The Downside

by Mike Cooper

  “Now take a look at the back,” Nicola said.

  Manhattan no longer had alleys, Hollywood to the contrary—everything had been filled in with development. The skyscraper here was flush with its neighbor: a six-story brownstone adjacent to a narrower three-story building, then a brick rectangle three times as high, and so on down the block.

  The enormous, ragged notch, like the tower was splitting down the center, reappeared on its rear. Emily thought it looked stupid, but she was no architectural critic.

  “Again, the eleventh story,” said Nicola.

  “Uh-huh.” Emily crooked her neck. “So what’s on that floor?”

  “Stormwall Security Services.”

  “Aha.”

  “They have the monitoring contract for the vault,” she said. “I need to visit their computers.”

  Emily studied the floor for another minute.

  “There’s a reason we’re not looking at the front entrance, isn’t there?” she said.

  The fourth building down the block had a brightly lit health club above street level, rows of exercise machines visible through plate glass.

  “The gym has an emergency exit just above the roofline of its shorter neighbor,” Nicola said. “See? Like a fire escape, but it’s just an ironwork platform. There must be a ladder to the street off the shorter building, around back.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve seen people out there smoking. I assume they’re club employees, no doubt breaking all sorts of rules—members probably don’t want to see their personal trainers puffing away. But if they can get out there, I figure we can, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Might have to buy a day pass, but sure, once we’re inside we’ll figure it out.”

  Emily said, “We?”

  “From there,” Nicola said, not answering, “across the roof, then up the side of the next building. See that pipe? Not a drain; I think it’s an electrical conduit, RCN maybe. With the window ledges alongside, it doesn’t look too hard. Then over that roof, and we’re alongside Stormwall’s tower.”

  “And they’re”—Emily counted again—“five stories above that.”

  “I’m an okay climber.” Nicola held her hands up, like, You know? “I’m not good enough to do that alone.”

  “Fifty feet, unprotected.” Emily shook her head slowly. “People free-solo insane heights now. A thousand meters, more. Not me. You fall off anything more than fifteen feet, you probably spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

  “It’s not really climbing,” Nicola said. “See how the structural beams poke into the notch? More like going up a ladder.”

  “Uh-huh.” Emily peered at the building. “Until you slip and fall and die.”

  “The design is deliberately irregular. Looks to me like there are plenty of places to stop and rest.” The designer had done his best—no doubt he was a man—to make it seem jagged and broken. “That’s why I think this is possible. It doesn’t just make the climb almost as easy as a steep set of stairs, but it’s dark enough to hide in. At night, we’ll be invisible.”

  The corner traffic light changed, and another pack of cars accelerated past. A woman walked her dog along, and they fell silent until she was farther down the block. Nicola checked her phone but didn’t unlock the screen. Emily decided she was doing something to not look like they were loitering.

  “What about cameras?” she said. “The city has surveillance everywhere.”

  “Plenty, but all at street level. Look.” Nicola began pointing them out. “At the intersection, on the traffic signal. Over the entrance of that store. The ATM machine across the street. The corner of the skyscraper—see? Two stories up, but it’s pointed down. And so on. There are probably more, but they’re all aimed where they expect to see people, not birds.”

  Emily studied the route. In fact, it didn’t look that hard. She wondered if Nicola was selling herself short.

  “You definitely need to do this?”

  “The job doesn’t happen otherwise.”

  “Uh-huh.” The more she looked at it, the easier it seemed. “Why do you need me up there, too?”

  “You’re the climber. I’m an amateur.” She forestalled Emily’s objection with a gesture. “There’s no way to know what’s really up there. Not without doing it. And if I get into a jam, well—” She let her hand fall. “I’d like you there to get me out.”

  What the hell. She’d always wanted to be a nightclimber.

  “When?”

  Nicola looked at her phone again, checking the time. “How about six hours from now?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Well, fuck me,” said Asher.

  Corman grunted.

