B-Tower West Wall

Let me confess this to you. They killed baker as soon as we went in the door. They shot him twice in the chest: two men in business suits; pistols with silencers. Baker was a big man, but the bullets stopped him as if he had walked into a tree. I think he was dead before he hit the floor, but he lay there for a while with his legs thrashing and my son Chip, who had always thought a lot of Baker, pressed his small face against the front of my parka so he wouldn't have to watch.

"Dad, Dad," he pleaded, as if he wanted me to explain what was happening, to make it not true. I couldn't. All I could do was hold him and die with him, if that's what it was going to be. He was 12, and except for the television news, where it never seems quite real, he had not seen a man get killed before. I had, but never like this.

It was a few minutes after nine P.M. We had spent the weekend in New Hampshire, climbing rock in Tuckerman Ravine, had just got back to the city. Baker had parked his truck under the building, had come up for a drink. I was a widower, he was divorced. We had served together, Special Forces, Vietnam, back when it had begun. Now he was dead. I looked away.

All the drapes in the apartment were drawn, though I remembered having left them open. Most of the lights were on. I could hear the traffic on Tremont Street, six stories down: sirens and horns.

"Shut the door, McKim," one of the two men said to the other. They both wore gloves. This one was young, late 20s, medium build. His hair was red and longish and crossed his forehead in bangs. He had wash-blue eyes and a lopsided nose and when he spoke, the tone of his voice was persuasively calm, as if in his view Baker's dying counted for nothing at all.

"Look," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I don't know what this is. I don't care what you do to me. But let my boy go."

"There's some clothes in the bedroom," the redhead said. "Sports jackets, slacks, street shoes. Put them on, both you and the kid. There's an empty overnight bag in the closet. You put your climbing shit in that bag: pants, boots, parka. The kid won't need his. McKim will go in there with you while you change."

I nodded. McKim came up next to me. He was a couple of years older than the redhead, dark complected, heavier set. He had the thick neck and wrists of a man who might have been a wrestler once or a catcher in a trapeze act. His suit was expensive, $250, maybe $300. It smelled like cloves.

"You screw off or make noise or give McKim any trouble," the redhead went on, "and your kid will wind up as dead as your buddy. You got that?"

I told him I did.

McKim went with us into my bedroom, where we changed clothes the way we'd been told to. My wife's picture was on the dresser. When she had turned 30, she started having headaches but was misdiagnosed. By the time the doctors got it right, she was a long way toward being dead.

McKim took off his gloves and inspected his nails. They were cut short and filed smooth. He had not closed the bedroom door. I could hear the redhead talking on the living-room phone. "Yeah, yeah, we've got them," I heard him say. "Tell Sights to meet us there in half an hour. Yeah, yeah. No sweat."

Chip looked up at me. He was in his jacket and slacks now and looked nice, the way he always did whenever I took him out to a good restaurant, except he was pale and his lip was shaking; but he was holding on and I was proud of him for that and scared.

"We'll be OK," I told him. "We'll do what they want us to do and when they're through with us, they'll let us go." I glanced at McKim, hoping he'd back me up on that.

He didn't.

•

We took the elevator to the garage. They had a limousine waiting, a dark-blue late-model Caddy with a phone antenna in the center of its trunk. An old man drove. He wore plaid slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back and he didn't ask anybody where he should go and nobody told him. The redhead sat in front. Chip and I sat in back, along with McKim and my overnight bag. I held Chip's hand. It was early September, cool enough so the old man had the heater on low. There was an east wind coming in off the harbor; the few girls on the street who wore skirts had to hold them down with their hands. We drove west on Commonwealth.

"Dad," Chip whispered after a while. "Where are they taking us?"

"I don't know," I said. "To the Carlyle, maybe." That's a new 30-story hotel in the Back Bay. We pulled into the half-circle drive at the main entrance. The redhead turned around and looked at me.

"I'll be behind the kid when we go in," he said in the calm way he had of saying things. "You won't try any shit."

"No," I said.

Once the four of us were out, the old man drove the Caddy away.

The lobby of the Carlyle was jammed: a pharmacists' convention going on; men with short haircuts and plastic I.D.s pinned to medium-wide lapels. No cops in sight. I wouldn't have called them if there had been. McKim went to the main desk and got a room key, then we took a crowded elevator to the fourth floor, which I knew was the first floor of rooms.

