Lombardi gestured to the other man as he got up off his seat. Then both went around the body and passed through the entry to the vault area.
A short while before the ringing of the doorbell startled her into alertness, Kirsten had slipped into a doze on the sofa, a kind of syrupy exhaustion having settled over her in the late morning, and stayed with her as she'd done some routine chores — washing the breakfast dishes, straightening up the living room, and gathering the kids' toys from around the apartment and garden and hauling them back into their bedroom closet.
Afterward, sitting down to listen to some light jazz on the stereo, hoping it would calm her mind, she had been surprised at how fast her eyelids had started getting heavy, and thought it quite incredible that she could be simultaneously clipping along full-steam on nervous energy and feeling so mentally fatigued that her brain almost seemed immersed in a pool of thick, lukewarm glue. It was a little like the way she'd felt as a university student studying for final exams, living for days and nights on coffee and chocolate.. only many times more intense.
And now the sound of the buzzer had practically sent her bouncing off the couch, still half out of it, yet conscious of her nerves revving up to speed again.
She glanced at the clock on the wall opposite her. Could Nimec have arrived already? Under average circumstances it would have been highly unlikely he could have made it in so short a time… but he'd explained that he would be returning to the UpLink ground station in Johor, and would probably travel from there into KL by helicopter. Which had also told her a couple of things about him beyond the obvious fact that he was in a hurry. One, he was at least as concerned about Max as she was. And two, he had the sort of clout with Max's boss to pull some major strings, maybe even worked for UpLink himself—
Bzzzzzzzzz!
She crossed the room to the door, straightening her blouse, smoothing her skirt down with her hands. Whoever was out there was really leaning on the bell.
"Yes?" she said, reaching for the doorknob. "Who is it?"
"Johor police," a man said from outside. He was speaking Bahasa. "We want to see Kirsten Chu."
"Excuse me?" she replied in the same language. The blunt, gruff quality of his voice had surprised her as much as his response.
"It's about her call," he said. "We need to ask her some questions."
Kirsten didn't move, hardly even breathed. She was still holding the knob, her fingers suddenly sweating around it.
The Singapore cop with whom she'd spoken had said the Johor authorities would be in touch.. but she hadn't expected them to just show up at the door. Wouldn't they want to phone and make an appointment, if for no other reason than to spare themselves a needless trip in case she wasn't home?
And does he really sound like a police officer? she thought.
Her pulse fluttering in her temples, she raised the spyhole cover, peered outside….
And felt her stomach turn to ice.
Never mind how he'd sounded, none of the men standing in the walk outside — she could see four or five of them through the little two-way mirror — looked anything like police investigators. Their hair was long, their clothes sloppy, and their eyes…
Even had they been wearing bright silver badges and starched blue uniforms, their eyes would have given them away.
"Come on," the one nearest the door said. "Open up."
She pulled away from the spyhole and inhaled shakily.
"Just a minute," she said. "I need to put something on.
The man slammed the door with his forearm.
"Forget the games," he said. "Open it."
Her fingers harrowing her cheeks, Kirsten took a step backward across the living room.
''Open up!9' the man said, beating the door again, hitting it so hard she was afraid it might fly off its hinges.
Terrified, her breaths coming in sharp little bursts, Kirsten whirled and plunged through the apartment.
An instant later the door crashed open behind her.
The entryway through which the intruders had left the waiting room led to a short passage, which itself gave into another small, boxy room that was bare except for a computer workstation on the right, and a wall-mounted biometric scanner across from it beside a reinforced steel door.
"Lombardi" went straight over to the scanner. This was the part of the job that made him uptight. He'd been telling Turner the truth when he remarked that he was no technical wizard, and felt it would have been easy enough to steer the supervisor back into the room at gunpoint, force him to let the system take his readings, and in that way gain access to the vault. But the concern was that Turner might have triggered some discreet alarm had that been done. Caine's instructions had been explicit, and they'd been warned not to deviate from them under any circumstances.
Standing before the scanning unit, Lombardi raised his left hand to the level of the cameras designed to image his facial and iris characteristics, turning it so the artificial star-sapphire ring on his fourth finger would be visible to their lenses. Then, keeping that hand perfectly motionless, he placed his right hand flat on the machine's glass opto-electrical pad. Ordinarily this would both activate the unit and take readings of his fingerprint and palm geometry, which would then be converted to algorithms and matched to stored employee-identification data. But by an arcane process he did not quite understand, the specific star pattern on his ring would key a match with a simple data-string buried in the system mainframe's hard drive, which caused — or, according to Caine, was supposed to cause — the normal image-recognition sequence to be bypassed.
Lombardi held his breath and waited, one hand up, the other on the unit's clear glass interface, staring at its eye-level VDU. A red light had begun to glow beneath the glass, indicating the scanner had been activated by his touch… but if all was going as planned, the readings of its thermal sensors would be ignored by the computers.
Five seconds went by.
Ten.
He waited.
And then the words CLEARED TO ENTER appeared in the middle of the screen.
He exhaled, heard the faint click of the vault's lock mechanism retracting, and turned to his partner, who was already working open the heavy steel door.
They were in.
Kirsten ran toward the back of the apartment, hearing the door burst open behind her, hearing the men who'd been outside come pounding through the living room at her heels. She had only a vague notion of what to do, but it was all she had, and there was no choice except to go with it. If she could make it to the back door before they caught up, get into the building's central parking court, then maybe—
Suddenly a hand reached out from behind and snatched the sleeve of her blouse, pulling at her, yanking her backward. She stumbled, and almost lost her balance, but somehow managed to keep her legs underneath her, keep moving, carried by her own forward momentum. She twisted sharply as her pursuer tried to get his other hand around her, heard a loud ripping sound, and then was free of his grasp, racing across the room again, scrambling toward the door, a ragged streamer of cotton dangling from her arm.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Stop, you bitch!"
Kirsten was within several feet of the back door now, the kitchen on her immediate right, the hallway leading to the bedrooms on her left. She lunged ahead, shooting her hand out in front of her, reaching for the doorknob, thinking she might make it, thinking she really might, when the man whose grip she'd managed to escape a moment earlier sprang at her in a flying tackle, the full weight of his body whumping into her, his arms clamping around her waist.