Paranoia (46 page)

“Howdy, cowboy,” he said.

“J.J. himself let you have this?”

“The old man’s dead,” Seth said. He was smoking, which was how I could tell he was nervous. “I had to deal with Junior.” He handed me a folded pair of blue overalls, and I slipped them over my chinos and polo shirt, not easy to do in the cab of the old Isuzu truck. It reeked of spilled gasoline.

“I thought Junior hates you.”

Seth held up his left hand and rubbed his thumb and fingers together, meaning moolah. “Short-term lease, for a quickie job I got for my girlfriend’s dad’s company.”

“You don’t have a girlfriend.”

“All he cared was, he doesn’t have to report the income. Ready to rock ’n’ roll, dude?”

“Press send, baby,” I said. I pointed out the D Wing service entrance to the parking garage, and Seth drove down into it. The night attendant in the booth glanced at a sheet of paper, found the company name on the admit list.

Seth pulled the truck over to the lower-level loading dock and we took out the big nylon tote bags stuffed with gear, the Ettore professional squeegees and the big green buckets, the twelve-foot extension poles, the plastic gallon jugs filled with piss-yellow glass cleaner liquid, the ropes and hooks and Ski Genie and bosun chair and the Jumar ascenders. I’d forgotten how much miscellaneous
junk
the job required.

I hit the big round steel button next to the steel garage door, and a few seconds later the door began rolling open. A paunchy, pasty-faced security guard with a bristly mustache came out with a clipboard. “You guys need any help?” he asked, not meaning it.

“We’re all set,” I said. “If you can just show us to the freight elevator to the roof . . .”

“No problem,” he said. He stood there with his clipboard—he didn’t seem to be writing anything down on it, he just held it to let us know who was in charge—and watched us struggle with the equipment. “You guys can really clean windows when it’s dark out?” he said as he walked us over to the elevator.

“At time-and-a-half, we clean ’em
better
when it’s dark out,” said Seth.

“I don’t know why people get so uptight about us looking in their office windows when they’re working,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s our main source of entertainment,” Seth said. “Scare the shit out of people. Give the office workers a heart attack.”

The guard laughed. “Just hit ‘R,’” he said. “If the roof access door’s locked, there should be a guy up there, I think it’s Oscar.”

“Cool,” I said.

When we got to the roof, I remembered why I hated high-rise window cleaning. The Trion headquarters building was only eight stories high, no more than a hundred feet or so, but up there in the middle of the night it might as well have been the Empire State Building. The wind was whipping around, it was cold and clammy, and there was distant traffic noise, even at that time of night.

The security guard, Oscar Fernandez (according to his badge), was a short guy in a navy-blue security uniform with a two-way radio clipped to his belt squawking static and garbled voices. He met us at the freight elevator, shifting his weight awkwardly from foot to foot as we unloaded our stuff, and showed us to the roof-access stairs.

We followed him up the short flight of stairs. While he was unlocking the roof door, he said, “Yeah, I got the word you guys would be coming, but I was surprised, I didn’t know you guys worked so early.”

He didn’t seem suspicious; he just seemed to be making conversation.

Seth repeated his line about time-and-a-half, and we replayed our bit about giving the office workers heart attacks, and he laughed too. He said he guessed it kind of made sense anyway that people didn’t want us disrupting their work during normal working hours. We looked like legit window cleaners, we had all the right equipment and the uniforms, and who the hell else would be crazy enough to climb out on the roof of a tall building lugging all that junk?

“I’ve only been on nights a couple weeks anyway,” he said. “You guys been up here before? You know your way around?”

We said we hadn’t done Trion yet, and he showed us the basics—power outlets, water spigots, safety anchors. All newly constructed buildings these days are required to have rooftop safety anchors mounted every ten to fifteen feet apart, about six feet in from the edge of the building, strong enough to support five thousand pounds of weight. The anchors usually stick up like plumbing vent pipes, only with a U-bolt on top.

Oscar was a little too interested in how we rigged up our gear. He hung around, watching us fasten the locking steel carabiners. These were attached to half-inch orange-and-white kernmantle climbing rope and connected to the safety anchors.