"He's already here," McKim said as we walked down a long corridor. The carpet was deep blue and smelled as if one of the conventioneers had tossed his cookies onto it.

"I told him half an hour," the redhead said.

"Yeah, well, he's here now. He took the other key. I don't like that shit."

"He's all right."

"He sucks," McKim said.

"He does his job; forget it. Open the door."

We had reached the end of the corridor. McKim let us in to room number 418. Once we were in, he pulled the door shut behind him. The room was smoky, the drapes drawn. A wispy, thin kid in black slacks and a blue button-down sat sprawled on one of two queen-size beds. He was smoking a cigarette, watching TV highlights of a pro game that had been played earlier that afternoon: Patriots-Bills. Baker and I had bet on it driving back from Tuckerman Ravine. Baker had won. I had told him to come on up for a drink.

The kid had dark hair with a bald spot the size of a butter plate. He wore the kind of heavy-framed glasses people used to like in the Fifties. The lenses were the thickest I'd ever seen. They magnified his pupils so that when he looked at you it was as if he were seeing you through a couple of stewed prunes.

"Is this the man?" he said without getting up.

"Yeah, right," the redhead said.

"He looks older than I thought he would. Why did you bring the boy?"

"Never mind the boy, Sights. You just get your shit together. Show him what he's going to do."

Sights stood up, stretched, yawned. He may have been tired, but I'd have bet right then he was nervous, too. Chip's hand was small and moist in mine. I loved him. I've heard about fathers who don't love their kids, but I've never met one. I guess I've been lucky.

"You've done a considerable amount of direct-aid climbing, is that correct?" Sights said.

"I've done some," I said. He sounded like a third-string professor at the kind of college I might have made if I'd had time to make one.

"Long's Peak Diamond, El Capitan, The Fisher Towers...." He ticked them off.

"They're standard climbs," I told him. "I haven't done anything a lot of other people haven't done just as good or better."

"You were profiled in the Globe."

"Once. Five years ago. I haven't been west of Chicago since."

"But you still climb, correct?"

"I do when I can. Look, I'd like to know what this is all about."

"Tell him," McKim said. There was an ice bucket and a bottle of Chivas on the vanity. McKim was pouring himself a drink. The redhead had gone into the can.

"They want you to do a climb for them," Sights explained.

"What climb?"

He went to the window and opened the drapes. The room we were in had a close view of the Bennington Tower, a floodlit 52-story high-rise.

"That one," Sights said. "They need to get into an office on the forty-second floor."

•

The hotel was part of the Bennington Plaza complex, the biggest and newest collection of buildings in Boston. The Bennington Tower was the hub of the plaza wheel. It had over 1,000,000 square feet of office space and a restaurant on top where Chip and I had gone a lot. He liked the view and a waitress named Sadie who would always tell him Chip was hip and bring him desserts that weren't on the menu.

"Right now we are less than a hundred feet above the plaza roof," Sights said. He'd gotten a green Bill Forrest pack from the closet and taken from it what looked like photocopies of building blueprints and a half-dozen original diagrams. He'd spread them out on the bed near the door. McKim sat on one side of him, I sat on the other. Chip and the redhead sat in the chairs. "The facade lights go off at midnight. That's because of the energy crisis. They used to stay on all night." He blinked at McKim through his thick glasses, as if he was proud of having that kind of information.

"So what do. we do?" McKim wanted to know. "Just cut the shit."

"As soon as the facade lights are off, you rappel from here down to the plaza roof. He'll show you how; it's not difficult. Then you walk three hundred feet across the plaza roof to the corner of the west wall of the Tower. That's the one we're looking at."

"Which corner?" McKim said.

"The left one as you face it. There's less traffic on that side, less reflected light. The facade itself consists of hard aluminum mullions that run symmetrically in rows up the wall, and hard aluminum sills that run symmetrically across it. Where they intersect, they form rectangular boxes. Each box is two and a half feet wide and six and a half feet high. There are over six thousand of these boxes on each of the four walls. They are functional where they frame a window, decorative where they do not, but they are all made of the same material. The mullions and sills are three inches thick and extend seven inches out from the building itself."

Sights showed us how it looked. His blueprints and diagrams were clear, sharp and detailed; they showed the various elevations of the Tower, the curtain-wall design, the corridors, stair wells, elevators.

