Lexy shifted nervously on the seat. “Trespassing—if they catch us before we take anything. And breaking and entering. But if they catch us after, it’s theft. Grand theft, I think. Or does that just apply to autos? As in grand theft auto? Fuck, I don’t know.
I’ve never heard of petty theft. Have you?”
“No. Stop talking about it.”
“I guess there isn’t any such thing. Anyway, it’s not armed robbery, because we’re not armed. Burglary—that’s what it is.
And that’s a felony. We could go to jail. Jesus—strip searches .
forced lesbian sex . . . badly prepared food. I don’t know if l could stand it.”
Anne pounded Lexy’s knee with her fist. “Lexy, we’re not even going to take anything. Now, for godsakes, shut up!”
Lexy slumped back against the seat. “I’m sorry. I babble when I’m nervous. Anyway, I know a hell of a good criminal lawyer.
And he owes me.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Anne replied in a harsh whisper.
“Are we doing all this for that doctor of yours?”
“We’re doing it for Genny.”
“Just because that doctor said you should? You trust him that much?”
“He didn’t tell me to. It’s my own idea.”
“Why the hell doesn’t 7e go with you?”
“Be sensible.”
“You know what? I think you’re in love with the guy.”
Anne felt her face flush.
“You talk about him all the time—Dr. X says do this, Dr. X says do that. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Dr. Elder. Stop pretending you don’t know his name.”
“How about sexy? Is he good-looking at all?”
Anne gazed out the window at Fifth Avenue. They were just passing Forty-second Street. “Eight more blocks,” she said.
Lexy repeated her question.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. He’s tall and kind of rumpled and shaggy.
And he’s great with Genny. They really hit it off.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know.
“You must have some idea. Twenty-two? Seventy-three?”
“Fortyish.”
“Single?”
“Yes.”
“Probably gay, then.”
“He’s not gay!”
“How do you know?”
“My God, you’re a pest tonight!”
Lexy remained silent for several blocks.
k;- “It still puts me in a rage, every time I think about it,” Anne burst out. “Using me as a guinea pig, playing games with Genny’s k life. I can’t understand that kind of thinking.”
“Dalton was thinking about his favorite subject—money.”
“I don’t know why I married him. I don’t know why I do anything anymore. I wake up now wondering if I really have any idea of what I want out of life. Or even if I know who I am.”
“We’re all entitled to a mistake or two, Annie. Hell, I’ve made thousands. God hasn’t struck me down yet. Although He may well decide to tonight.”
Anne continued on her own line of thought. “I would’ve forgiven Dalton almost anything before I’d ever have thought of leaving him.
Especially since Genny’s birth. He really seemed to have changed. But I feel so damned betrayed.”
“You deserve much better than Dalton. I’ve always thought that. We’ll find you an available duke or a count somewhere-some dashing European with a country estate outside Paris, a chalet in St. Moritz, and a villa in Juan-les-Pins, so I can visit you year round.”
“No more of your dashing anythings. That phony Italian count of yours was the limit.”
“You have to give him some points for style. I mean, suddenly there he is, stark naked on your bed, with a hard-on. Every girl’s fantasy.”
“It was insulting.”
“I’d have jumped right on and screwed his brains out.”
“Not my style, I’m afraid. And I’m not the type to have affairs, anyway. I couldn’t handle it. Especially now, with Genny.”
“What are your plans? To become a piano-playing nun?”
“We’re here.”
The taxi let them out at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirtyfourth Street. It was a chilly spring night. A strong wind gusted down the canyonlike avenue, adding to the discomfort.
“Let’s get inside!” Lexy gasped. “I’m freezing.”
They hurried down the Avenue to a big office building in the middle of the block and went inside. It was just past one o’clock in the morning, and the guard at the front security desk, a solemn black man in his sixties, looked up in surprise as the two women came bustling in. “You ladies working this late?”
Lexy took charge. “Never on your life,” she shot back. “We’ve been partying. Just stopped by to pick up something very important my friend here left in her desk.” Lexy gave the guard a big conspiratorial wink.
The security guard shrugged, completely puzzled. “Sign in here,” he said, pushing an open ledger across the desk. A cheap ballpoint was attached to the sign-in book by a partly unraveled length of string.
Lexy quickly scribbled “Gertrude Stein” and “Alice B. Toklas” in the column labeled “Name.” In the “Company” column she wrote
“Macro-peripherals, Inc.”; in the “Time In” column, “1:10.”
“I’ll have to look in your bags,” the guard said in a weary voice.
Lexy dropped her thousand-dollar designer pocketbook onto the desk and snapped it open. The guard stirred the contents languidly with a forefinger, then nodded.
“I thought you were just supposed to go through stuff on the way out?”
Lexy said.
The man rolled his eyes in bored resignation. “How do I know what you might be taking out if I don’t see what you’re bringing in?”
Lexy gave him a toothy grin. “Good point, sir.”
Anne settled her large leather handbag on the desk and undid the strap.