“Neat,” he said. “You guys probably climb mountains in your spare time, huh?”

Seth looked at me, then said, “You a security guard in your spare time?”

“Nah,” he said, then he laughed. “I just mean you got to like climbing off tall places and stuff. That would scare the shit out of me.”

“You get used to it,” I said.

Each of us had two separate lines, one to climb down on, the other a back-up safety line with a rope grab, in case the first one broke. I wanted to do it right, and not just for appearance’s sake. Neither one of us felt like getting killed by dropping off the Trion building. During those unpleasant couple of summers when we worked for the window cleaning company we kept hearing about how there was an industry average of ten fatalities a year, but they never told us if that was ten in the world or ten in the state or what, and we never asked.

I knew that what we were doing was dangerous. I just didn’t know where the danger was going to come.

After another five minutes or so, Oscar finally got bored, mostly because we stopped talking to him, and he went back to his station.

The kernmantle rope attaches to a thing called a Sky Genie, a kind of long sheet-metal tube in which you wind the rope around a forged aluminum shank. The Sky Genie—gotta love the name—is a descent-control device that works by friction and pays out the rope slowly. These Sky Genies were scratched and looked like they’d been used. I held it up and said, “You couldn’t buy us new ones?”

“Hey, they came with the truck, whaddaya want? What are you worried about? These babies’ll support five thousand pounds. Then again, you look like you’ve put on a couple pounds the last few months.”

“Fuck you.”

“You have dinner? I hope not.”

“This isn’t funny. You ever look at the warning label on this?”

“I know, improper use can cause serious injury or even death. Don’t pay attention to that. You’re probably scared to remove mattress tags too.”

“I like the slogan—‘Sky Genie—Gets You Down.’”

Seth didn’t laugh. “Eight stories is nothing, guy. You remember the time when we were doing the Civic—”

“Don’t remind me,” I interrupted. I didn’t want to be a big pussy, but I wasn’t into his black humor, not standing up there on the roof of the Trion building.

The Sky Genie got hooked up to a nylon safety harness attached to a waist belt and padded seat board. Everything in the window-cleaning business had names with the words “safety” or “fall-protection” in them, which just reminds you if anything goes even slightly wrong you’re fucked.

The only thing we’d set up that was slightly out of the ordinary was a pair of Jumar Ascenders, which would enable us to climb back up the ropes. Most of the time when you’re cleaning the windows on a high-rise you have no reason to go back up—you just work your way down until you’re on the ground.

But this would be our means of escape.

Meanwhile, Seth mounted the electric winch to one of the roof anchors with a D-ring, then plugged it in. This was a hundred-and-fifteen-volt model with a pulley capable of lifting a thousand pounds. He connected it to each of our lines, making sure that there was enough play that it wouldn’t stop us from climbing down.

I tugged on the rope, hard, to check that everything was locked in place, and we both walked over to the edge of the building and looked down. Then we looked at each other, and Seth smiled a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing smile.

“Are we having fun yet?” he said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You ready, buddy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Ready as Elliot Krause in the Port-O-San.”

Neither one of us laughed. We climbed onto the guardrail slowly and then went over the side.

85

We only had to rappel down two stories, but it wasn’t easy. We were both out of practice, we were lugging some heavy tools, and we had to be extremely careful not to swing too far to either side.

Mounted on the building’s façade were closed-circuit TV surveillance cameras. I knew from the schematics exactly where they were mounted. I also knew the specs on the cameras, the size of the lenses, their focal range and all that.

In other words, I knew where the blind spots were.

And we were climbing down through one of them. I wasn’t concerned about Building Security seeing us rappelling down the side of the building, since they were expecting window cleaners early in the morning. What I was concerned about was that, if anyone looked, they’d realize we weren’t actually cleaning any windows. They’d see us lowering ourselves, slowly and steadily, to the fifth floor. They’d see that we weren’t even positioning ourselves in front of a window, either.

We were dangling in front of a steel ventilation grate.

As long as we didn’t swing too far to one side or the other, we’d be out of camera range. That was important.