"Why the corner?" I asked.

"Because it's the only place where the sills are not flush with the wall. You've got a two-inch gap where you can loop a sling and hang a stirrup."

"What happens when we get to the forty-second floor?"

"The office they want is in the center of the wall. You will have to traverse ninety feet, stepping from box to box."

"Any protection on that?"

"Nothing I could figure," Sights admitted. "But with seven-inch platforms to stand on, I don't see why you should have any trouble."

I studied the drawings he'd made, tried to memorize them, tried to discover a way out for Chip and me.

"All right," I said finally. "Suppose we don't have any trouble. We're forty-two stories up and I'm ninety feet out on the wall. I've got nothing to anchor to and no way to protect him coming across--"

"That was the most difficult problem I had," Sights admitted. He looked satisfied as hell. He got up and went to the closet, came back with what looked like a two-and-a-half-foot length of one-inch pipe with a chrome sleeve and rubber cups at each end.

"Have you ever seen one of these?" he asked. I told him I hadn't. McKim told him he had.

"It's a portable chinning bar," Sights explained. "It's designed for doors. You turn the sleeve and the ends tighten against the frame. If you use enough torque, a man weighing three hundred pounds could hang from it all day."

"So what?" McKim said. "What good is that going to do him?"

"I put that in the box in front of the window you want," I said.

"Correct," Sights said. "That will give McKim a fixed rope on the traverse and something to tie on to while he works on the window."

"Very beautiful," the redhead said. I didn't know he'd been listening, but I guess he had, and Sights looked pleased.

"How the fuck do we get down?" McKim wanted to know.

"You traverse back to the corner and make four rappels. Then you walk back across the roof of the plaza. You will have a penlight to signal with. When you do, Red will lower a rope and up you come."

"Have you got ascenders?" I asked.

"Jumars," he said. "Two pair in the pack. Carabiners, five-step web stirrups, slings, everything you need. There are three hundred-and-fifty-foot ropes in the closet: two for you to take and one to leave here."

"It sounds like a hell of a lot of trouble," I said. "Why not take the elevator and jimmy the office door?"

"The offices shut down at five P.M.," he told me. "Seven days a week. The elevators are computer programmed. Once the cleaning crews are out--usually by eleven--the only one that operates is the express to the restaurant. All the office doors have electromagnetic locks. There are infrared scanners in the halls and emergency stair wells. Pinkertons patrol the lobby and the plaza outside the building."

"How thick is the window?" McKim wanted to know.

"They vary, depending on wind load and building height. That high, you should figure half-inch glass in a double-glazed unit."

"What about alarms?"

"There aren't any. Except for the floodlights and the Pinkertons in the plaza, there is no outside security at all."

"How come?"

"They think it's impossible for anyone to go up that way."

"How the fuck do you know what they think?" McKim said.

Sights smiled.

"I asked their security chief," he said. "I told him I was doing a term paper."

I asked McKim if he'd ever climbed before, though I knew he hadn't. He shook his head.

"How high will we be?" I said.

Sights blinked. "The Tower is eight hundred feet. By the time you get to the forty-second floor, you will be about six hundred feet above the plaza roof."

"That's a long way up for anybody who hasn't climbed," I said. "If I'm going to do it, I'd rather do it alone."

"You don't pick locks, do you?" the redhead put in. He had got up and was pouring himself a drink. He wasn't really asking, but I told him I didn't pick locks. "Don't worry about McKim." he said. "You just get him to the right window and he'll take care of the rest of it."

They paid Sights off and he left. I couldn't tell how much they gave him, but it was in cash and it looked like a lot.

"Are you going to do it, Dad?" Chip asked me. He'd got up to give me his chair and I'd taken it and pulled him down onto my lap. We'd scrubbed up at noon in a mountain stream in New Hampshire. His hair smelled terrific: like sun and leaves.

"Sure," I said, trying to sound calm. "It should be easier than what we were doing in Tuckerman's."

"Will it take a long time?"

"I don't think so. Couple of hours, maybe."

"What should I do?"

"Sit tight."

"Do I have to do what he says?"

"Yes."

"Can't I--"

"You do what he says. I don't want you to worry about me; I'll be fine. OK?"

"Sure. OK."

