Cold Vengeance

CHAPTER 79

New York City

CORRIE HAD SPENT THE FIRST PART OF THE EVENING helping her new friend clean the place and cook a tray of lasagna — while keeping an eye on the building next door. Maggie had left at eight PM to work at the jazz club, and she wouldn’t be home until two in the morning.

Now it was almost midnight and Corrie was finishing her third cup of coffee in the tiny Pullman kitchen while contemplating her kit. She had read, then re-read, her tattered copy of the underground classic MIT Guide to Lock Picking, but she feared that the new locks on the house might be of the kind that had serrated drivers, almost impossible to pick.

And then there was that lead alarm tape she’d noticed. It meant that even if she picked the lock, opening the door would generate an alarm. Opening or breaking a window would do the same. On top of that, despite the appearance of advanced decrepitude, there might be motion detectors and laser alarms scattered throughout the place. Or maybe not. No way to know until she was inside.

… Inside? Was she really going to do this? Before, all she’d been considering was an external recon. Somehow, over the course of the evening, her plans had unconsciously changed. Why? She had made a promise to Pendergast to stay out of things — but at the same time, she had a deep, instinctual feeling that he was unaware of the full scope of the danger facing him. Did he know of what these drug dealers had done to Betterton and that Brodie couple? These were bad, bad guys.

And as for herself — she was no fool. She would do nothing whatsoever to endanger herself. The house at 428 East End Avenue gave every impression of being deserted — there were no lights on inside at all. She’d been watching the place all day: nobody had come or gone.

She was not going to step over the line of her promise to Pendergast. She wasn’t going to tangle with drug smugglers. All she would do was get her ass in the house, look around for a couple of minutes, and go. At the first sign of trouble, no matter how small, she’d get the hell out. If she found anything of value, she’d take it to that pumped-up chauffeur Proctor and he could pass it on to Pendergast.

She glanced at her watch: midnight. No point waiting any longer. She folded up the lock picks and tucked them in her knapsack, along with the other gear: a small portable drill with bit-sets for glass, wood, and masonry, a glass cutter, suction cups, a set of wires, wire strippers and tools, dental mirrors and picks, a couple of small LED lights, a stocking for her face in case there were video cameras, gloves, Mace, lock oil, rags, duct tape, and spray paint — and two cell phones, one hidden in her boot.

She felt a certain mounting excitement. This was going to be fun. Back in Medicine Creek, she’d often performed break-ins like this — and it was probably a good idea to keep her hand in, not let herself grow stale. She wondered if she was really cut out for a career in law enforcement or if she shouldn’t think about becoming a criminal instead… Then again, many people in law enforcement did have a sort of perverse attraction to criminality. Pendergast, for one.

She exited the kitchen onto the tiny back patio, which was surrounded on all sides by an eight-foot brick wall. The garden was overgrown, and several pieces of cast-iron lawn furniture were arranged around the patio. The lights of the surrounding rear windows cast enough illumination for her to see while sheltering her from prying eyes.

Selecting the darkest section of brick wall abutting 428, she placed a piece of lawn furniture against it, climbed onto it, then pulled herself over the wall and slipped into the backyard of the abandoned house. It was completely overgrown with ailanthus trees and sumac: even more perfect cover. She pulled a rickety old table over to the wall she’d just scaled, then moved ever so slowly through the overgrowth toward the back of the house. Absolutely no lights or signs of activity within.

The patio door was of metal and sported a relatively new lock. She crept forward, knelt, and opened her lock-pick set, selecting a tool. She inserted the pick and bounced it off the tumblers, rapidly establishing that this would be a very difficult lock to pick. Not for Pendergast, perhaps, but certainly for her.

Better look for an alternative.

Creeping along the back of the house, she spied some low basement windows in sunken wells along the rear wall. She knelt and shone a light into the closest one. It was filthy, almost opaque, and she reached down with a rag and began wiping it. Gradually she cleaned it well enough to see through, and saw that metal alarm tape had also been placed on this window.

Now, this was something she could work with. Taking out the cordless drill, she fitted a 0.5mm diamond tip to the end and fired it up, drilling two holes through the glass, one through the upper foil tape near the junction, and one through the lower foil tape, making sure not to sever the tape and therefore break the circuit. She stripped a copper wire and threaded it through both holes, using a fine dental pick to attach it to the foil on the inside, thus maintaining a complete circuit and, in essence, deactivating the alarm for the rest of the window.

Then, once again using the drill, she made a number of holes in the glass, outlining an opening large enough for her to slip through. Next, she scored a line on the glass with the glass cutter, connecting all the holes with one another. Affixing the suction cup, she rapped sharply on the glass; it broke neatly along the line. She removed the piece and set it aside. Although the lead foil was torn along the cut, it didn’t matter: thanks to the copper wire, the circuit remained live.

She stepped back, glanced around at the surrounding buildings. Nobody had seen or heard her; nobody was taking any notice. She looked up at the structure before her. It remained dark and silent as the grave.

She returned her attention to the window. Wary of a motion sensor, she aimed a flashlight through it, but could see very little save filing cabinets and stacks of books. The lead tape was a rudimentary alarm system, and she suspected that whatever existed in the interior — if anything — might be as lame. Using a dental mirror, she was able to direct the flashlight beam into all corners of the room, and spotted nothing resembling a motion detector, infrared or laser trip alarms.

She stuck her arm in and waved it around, ready to run at the first sign of a red light coming on somewhere in the darkness.

Nothing.

Okay, then. She turned around, stuck her feet through the hole, carefully worked her way in, dropped to the floor, then pulled her knapsack in behind her.

Again she waited in the dark, motionless, looking for any blinking lights, any indication of a security system. All was quiet.

She pulled a chair from one corner and placed it below the window, in case she needed to make a quick escape. Then she glanced around. There was just enough moonlight to make out the contents of the room: as she had noticed from outside, it seemed to be primarily a storage area, full of metal cabinets, yellowing paper files, and piles of books.

She moved toward the first pile of books and lifted the grimy plastic cover. It exposed a stack of old, identical, buckram-bound hardcovers, each one sporting a large black swastika in a white circle, surrounded by a field of red.

The book was Mein Kampf, and the author was Adolf Hitler.