The guard stuck a hand in, felt around, and pulled out a black plastic removable cartridge disk, about the size of a paperback book. “What’s this thingamajig?” he asked.
Anne started to slammer something. Lexy cut in briskly: “It’s her homework—what do you think it is?”
“Homework,” the guard repeated, turning the RCD over in his hand.
“It’s the computer storage disk from her work station. She takes it home every night. Boss’s orders.”
The guard turned the disk over one more time, then dropped it back into Anne’s bag.
“Hey, be careful with that!” Lexy cried. “There’s very valuable data on it. If you damaged it, by God . . .”
The guard held up a palm. “Take it easy, ladies.”
Anne and Lexy strode swiftly past the security desk to the elevator banks.
“I didn’t expect him to pull that cartridge right out of my handbag,”
Anne said, as the elevator door closed behind them. “I nearly fainted.”
“It’s just as well. Now he’ll expect to see it in your purse when we come back down.”
They got off on the thirtieth floor, where the executive offices of Stewart Biotech were located.
The doors on both sides of the elevator banks were locked, but Anne had a key. Dalton had given it to her more than two years ago, so she could meet him there when he was working late. She had used it only once.
Dalton’s office was locked as well.
“Now what?” Lexy asked.
“Hank Ajemian keeps an extra key in his desk.”
“Suppose his office is locked?”
“It will be. But Hank is always forgetting his keys, so his secretary keeps an extra one in her desk drawer for him.”
Anne unlocked Dalton’s office with the key from Ajemian’s desk and turned on the switch by the door. The room came alive with a muted glow. It was an unusually large space, with Oriental carpeting, antique furnishings, and expensive art hanging on mahogany-
paneled walls. The two outside corner walls were glass. Beyond, the New York skyline shimmered in the night, a breathtakingly romantic panorama of bridges, skyscrapers, and street traffic.
“How about this,” Lexy purred. “I should have known he’d have the most pretentiously upscale office in the city.”
Anne locked the office door behind them and moved behind Dalton’s desk.
It was an old-fashioned banker’s model, its cherry wood polished to a lustrously deep brownish-red sheen. A photograph of Genny, taken by the pool garden when she was a year and a half, sat at one corner, near the telephone console. Anne saw it and felt her anger return. She groped with her fingers along the right inner side of the knee well, found the button, and pushed it.
Across the room, a three-foot-wide hinged section of the bookcase that lined the inner wall swung out silently like a door. Behind it was a small safe, embedded in the thick concrete-and-steel inner core of the building. It was designed to withstand almost any conceivable assault—acid, lock picking, acetylene torch, or high explosives.
Only Dalton Stewart and Hank Ajemian knew the combination to the safe’s electronically controlled locking system, but Anne was confident she could figure it out. Dalton was very superstitious about numbers—particularly the number 51371. It represented the date—May 13, 1971—that his father had gone off to prison. He always used it.
Every PIN number of every joint account and charge card they had shared had used that same number. Whether he did it out of some kind of masochism, or ritual of revenge or atonement, she didn’t know.
Whatever his reasons, she was sure he would have used the same number for the safe’s combination, and she was right. As soon as she punched in 51371, the safe door clicked open.
Anne pulled the door back with trembling fingers. If someone should walk in now, there would be no explaining their presence.
The thick steel door swung open easily. Inside, on a series of small shelves, sat stacks of documents—colored folders, contracts, company documents, secret intelligence reports, notebooks, computer printouts, a thick black ledger with several rubber bands wrapped around it, and other odds and ends, including several thousand dollars in cash.
Anne sorted impatiently through the piles several times. Lexy looked over her shoulder. “Find it yet?”
“No.”
Lexy sifted through the material in the safe herself. “Jesus, Anne, it’s not here.”
_F “It has to be.”
: .
.
“It ought to be pretty easy to see it, then. Who told you it was here?”
Anne slammed the safe door shut. “Hank Ajemian.”
“Would he lie to you?”
“No. He even told me the cartridge type and size.”
“Did you tell him you were going to try to steal it?”
“Copy it. Of course not.”
“Then Dalton must have moved it.”
They stood looking at each other in the middle of the big office.
“Any idea where else he would put it?” Lexy asked.
Anne shook her head. After all the tension and the effort, the failure to find it made her numb.
She decided to take one more look. She redialed the combination, pulled the door open, removed all the contents, and went through them one at a time, repositioning each item back in its place after she had examined it. The ledger book wrapped with rubber bands was last. She peeled off the bands and opened it.
“Look.”
Inside the ledger, neatly tucked into a rectangular recess cut through the middle of the book’s pages, was a black plastic RCD.
A gummed label on its surface identified it as Jupiter.
“How quaint,” Lexy said. “The old Agatha Christie hollowedout-book trick.”
Anne slipped the Jupiter cassette into her purse with the blank one she had brought, and the two of them went out to the rows of secretaries desks, looking for a computer.
Every desk had one, but none of them was configured to accept this particular kind of RCD.
“Great,” Anne said. “We can’t copy it.”
“What do we do?”