I held him tight. Ever since they'd shot Baker, I'd been trying to figure a way out of this jam we were in, but so far nothing had come up right, everything too risky, too liable to get us both killed. All I could do was wait and hope. McKim had gone into the can to change clothes. When he came out, he was wearing fatigue pants, a black sweat shirt like mine and a pair of Royal Robbins Double-R Klettershuhs. He had a holster suspended from a wide black-leather loop on his left shoulder. The holster had been especially made for a modified automatic with a silencer. He stood next to one of the beds, shoving his wallet, keys and change into his trouser pockets. I looked at him. I'd been right about his build. He looked strong as hell.

"What time is it?" he asked.

(continued on page 159)

B-Tower West Wall(continued from page 120)

"Ten-thirty," the redhead said. "You've got an hour and a half."

•

The façade lights went off at 12 and we were on the plaza roof at 12:10. McKim had taken the bottom half of the window unit out; I'd used the vanity to anchor our rappel. Once we were down, he blinked his penlight and Red hauled up the rope. When I thought about Chip alone in that room with one of the men who had killed Baker, I felt weak, as if someone had drained off half my blood.

It was dark and cold and I could feel the wind coming at me damp and salty as we hurried across the plaza roof. The roof surface was fixed gravel and what noise we made going across was lost in the noise of the late traffic on the city streets. The stream of headlights, the glitter and flare of restaurant signs, movie marquees and arc lamps all seemed a million miles away to me, like a promised land I'd only be able to dream about and never reach. Where I was was dark and cold and deadly with McKim just beside me, sure of himself because he knew I wouldn't do anything to risk my son's life.

"Get started," he told me when we got to the northwest corner of the Tower. I wondered how sure of himself he really was about this climb we were about to try. And I wondered, too, what they were after in that office on the 42nd floor. Something big. Something worth killing an innocent man for.

I uncoiled one of the ropes we had, tied one end around McKim's solid waist, the other around my own. He would carry the second coiled rope and the Bill Forrest pack, in which he'd put his tools. I showed him how he should follow me after I'd gone up one lead.

"Get started," he said. And I did.

I went up a rope's length, moving as quickly as I could. Sights had been right. The aluminum sills curved at the corner and gapped from the wall. I'd stand on one, reach half a foot over my head, loop a sling, hang a five-step web stirrup. Then I'd go up the stirrup, gripping the adjacent vertical mullions to steady myself. Once I was standing on the next higher sill, I'd reach down, retrieve the stirrup and repeat the process. It was awkward at first, but I got on to it quickly.

I ran the rope out, anchored myself and gave McKim a snug belay as he came up with his own stirrup and sling. I found it was easiest to stand sideways on the sill with my back to the wind that was blowing hard along the north wall of the Tower. I was already higher than we'd been in the hotel. I could see the lighted window of 418, but Red had drawn the drapes again and I couldn't see in. God help Chip, I thought, if anything goes wrong.

McKim came up. I could hear him grunting and cursing just below me in the dark. There were no stars visible, no moon. The light from the streets below bounced off a lowering overcast of cloud. Though they were just 300 feet away, I had trouble seeing the corners of the hotel, could not see the upper floors at all. If anyone on the street happened to glance up at the Bennington Tower, there was no chance he was going to see us, and just now I was glad of that.

"Far enough," I told McKim. "Tie yourself in. I'm going up."

We made the 42nd floor in five leads. McKim got slower on each one. During the fourth and fifth leads, he lost his grip on the mullions twice and fell back and I had to stop him with the rope. He was winded, silent and, I think, more scared than he'd figured on being. At the end of it, we were 600 feet above the plaza roof, shrouded in fog. The mullions and sills were cold and wet. The big panes of glass on the north wall creaked and popped in the wind.

"Christ," McKim croaked. He stood just below me. I could hear him, but I couldn't see him.

"Tie yourself in," I said. "Give me the extra rope and the chinning bar." When he did, I tied the chinning bar to the back of my waist loop, then made one end of the extra rope fast to the sill just above my head, draping the loose coils over my left shoulder. I told McKim how he should do the traverse. I took the penlight from him and told him I'd signal when I wanted him to start. He sounded as if he wanted to talk some more, but I didn't and I stepped very slowly and carefully from the corner into the first box on the west wall.

