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Crowley felt bad for once again refusing Rose’s offer of help, but knew this mission was best tackled alone. He had spent the rest of the day researching and planning, then he and Rose left the hotel for dinner with Aunt Gertie a little after 4.30pm. They’d enjoyed a pleasant evening, taking the opportunity to talk about mundane things and pretend they weren’t deep into investigating a potentially immortal witch. Some things, Crowley thought to himself, were best put on the back burner now and then so a soul could enjoy a good meal and a fine wine. But he had restricted himself to only a couple of glasses of wine, given his later plans. It was slightly awkward every time Gertie mentioned her boyfriend, but he and Rose had both done a good job of quickly diverting the conversation each time. He was comfortable his aunt hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
Once dinner was finished, they had chatted until around ten and then excused themselves. Rose had been upset Crowley wouldn’t take her along and tried again to convince him to let her join him on the mission, but he insisted he go alone. It would be hard enough for one person, he said. Sometimes more hands didn’t make for lighter work. Besides, she needed the rest, he firmly believed that. So did he, for that matter, but the opportunity wasn’t there for him. So reluctantly Rose had returned to the hotel while Crowley shouldered his small backpack and headed over to Park Avenue and East 60th Street, and the large stone Christ Church on the corner there.
His research had led him down a maze of city planning and blueprints. It was remarkable the kind of information a determined person could unearth, and he had discovered one fatal flaw in the Grolier Club’s defenses. At least, he hoped it was a flaw. And just why the Grolier Club was so tightly secured was a mystery he chose not to dwell on too deeply. Maybe it was merely the value of its collections. There was a wealth of books in there, after all.
The flaw he’d discovered had to do with the Club’s adjacency to the Christ Church. At nearly midnight, the street outside wasn’t completely deserted, he assumed nowhere in New York ever was, but the sidewalk was mostly empty, and the shadows of the arched doorway afforded Crowley the concealment he needed for a few moments with his lock picks. He slipped inside the church and closed the door behind him. He paused for a moment, and there were no shouts from outside, no alarms flashing inside. Good. Stage one was a success. But it was also the easiest part.
The interior was ostentatious, even by church standards. A black and white checkerboard floor stretched away from him between wooden pews. The walls were mostly gold, the ceiling black tiled with gold grouting. Two large white-veined, black marble columns stood sentinel to either side. At the far end, a great domed arch stood tall, filled with murals. Crowley only paused a moment to take it all in, then moved quickly through the church and down the right-hand side. On the other side of the black marble column, he headed for a door. It was open, and he slipped through, a penlight flashlight piercing the darkness beyond.
The corridor ahead was narrow, and Crowley followed it, then slipped through a side door and up two narrow flights of stairs. “Come on, come on,” he whispered to himself, gritting his teeth against a possible end to his mission right here. Then he saw a small wooden door in the side wall, about three feet square, and let out a suppressed, “Yes!” of triumph. The maintenance hatch hasn’t been marked on any of the plans he’d studied, but he had bet it would be there, as there was no other access to the ducting otherwise.
He crouched at the door and set to work on the small padlock pinning the hasp closed. It only took a moment to pick that lock, and he was in, crawling through a service space behind the large, arched end of the church, and, if the blueprints he’d found were to be believed, above the Grolier Club itself.
As he moved further through the crawl space, a dim light began to illuminate the area ahead of him. He got closer and saw it was leaking up through the edges of ceiling tiles off to his left. This was it. Crowley carefully shifted himself into position and gently pried up the nearest tile. It was about two feet by three feet, old-fashioned pressed metal instead of the more modern particle board new buildings might have had. It was heavy and scraped across its mountings, the sound harshly loud in the silence. With it halfway off, Crowley paused, teeth gritted. There were no other sounds. He slid it the rest of the way, then leaned forward over the gantry he sat on to see. The light came from soft, concealed nightlights around the edges of the ceiling, a couple of feet below where he squatted as if suspended above the large room below. The wooden floor seemed an awfully long way away, and Crowley swallowed down a moment of vertigo. It would be an ignominious end to fall through a suspended ceiling and die on the floor of an exclusive book club.
There was a camera mounted in the corner, only a few feet from where he sat, that seemed to take in the whole room. Its fish-eye glass stared forward and down. He checked, and saw no other cameras in the large room and thanked his luck that his first attempt had put so near to it. He replaced the tile, shifted carefully back, and levered up the tile he estimated to be right above the camera. Dust drifted down in a soft rain, vanishing from sight as it fell. He paused a moment, but nothing more happened, no alarms triggered. Holding his breath, he lay on his stomach and leaned down to reach the camera.
Two wires went into the back of it, and Crowley reached forward, balanced precariously, and tugged at the nearest. It popped free of its socket, and Crowley let it lay almost but not quite connected. It was ample to ensure the signal was interrupted. With any luck, someone would put it down to a wandering rodent or something similar rather than deliberate sabotage. He only hoped no one was looking at a security screen at that moment, who may then come and investigate. Regardless, he needed to move fast, just in case.
