Dance Of Death

FIFTY-ONE

For perhaps the fiftieth time in the last two days, Larry En derby had made up his mind to quit, get the hell out of the museum.

It wasn't enough that he worked in a windowless basement room in the Museum of Natural History, the spookiest damn place in all of New York City. He couldn't get the horror of what he'd found two days ago out of his head. They hadn't even given him a frigging day off, offered him counseling, or even thanked him. It was like he didn't count. It was like she didn't count, the way they just moved right ahead with the exhibition as if nothing had happened.

Margo Green. He didn't know her well, but she'd gone out of her way to be nice to him the few times they'd met. Which was more than he could say for most of the curators and all the administrators. It was just the way the museum treated everybody below a certain level: hired help.

But, if he could admit it to himself, Enderby was mainly disgruntled because the museum had chosen this exact time-during the biggest party in five years-to switch over yet another museum hall to the new security system. So, instead of scarfing down caviar and champagne with the beautiful people two flights up, they were down there in the basement once again, toiling over software subroutines.

Sure, they'd been invited to the party, like everyone else in the museum. That just added insult to injury.

He rolled back from the computer console with an exaggerated sigh.

"Holding up?" Walt Smith, project manager for the museum's security upgrade, asked from behind a nearby monitoring screen.

Smitty had been unusually gentle since Enderby's discovery, two days before. Everyone was tiptoeing around him, like somebody had died in his family.

"How about a short break to check out the party?" Enderby asked him. "I wouldn't mind a few of those cocktail shrimp."

Smitty shook his head. He held a BlackBerry in one hand and a cell phone in the other. "I don't think that's going to be possible, Larry. Sorry."

"Come on, Smitty," Jim Choi, the software engineer, said from the far side of the diagnostic display unit. "Just give us half an hour. You'd be surprised how many shrimp I can ingest in half an hour. The party's almost over, they'll run out of food soon."

"You know we can't alter the schedule. The Astor Hall's just like any other, one more on the list. What, we're going to sneak the hands of the atomic clock back five minutes, maybe nobody will notice?" Smitty laughed at his own miserable joke.

Choi rolled his eyes. Smitty was not known for his rapier-like wit.

Enderby watched the goatee on Smith's chin waggle up and down as he laughed. It was a straggly little thing, seemingly attached by only a few hairs, and Enderby half hoped it might fall off one of these days. Despite Enderby's general irritation, he had to admit Smitty wasn't a bad guy to work for. He'd worked his way up through the ranks and, despite being only thirty-five, was as Old Museum as they came. A real stickler, relatively humorless, but as long as you were a conscientious worker and did your job, he looked out for you. It wasn't Smitty's fault the museum bigwigs were demanding that the new security system be fully installed and operational, yesterday.

Smitty stood up and walked across the room, past racks of computer workstations and servers, to a bank of six dozen small CCTV monitors mounted in the far wall. Most of the monitors showed black-and-white still lifes of empty museum hallways and display cases. Half a dozen in the lower right corner, however-the video feeds from the Hall of the Heavens, where the opening party was going on-were a riot of movement. From his terminal, Enderby watched the little images dance and jitter their way across the screen with a heavy heart. Upstairs, the museum's slope-shouldered, mouth-breathing curators were rubbing elbows with starlets and nymphets; and here he was, toiling in this cave like some troglodyte. True, it could be worse-he could be working in the "Pit," the museum's Central Security Office, which was twice as large but unpleasantly hot and crammed full of even more screens and keyboards than this Advanced Technology Center. Worse, but not much worse.

Smitty was squinting at his BlackBerry. "Okay, set to initialize the final test?"

Nobody replied.

"I'll take that as a yes." He turned back to his console, tapped briefly on the keyboard. "Astor Hall," he intoned, "final fail-safe test of the security upgrade, January 28, 8:28 p.m."

Jeez, he always makes it sound like it's Mission Control in here, Enderby thought. He glanced over at Jim Choi, who once again rolled his eyes.

"Larry, what's the status of the legacy system?" Smitty asked.

"Looks good."

"Jim, give me an update on the laser grid in the Astor Hall."

A brief tapping of keys. "Ready to go," Choi said.

"Then let's run the low-level diagnostics."

There was a brief silence as both Smitty and Choi ran independent tests. Enderby, whose job was to monitor the behavior of the preexisting security system as the updated laser security system was brought online, stared at his monitor. This was probably the fortieth hall they'd converted to the new system. And for each conversion, there were a hundred steps to perform: on-site analysis, system architecture, coding, installation… He could be making three times his salary in some slick start-up in Palo Alto, with stock options to boot. And he probably wouldn't stumble over any bodies in the middle of the night, either.

Smitty looked up from his keyboard. "Jim, what's your checksum?"

"It's 780E4F3 hex."

"I concur. Let's proceed." Smitty picked up a phone, dialed.

Enderby watched without interest. He knew Smitty was calling the boys in the Pit, giving them a heads-up that the switchover was about to happen, just a reminder in case some newbie went apeshit when he saw the hiccup on their screens. It was always the same. The old system would be disabled; there would be a ninety-second period in which the new system was initialized and the "handshake" performed; then a final twenty-minute test of the new system would follow, to ensure the installation was correct and that it had been brought online successfully. Twenty minutes in which they had nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs. Then, at last, the new system would become fully operational and the old system put in backup mode. He fetched a huge yawn. As he did so, his stomach grumbled unhappily.

"Central Security?" Smitty was saying into the phone. "Who is this, Carlos? Hey, it's Walt Smith in ATC. We're activating the lasers in the Astor Hall. We'll be initializing in about five minutes. Right. I'll call back once the handshake's complete."

He put the phone down, then looked back at Enderby. "Hey, Larry," he said gently.

"What?"

"Just how much time did Choi there say he needed to consume that trawler-load of shrimp?"

"I told you," Choi piped up. "Thirty minutes."

Smitty leaned forward, resting his arm on the console. "Tell you what. If we can get this initialization done and the twenty-minute test phase started, I'll give you fifteen. Including the time it'll take us to get there and back again."

Enderby sat up. "On the level?"

Smitty nodded.

Choi grinned widely. "You just purchased yourself a boy."

"Good. Then let's see how fast we can get through this checklist." And Smitty turned back to his terminal.