Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child [84]
The third room stayed quiet.
I checked pockets. They were all empty. All sanitized. Nothing there at all, except neutral items like tissues and lonely dimes and pennies trapped down in the seams. No house keys, no car keys, no phones. Certainly no wallets, no badge holders, and no IDs.
I picked up the dart gun again and held it one-handed, out and ready. Moved to the third room’s door. Swung it open and raised the gun and pretended to aim. A gun is a gun, even if it’s empty and the wrong kind. It’s all about first impressions and subliminal reactions.
The third room was unoccupied.
No medical technician, no backup agents, no support staff. Nobody at all. Nothing there, except gray office furniture and fluorescent light. The room itself was the same as the first two, an old brick basement chamber painted flat white. Same size, same proportions. It had another door, which I guessed led onward, either to a fourth room or a stairwell. I crossed to it and eased it open.
A stairwell. No paint, beyond an ancient peeling layer of institutional green. I closed the door again and checked the office furniture. Three desks, five cabinets, four lockers, all gray, all plain and functional, all made of steel, all locked. With combination locks, like the cells, which made sense, because there had been no keys in the agents’ pockets. The desks held no piles of paper. Just three sleeping computers and three console telephones. I hit space bars and woke up each screen in turn. Each one asked for a password. I lifted receivers and hit redial buttons and got the operator every time. Extremely conscientious security. Painstaking, and consistent. Finish a call, dab the cradle, dial zero, hang up. The three guys weren’t perfect, but they weren’t idiots, either.
I stood still for a long moment. I was disappointed about the combination locks. I wanted to find their stores and reload the dart gun and shoot the other two agents with it. And I wanted my shoes.
I wasn’t going to get either satisfaction.
I padded my way back to the cells. Jacob Mark and Theresa Lee looked up, looked away, looked back. Classic double-takes, because I was alone and I had the dart gun in my hands. I guessed they had heard the noises and assumed I was getting smacked around. I guessed they hadn’t expected me back so soon, or at all.
Lee asked, “What happened?”
I said, “They fell asleep.”
“How?”
“I guess my conversation bored them.”
“So now you’re really in trouble.”
“As opposed to what?”
“You were innocent before.”
I said, “Grow up, Theresa.”
She didn’t answer. I checked the locks on the cell gates. They were fine items. They looked high quality and very precise. They had milled top-hat knobs graduated with neat engraving all around the edges, from the number one to the number thirty-six. The knobs turned both ways. I spun them and felt nothing at all in my fingers except the purr of slight and consistent mechanical resistance. The feel of great engineering. Certainly I didn’t feel any tumblers falling.
I asked, “Do you want me to get you out?”
Lee said, “You can’t.”
“If I could, would you want me to?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because then you’d really be in trouble. If you stay, you’re playing their game.”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “Jake? What about you?”
He asked, “Did you find our shoes?”
I shook my head. “But you could borrow theirs. They’re about your size.”
“What about you?”
“There are shoe stores on Eighth Street.”
“You going to walk there barefoot?”
“This is Greenwich Village. If I can’t walk around barefoot here, where can I?”
“How can you get us out?”
“Nineteenth-century problems