van, with Cleo riding shotgun. “We’ll have to take it as an omen.”
    He maneuvered the van between a late-model sedan and an aging SUV.
    She ducked down to look through the windshield at the streetlight. “Kinda in the spotlight here, aren’t we?”
    “Your city taxes at work.”
    “Yours, maybe. I’m not getting a paycheck these days.” Her eyes widened when he pulled a gun from under his seat. “Whoa, big guy, you didn’t say anything about armed B and E.”
    “In for a penny,” he said. “Sit tight.” He climbed out, walked casually down the sidewalk, then, turning, shot out the streetlight with a muffled pop and a musical tinkle of glass.
    “BB gun,” he told her when he slid back into the van. He reached behind him, knocked three times on the partition that separated the cab from the back of the vehicle.
    Seconds later the van shifted and the rear door opened. Closed. In her side-view mirror, Cleo watched Gideon and Malachi step onto the sidewalk. Gideon headed east, Malachi west.
    “And they’re off,” she mumbled.
    They waited three long minutes, in the dark, in silence, before Jack’s walkie-talkie hissed. “For a city that never sleeps,” Malachi said, “it’s damn quiet out here.”
    “Clear on the east as well,” Gideon reported.
    “Stay on this channel.” Jack knocked twice on the partition, looked at Cleo when he heard the answering rap from the back. “Ready?”
    “As canned ham.”
    They got out on opposite sides. Jack slung his bag over his shoulder and, when he reached Cleo, slung his arm over her shoulders. “Just a couple of