Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 3

3

I don’t believe in cranking up the night vision everywhere you go. Sure, you get this nice green hazy view of damn near everything. It’s great for some situations. But in a raid like this, someone turns on the lights and you’re blind for half a second.

And while your eyes adjust, some rent-a-cop shoots you.

You’re better off with the human eye. We’re descended from a long line of people who didn’t get eaten by lions and tigers and bears, at least not before they had kids. I haven’t had kids, so I’m safe.

It’s a joke, people. Chill. Sheesh.

The glass disk lays at an angle, so I slip down it and plant my high-traction waffle-tread parachute-cord-laced leather boots on the smooth barren concrete next to it. As my eyes adjust, the dark bowels of the Embassy Building’s forty-first floor coalesce from the darkness. The building management company’s system said that some wealth management assholes rented this floor a few months ago and totally gutted it so they could put in fancier and more expensive walls. Looking around I see flashes of the glass exterior all around me, sliced by all these irregular vertical lines. The contractors had gotten the aluminum studs up for the interior walls, but the glass and wallboard wasn’t yet hung.

The place stinks of industrial glue and solvents, passing my face in a steady stream through the hole in the glass at my back. It’s the smell of good honest labor, real people doing real work with real skill, for not enough money, and going home to try to give the families they love a better life.

Once those smells wore off, the place would stink of perfume and corruption.

Standing sparks flames from my toes all the way up my spine. My feet had dangled from my knees for the last hour and a half, and now I suddenly made them do all the work. My knees and hips demand their union-contracted break, and my elbows threaten a sympathy strike if I don’t ditch the clunky traction pads. The shoulders demand I ditch the pack while I’m at it.

I hold myself still, though, and study the room.

The red and white beacon of an EXI sign, the last letter cloaked by a tangle of cables drooping from the ceiling. Tiny green LEDs gleam from the central stack, where the elevator and the wiring and the water transfix the floor and ceiling. Scattered dots of red LEDs from the smoke detectors and the carbon monoxide detectors, still active even during construction. Aluminum ventilation shafts, too narrow to crawl through and too thin to stop bullets, hug the ceiling and reflect sharp lines of light.

A few feet before me, sawhorses shape the shadows. A square thing a little smaller than a kitchen cabinet lurks to my left. One edge of the severed glass plug had landed on it, tipping the glass at a good fifty-two degrees or so. A tool chest?

But the space to my right is open and clean.

I sink to my knees on the warm concrete with a sigh of simple pleasure and shrug out of the backpack’s shoulders and hip belt. I unbuckle the traction pad from my right elbow, and the skin beneath it suddenly seems to steam beneath the skintight suit. The pad goes into a special pouch on the outside of the backpack, and the other three pads follow. From the bottom part of the backpack, I stash my climbing belt and pull out the one with my penetration tools: a couple special-purpose microcomputers, lock picks, a silenced tiny .38 semi-auto, a couple other breaking-and-entering gadgets.

I figure that was Batman’s secret, too. He didn’t put everything on his utility belt. He kept a separate utility belt for each villain. Always learn from the greats.

Then I rotate my legs into the splits and start turning my shoulders to work out the strains.

In the movies, someone climbs a building and charges straight off to disarm the alarm system before getting into a firefight and blowing up the place. People reload their guns and neatly stow their electronic countermeasure devices, but they forget that their greatest weapon, their most powerful tool, is their own body. When you push yourself to your limits, find a secure location and take a moment or two to loosen up.

In a couple minutes the splits get comfortable, so I stretch my feet straight out in front and lower my head between them, pushing my arms further out, straightening my spine. My left hand brushes a stray socket wrench, but I ease my fingers past it. Fingerprints don’t worry me—my gloves are this incredible synthetic stuff, high-traction, breathable, and totally resistant to stains. Picked them up at Costco. Advertised for use with cell phone touchscreens. They probably work okay for that, too, but I use a phone with a physical keypad when I’m on the job.

In a few minutes I float to my feet, joints free and muscles relaxed. The tool belt clips around my waist, the backpack on my back, everything carefully secured and tucked inside light-absorbing dark green cloth that matches my jumpsuit. I feel like I’ve just had a massage.

The central stack of a business tower holds the building’s vitals, like the elevator shafts and the great big sewage and water pipes. The Embassy’s builders had thought ahead, though, even back when they built this place, and right next to the elevator they’d put in this ten-foot shaft just for wiring.

The wiring shaft has a mechanical lock, and an alarm. You don’t want your wiring shaft on the building’s swipe card system, because if the swipe card wiring breaks and the door locks you can’t get at it to fix it. It’s keyed on both sides, so maintenance people can use a key to leave the wiring shaft. So they usually put a pretty decent lock on the door—a high-end Schlage in this case.

It’s a tough lock. I need a whole three minutes to pick it. I carry a Lock-Release in my bag, this gun-like thing law enforcement uses to automatically open locks. It works, but having to use it makes me feel like I’ve failed, and I’m not in a hurry tonight.

The wiring shaft is lit with these old fluorescent tubes, one on every floor. There’s kind of a floor. It’s a metal grid with wire panels, kind of like a drop ceiling you can see through. The floor panels near the corrugated concrete walls are all removed so these tie-wrapped or twine-bound bundles of dozens of different types of wire can pass up and down. Two holes in opposite sides of the shaft, each the size of a dinner plate, act as pass-throughs for this floor’s wiring. A clean new bundle emerges from each hole and pours down through one of the gaps in the floor. Up near the roof, this shaft is pretty empty. Down in the basement, it’s a choked claustrophobic nightmare. The wiring shaft stinks of grease and ancient plastic and ages and ages of dust. (All hail the mighty steroid nose spray!)

The wires carry the building’s secrets. I could learn so much with a couple carefully placed sniffers.

But the greasy grimy flat metal rungs of the ladder carries me up to the forty-ninth floor and Butterfly Star Research.