House on Fire

22

Maggie and I looked at each other. We couldn’t really see each other’s eyes, but we both knew what to do. We immediately dropped to the floor, scuttled across the carpet, and squatted down behind the biggest pieces of furniture we could find — the bulky Chesterfield armchairs — flattening ourselves on the floor. Staying out of sight lines in case someone entered the study.

Breathing slowly, I calmed myself and waited for the study door to open.

Conrad Kimball was a light sleeper. Maybe he was a night owl. If he entered the room and switched on the lights, we were both well and truly screwed.

Maybe he was looking for something. Maybe he forgot something.

Maybe Maggie’s intel was bad and a pressure-sensitive silent alarm under the Aubusson had alerted him.

Breathing through my nostrils, I once again managed to steady my pulse. I waited to be discovered.

After all, I was staging a break-in from within the target’s house. The target being a highly suspicious man. Who had at least three outsiders as houseguests: Maggie, me, and Paul’s brilliant Moroccan girlfriend.

I found myself staring at the carpet, at the wooden baseboard. Once my eyes had acclimated to the dark, I could see an odd, misplaced seam in the polished cherrywood baseboard molding. I shone the flashlight on it, pulsed it on and off, and confirmed that there was a vertical seam where — given the high-end craftsmanship that went into building this house, the uninterrupted length of the boards — there shouldn’t be.

A repair? Possibly, but not likely.

So while I listened for the door to open, I crawled across the carpet on my hands and knees and drew closer to the errant seam. I felt it, touched the baseboard, hoping for something like a spring-loaded touch-latch that would open some hidden compartment in the bookcase. I was thinking of a kick panel that might unlock a hidden door. But nothing clicked or moved. I looked more closely, searching for telltale traces of dust that might indicate an air leak from an adjoining room, due to temperature differentials or pressure changes. But I saw none.

I waited for a few more seconds, perfectly still. The door to the study didn’t open.

No one walked in or walked by.

A false alarm. A servant using the bathroom, maybe. No one was coming.

I caught Maggie’s eye and decided to stand. I saw nobody. I thought about the blueprints of the study I’d examined. I distinctly remembered seeing a large closet in the plans, but there didn’t appear to be one here anymore.

So I took out a tiny infrared thermal camera and attached it to my cell phone. I focused on the bookshelves and saw a spill of blue at the baseboard molding, about two or three feet wide.

The blue indicated cold air.

That told me that behind the wall of books was an unheated space; the closet that used to be here had been walled over.

Or converted into a safe room but covered with a bookcase to conceal its entrance. I began testing each shelf, pressing here and there, looking for a spring latch. Maggie got to her feet, saw what I was doing, and started testing the risers, the vertical boards that comprised the bookcases, while I tested the horizontal boards. But nothing clicked. Nothing moved.

Maybe you had to pull a certain book. I’d seen that trick before. Mostly in movies, but occasionally in real life, inspired by the movies. But nothing popped open.

Until Maggie touched the edge of a lower shelf a few inches off the ground and something gave way. A thud, and then a section of shelves jutted open. The shelves were bolted to a metal door. I grasped the edge of the heavy door — heavy because of all the books, plus it was steel — and pulled it open.

The safe room.

Lined with filing cabinets.

She smiled at me. “We’re in,” she said.