There was no further response from Liza. There was a new look in Silver’s eyes: a haunted look.
Silver reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone, dialed a number. “Edwin?” he said. “Edwin, it’s Richard.” Then he held the cell phone away from his ear so both Tara and Lash could hear the response.
“Yes, Dr. Silver,” came Mauchly’s tinny voice.
“Where are you currently?”
“We’ve just penetrated the interstructural barrier.”
“Hold your position. Don’t proceed any farther until you get instructions from me.”
“Could you repeat that, Dr. Silver?”
“I said, hold your position. Do not attempt to enter the penthouse.” This time, Silver kept the phone to his ear. “Everything’s fine. Yes, Edwin, just fine. I’ll get back to you soon.”
But Silver did not look fine as he replaced the phone in his pocket. “Christopher. It’s vital that we talk, and talk now.”
Lash hesitated just one more moment. Then he swung his legs off the chair, plucked the leads from his forehead, and exited the chamber.
FIFTY-FIVE
Mauchly looked down at his cell phone a moment, as if doubting it was working properly. Then he returned it to his lips. “Could you repeat that, Dr. Silver?”
“I said, hold your position. Do not attempt to enter the penthouse.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes, Edwin, just fine. I’ll get back to you soon.” And with a chirrup, the phone went silent.
Mauchly gave it another long stare.
Even through the distortion, there’d been no doubt the voice was Silver’s. There was an unusual undercurrent to it Mauchly did not recall hearing before, and he wondered if Lash was threatening him, if he was being held hostage in his own penthouse. Yet the voice hadn’t sounded frightened. If Mauchly detected anything, he detected great weariness.
“That was Silver?” Sheldrake shouted from below.
“Yes.”
“And his orders?”
“Not to enter the penthouse. Hold our position.”
“You kidding?”
“No.”
There was a brief silence. “Well, if we’re to hold our position, could we hold it somewhere more comfortable? I’m feeling like a circus gymnast here.”
Mauchly glanced down. It seemed a reasonable request.
For the last fifteen minutes, they had been waiting at the top of a long metal ladder that climbed the inside wall of Eden’s inner tower, just below the roof. Waiting while a security tech — a sleepy-eyed, tousle-headed youth named Dorfman — tried to outsmart the access mechanism of the barrier to Silver’s penthouse. It had been a long fifteen minutes, made longer by the hard metal rungs of the ladder and the constant noise of the huge power plant arrayed across the cavernous space below them: the generators and transformers that supplied electricity to the hungry tower. Despite the full resources of the security staff, Dorfman had had a difficult time.
Perhaps Stapleton could have made a quicker job of it. Had she wanted to…
But Mauchly would not allow himself to ponder the problem of Tara Stapleton any further. Instead, he made a mental note to reevaluate penthouse security at the earliest possible opportunity.
Clearly, he’d allowed Silver’s passion for privacy to be carried beyond reasonable extremes. The last fifteen minutes had been proof of that. It was an indulgence, a dangerous indulgence. The battering ram had failed — as expected — but high-tech methods had also proven alarmingly slow. What if Silver should fall suddenly ill and be unable to help himself? If the elevator were to malfunction, precious minutes would be lost reaching him. Silver was simply too valuable an asset of the company to be put at risk, and Mauchly himself would tell him so. Silver was a reasonable man; he would understand.
Now, Mauchly looked up the ladder. It disappeared into a hatch in the roof of the inner tower and ascended into the terminal baffle: the open space between the inner tower and the floor of Silver’s penthouse. Looking up still farther, Mauchly could see Dorfman, standing just within the newly opened security hatchway leading into the penthouse. He was looking quizzically down at Mauchly, one hand gripping a ladder rung, the other holding a logic analyzer. Continuity testers, electronic sensors, and other gear hung on cords from his belt.
“Proceed,” Mauchly called up.
Dorfman raised a hand to one ear.
“Proceed! Wait just inside for us.”
Dorfman nodded, then turned to grasp the narrow ladder with both hands. Another moment and he had climbed out of sight, disappearing into the blackness of the penthouse.
Mauchly glanced down at Sheldrake, motioned for him and his men to follow. It had been a hard-fought battle, gaining access to the penthouse: if they were going to wait, they might as well wait inside.
He began climbing the rest of the way up the ladder. Four steps took him to the porthole in the tower’s roof; another four steps brought him up into the baffle. He had never been in this space before, and despite himself he stopped to look around.
Mauchly was not a particularly imaginative man, but — as he slowly swivelled through an axis of one hundred and eighty degrees — he found he had to fight back vertigo. A dark metal landscape — the roof of the inner tower — ran away from him on all sides. It was studded with cabling, and its flow was interrupted by countless small equipment housings. Some ten feet above, like a titanic lowering sky, hung the steel underbelly of the penthouse structure. It was fixed to the tower’s roof by a carapace of vertical I-beams. Two metal-sheathed data trunks ran from fairings in the upper structure to the roof of the inner tower. In the distance he could make out a third, much larger boxlike structure: the shaft of Silver’s private elevator. Around the periphery ran a lattice of horizontal slats, through which the rich hues of the setting sun could be glimpsed. An observer, staring up at this decorative latticework from street level, would never know it was concealing the jointure of two physically separate structures, the inner tower and the penthouse above it. But to Mauchly, sixty floors above Manhattan, it felt like being between the layers of a huge metal sandwich.
And there was something else: something more unsettling. Set into the walls of the long axis, midway between the two structures, were the telescoping sections of the huge security plates. Mauchly could make out three indentations in their steel flanks: two fitted to the data trunks, the other to the private elevator. The plates were fully retracted now, but if an emergency was ever declared they would slide forward and lock together, sealing the penthouse from the tower below. From his vantage point, the massive hydraulic pistons that powered the plates looked like the springs of a colossal mouse trap.
“Mr. Mauchly?” Sheldrake called up from below.
Mauchly roused himself, took a fresh grip on the ladder, and — turning his eyes from the baffle — climbed up through the security hatchway and into the vestibule of the penthouse.
His first impression was the simple relief of setting foot on solid ground again. The second impression, following immediately, was of unrelieved dark.
“Dorfman!”
There was a rustling in the dark beside him. “Here, Mr. Mauchly.”
“Why haven’t you turned on the lights?”
“I’ve been looking for a switch, sir.”
Mauchly rose, feeling his way forward until he touched metal. He felt along the wall until he reached a door — closed — then continued along the walls until he returned once again to the security hatchway. His circuit of the small compartment yielded no light switch.
There was a clatter, and a dark shape suddenly thrust its way into the hatchway, obscuring the dim light filtering up from below.