From his backpack, Crowley pulled out a coiled length of knotted rope. It was thin, but incredibly tough nylon, designed for climbers. Lightweight but able to support a considerable load. He looped and fixed one end securely to a metal stanchion set into the stonework behind him and was about to drop the rest down when something caught his eye.
Set evenly around the walls, maybe ten feet apart, were small black boxes, each with a dark lens in the center. Frowning, Crowley dug in his backpack and found nothing to help. Cursing, he looked around. Then he smiled, remembering the soft rain when he had moved the tile. The rarely used maintenance space was very dusty. Gathering a small handful of fine dust, he sprinkled it through the hole in the ceiling and watched it tumble through the air, enough this time that he didn’t lose sight of it. As it passed in line with the small black boxes, it sparkled red briefly. Lasers. This place was serious about security.
Crowley gathered more dust, blew it gently forward, and watched it fall. It took about ten minutes, which felt like ten hours as he expected a security guard to appear and look right up at him every moment, but he eventually had the crisscross pattern of security lasers figured out. He’d been forced to remove two more ceiling tiles in the process. Now he’d found a spot he could use to drop into a laser-free diamond area, then he could crawl below the lasers to get to where he needed to be. He replaced the other two tiles and re-tied his rope at his new chosen point of entry. He lowered the line with excruciating slowness, desperate that it did not swing and interrupt any beam of light. Once it was down, he lowered himself through the hole in the ceiling and painstakingly went hand under hand down to the floor. His arms were trembling with the effort by halfway down, going so slowly, but his strength would hold out. He knew his limits. Once his feet hit the wooden floor, he immediately dropped to his belly and crawled forward. From his vantage point high in the ceiling, he’d seen the cabinet he needed. At least, he hoped he had.
On the floor by the correct cabinet, he turned onto his back and mentally tracked all the small black eyes around the room and their invisible beams of light. Nodding once he’d chosen the space to stand up in, he slowly rose to his feet. No alarms. At least, none he could hear. Silent alarm systems were common, but he had to hope against that.
With his surgical gloves in place, and his face covered with a bandana in case he’d missed any cameras, he quickly went to work on the lock at the side of the glass display case. Now he was close enough to read the small cards placed next to the exhibits, he confirmed the small, black journal he’d seen from above was indeed the Poe journal on loan. His heart raced with excitement and nerves, but he forced himself to work slowly and calmly.
The small sliding lock took no real effort to open, and Crowley slid the glass front carefully aside. He reached in and took the journal, his hands trembling with tension. If he and Rose were right, he was holding all he needed to pin Matthew Price to the wall.
He slipped the book into his pocket and removed a small black book of similar design. It wasn’t entirely a lookalike, but it wasn’t bad. He’d found it in a book store not far from their hotel, roughed it up to make it appear aged, and smeared it with road gravel. Once he’d brushed that off again, he had been quite pleased with his handiwork. It looked interesting enough to put off the casual eye. Placing it on the small glass display stand now, it didn’t look out of place at all. With a soft smile, he slid the glass door closed again and re-locked it.
Making sure he’d left nothing behind, he commando-crawled back to his hanging rope and climbed slowly hand over hand back up again. It was slow going, ensuring the end of the rope didn’t swing back and forth with his motion, and his biceps were burning as he neared the top.
He crawled in through the gap where the ceiling tile had been removed and began to carefully bring the rope up, coiling it slowly over his arm. He was awash with relief when the end of it lifted above the level of the crossed lasers. Then a sharp beep made his heart stutter. He froze.
Nothing discernible had changed. What had beeped? Then the door at the end of the large room rattled. Crowley held his breath as the door opened slowly. A large man, his dark skin reflecting the nightlights softly, entered the room and looked around. He wore a navy blue security guard’s uniform, with a black peaked cap bearing a logo Crowley couldn’t quite make out. Tufts of gray hair curled out from the edges of it. The guard shone a flashlight left and right, lips pursed.
Crowley’s rope hung in the air maybe ten feet off the ground. If the man’s gaze rose even a little bit, he was sure to spot it. Then that gaze would rise up the rope to the hole in the ceiling and Crowley framed by it, wide-eyed and breath held. He was tempted to haul the rope quickly up, but surely the guard would see the movement. Or perhaps he could drop it and run, but then the guard would definitely see him, and they’d know there had been a break-in.
Like a rabbit in headlights, Crowley squatted, his legs cramping from the precarious position he held, his arms trembling from the climb and then being held so still, holding the rope out in front of him like he was fishing for something in the room below.
The guard swept his flashlight around the room once more. Then once more.
Crowley gritted his teeth. Don’t look up! Don’t look up!
Then the man turned and left, closing the door silently behind him. Crowley’s relief was so complete that for a moment his vision crossed and he thought he might pass out and fall through the hole back to the hard wooden floor below. He sat back, legs muscles screaming, and quickly coiled up the rest of the rope. That was way too close for comfort. Heart racing faster than if he’d run a mile at a dead sprint, he replaced the ceiling tile and quickly retreated the way he’d come.