Book Five
'We make the buildings, then the buildings make us.'
Mitch watched Kenny working in the computer room on CCTV. There was one thing you could say about Kenny, thought Mitch, and that was the guy's level of concentration. He never looked up. Just kept his eyes on screen and his fingers on the keyboard. Another fifteen minutes passed and, growing impatient for news, he tried to call him on the phone. Unable to carry the full band width on cellular transmission, the CCTV was pictures only. But it was plain to see that Kenny wasn't answering.
'What's the matter with him?' said Mitch. 'Why doesn't he pick up the phone?'
Bob Beech, standing at Mitch's shoulder gave a laconic shrug and extracted a stick of gum from one of the many pockets in his sportsman's vest.
'He's probably got the phone turned off. When he's got his head into a problem he often does that. I guess he'll call when he's got something for us.'
'Maybe you ought to go and help him,' Mitch suggested.
Beech drew a sharp intake of breath and shook his head. 'It may be my computer but it's Aidan Kenny's building management system,' he said.
'If he needs my help I reckon he'll ask for it.'
'Where's Richardson?' Mitch shook his head wearily. 'He was supposed to go and find Kay '
Mitch clicked the mouse to look inside the swimming pool The picture on the CCTV continued to show a swimming pool with no sign of Kay and the same unidentified object near the foot of the screen.
Marty Birnbaum came alongside Mitch and leaned towards the screen. 'If I were you,' he said quietly, 'I wouldn't look too hard for either one of those two. If Ray did find Kay then he might prefer to be left alone for a while.'
'You mean…'
Birnbaum raised his almost invisibly fair eyebrows and ran a hand through a head of yellow curls so small and neat that there were many at the office, Mitch included, who had wondered if it might be permed. And the tan? That looked fake too. As fake as the smile, anyway.
'Even with a plane to catch?'
'We're none of us going anywhere at the moment. Besides, Ray
Richardson being the kind of guy he is, I can't imagine he would take very long about it, can you?'
'No, I guess not, Marty. Thanks.'
'Don't mention it. And I mean don't mention it, Mitch. You know what he's like.'
'Oh, I know what he's like all right,' he said grimly. Mitch stood up, took off his jacket, undid his tie and, rolling up his shirtsleeves, went over to the window. The building was warming up.
Outside the Gridiron the sky was turning a delicate shade of purple. Most of the lights in the other office buildings nearby had already gone out as people left early for the weekend. Though he could not see the ground Mitch knew that there would be little traffic moving in the downtown area now. About this time the bums and the winos started to take over. But Mitch would happily have organized a midnight walking tour of Pershing Square just to have been out of the building. He didn't mind the heat so much as the smell, for the stink of excrement was now unmistakable. First rotting meat. Then fish. And now the smell of shit. It was almost as if the bad smell was having a psychosomatic effect on him, although he knew that was not the only reason he was so worried. What had really started to bother him was the thought that somehow Grabel had sabotaged the Gridiron's building management systems as a way of getting back at Richardson. When better to do it than two or three days before the inspection? Grabel knew his way around computers, too. He was no Aidan Kenny, but he knew what he was doing.
Mitch turned to face the room. Everyone was just sitting around the long, polished ebony table, or lounging on the big leather sofa underneath the floor-to-ceiling window, waiting for something to happen. Looking at their watches. Yawning. Anxious to get out and go home and take a bath. Mitch decided to say nothing. There seemed to be no point in alarming them without good cause.
'Seven o'clock,' said Tony Levine. 'What the hell's keeping Aidan?' He stood up and went over to the phone.
'He's not answering,' Mitch said dully.
'I'm not calling him,' explained Levine. 'I'm calling my wife. We were supposed to be going out to Spago's tonight.'
Curtis and Coleman appeared at the door of the boardroom. The older man looked questioningly at Mitch, who shrugged back at him and shook his head.
'Couldn't we at least open a window?' said Curtis. 'This place smells worse than a dog kennel.' He began to take out his police radio.
'These windows were not designed to be opened. And they're not just bullet-proof.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means,' said Beech, 'that you won't be able to use that radio in here. The glass is an integral part of the Faraday Cage that surrounds the whole building.'
'The what?'
'The Faraday Cage. Named after Michael Faraday, who discovered the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction. Both the glass and the steel framework are designed to act as an earthed screen, to shield us from external electrical fields. Otherwise the signals emitted by the VDUs could be captured with the aid of some simple electronic surveillance equipment. And used to reconstruct the information appearing on those computer screens. A corporation like this one has to be extremely careful of electronic eavesdroppers. Any one of our competitors would pay a lot of money to get their hands on our data.'
Curtis pressed the send/receive button on his radio a couple of times as if seeking to verify what Bob Beech had told him. Hearing nothing but white noise he put the unit down on the table and nodded.
'Well, you learn something every day, I guess. Can I use your phone?'
Tony Levine cleared his throat. 'I'm afraid you won't be able to do that either,' he said perplexedly. 'The phone isn't working. At least, the outside lines aren't. I just tried to call home. It's out.'
'Out? What do you mean, out?'
'Out. As in not working.'
Curtis crossed the room angrily, snatched up the phone and stabbed out the number of New Parker Center as if he was killing ants. Then he tried 911. After a minute or so he shook his head and sighed.
'I'll check the phone in the kitchen,' volunteered Nathan Coleman. But he was soon back again, his face wearing an expression that indicated no improvement on the situation.
'How could this happen, Willis?' said Mitch.
Willis Ellery leaned back in his chair. 'All I can think is that there's been some kind of spurious tripping of the magnetic circuit-breaker that controls the telecommunications power distribution unit. That might have been caused by powering up equipment. Or it could be that Aid had to shut something down and then start it up again.'
He stood up to consider the matter further and then added, 'You know, it could be there's a general problem with all the fibre-distributed data interface. There's a local equipment room on this floor with a horizontal local area network that's connected to the computer room via a high-speed backbone LAN. I can go and check that out.'
Curtis watched him leave the room and grinned. 'High-speed backbone,' he said. 'I love that. There are times when I could use a little of that myself. You know, with all these technical experts around, Nat, it beats me that we're stuck inside an office building at seven o'clock at night.'
'Me too, Frank.'
'But doesn't it give you a good feeling? To know that we're in such capable hands? I mean, thank God we've got these guys with us, y'know?
I'd hate to think what might have happened if we'd been here on our own.'
Mitch smiled and tried to shrug off the detective's sarcasm. But there was something he had said that he couldn't shift from his mind. The time. Seven o'clock. Why did that of all things seem to nag at him?