Bracing our feet against a ledge, we got out our power tools and set to work on the hex bolts. They were securely fastened, through the steel and into concrete, and there were a lot of them. Seth and I labored in silence, the sweat pouring down our faces. It was possible that someone walking by, a security guard or whoever, might see us removing the bolts that held the vent grate in place and wonder what we were doing. Window cleaners worked with squeegees and buckets, not Milwaukee cordless impact wrenches.

But this time of the morning, there weren’t many people walking by. Anyone who happened to look up would probably figure we were doing routine building maintenance.

Or so I hoped.

It took us a good fifteen minutes to loosen and remove each bolt. A few of them were rusted tight and needed a hit of WD-40.

Then, on a signal from me, Seth loosened the last bolt, and we both carefully lifted the grate away from the steel skin of the building. It was super heavy, a two-man job at least. We had to grip it by its sharp edges—luckily I’d brought gloves, a good pair for both of us—and angle it out so that it rested on the window ledge. Then Seth, grasping the grille for leverage, managed to swing his legs into the room. He dropped to the floor of the mechanical equipment room with a grunt.

“Your turn,” he said. “Careful.”

I grabbed an edge of the grate and swung my legs into the airshaft and dropped to the floor, looking around quickly.

The mechanical room was crowded with immense, roaring equipment, mostly dark, lit only by the distant spill from the floodlights mounted on the roof. There was all kinds of HVAC stuff in here—heat pumps, centrifugal fans, huge chillers and compressors, and other air filtration and air-conditioning equipment.

We stood there in our harnesses, still hooked up to the double ropes, which dangled through the ventilation shaft. Then we unsnapped the harness belts and let go.

Now the harnesses hung in midair. Obviously we couldn’t just leave them out there, but we’d rigged them up to the electric winch up on the roof. Seth pulled out a little black remote-control garage-door opener and pressed the button. You could hear this whirring, grinding noise far off, and the harnesses and ropes began to rise slowly in the air, pulled by the electric winch.

“Hope we can get ’em back when we need ’em,” Seth said, but I could barely hear him over the thundering white noise in the room.

I couldn’t help thinking that this whole thing was little more than a game to Seth. If he was caught, no big deal. He’d be okay. I was the one who was in deep doodoo.

Now we pulled the grate in tight so that, from the outside, it looked like it was in place. Then I took an extra length of the kernmantle, ran it through the grips, then around a vertical pipe to tie the thing down.

The room had gone dark again, so I took out my Mag-Lite, switched it on. I walked over to the heavy-looking steel door and tried the lever.

It opened. I knew that the doors to mechanical rooms were required to be unlocked from the inside, to make sure no one got trapped, but it was still a relief to know we could get out of here.

In the meantime, Seth took out a pair of Motorola Talkabout walkie-talkies, handed me one, and then pulled out from his holster a compact black shortwave radio, a three-hundred-channel police scanner.

“You remember the security frequency? Something in the four hundreds UHF, wasn’t it?”

I took a little spiral-bound notebook from my shirt pocket, read off the frequency number. He began to key it in, and I unfolded the floor map and studied my route.

I was even more nervous now than when I was climbing down the side of the building. We had a pretty solid plan, but too many things could go wrong.

For one, there might be people around, even this early. AURORA was Trion’s top-priority program, with a big deadline a mere two days off. Engineers worked weird hours. Five in the morning, there probably wouldn’t be anyone around, but you never knew. Better to stay in the window-washer uniform, carrying a bucket and a squeegee—cleaning people were all but invisible. Unlikely anyone would stop to ask what I was doing here.

But there was a gruesome possibility that I might run into someone who recognized me. Trion had tens of thousands of employees, and I’d met, I don’t know, fifty of them, so the odds were in my favor I wouldn’t see someone who knew me. Not at five in the morning. Still . . . So I’d brought along a yellow hard hat, even though window washers never actually wear them, jammed it down on my head, then put on a pair of safety glasses.

Once I was out of this dark little room, I’d have to walk several hundred feet of hallway with security cameras trained on me all the way. Sure, there were a couple of security guys in the command center in the basement, but they had to look at dozens of monitors, and they were probably also watching TV and drinking coffee and shooting the shit. I didn’t think anyone would pay me much attention.