She rubbed the scar on her forehead and again concentrated on seeing the resort’s floor plan. In the past, the dumbwaiter also could be accessed from the fourth-story linen closet. Maybe she’d have better luck there.
She shed her coat; she didn’t want the weight, the bulk or the warmth. She made sure the fastenings on her Kevlar vest were secure, then secured the buttons on her white button-up shirt and tucked the tails into her jeans. She started up the first stairway she found and ran up three flights of stairs.
Thank God for Mara and her pitiless step-climbing workouts.
On the fourth floor, Kellen used her pass card to enter the dark linen closet and shone her flashlight around. Bracketed shelves loaded with linens covered the place where the dumbwaiter access should be. She threw out her hands. “Could it ever once be easy?” she asked the folded sheets and towels. She placed the flashlight pointed straight up on the floor and set to work shoving the linens onto the floor. When the housekeepers returned, they’d curse her name, but in her head a chorus sang, Hurry. Hurry. No time. No time.
When the top shelf was empty, she repeated with the second shelf, then the third…and there it was, a cabinet, thirty inches by thirty-six inches, with a handle at the bottom to lift the panel up and out of sight. She removed the fourth shelf, shoved the door up and looked into a narrow wooden box that had once discreetly carried food and dishes up and down from the eighth-floor suite. In fact…reaching in, she pulled out a single stained white plate festooned with an ancient bread stick and a tarnished silver fork and placed them on the floor.
She released the brake and tried the electrical controls; they were useless in the blackout and perhaps broken with age. So she pushed down on the bottom of the dumbwaiter. It slid down, and four stories above, the old iron wheel that supported the cart squealed in ungreased anguish.
She froze.
To rescue Carson Lennex, she needed the element of surprise.
Slowly, delicately, she pushed the dumbwaiter down again. Again the wheel squalled.
The wheel was attached at the eighth-floor ceiling outside Carson’s suite. She was so screwed, and yet—even with the noise, an archaic and discontinued dumbwaiter was her best bet. Inch by inch, she pushed the cart down, grinding her teeth at each metallic wail. At last, she could see the top of the box and the steel cables that supported it. They ran up to the wheel and down again; one raised it, one lowered it. On this end, things looked sturdy enough. She stuck her head in the shaft, pulled out her tactical flashlight and shone it up into the darkness. She couldn’t see twenty feet up, much less view the ceiling where the wheel was secured. Well secured. She hoped. If it wasn’t, during the fall, she’d have a long time to think before she landed in the resort’s basement and all the equipment from above came hurdling onto her head.
When the top of the dumbwaiter was even with the bottom of the cabinet door, she set the brake and checked her equipment. Her pistol rested in her side holster. She reloaded Mitch’s pistol and slid it back into her boot. Her knife’s leather holster was buckled on her belt. Beneath her shirt, she wore her Kevlar vest, and she used the clip on her flashlight to connect it to the brim of her hat. Gripping both cables tightly in her fists, she eased her way onto the top of the box.
The wheel moaned in protest.
She stood up and began to work the cables.
The box moved up a few inches.
The wheel squealed, high and shrill.
She stopped. Started again.
More squealing. No matter how gently she moved the cables, the wheel complained.
Nils might not know exactly what was happening, but he had to hear that and he was far too smart not to investigate.
On the other hand, if she grasped both the cables and climbed them, she would in theory reach the eighth floor with a minimum of noise.
That idea was a winner.
Okay, it stank, but Carson Lennex didn’t have time for her to think of another option.
She had been through basic training. She knew how to climb, and Mara’s constant, ruthless full-body training had kept Kellen in practice. She didn’t usually ascend four stories without a safety net, but—hey, no guts, no glory, and she didn’t want a dead movie actor laid at her guilty doorstep.
Gripping both cables, she leaned into them, wrapped them close, used her shoulders and arms and legs to lift herself into position and began to climb. The mechanical wheel whispered its protests now, a secret squeal every time she gripped and shifted. The metal cable ripped at her palms and caught on her clothes. Thick, sticky old grease clung to her face and hands. The narrow shaft was stuffy; sweat gathered on her face and beneath her Kevlar vest, and little rivulets trickled down her skin and itched like scampering spiders. Or maybe they were scampering spiders…
Climb faster.
She knew when she passed the fifth floor; a cabinet door like the one on the fourth floor marked the spot.
So she could mark her progress.
Sixth floor.
Seventh floor.
She was now thirty feet above the fourth floor and the shelves where she’d started. Her shoulders throbbed, her arms shook, her legs clasped the cables and her hands were bleeding. A sense of urgency overrode the aches and pains, yet she moved slowly and steadily. Her uncle used to tell the story about the two bulls in the field. The young one said, “Let’s run down to the pasture and screw some of those cows.” And the old one said, “Let’s walk and screw them all.”
Kellen was close; now wasn’t the time to expend all her energy attaining her first goal, the suite itself. Once she was there, she had Nils Brooks to contend with. She knew her opponent, she’d fought her opponent and Nils was a combatant whose skills surpassed her own. She did hope not to do battle with him. She hoped merely to kill him. But she had to be prepared for any eventuality.
She looked up, and at last, the flashlight illuminated the old black iron wheel where her cables looped and held. The closed cabinet door before her led into Carson Lennex’s bedroom…if no remodels had been done since the floor plan had been created.
No cabinet hardware existed on the shaft side.
Why would there be? Only a fool would come up the dumbwaiter shaft.
She gripped the cables with her left hand and wound her legs around them, and with her right hand pulled her knife from its holster. Leaning forward, she slid the tip of her knife into the crack between the door and the sill and pried the door up a crack. Light leaked into the shaft. As she killed the flashlight and slid it into her holster, she wondered—when she opened the door, what would she find?
From far inside the suite, she faintly heard a man’s muffled scream.
She unsnapped her holster, cleared the pistol’s safety, leaned in again and lifted the cabinet door inch by inch. She heard nothing. Then…the faint sound of music. Classical.
Full orchestra. Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” Music to torture a man by.
The door was lifted enough for her to see that half of the opening was blocked by a tall piece of furniture—Carson’s chest of drawers—and the other half faced a wall three feet away. She knew where she was now—in the short corridor between Carson’s bathroom and bedroom.
She faintly smelled cigarette smoke. The overture swelled, and as it did, as cannons blasted, she heard another scream of agony.
In every battle, there came that moment when your mind screamed, Go! Go! Go! This was that moment. Kellen shoved the cabinet the rest of the way to the top, holstered her knife and launched herself sideways through the gap.
The cables rocked back and forth.
The wheel squalled in protest.
Kellen got stuck at butt level. This indignity was likely to get her killed. She grasped the forward edge of the chest and dragged herself forward. In some horrible comedic parody, she fell into the room and scrambled to her feet. She pulled her Glock and peered around the chest of drawers.
The bedroom was empty. The glass shelves that had held the statues were smashed.
Violence. Not good.
She needed backup. Did she have it?