It was bad standing there: too close, too tight. I felt as if someone had put me in a coffin. I wanted to step back to get some breathing room, but all I had to stand on was that seven-inch sill. I kept my left arm high so the coils of the extra rope wouldn't spill off and I moved from the first box to the second. I had to squeegee water off the surface of the mullions before I could get a fair grip on them. My leather belaying gloves were soaked.

According to Sights's diagram, the window of the office they wanted was 30 boxes in from the corner of the 42nd floor. I counted each one as I stepped around, then rested a few seconds, then stepped around to the next. The weight of the chinning bar and the extra rope pulled like a hand behind me. Twice I pressed my face against the cold window glass and rested a full minute. My heart tripped in my chest. Sooner or later, I knew I'd have to make a move, for Chip's sake and my own, but I still couldn't think what it would be. The redhead and McKim weren't going to let us go, I was pretty sure of that. We'd seen them kill Baker and they hadn't told Sights anything about it nor explained to him why they'd brought Chip along. My guess was they'd be needing Sights again and that's why they were keeping his nose clean. I guessed they wouldn't be needing us again.

As I kept moving toward the center of the west wall, I heard sirens in South Boston, a long way off, and jets taking off and coming in at Logan, in spite of the fog. I wished Chip and I were on one of them, going to Puerto Rico, maybe, someplace in the sun.

When I was able to, I set the chinning bar high up between the mullions that framed the window they wanted. I couldn't see anything inside. I screwed the bar in as tightly as I could, yanked it a couple of times, then slowly let it take my weight until I was hanging from it. I weighed 190 and it held me solidly. I pulled all the slack out of the extra rope, tied it to the bar, stepped one box over and signaled for McKim to come ahead. Somehow he managed to spot that wink of light through the fog; I think he would have spotted it if I'd been three states away. He came quickly, wanting to get it over with, feeling safer with the fixed rope to clip to than I'd felt without it.

"Tie onto the bar," I told him when he reached it. "It's safe. You can hang from it, lean back, whatever you want."

He didn't answer, which was just as well, because at that moment I saw what I was going to do, all laid out like a color film on a small white screen in my brain.

McKim cut out the lower half of the outside panel of glass and taped it to the upper half. Then he cut out the lower half of the inside panel and dropped it onto the carpeted floor of the office. He did it fast and clean and told me to follow him in.

It was pitch-black inside and smelled of cleaning fluids. I could hear a soft whirring sound, as if the blower in a heating unit had come on. According to Sights's diagram of the suite, there were three rooms: the private office we were in, a larger reception area and a file room. McKim got a three-battery flash out of the pack and told me to follow him. We were still roped up. I coiled the slack as we went. He headed for the file room. Shadows cast by the beam of his light bobbed and shrank.

The files were color-coded and numbered. From what I could see, there were a lot of them: They covered three walls of the room from floor to ceiling. McKim moved the flash impatiently; it appeared that he knew exactly what he was looking for but couldn't find it. The cabinets were heavy-gauge steel and locked. The colors were pastel: yellow, orange, buff, green, blue. The numbers seemed to run in series: A/100, A/110, and so on. McKim swore. He was on his hands and knees now, moving slowly, checking the numbers on the bottom row.

"OK, I got it," he said finally. "Hold the fucking light."

I put the beam on the green-vinyl pack. He got out an aerosol can of silicone and a small leather packet of lock picks, which he unrolled on the carpeted floor. He blew a jet of silicone into the file lock, chose one of the picks and went to work. I couldn't see my watch, but I don't think it took him a minute and a half to open the drawer. It was blue and the number on it was N/100. It rolled out quietly. McKim reached in. I could see his thick wrists and stubby fingers moving over the legal-size folders, quickly at first, then slowing as he neared the back.

"OK, got it," he said, this time more to himself than to me. He pulled out what looked like a pocket-size ledger, and then two more.

"Give me some light," he said. I did. He sat on the carpet, looking at the ledgers. Each of them was bound in worn red leather with a gold Roman numeral embossed on the center of the front cover: I, II, III. The ledger sheets themselves were coded and filled with neat columns of figures. McKim grinned. I hadn't seen him do that before. I stood over him, the coils of rope in my left hand, the flash in my right. It was quiet in the room, as if the walls and floor and ceiling were all six feet thick, as if we were inside the main vault of a bank.

"Fucking Nancarrow," he said, looking up at me.

