But this one kept holding after its little slips, and fiddling with his fingertips he could see that shoving the cam back into place in the housing after he released it helped it to catch sooner. So with a kind of teeth-clenching patience, a holding-the-breath antigravitational effort, he could use the other one for the big pulls of the ascent, and then set the bad one by hand, to hold him (hopefully) while he moved the good one up above it again.
Eventually he got back up to the height he had wanted to descend to in the first place, and was finally ready to go. He was drenched in sweat and his right hand was burning. He tried to estimate how much time he had wasted, but could not. Somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour, he supposed. Ridiculous.
Swinging side to side was easy, and soon he was swaying back and forth, until he could reach out and place a medium sucker against Laveta’s office window. He depressed it slightly as he swung in close, and it stuck first try.
Held thus against her window, he could pull a T-bar from his waist bag and reach over, just barely, and fit it into the window washer’s channel next to the window. After that he was set, and could reach up and place a dashboard into the slot over the window, and rig a short rope he had brought to tie the sucker handle up to the dashboard, holding open Laveta’s window.
All set. Deploy the X-Acto, unscrew the frame, haul up the window toward the dashboard, almost to horizontal, keeping its top edge in the framing. Tie it off. Gap biggest at the bottom corner; slip under there and pull into the office, twisting as agilely as the gibbons at the National Zoo, then kneeling on the carpeted floor, huffing and puffing as quietly as possible.
Clip the line to a chair leg, just to be sure it didn’t swing back out into the atrium and leave him stuck. Tiptoe across Laveta’s office, over to Diane’s in-box, where he had left his letter.
Not there.
A quick search of the desktop turned up nothing there either.
He couldn’t think of any other high-probability places to look for it. The halls had surveillance cameras, and besides, where would he look? It was supposed to be here, Diane had been gone when he had left it in her in-box. Laveta had nodded, acknowledging receipt of same. Laveta?
Helplessly he searched the other surfaces and drawers in the office, but the letter was not there. There was nothing else he could do. He went back to the window, unclipped his line. He clipped his ascenders back onto it, making sure the good one was high, and that he had taken all the slack out before putting his weight on it. Faced with the tilted window and the open air, he banished all further consideration of the mystery of the absent letter, with a final thought of Laveta and the look he sometimes thought he saw in her eye; perhaps it was a purloined letter. On the other hand, Diane could have come back. But enough of that for now; it was time to focus. He needed to focus. The dreamlike quality of the descent had vanished, and now it was only a sweaty and poorly illuminated job, awkward, difficult, somewhat dangerous. Getting out, letting down the window, rescrewing the frame, leaving the cut seal to surprise some future window washer … Luckily, despite feeling stunned by the setback, the automatic pilot from hundreds of work hours came through. In the end it was an old expertise, a kid skill, something he could do no matter what.
Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t actually focusing very well. On various levels his mind was racing. What could have happened? Who had his letter? Would he be able to find the woman from the elevator?
Thus only the next morning, when he came into the building in the ordinary way, did he look up self-consciously and notice that the mobile now hung at a ninety-degree angle to the position it had always held before. But no one seemed to notice.
Department of Homeland Security CONFIDENTIAL
Transcript NSF 3957396584
Phones 645d/922a
922a: Frank are you ready for this?
645d: I don’t know Kenzo, you tell me.
922a: Casper the Friendly Ghost spent last week swimming over the sill between Iceland and Scotland, and she never got a salinity figure over 34.
645d: Wow. How deep did she go?
922a: Surface water, central water, the top of the deep water. And never over 34. 33.8 on the surface once she got into the Norwegian Sea.
645d: Wow. What about temperatures?
922a: 0.9 on the surface, 0.75 at three hundred meters. Warmer to the east, but not by much.
645d: Oh my God. So it’s not going to sink.
922a: That’s right.
645d: What’s going to happen?
922a: I don’t know. It could be the stall.
645d: Someone’s got to do something about this.
922a: Good luck my friend! I personally think we’re in for some fun. A thousand years of fun.
Anna was working with her door open, and once again she heard Frank’s end of a phone conversation. Having eavesdropped once, it seemed to have become easier; and as before, there was a strain in Frank’s voice that caught her attention. Not to mention louder sentences like:
“What? Why would they do that?”
Then silence, except for a squeak of his chair and a brief drumming of fingers.
“Uh-huh, yeah. Well, what can I say. It’s too bad. It sucks, sure … Yeah. But, you know. You’ll be fine either way. It’s your workforce that will be in trouble … No no, I understand. You did your best. Nothing you can do after you sell. It wasn’t your call, Derek … Yeah I know. They’ll find work somewhere else. It’s not like there aren’t other biotechs out there, it’s the biotech capital of the world, right? … Yeah, sure. Let me know when you know … Okay, I do too. Bye.”
He hung up hard, cursed under his breath.
Anna looked out her door. “Something wrong?”
“Yeah.”
She got up and went to her doorway. He was looking down at the floor, shaking his head disgustedly.
He raised his head and met her gaze. “Small Delivery Systems closed down Torrey Pines Generique and let almost everyone go.”
“Really! Didn’t they just buy them?”
“Yes. But they didn’t want the people.” He grimaced. “It was for something Torrey Pines had, like a patent. Or one of the people they kept. There were a few they invited to join the Small Delivery lab in Atlanta. Like that mathematician I told you about. The one who sent us a proposal, did I tell you about him?”
“One of the jackets that got turned down?”
“That’s right.”
“Your panel wasn’t that impressed, as I recall.”
“Yeah, that’s right. But I’m not so sure—I don’t think they were right.” He grimaced, shrugged. “It was a mistake. Anyway, they’ll get him to sign a contract that gives them the rights to his work, and then they’ll have it to patent, or keep as a trade secret, or even bury if it interferes with some other product of theirs. Whatever their legal department thinks will make the most.”
Anna watched him brood. Finally she said, “Oh well.”
He gave her a look. “A guy like him belongs at NSF.”
Anna lifted an eyebrow. She was well aware of Frank’s ambivalent or even negative attitude toward NSF, which he had let slip often enough.
Frank