  “Just once, I’d like something to go smooth.”

  “If it was easy,” said Finn, “anyone could do it.”

  The three of them sat in the cab of the Kenworth—which Gil had let them keep for a while longer—looking out into the night. The old truck was worn inside, the seat vinyl torn, the shift balky and not just because Finn kept banging the lever into Asher’s knee. It smelled of cigar smoke and greasy food gone rancid.

  “Maybe they’re worried about the copper,” he added. “Or the equipment.”

  “Fucking New Jersey.” Asher shook his head. “Assholes here will steal anything, I guess.”

  The job site was a replacement bridge over a small river a few miles from Blairstown. Farms had given way to development long ago, even a two-hour drive from the city, and they could see lights of a McMansion suburb through trees at the bank.

  The bridge was half done—abutments installed at either side, the roadways graded but not paved, a framework of steel erected across the span. A site trailer and a porta-potty sat to one side, and the drilling rig was lashed down on a trailer next to them. Presumably, the bridge contract required a parallel utility conduit under the ground.

  As promised, the MTBM looked clean and ready to go: control unit, sedimentation tank, the cutting head itself under a tarp, jacking frame dismantled, stacked, and cabled in place. The trailer was even faced the right way, ten feet from the road. They could have backed in and been gone in five minutes.

  Except the entire site was fronted by a temporary eight-foot chain-link fence, posts sunk into concrete footings and two strands of barbed wire at the top. The barrier wasn’t complete—the fencing petered out close to the river—but it was more than sufficient to keep out any vehicles.

  Like their truck.

  “It’s just some galvanized poles,” said Asher. “We can drive right over it, flatten the son of a bitch.”

  Corman snorted.

  “What? I don’t see any alarm wires.”

  “Maybe not,” Finn said, “but that means fuck-all. Anyway, we’re sitting in the middle of Soccer Mom Acres here. Go crashing around, and we’ll have SWAT teams arriving in about sixty seconds.”

  “All right, fine. We’ll just cut the chain.”

  “It’s one of those bike messenger locks.” Finn put the truck in gear, hitting Asher in the knee again. “See?”

  He drove past slow enough for all of them to admire the heavy black shackle securing the gate: a massive piece of tempered steel, its evolved design the result of a five decades’ war against the most determined thieves in the Western world.

  “Huh.”

  “Jaws of life might open it,” Finn said. He kept going, wary of drawing attention idling on the road. “Too bad we don’t have one.”

  “Diamond-tipped saw,” said Asher.

  “Shit, forgot that, too.”

  They drove back to the I-80 entrance. Finn pulled in to a sparsely occupied Park-and-Ride lot, putting the truck at the darker end. Traffic passed steadily on the four lanes of state road.

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  And it was Corman who
answered, pulling out his cell phone. “Call Nicola,” he said. “She’ll know.”

  Nicola’s heart raced—and not from exertion. Scaling the wall, hand over hand on the conduit and using the masonry clips for footholds, had been easy enough. But they’d gone as fast as they could, feeling exposed to the buildings all around. Fortunately, the entire side was dark, brighter light from the skyscraper casting deep shadows.

  They’d gotten through the health club easily, for the cost of an introductory two hours each. After a tour, the trim young woman went back to the desk and left them at the locker rooms. Emily found the service door first and propped it open with a wedge that was clearly sitting on the iron landing for that purpose.

  No one else was out there. After a moment, Nicola hopped the rail and dropped to the flat roof of the shorter, adjoining building. She checked the far edge, peering carefully over the parapet, and returned.

  “The fire escape’s back there,” she’d said, looking up at Emily, still on the landing. “We can leave that way. About ten feet to the sidewalk.”

  “Good.”

  “Ready?”

  “Just a minute.” Emily closed the door and pushed the wedge beneath it. “Anyone tries to come out, it’ll take an extra minute to dislodge that. Don’t want them seeing us halfway up.”

