Guilty Minds

Merlin was coughing, and then I began to cough as well. I was furious at him for setting off the halon system, for doing something so impulsive without even checking with me. But even more, I was beginning to feel icy tendrils of panic seep into my bowels.

Because I did not see a way out.

56

Despite the deafening clang of the alarm, despite the hissing of the halon gas, despite my growing sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in this steel-reinforced coffin, I forced myself to focus. To think.

It wasn’t easy. I was steadily growing more and more woozy from breathing the halon, and I couldn’t stop coughing. My body was desperately craving oxygen.

What Merlin had done wasn’t, in fact, stupid. Setting off the fire alarm should have triggered the automatic unlocking of the vault doors. That’s how it should have been, and probably what the fire code required.

But this setup privileged security over safety. Our failure to enter the right code in the secondary panel meant we were locked in, whether that was against the fire code or not.

When I was a teenager living in the town of Malden, north of Boston, my friends and I used to hang out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, a used-car dealership owned by one of my buddies’ fathers. There I learned, from a repo man, how to pick locks. I also learned the rudiments of electrical wiring, the stuff engineers learn in school. And I knew that the secondary alarm panel had to be connected to some kind of relay switch that triggered the relocking bolts. It didn’t take me long to find what had to be the relay. It was a white-painted metal box about four inches square, mounted to the wall next to the door. Unobtrusive. Easy to miss. These relays always have an electromagnet inside, and the magnet either closes a switch or opens it. And that, right or wrong, was about the sum total of what I knew about relay switches.

Connected to the relay was white-painted electrical conduit about half an inch wide, which ran along the doorframe, then straight up to the ceiling. That had to be the power supply.

I handed Merlin the brown folder so I had both hands free. “Let me have your magnet,” I said.

Merlin, no surprise, seemed to get why I wanted it. I’m sure he knew a hell of a lot more about mechanical engineering than I did. “You think-?”

He handed me the oblong chunk of rare-earth magnet. Neodymium, he’d said. It was extremely strong, but was it strong enough? I took it and knelt down. I pulled open the metal box and saw, as I suspected, a copper coil inside. The guts of the electromagnet. Then I placed the neodymium magnet on the exterior of the box and waited.

And nothing happened.

My chest had grown tight, and I was short of breath and light-headed, and my heartbeat had begun to speed up, not from adrenaline either.

“Nice try,” Merlin said. “But the fire department should be here soon.”

What I did next was out of desperation. I took out the Glock I’d stolen from Curtis Schmidt’s house. I stood up, gripped the gun two-handed, and cocked it. My head was swimming.

“Heller, you’re not serious.”

“Stand back,” I said.

I fired a round into the wiring conduit on the doorframe.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the bolts ka-chunked open. I grabbed the door lever and pulled it open. We both dove forward, out of the halon, and gulped air. I stumbled a bit, unsteady on my feet. I could hear sirens in the distance, which meant they must have been close to the building.

Merlin pointed toward a door marked STAIRS. We ripped off our masks so we could breathe better.

And we ran.

57

I screwed up, Nick,” Merlin said.

“It was a good idea,” I said. “It didn’t work. That’s not screwing up.”

“No, I don’t mean lighting the paper on fire. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, I left the folder behind.”

“Oh.” I paused. “You did, huh? Yeah, that’s a screw-up, all right.” I felt a surge of hot anger but did my best to conceal it. Merlin looked so dispirited that I added right away, “But not a tragedy. We got the name and her location. We have Ellen Wiley and Upperville, Virginia. I remember that much.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

We walked down a dark, wide street, moving from pool to pool of yellowish light cast by the sodium-vapor street lamps. Traffic was light, but not nonexistent. It was a little after four in the morning. Dawn was still a few hours off.

– 

Merlin’s mistake had put added pressure on us-“us” being me, Dorothy, and now Mandy Seeger, since I thought of Mandy as being part of our team. Not only had we set off the fire alarm and damaged the strong room door, but at some point soon, someone in the firm would find the misplaced Slade Group file folder, and that would start a clock ticking. The fact that the file had been isolated and removed from the secured file cabinets would tell them it was probably important. That would point a blinking neon arrow at Ellen Wiley’s name. Maybe they’d alert her that someone might be coming for her.

Because someone was.