I nodded as though I didn't know what he was talking about, but I did and he knew I did.

"If you've got what we came for, let's get out of here," I told him.

"We just blew that son of a bitch away," he replied.

"OK, swell," I said. "My boy's waiting for me. I'd like to get back to him."

"Fuck you," McKim said. He started to get up. He was about halfway up when I kicked him. I kept the light on the left side of his face and kicked him just under the chin, the way I would have punted a football. I heard his teeth snap, heard him grunt, saw him bang up against the file cabinets, then sag to his knees. I was edgy as hell but mad, too. I came up next to him and swung the flash against the back of his neck. The light winked out. I heard him groan as he went down. In the pitch-darkness of the room. I found him, groped for the pistol in his shoulder holster. I thought he had to be damn near out, but suddenly he was boiling up under me, shoving his fist in my gut, locking his hands on my throat. I could hear him snarl, spit blood. I tried to pull his hands away but couldn't. When I began to black out, I found his pistol, with some difficulty pulled it out of the long holster, put the silencer against his heart, pulled the trigger once. It was a Beretta .380. It bucked a little. There was hardly any noise. I felt McKim slide away from me.

•

I could have picked up one of the office phones then and called the police. I could have told them about Baker and McKim and Sights and Nancarrow and the old man in the parking garage at my place who had probably fingered Baker while we were on our way up. I could have told them where the redhead was and how he was holding Chip as a hostage, could have let them be responsible for trying to get my son out safe, and maybe I should have, but I didn't.

I figured the way things had been going in this country for the past ten years, I'd most likely be the one they'd lock up and the redhead would go free or do short time and Chip would get killed or hurt bad when the cops raided the room. He was all I had, and if anything was going to happen to him, it was going to be my fault and not somebody else's.

I found the penlight and untied the rope that still connected me to McKim. I went through his pockets. He was carrying the hotel-room key, a small bottle of glycerin, a thick roll of aluminum-backed tape, the straight-stemmed cutter he'd used on the glass, his wallet and the packet of lock picks. I took everything except the wallet. I put the ledgers in the breast zipper pocket of my parka. I put on the shoulder holster with the pistol in place.

There were a toilet and a closet in the private office where we'd come in. There were some clothes in the closet, including a couple of sports jackets. I took one and tied it around my waist. It was 1:40 A.M. From here on, I knew I was going to have to move fast and be lucky. My heart was beating as if it were coming through my shirt. The office had got cold; I was having trouble catching my breath.

I backed out of the hole McKim had made in the window, reached up for the chinning bar, pulled myself up. I couldn't see anything and because I couldn't, I felt disoriented and I closed my eyes and thought about the Bennington Tower and how Sights had said there were over 6000 boxes on any given wall and how I was now on the west wall, 42 floors up, standing on a seven-inch sill that helped form one of those boxes. I thought how I was exactly 30 boxes from the northwest corner and how I had made the traverse safely once without protection and how, if I was careful, I could make it again.

I untied the fixed rope at this end, let it go. I loosened the chinning bar and tied it to my belt. Then I was stepping slowly from box to box again, counting each one as I went. The mullions were cold and slippery; it was all I could do to hang on to them. My hands and forearms ached. I'd stand face in, with my soles flat and heels hanging over the 600 feet of space between me and the plaza roof. Then I'd move around the vertical mullion that separated me from the next box. When I got to the corner, the wind was blowing hard. I could hear the north wall creak and pop as if it were about to let go. I knew skyscrapers swayed with the wind and wondered how much this one was swaying right now.

I put my hand behind the gap in the corner sill and leaned back. The fixed rope lashed at my left. I squinted up. The atmosphere was heavy with the brackish smell of the harbor. A hundred and fifty feet above me, I thought I could see where the restaurant lights brightened the overcast. I checked my watch. The place was due to close in five minutes. I prayed some people had just come in or were taking their time with a late snack, as I knew they often did.

I was going up there. I was going up past the restaurant, up the building cap to the roof. There I was going to find a 100-foot antenna and a maintenance door that led to a storage room off the kitchen. The blueprints Sights had gotten had laid it all out for me, had told me everything except whether or not I could reach the roof edge from the last of the corner sills and, if I could, whether or not the door on the roof would be unlocked.

