hundred feet.
Initially, the strain on Graham’s arms and shoulders had been tolerable.
But as he payed out the line, he became increasingly aware of the toll
taken by five years of inactivity. With each foot of rope, new aches
sprang up like sparks in his muscles, spread toward each other, fanned
into crackling fires.
Nevertheless, the pain was the least of his worries. More important, he
was facing away from the office doors. And he could not forget the
vision: a bullet in the back, blood, and then darkness.
Where was Bollinger?
The farther Connie descended, the less slack there was in the line that
connected her to the window Post. She hoped that Graham had estimated
its length correctly. if not, she might be in serious trouble. A
toolong safety line posed no threat; but if it was too short, she would
be hung up a foot or two from the ledge. She would have to climb back
to the window so that Graham could rectify the situationr she would have
to give up the safety line altogether, proceed to the setback on just
the belayer’s rope.
Anxiously, she watched the safety line as it gradually grew taut.
overhead, the main rope was twisting and untwisting with lateral
tension. As the thousands of nylon strands repeatedly tightened,
relaxed, tightened, she found herself turning slowly in a semicircle
from left to right and back again. This movement was in addition to the
pendulumlike swing caused by the wind; and of course it made her
increasingly ill.
She wondered if the rope would break. Surely, all of that twisting and
untwisting began where the rope dropped away from the window. Was the
thin line even now fraying at its contact point with the sill?
Graham had said there would be some dangerous friction at the sill. But
he had assured her that she would be on the ledge before the nylon
fibers had even been slightly bruised. Nylon was tough material.
Strong. Reliable. It would not wear through from a few minutes-or even
a quarter-hour-of heavy friction.
Still, she wondered.
At eight minutes after eleven, Frank Bollinger started to search the
thirtieth floor.
He was beginning to feel that he was trapped in a surreal landscape of
doors; hundreds upon hundreds of doors. All night long he had been
opening them, anticipating sudden violence, overflowing with that
tension that made him feel alive. But all of the doors opened on the
same thing: darkness, emptiness, silence. Each door promised to deliver
what he had been hunting for, but not one of them kept the promise.
It seemed to him that the wilderness of doors was a condition not merely
of this one night but of his entire life. Doors. Doors that opened on
darkness. On emptiness. On blind passages and dead ends of every sort.
Each day of his life, he had expected to find a door that, when flung
wide, would present him with all that he deserved. Yet that golden door
eluded him. He had not been treated fairly. After all, he was one of
the new men, superior to everyone he saw around him. Yet what had he
become in thirty-seven years? Anything? Not a president.
Not even a senator. Not famous. Not rich. He was nothing but a lousy
vice detective, a cop whose working life was spent in the grimy
subculture of whores, pimps, gamblers, addicts and petty racketeers.
That was why Harris (and tens of millions like him) had to die.
They were subhumans, vastly inferior to the new breed of men. Yet for
every new man, there were a million old ones. Because there was
strength in numbers, these pitiful creatures-risking thermonuclear
destruction to satisfy their greed and their fondness for childish
posturing-held on to the world’s power, money and resources. Only
through the greatest slaughter in history, only in the midst of
Armageddon, could the new men seize what was rightfully theirs.
The thirtieth level was deserted, as were the stairs and the elevator
shafts.
He went up one floor.
Connie’s feet touched the ledge. Thanks to the scouring wind, the stone
was pretty much free of snow; therefore, there had been no chance for