Wilson called his wife and told her not to come home until six o’clock. He and Jane were going to need more than the three hours that he had allotted.
There was a coffeemaker in his home office, and Jane brewed a strong pot. They both took it black and sugarless.
Wilson produced a plate of his wife’s chocolate-drop-lemon cookies. Jane wasn’t a cookie person, but this seemed like a cookie moment if ever there was one, and they were delicious.
Rather than hack the San Francisco building department’s archives, Wilson went to a website called Emporis, which styled itself as a provider of construction data on buildings of “high public and economic value.” From there he was directed to the company that had put up the building in question and to all the principal subcontractors that the primary contractor had employed.
“D.J. hired the best,” Wilson said, “and it’s not a company he’s got a piece of, as far as I know.”
The contractor maintained electronic archives, and Wilson was confident of getting into them in mere minutes, because he had spent hours hacking them in the past and had used a Trojan to set up a back door to allow easy access in the future.
“I’ve bid against them,” he told Jane. “They shave costs in ways that kill their competitors. I needed to know how.” He seemed to read her expression and smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I guess I didn’t fall as far from the tree of Otis as I sometimes like to think.”
Beyond the wall of glass, the loom of the sky gradually wove darker skeins into the overcast as the planet turned away from the sun, and the sea darkled with a reflection of the clouds.
“The building has three stories of underground parking. Of the aboveground floors, the first seven encompass one hundred and twelve thousand square feet of office space. Because of the wraparound balcony, the three upper floors total a little more than twenty-seven thousand.”
After much scanning and study of blueprints, Wilson found a contiguous series of voids six or seven feet square, dead center on the south wall, running all the way from the roof to the first of three levels of subterranean parking.
“It might be a spiral staircase,” he said, “although it’s just large enough for a switchback with small landings.”
“How is it accessed?”
“It appears to terminate behind a supply closet of some kind. My best guess is the closet will be lined with storage shelves, and a hidden lever will swing one set of shelves out of the way.”
“Secret door.”
“Totally Indiana Jones,” he said.
“There’ll be an alarm on the door. Any way I could foil it?”
“If the door’s properly hidden, you wouldn’t want an alarm on it. An alarm ties your architectural security to your electronic security, so if a really brilliant black-hat hacker gets in the latter, he can also find the former. Then your secret escape route isn’t secret anymore.”
“Cameras in there?”
“If you can monitor the hidden stairwell through security cameras, a black-hat guy can monitor it, too, and see where you are in the middle of your escape. A bolt-hole or a secret passageway is far more likely to remain secret if it’s kept simple. You design it so it can’t be found, at least not casually, so then the only one who’s ever going to use it is the guy who feels he needs it in the first place.”
With dusk, a brisk breeze came off the water and up the hill, and palm fronds tossed as if the trees lamented the passing of the light.
“What I believe,” Jane said, “what I’ve been told, is that I can get into either the eighth or the tenth floor from those stairs, but not into the ninth. The door at the ninth would have to be blown down with a packet of C-4. Kind of difficult to arrive stealthily after that.”
“D. J. Michael lives on the ninth, huh? You said the eighth and tenth are security barriers. What does that mean, exactly?”
“You don’t want to know. I intend to go in at the eighth floor. If I make it through there alive, I need a way to get up to the ninth from the eighth. Some way he won’t be expecting.”
Wilson regarded her in silence for a long moment. “Everything about you on the news is bullshit, isn’t it?”
“Most of it. I have had to kill some people in self-defense. On the news, they never call it self-defense.”
“What the hell is all this really about?” He held up one hand to silence himself. “Yeah, okay—I don’t want to know.” He swung back to the screen. “Let’s see if we can find you what you need.”