Using the stirrup, I began to move up. It seemed to take forever. I had to tell myself over and over to take it easy and not make a stupid mistake that would get me killed and probably Chip also. The wind wanted to blow the stirrup away. I could hear it crack like a flag under me when I was standing in the higher steps. My eyes streamed tears. My gloves were soaked and stiff and my fingers were numb. There were no more planes. When I listened for street noises, all I could hear was the racket the curtain wall of the building was making, the same splitting and popping noises the frozen surface of a lake will make in the dead of winter.

Come on, move,I told myself. But I was lead-footed and slow. When I finally got level with the restaurant, I gambled that no one would be looking out because of the fog and mist that wrapped the building like a bandage, and I leaned around one of the mullions and looked in.

The lights were soft. Most, but not all, of the tables were empty. I saw Sadie rolling the beef cart back toward the kitchen. I'd always liked her. She had the same kind of figure my wife had had: lean, small-breasted, graceful. If she hadn't been 15 years younger than I was, I'd have asked her out. Faintly through the double sash I could hear the music they always piped in after the gal at the piano bar quit. I wanted to be in there. I wanted to be one of the people I saw, sitting at a table, eating, drinking. When I thought about it, I felt tired, as if I couldn't go on: and sad as hell, too. I don't know why, but that's the way I felt looking into that place.

I used the penlight to check my watch. It was 2:25.

I continued climbing up the corner until I reached the roof cap. It felt like smooth wet marble under my gloved hand. The sills and mullions ended here. I held on to the last of them. Fifty feet above my head, one of the antenna lights blinked off and on at two-second intervals, giving the overcast a slight red glow. The wind rushing past the north wall tugged at my parka sleeve and pants leg.

I untied the chinning bar from my belt, screwed it out as far as it would go and shoved it up through the gap in the last sill, then tied it off with the same sling I hung the stirrup from. Then I began to go up, using the chinning bar to steady myself the same way I had used the vertical mullions before they'd run out. I balanced up on the balls of my feet, one step at a time. The stirrup wobbled under me. The wind wanted to push me back. I kept my face in the lee of the west wall, my cheek pressed against the roof cap. The chinning bar extended waist high beyond the last sill and I hung on to it and hoped to God it wasn't going to pop out on me or slip back through the gap.

According to Sights's blueprints, the roof was recessed to drain toward its center. A masonry lip four inches high and four inches thick kept any build-up of rain water from spilling over. When I finally stood gingerly on the last sill, I let go of the bar and reached up arm's length and felt with my finger tips the edge of the masonry lip. I didn't want to commit myself but knew if I was going to, I'd have to do it quickly.

I stepped up on my toes, stretched and reached until I had the lip with both hands, and I began to pull myself up. I kicked the wall with my feet, felt my forearms knot up and cramp, felt the strength begin to go out of them, knew in an instant I'd never make it. I pulled with everything I had left, wondered if the masonry was strong enough or whether it would suddenly break off in my hands and I would fall back and down all the way to the plaza roof. I cursed myself for not having rigged up some kind of protection. I closed my eyes and pulled and kicked, and just before I would have given it up, I found the chinning bar with my right foot, pushed down on it, pulled myself up and over.

For a few seconds, as I lay on the roof trying to get my wind, I had the same good feeling I'd always had whenever I'd worked hard to get to the top of something. Then, in the red glow from the antenna lights, I hurried across the roof to the raised steel hood where the maintenance door was set and I tried the door and it was locked.

Everything came down on me then, everything that had happened since McKim and his friend had killed Baker and taken Chip and me away. I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash something flat. I wanted to find the jerk-off who'd put a lock in a door like this and tie a knot in his nuts. When I tried to pick the lock with one of McKim's tools, my hands shook so badly I dropped the tool, and then all I could see was a lot of bright red with the image I had of those two pistols with silencers and Baker falling back and I took the handle of the door in both hands and began to turn it and kept turning until I heard something give and then the door was open.

A short flight of steel steps led to the storage closet. I used the penlight and went down. I could hear people talking in the kitchen. I got out of my parka and into the sports jacket I'd brought. I wouldn't look any too good, but neither did a lot of folks these days. I transferred the ledgers from the parka to my combat trousers. Then I went to the closet door, which was not locked, and I opened it a crack.

I could smell frying grease and some kind of cleanser. It was hot. Three men in white aprons and hats stood along a stainless-steel counter. They weren't looking my way. I stepped into the kitchen and was almost to the restaurant door before one of them called to me.

