*
Her head throbbed in agony and she tasted blood from the cut in her mouth after colliding with the stone wall.
With the razor at her throat, the killer had taken her gun and dragged her through a basement door then up steep stairs into the "facade" side of the town house, the front, a modern, stark place echoing the black-and-white decor of SSD.
Then he led her to a door against the back wall in the living room.
It turned out to be, ironically, a closet. He pushed through some stale-smelling clothes and opened another door against the back wall, dragged her inside and relieved her of her pager, PDA, cell phone, keys and the switchblade knife in the back pocket of her slacks. He shoved her against a radiator, between tall stacks of newspaper, and cuffed her to the rusty metal. She looked around at the hoarder's paradise, moldy, dim, stinking of old, stinking of used, and filled with more junk and refuse than she'd ever seen in one place. The killer took all her gear to a large, cluttered desk. With her own knife he began to disassemble her electronics. He worked meticulously, savoring each component he extracted, as if dissecting a corpse for the organs.
Now she was watching the killer at his desk, typing on his keyboard. He was surrounded by huge stacks of newspapers, towers of folded paper bags, boxes of matches, glassware, boxes labeled "Cigarettes" and "Buttons" and "Paper Clips," old cans and boxes of food from the sixties and seventies, cleaning supplies. Hundreds of other containers.
But she wasn't paying attention to
the inventory. She was reflecting, in shock, how he'd tricked them. Five Twenty-Two wasn't one of their suspects at all. They were wrong about the bullying executives, the techs, the clients, the hacker, Andrew Sterling's hired gun to drum up business for the company.
And yet he was an employee of SSD.
Why the hell hadn't she considered the obvious?
Five Twenty-Two was the security guard who'd taken her on a tour of the data pens on Monday. She remembered the name badge. John. His last name was Rollins. He must have seen her and Pulaski arrive at the guard station in the SSD lobby on Monday and moved in quickly to volunteer to escort them to Sterling's office. He'd then hovered nearby to find out about the purpose of their visit. Or maybe he'd even known ahead of time they were coming and arranged to be on duty that morning.
The man who knows everything . . .
Because he'd freely escorted her around the Gray Rock on Monday she should have known that the guards had access to all the pens and the Intake Center. She recalled that once you were in the pens, you didn't need a passcode to log on to innerCircle. She still wasn't sure how he'd smuggled out disks containing data--even he had been searched when they'd left the data pen--but somehow he'd managed to.
She squinted, hoping the pain in her skull would diminish. It didn't. She glanced up--to the wall in front of the desk, where a painting hung--a photorealistic portrait of a family. Of course: the Harvey Prescott he'd murdered Alice Sanderson for, her death blamed on innocent Arthur Rhyme.
Her eyes finally accustomed to the dim light, Sachs was looking over the adversary. She hadn't paid attention to him when he'd escorted her around SSD. But now she could see him clearly--a thin man, pale, a nondescript but handsome face. His hollow eyes moved quickly and his fingers were very long, his arms strong.
The killer sensed her scrutiny. He turned and looked her over with hungry eyes. Then he returned to the computer and continued typing furiously. Dozens of other keyboards, most of them broken or with the letters worn down, sat in piles on the floor. Useless to anybody else. But 522, of course, was incapable of throwing them away. Surrounding him were thousands of yellow legal pads, filled with minute, precise handwriting--the source of the flecks of paper they'd found at one of the scenes.
The smell of mold and unwashed clothing and linens was overwhelming. He must be so used to the stench he doesn't even notice it. Or maybe he enjoys it.
Sachs closed her eyes and rested her head against a stack of newspapers. No weapons, helpless . . . What could she possibly do? She was furious with herself for not leaving a more detailed message with Rhyme about where she was going.
Helpless . . .
But then some words came to her. The slogan of the entire 522 case: Knowledge is power.
Well, get some knowledge, damnit. Figure out something about him you can use for a weapon.
Think!
SSD security guard John Rollins . . . That name meant nothing to her. It had never come up during the investigation. What was his connection to SSD, to the crimes, to the data?
Sachs scanned the dark room around her, overwhelmed by the amount of junk she saw.
Noise . . .
Focus. One thing at a time.
And then she noticed something against the far wall that caught her attention. It was one of his collections: a huge stack of ski-resort lift tickets.
Vail, Copper Mountain, Breckinridge, Beaver Creek.
Could it be?
Okay, it was worth the gamble.