Carmellini moved like a shadow, making no detectable noise. Chance seemed to be making enough noise for both of them. He could hear himself breathing and his heart pounding, could hear the echoes of his footfalls in the cavernous hallways.
Keeping near the wall, they climbed the stairs to the second floor. Carmellini moved slowly, steadily, listened carefully before turning every corner, then lowered his head, keeping it well below the place one would naturally look for it, and peeped around the corner. Then he slithered around the corner out of sight; Chance followed as silently as he could.
The top of the staircase put them out on the fourth floor of the building. There had to be another staircase, probably very narrow, leading to the roof: Where might it be?
Carmellini was ready to go explore when he suddenly held up his hand. He held a finger to his lips.
Chance listened with all the concentration he could muster.
He could hear something! Voices?
Carmellini slowly inched along the hallway toward an open door, then froze there.
He came back down the hallway to Chance, put his lips against Chance’s ear. “A couple of kids making love.”
The silenced Ruger felt heavy in Chance’s hand.
“Gonna kill ’em?”
Not shooting them was a risk, sure.
Chance listened carefully. The lovers were whispering. No other sounds.
“Find the stairs up.”
The stairs were at the end of a hall, behind a locked door. Carmellini worked on the lock in the darkness for almost a minute before he pulled the door open.
They closed the door behind them and climbed the totally dark staircase, feeling their way. They ended up in a stuffy, black attic. Chance used the flashlight. Furniture, desks, chairs, stacked everywhere. In the middle of the attic was another stairway up.
The door to the roof was also locked, this time with a padlock, which was on the interior side of the door.
“What if there is a padlock on the other side?” Chance asked.
“Then we’re screwed. Unless you want to kick this thing down.”
“No.”
“Let’s try to get this lock open, then the door.”
“Okay.”
The lock was rusty, corroded. After several minutes’ effort Carmellini admitted his defeat and used a wire saw to cut through the metal loop of the lock. That took two minutes of intense effort but didn’t make much noise, considering.
With the lock off and hasp pulled back, they pushed at the door. It refused to open. With both men heaving, the door slowly opened with great resistance, and groaned terribly.
“That’ll wake the dead,” Chance muttered, and wiped the sweat from his face as Carmellini slipped out onto the roof.
Chance followed along.
The metal roof sloped away steeply in several different planes. Moving on hands and knees they worked themselves over toward the edge that faced the science building.
“Let me do this,” Carmellini whispered, and extracted the rope from his backpack. “Get out of the way, up by the door.”
Chance went.
The glare of the city and the streetlights below illuminated the roof quite well, too well in fact. While it was easy to see where to walk, anyone below who bothered to look could probably see the black shapes silhouetted against the glare of the sky.
Chance huddled against the dormer that formed the staircase up from the attic. He watched Carmellini on the edge of the roof, shaking out the rope, checking the grappling hook. Now he began to twirl the hook above his head, letting out more and more line to make the hook swing an ever-larger circle. Just as it seemed the circle was impossibly wide, he cast the line and hook across the chasm separating the buildings at a metal vent sticking up out of the roof.
The hook made an audible metallic sound as it hit the far roof, then it began sliding off.
Carmellini quickly pulled in line in huge coils, but too late to stop the grappling hook from sliding off the roof.
He kept pulling on the line. In seconds he had the hook in his hand and bent down against the roof.
Someone was down below. Even back here Chance could hear voices. He scanned the surrounding roofs, the streets that he could see, the blank windows looking at him from other buildings.
Minutes ticked by, the voices below faded.
Now Carmellini was standing, swinging the rope and hook, now casting it … and it caught! He tugged at it, worked his way back up the roof to where Chance was kneeling.
Carmellini put the end of the rope around the dormer, pulled it as taut as possible, then tied it off.
“Well, there is our way across,” the younger man said. “You want to go first, or should I?”
“Anchored solid, is it?”
“You bet.”
“Age before beauty,” Chance said, and tugged on leather gloves, wrapped his hands around the rope. He worked out hand over hand, then draped his lower legs over the rope. His backpack dangled from his shoulders.
Hanging from the rope like this took a surprising amount of physical strength. The rope sagged dangerously with his weight, becoming a vee with him at the bottom, which made it more difficult to move along it.
Gritting his teeth, trying to keep his breathing even, William Henry Chance worked his way along the rope, taking care not to look down. At one point he knew he was over the chasm but it didn’t matter: if he slipped off the rope the fall would kill him, whether he hit the roof and slid off or missed it clean.
He kept going, doggedly, straining every muscle, until he felt the bag dragging along the roof of the science building. Only then did he unhook his legs from the rope and let them down to the roof. Still pulling on the rope, he heaved himself up by the vent and grabbed it.
The grappling hook was holding by one tong. He wrapped the rope around the vent and set the hook, then tugged several times to make sure it would hold.
Wiping his forehead, he breathed heavily three or four times. He had one hand on the rope, so he felt the tension increase with Carmellini’s weight. He peered at the other building. Carmellini came scurrying along the rope like a goddamn chimpanzee.
The younger man was over the gap between the buildings when the rope broke, apparently where it was anchored atop the lecture hall. Carmellini’s body fell downward in an arc and disappeared from view. An audible thud reached Chance as Carmellini’s body smacked against the side of the science building.
“Our Lady of Colón was under this storm system, out of sight of the satellites passing over, for six hours,” Toad Tarkington explained to Jake Grafton. They were bent over a table in Mission Planning, studying satellite radar images. “When next it reappeared, it was steaming for Bahia de Nipe at twelve knots, yet its average speed of advance while it was out of sight was two knots.”
“Two?”
“Two.” Toad showed him the positions and measurements.
“So it was stopped somewhere.”
“Or made a detour.”
“What if the ship rendezvoused with another ship and the warheads were transferred?”
“Possible, but if you look at these other ship tracks, it doesn’t seem very likely. All these other tracks were going somewhere, with speed-of-advance averages that seem plausible.”
“Okay. What if the ship stopped and the crew dumped some of the weapons in the water? Maybe all of them. Dumped them in shallow water for someone to pick up later. How deep is the water in that area?”
“That area is the Bahamas, Admiral. Pretty shallow in a lot of places in there.”
“Have NSA put that area under intense surveillance. Have them study every satellite image since that storm passed. If those warheads were dumped overboard from the Colón, someone is going to come along to pick them up. We have to get there before that somebody gets them aboard.”