"Hey, no customers back here," he said.

"Sorry," I told him. "I took the wrong door. I wanted the head."

He told me where it was, but I already knew. I checked to be sure Sadie wasn't anywhere close by and then walked through the restaurant. At one of the tables I passed, a college kid in Levis and a turtleneck sweater was finishing a beef sandwich and a bottle of Bass Ale. Come as you are. That's how it was these days. For once, I was glad.

The maître de smiled at me when I walked by his station, but he was busy sorting receipts and didn't recognize me. There were a half-dozen people waiting in the lobby for the high-speed elevator. I waited with them, wondering what they'd say if they knew there was a dead man in an office on the 42nd floor and I was the one who had killed him, or what they'd say if they knew how I'd gotten in here and where I was going now and what I intended to do when I got there. Then I tried not to think about it or about anything else.

The elevator arrived at last. Nobody got off. The seven of us got on. We faced front. It took 30 seconds to go from the 52nd floor to the main lobby.

The place was crawling with Pinkertons. I stayed with the group until I was in that section of the plaza that joined the Bennington Tower with the Carlyle Hotel. Then I broke off and headed for the hotel door. It was a revolving door and I was about to go through it when a Pinkerton stopped me and wanted to know if I were a guest. I told him I was and showed him McKim's key and he waved me on.

The hotel lobby was empty. I went up to the desk clerk and asked him to hold the ledgers for me, not to mention them to anyone else, not to give them to anyone else except the police if I didn't pick them up in an hour. He looked nervous and asked me my name and room number and I took a chance and told him McKim, 418, and he said OK and put the ledgers into his safe.

I took an elevator to the fourth floor and went down the long corridor again. It seemed like I'd gone a mile before I was finally standing just outside the room. My legs were shaking. The corridor was empty and silent, but I could hear the sound of the TV, muffled by the door. I wondered whether Chip was still in the chair where he'd been when I last saw him or whether he'd gotten sleepy and the redhead had let him bag it on the bed. I tried the key. It went halfway into the lock, then hung up on something. I eased it back out, dipped it into McKim's bottle of glycerin, tried it again. This time it went all the way in without a sound.

I wondered if the chain lock were on. McKim hadn't used it, but I didn't know about the redhead. I took the pistol out of the holster, held it in my right hand with the silencer alongside my cheek. Then, with my left hand, I turned the doorknob as slowly as I could and began to open the door. I'd figured the redhead would be watching TV or looking out the window. I hadn't figured he'd be sitting on the vanity, looking at me as I opened the door, but he was. His wash-blue eyes widened until his eyebrows were lost somewhere behind his bangs. I don't know if he was going for his gun when I shot him. I didn't give a damn. I put a bullet in his chest and watched him sit up a little straighter and then pitch toward the floor.

"Dad!" Chip shouted. He'd been lying on his back on one of the queen-size beds and he came to me and put his arms around me and he was safe and alive and if anything in my life has ever made me happier than that, I don't know what it was.

"Take it easy," I said. "We've got some things to do."

•

I picked up the ledgers at the desk and we left the hotel. According to the newspapers I'd read, Joseph Nancarrow had been an accountant for the New England Syndicate for 12 years. A month ago, he'd made a deal with the prosecutors, had bought himself immunity in exchange for the financial records McKim and the redhead had gone to so much trouble to steal. It's that kind of world. No use pretending it isn't. I had the ledgers now and I got in touch with the prosecutors and made a deal of my own: a new life for me and for Chip.

My name used to be Hank Gage. It's not Hank Gage anymore. I used to be a manufacturer's rep. I'm not that anymore, either. No chances. No loose ends. That's the only way to fly. I still climb, though. Today Chip and I are going to drive to the high country and do a 1000-foot headwall. It'll take two days. Tonight we'll be snug in our hammocks, hanging from pitons a long way up. The wind will blow clean through the high trees. Before we fall asleep, we'll think about the woman who was my wife, each in our own way and without saying anything. At dawn we'll hear the coyotes bark.

Hey, look, I'm glad I told you about it. Whatever you read in the papers was bull. This is how it happened, just this way. I didn't leave anything out. My son wanted it straight. Oh, yeah. In case you're wondering, he's a little older now. I don't call him Chip anymore.