Terminal

Sean glanced at her for a second before looking back at the road. “Of course we stole,” he said. “It was thrilling at the time and we used to think all the people who lived on the North Shore were millionaires.” Sean went on to tell how he and his buddies would sell the goods in Boston, pay off the driver, buy beer, and give the rest to a fellow raising money for the Irish Republican Army. “We even deluded ourselves into thinking we were youthful political activists even though we didn’t have the faintest idea of what was going on in Northern Ireland.”

“My God! I had no idea,” Janet said. She’d known about Sean’s adolescent fights and even about the joy rides, but this burglary was something else entirely.

“Let’s not get carried away with value judgments,” Sean said. “My youth and yours were completely different.”

“I’m just a little concerned you learned to justify any type of behavior,” Janet said. “I would imagine it could become a habit.”

“The last time I did any of that stuff was when I was fifteen,” Sean said. “There’s been a lot of water over the dam since then.”

They pulled into the Forbes parking lot and drove to the research building. Sean cut the engine and turned out the lights. For a moment neither moved.

“You want to go ahead with this or not?” Sean asked, finally breaking the silence. “I don’t mean to pressure you, but I can’t waste two months down here screwing around with busywork. Either I get to look into the medulloblastoma protocol or I go back to Boston. Unfortunately, I can’t do it by myself; that was made apparent by the run-in with hefty Margaret Richmond. Either you help, or we cancel. But let me say this: we’re going in here to get information, not to steal TV sets. And it’s for a damn good cause.”

Janet stared ahead for a moment. She didn’t have the luxury of indecision, yet her mind was a jumble of confusing thoughts. She looked at Sean. She thought she loved him.

“Okay!” Janet said finally. “Let’s do it.”

They got out of the car and walked to the entrance. Sean carried the tools he’d gotten at the Home Depot in a paper bag.

“Evening,” Sean said to the security guard who blinked repeatedly as he stared at Sean’s ID card. He was a swarthy Hispanic with a pencil-line mustache. He seemed to appreciate Janet’s shorts.

“Got to inject my rats,” Sean said.

The security guard motioned for them to enter. He didn’t speak, nor did he take his eyes off Janet’s lower half. As Sean and Janet passed through the turnstile they could see he had a miniature portable TV wedged on top of the bank of security monitors. It was tuned to a soccer match.

“See what I mean about the guards?” Sean said as they used the stairs to descend to the basement. “He was more interested in your legs than my ID card. I could have had Charlie Manson’s photo on it and he wouldn’t have noticed.”

“How come you said rats instead of mice?” Janet asked.

“People hate rats,” Sean said. “I didn’t want him deciding to come down and watch.”

“You do think of everything,” Janet said.

The basement was a warren of corridors and locked doors, but at least it was adequately lighted. Sean had made many trips to the animal room and was generally familiar with that area, but he hadn’t gone beyond it. As they walked, the sound of their heels echoed off the bare concrete.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Janet asked.

“Vaguely,” Sean said.

They walked down the central corridor taking several twists and turns before coming to a T intersection.

“This must be the way to the hospital,” Sean said.

“How can you tell?”

Sean pointed to the tangle of pipes lining the ceiling. “The power plant is in the hospital,” he said. “These lines are coming over to feed the research building. Now we have to figure out which side has the chart vault.”

They proceeded down the corridor toward the hospital. Fifty feet down there was a door on either side of the narrow hall. Sean tried each. Both were locked.

“Let’s give these a try,” he said. He set down his bag and removed some tools, including a slender jeweler-like allen wrench and several short pieces of heavy wire. Holding the allen wrench in one hand and one of the pieces of heavy wire in the other, he inserted both into the lock.

“This is the tricky part,” he said. “It’s called raking the pins.”

Sean closed his eyes and proceeded by feel.

“What do you think?” Janet asked as she looked up and down the corridor, expecting someone to appear at any moment.

“Piece of cake,” Sean said. There was a click and the door opened. Finding a light, Sean turned it on. They had broken into an electrical room with huge wall-sized electrical buses facing each other.

Sean turned out the light and closed the door. Next he went to work on the door across the corridor. He had it open in less time than the first.

“These tools make a decent tension bar and pick,” he said. “Nothing like the real thing, but not bad.”