  They ran across the rubber membrane of the roof, going around a blocky HVAC unit and the stub of an ancient brick chimney. Emily yanked on the conduit, which didn’t budge, and after a quick look at Nicola—Okay?—she started up.

  Nicola followed, and Emily pulled her over the top edge. A moment to catch her breath, and they dashed across the second roof to the far side, where it butted up against the skyscraper.

  A weatherbeaten headhouse, basically a small shed for a door at the top of an interior stairwell, stood close to the modern steel and glass of the newer building. They ducked behind it, into deeper shadow.

  As they settled on to their heels, a loud braying pierced the air.

  “What the fuck?” Emily jerked around in surprise.

  “Oh, shit, I cannot believe I forgot that!” Nicola unzipped a slash pocket on her jacket and pulled out her phone.

  “I turned mine off, you know?”

  “It’s Finn.” She hesitated for a second. “Ought to take it, I think.”

  They were alone on the roof, six stories above street level. Traffic noise drifted up, but it felt far away. The blank glass of the skyscraper was dark at their level. Behind the headhouse, they were well concealed.

  “I’m going to check out the notch.” Emily moved away.

  Nicola clicked the phone’s accept button.

  “Got a minute?” Finn’s voice.

  “Keep it quick. We’re in the middle of … you know.”

  “Right. So are we.”

  “Problem?”

  “There’s a fence we didn’t expect.” He described the lock. “Corman’s got a plasma torch at the warehouse, but we can’t drive all the way back for it.”

  “Might be kind of obvious, too.”

  “So I heard once, well, this guy inside was telling me you can open these things with a cap from a ballpoint pen. Corman thinks you might know how to do that.”

  “Sure, it works great, but only on the old tubular keyways. Kryptonite saw the YouTube videos, too, you know. They changed to flat keys, oh, fifteen years ago at least.”

  “Damn. Doesn’t look that old.”

  “Well, there’s other ways. You have a pair of hydraulic bolt cutters? That’s what the bicycle thieves mostly use now. They’re nice and fast.”

  “That’s back at the shed, too.”

  “Okay. How about a tire jack? Messy but it works.”

  There was a pause, some muffled voices that Nicola couldn’t make out.

  Finn came back on the line. “Asher’s going to check, but I doubt it. We’re in a hauler, not an automobile.”

  “You’re making this hard.” Nicola thought for a moment. “Maybe a long steel pipe that fits over the crosspiece end, if you can get enough torsion … ?”

  “Probably not.” Another off-call conversation, his hand apparently over the phone’s mic. He came back: “Asher found a sledgehammer.”

  “No jack, but a sledgehammer?”

  “This thing’s a real jalopy.”

  Emily came back, sliding into place alongside. She gave a thumbs-up, then pointed at the phone with a questioning look.

  Nicola made a just-a-minute gesture with her free hand.

  “I’d hate to drive away.” Finn sounded frustrated. “It’s just sitting there for the taking.”

  Nicola thought about the lock’s design. Heavy, well-tempered steel … “Hey, wait,” she said. “You’re at a job site, right? Heavy equipment lying around?”

  “Yeah, but we can’t fire up a jackhammer. This has to be discreet.”

  “How about welding tanks?”

  “A welding torch won’t cut this. It wouldn’t be hot enough.”

  “No, just the tanks. Oxygen, acetylene, whatever. Any gas, really.”

  “Actually, there might be, over by the site trailer—”

  “Perfect.” Nicola grinned. “You’re going to love this.”

  Finn pulled on his cap as he got down from the cab. Corman had gone around the end of the fence at the edge of the property on foot, moving far more fluidly and quickly than his size would suggest. He came back carrying a dull metal tank in one hand—impressive, as it probably weighed well over one hundred pounds.

  “This ain’t gonna work,” said Asher, exiting the truck from the other door. “Stupid.”

  “Just get the sledge.”