“Take it with us. I’ll find a way to copy it, then return it.”
Lexy threw up her hands in distress. “Oh my God. You mean we’d have to come back?”
“What else can we do? I’ve got to have it.”
“We can leave the blank one here in its place. Then you don’t have to come back.”
“Why?”
“They have copies in Munich, or wherever they’re doing the actual work on this thing. So they don’t need this one at all. It’s only a backup. Like the original negative of a movie. They store it and work from dupes. This’ll probably sit here for years, untouched.”
“I’d rather put the original back.”
“Okay. But leave the blank one here, anyway, for the time being. You don’t want to have to explain to the guard downstairs why you came in with one RCD and are leaving with two.”
“That’s true.”
Anne substituted the blank RCD for the real one in the hollowedout space in the ledger book, wrote “Jupiter” on its label, wrapped the rubber bands around it again, tucked it under the pile of documents on the bottom shelf, and locked the safe again.
She slipped the Jupiter RCD into her leather bag, swung the hinged bookshelf back down into position in front of the safe, replaced the office door keys in their proper desks, and hurried out, with Lexy close behind her.
When the elevator doors opened at the ground floor, four armed men in uniform were standing there waiting for them. The patches on their sleeves indicated that they were employees of something called Protectall Security Services.
Anne and Lexy stood in the elevator, paralyzed and speechless.
The door started to close again. One of the guards jumped forward and stuck his foot in the way. He waved his pistol at them.
“Come on out, girls. Over to that wall over there.”
They grabbed the women and led them over to the section of wall at the back end of the elevator bank. One guard, flourishing a two-way radio, ordered them to leave their bags on the floor.
They obeyed.
“Now stand facing the wall. Put your hands on the wall.”
Anne stole a sideways glance at her friend. Lexy’s face looked the way Anne felt—terrified. God, why had she done this? And why had she dragged Lexy into it?
She heard the guards talking. They were trying to decide who should frisk them. They were mumbling, and Anne couldn’t make out much of what they were saying.
The night security man who had checked them in suddenly appeared, carrying the sign-in sheet with him.
“These the ones?” someone asked him.
“Yessir. Those’re the ones all right.” He handed the sheet to the guard with the radio.
“One of you girls Gertrude Stein?”
“That’s me, Officer,” Anne said, surprised at her own boldness.
“And Alice B. Toklas?”
“She’s Alice. What’s this all about?”
“There may have been a robbery in the building,” he said.
“We’re going to have to frisk you ladies.”
“We’re not armed, Officer,” Anne said.
“We’re gonna have to frisk you anyway.”
The guard in charge—the name on his lapel ID was Don Martin—handed his radio to one of the other men. He had decided to reserve the responsibility of the frisk for himself. He walked over to Lexy first and put a hand on her shoulder from behind.
“Have to ask you to spread your legs, Alice.”
Anne, her hands still planted against the cold marble wall, looked across at Lexy again. Lexy winked back. Martin, a tall, very muscular white male with unkempt blond hair that curled out below his uniform cap, ran his hands quickly up and down Lexy’s sides, under her arms, and around her waist. He then bent down and slipped both hands up each leg in turn, stopping a considerate inch or two sho
rt of her crotch.
He moved over to Anne. One of his men laughed. “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it, right, boss?”
“Shut up, Darrell.”
Martin’s frisk of Anne was much more thorough. He slid both hands over her breasts from behind, cupping and squeezing them in his big hands, and then pinching her nipples between his thumb and forefinger. Anne stared at the wall and didn’t move. She could smell rum and tobacco on his breath.
Martin knelt down and ran his hand up one leg. Anne closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Why hadn’t she had the sense to wear jeans, like Lexy, instead of a damned skirt?
She felt his hands exploring up along her thigh. It was all she could do to stand still. She could hear the men behind them snickering.
Martin ran one hand slowly over her buttocks and began a leisurely stroking of her pubic bone with the other.
She felt his fingers tugging at the crotch of her panties, trying to insinuate themselves inside. She was about to scream when one of the other guards protested that he was taking too much time.
Martin reluctantly ended his frisk.
“Look through their handbags, Darrell,” he said.
“I did already. Nothing there.”
“You check with the night man?”
The night man, standing right there, answered. “Yeah, I looked too.
That’s what they brought in.”
Martin turned to a fifth security guard, just coming off the elevator.
“What about the safe, Bill?”
“It was locked.”
“Any signs of forced entry?”
“Not that I could see. nothing missing, I guess.
Martin exhaled loudly, showing his displeasure. “What’re you girls doin’ here, middle of the night?”
“We just came in to get something from Gertie’s desk,” Lexy explained in a chirpy voice.
“You work here? In the building?”
“Yes sir. Macro-peripherals, Inc. We both work on software design.
You know, for computer programs and related . . .
computer-assisted peripheral kinds of things.”
“Yeah. Well, the alarm went off down in our office for Stewart
”
-.
, .
b Y.
s..:
Biotech, up on the thirtieth floor. You girls know anything about D,.
Tom Hyman Page 25