House on Fire

70

The room was dark and quiet.

I stood listening for a moment. I heard no one in the suite, just the breeze from outside, some distant music from down the beach. The slight hum of the honor-bar refrigerator. I pulled the glass doors closed, and it got even quieter. Most of this room was taken up by a coffin-shaped conference table. Would Conrad sit in here? Or elsewhere in the suite? I had to assume this room was one possibility. I had enough devices.

Walking around the room, I selected the device I wanted to plant on the ceiling above the conference table. It looked like a smoke detector, but it contained a GSM bug. So as soon as it detected sound, it recorded and stored it, compressed it, and then sent it out in a burst every thirty minutes. I climbed onto the conference table, squeezed a little Superglue, and the thing stuck firmly to the ceiling, right above the head of the table. Underneath the table I plugged in a power strip that also contained a GSM bug. The strip looked like it belonged there.

I paused, listened again. Conrad was downstairs at dinner. Was there anyone here? Did he travel alone, or had Natalya accompanied him? What if she was asleep in the master bedroom? Was there security inside the suite as well as out?

I had no idea what to expect: I saw only the deep darkness of a hotel suite. I switched on my little Maglite and ventured farther down the corridor and came upon a living room with a large TV. This looked like a comfortable place to have a conversation. Another spot where Conrad might confer, either on the phone or in person. Here I planted two devices, the fake smoke detector on the ceiling and an electrical plug converter, a white cube, the kind you see in Europe. This too had a SIM card inside, was powered by the electrical current it was connected to, and worked the same way as the fake smoke detector: triggered by ambient sound, it would start recording and would send compressed sound files every half hour. I plugged that in between the lamp plug and the wall outlet. It was unobtrusive and looked like it belonged there, even though the lamp plug, of course, didn’t actually need a converter.

When I was finished, I switched off my flashlight, stopped, and listened. I heard a cart pass by in the outside hallway, and I froze.

I waited, listening.

Then a doorbell chimed, a knock at the door and a voice: “Housekeeping!”

She was here for turndown service, which meant turning down the bed linen and preparing the bed, maybe leaving a chocolate on the pillow. I almost called out, “Not now, please,” until I realized that the security guard outside the room would take notice that someone was inside a suite that was supposed to be unoccupied. And that would not be good.

But the door she was knocking on was thirty feet from where I was standing, and she was about to open it.

Noiselessly, I raced across the carpet out of the room, down the hall, toward the conference room that opened onto the balcony. I pulled closed the drapes, then slid open the glass doors behind them and slipped out to the balcony, closing the door behind me.

I looked out, looked down and to either side. I didn’t see anyone out there. Not yet. Nobody had seen me climbing up the rope from the second floor. Probably no one would see me climb down the same rope. Kimball Pharma had taken over the hotel, and nearly everyone associated with the company was downstairs at dinner.

The problem was that I couldn’t leave the ropes and titanium anchor and carabiners in place once I returned to Megan’s balcony. If I did, they’d be spotted by hotel security and/or management at some point in the night. In the morning light, for sure. That would raise questions about the security in the presidential suite. It would send up an alarm. And rappelling down, using the rope, necessarily meant leaving the rig in place. So I had to take the rope with me, in the backpack, and climb down some other way.

The ground floor of the hotel had high ceilings, so I estimated the height at three stories to be around forty-five feet. Directly below was hard stone. Would I survive if I jumped? Probably, if I rolled right. But I’d probably also break some bones. Which I preferred not to do.

I unfastened the anchor from the railing and put it with the rope and all the other gear into my backpack. Then, grasping the steel pipe, I swung my legs up and over. Climbing down the railing, my feet dangling, I swung my feet around and then touched down on the steel rail of the floor below. Megan’s balcony. I gripped the bottom rung of the third-floor railing as I swung my feet again, torqueing in toward the glass doors, and then I let go, landed on the second-floor balcony.

The drapes were drawn — I’d drawn them myself — and I could see that the lights in the room were on.

I’d left them off.

Someone was in Megan’s suite. Turndown service? Or was it Megan herself?

For at least the time being, I was trapped outside. I went over to the sliding doors and gently, slowly, tried to pull them open.

They were locked. I definitely hadn’t done that. Either the housekeeper had done it or Megan had returned early from dinner again because the Lactaid hadn’t done the trick, and for some reason she had locked the balcony doors. And now I was definitely stuck here.

I’d known this was a possibility, so I’d thought it through, the worst-case scenario.

I looked out the balcony, eyeballed the drop at fifteen to twenty feet. Onto hard stone. Maybe fifteen feet from the bottom of the second-floor balcony. Definitely doable. To parkour champions, this was nothing.

I didn’t have time to overthink it. I swung my legs outside the railing, grabbed the top rung, then dropped rung by rung until my feet were dangling in the air — and then I let go. Spun and crouched and dropped, landing, hard.

I sprang to my feet, wincing a bit. I did a survey: legs okay, knees relatively okay.

A minute later, I pulled out a mobile phone and called Dr. Zubiri.

“Ready,” I said.