  They walked up to the gate. Finn glanced around. The site was illuminated by some bright security lights, sharp shadows at the edge. They were below a slight gradient leading up from the river and no houses were immediately nearby. Still, anyone could drive past.

  “Don’t look suspicious,” he said.

  Asher hooted, and even Corman might have cracked a fleeting smile.

  “Right, then.” Finn got out of the way. “Go ahead.”

  Corman tipped the tank toward the lock and opened the valve. A loud hiss as the acetylene blasted out in a narrow stream. Some of it vaporized immediately, creating a thin cloud. More condensed on the lock and the fence poles it was fixed around. Corman held the spray for thirty seconds, then abruptly stepped back and dropped the tank. He shook his hands in the air, grimacing

  Finn bent down and twisted the tank’s stopcock closed. It was subzero cold, like the metal tank itself. Corman had gotten freezer burn.

  “Hit it,” he said, and Asher swung the sledgehammer.

  The lock shattered, its steel as brittle as glass.

  “I’ll be goddamned.” Asher stared at the broken metal.

  “Nicola said thieves use cans of compressed air. But a tank this size, under greater pressure, runs even colder.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Uh … high pressure to low pressure, the system energy has to be constant … ? Something like that.” Finn shrugged. “Who cares? Come on, let’s hitch up the trailer.”

  Eleven stories up, and it felt like the temperature had dropped twenty degrees.

  “It’s like we’re climbing fucking Everest.” Nicola leaned back into the notch, resting her legs and warming her hands in her armpits. “This wind is arctic.”

  “Everest is in the Himalaya.” Emily seemed comfortable, one hand on a beam, one foot on a joint with two-inch bolt heads, standing as easily as if they were on the ground.

  Nicola gave her a look, which, in the shadowed darkness of the building’s notch, she probably couldn’t see. “We’re not at the North Pole, either,” she said. “But it feels like it.”

  “So how’s the window look?”

  “Well.” Bac
k to business. “Not good.”

  “No?”

  Nicola flexed her hands, decided they were warm enough to try again, and eased back around the corner.

  Wind whistled along the skyscraper’s side. The lights of the city spread away in all directions. Traffic meandered in a neon gulley far below.

  She started to freeze up, and not because of the cold.

  “Don’t look down,” Emily said helpfully.

  “I know that.”

  Stormwall’s windows were six feet tall, running from about waist height to the interior ceiling. Slatted vertical blinds had been pulled to the side, and a few lights inside—computer monitors, equipment LEDs, that sort of thing—provided enough illumination to see. It looked like a typical office warren: cubicles, racks of equipment, some plastic ivy. Everything beige and gray, including the plants.

  The problem was the narrow silver strip banding the entire window, just inside the frame. And the small black boxes mounted just below the ceiling, in every corner and across the middle of the room as well. And what looked very much like a pair of cameras near the door.

  Not to mention the window itself was heavy tempered glass, permanently mounted in a three-inch metal frame.

  She returned to the shelter of the notch.

  “Four breaching charges might take out the window,” she said. “I can’t see any other way to get through it. And even if we had a magic glass cutter, there’s about five different alarm systems in there. I wouldn’t make it to the front desk.”

  “No go, huh?”

  She shook her head. “Fuck.”

  “Oh well.” Emily didn’t seem too disappointed. “At least we got a great view. It’s spectacular up here!”

  Nicola shivered once, then again. “I’m fucking cold.” She crouched on the beam, huddling into her jacket. The cat-burglar black fleece didn’t insulate well.

  “We’ll warm up on the downclimb.”

  “If we had rope, we could just rap down.”

  “If we had wingsuits, we could jump.”

  That made her laugh. “Have you done that?”

  “Of course not. Those guys are crazy.”

  They started to climb down. Emily went first, keeping an eye on Nicola above her—not belaying, because they had no equipment, but ready to arrest a fall. Nicola’s arms, and particularly her hands, were hurting more than she wanted to admit.