Tension was good for a climber; but too much tension could cause him to
make mistakes.
Both harnesses had accessory loops at the waist. Graham was carrying
pitons, carabiners, expansion bolts, a hammer, and a compact
battery-powered drill the size of two packs of cigarettes. In her
harness loops, Connie had a variety of extra pitons and carabiners.
Besides the equipment hung on their harnesses, they were both burdened
with rope. Connie had hundredfoot lengths of it at each hip; it was
heavy, but so tightly coiled that it did not restrict her movements.
Graham had another hundred-foot coil at his right hip.
They were left with two shorter lengths: and these they would use for
the first leg of the descent.
Last of all, they put on their gloves.
At every floor, Bollinger got off the elevator. If the entire level was
occupied by one business firm, he tried the locked doors at opposite
ends of the alcove. If it was an “open” floor, he stepped out of the
alcove to make certain there was no one in the corridor.
At every fifth floor, he looked not only into the corridor but into the
stairs and the elevator shafts as well. On the first twenty floors,
four elevator shafts served the building; from the twentieth to the
thirty-fifth floors, two shafts; and from the thirty-fifth to the
fortysecond, only one shaft. In the first half of his vertical search,
he wasted far more time than he could afford, opening the emergency
doors to all of those shafts.
At ten-fifty he was on the fifteenth floor.
He had not found a sign of them. He was beginning to wonder if he was
conducting the search properly.
However, at the moment he was unable to see any other way to go about
it.
He went to the sixteenth floor.
Connie pulled on the heavy cord and drew back the office draperies.
Graham unlatched the center window. The two rectangular panes wouldn’t
budge at first, then abruptly gave with a squeal, opened inward like
casement windows.
Wind exploded into the room. it had the voice of a living creature; its
screams were piercing, demonic. Snowflakes swirled around him, danced
across the top of the conference table and melted on its polished
surface, beaded like dew on the grass-green carpet.
Leaning over the sill, he looked down the side of the Bowerton Building.
The top five floors-and the four-story decorative pinnacle above
them-were set back two yards from the bottom thirty-seven levels.
just three floors below, there was a six-foot-wide ledge that ringed the
structure. The lower four-fifths of the building’s face lay beyond the
ledge, out of his line of sight.
The snow was falling so thickly that he could barely see the street
lamps on the far side of Lexington Avenue. Under the lights, not even a
small patch of pavement was visible.
In the few seconds he needed to survey the situation, the wind battered
his head, chilled and numbed his exposed face.
“That’s damned cold! ” As he spoke, breath pluming out of him, he
turned from the window. “We’re bound to suffer at least some
frostbite.”
“We’ve got to go anyway,” she said.
“I know. I’m not trying to back out.”
“Should we wrap our faces?”
“With what?”
“Scarves-”
“The wind would cut through any material we’ve got handy, then paste it
to our faces so we’d have trouble breathing.
Unfortunately, the magazine didn’t recommend any face masks in that
buyer’s guide. Otherwise, we’d have exactly what we need.”
“Then what can we do?”
He had a sudden thought and went to his desk. He stripped off his bulky
gloves. The center drawer contained evidence of the hypochondria that
had been an ever-growing component of his fear: Anacin, aspinn, half a
dozen cold remedies, tetracycline capsules, throat lozenges, a
thermometer in its case … He picked up a small tube and showed it to
her.
“Chap Stick?” she asked.
“Come here.”
She went to him. “That stuff’s for chapped lips. If we’re going to be
frostbitten, why worry about a little thing like chapped lips?”
He pulled the cap off the tube, twisted the base to bring up the waxy