14 months ago, right at the beginning of the period when the money started moving, could Web handle the technical side, the transfer switch, the communications hub? Web came from facilities management before operations. He would absolutely know how. She looked at the stairwell door in front of them. Ethan handles the planning.
Webb handles the execution. That's how they've always worked together. Above them in the stairwell, the phone stopped ringing and then faint, muffled by the concrete of voice. Not words, just the cadence of someone speaking. Someone delivering information in clipped short sentences.
The way you talk when you're reporting something and you want to be efficient. Darius leaned close to the door and listened. The voice stopped. Footsteps moving up away from them. He pulled the lever and eased the door open 2 in.
The stairwell above was dark. No emergency lighting in this secondary access, which meant no backup circuit ran through here. He switched his work light on its lowest setting and directed it upward in a narrow beam. The stairwell was empty. Up, he said.
They went up. Floor 19, 20, 21. He moved steadily, monitoring the sound of the building around them, reading it the way he'd learned to read every structure he'd ever worked in the language of stress and load and resistance, the sounds a building makes when it's holding, and the different sounds it makes when something is wrong. At floor 23, the stairwell door had a problem. Darius saw it before Victoria did.
The door was a jar and the gap between door and frame showed evidence of something being wedged in the mechanism. Not broken, deliberately propped. Someone had made sure this door would stay open. Someone who needed to move through this floor quickly and didn't want to deal with the key card reader. Darius held up his fist closed.
The old hand signal for stop and Victoria stopped one step below him. He pointed at the door. She leaned forward to look. He saw her eyes take it in and her jaw tighten. He pointed at himself, then at the door, then held up two fingers.
She understood. He was going through first, and she should wait 2 seconds. He pushed the door with the flat of his hand. Slowly, controlling the speed of it, keeping it from making noise. Floor 23 was the records floor.
Filing systems, archive storage, the physical paper records that the company still maintained because Victoria K's apparently believed that paper crooked were harder to falsify than digital ones. Row after row of shelving units, most of the floor open plan lit only by two dim emergency strips near the ceiling and across the floor near the north window bank. A man was standing with his back to the stairwell door, looking out at the storm, his phone pressed to his ear. Marcus Webb, Darius had never met Marcus Webb, had seen him twice, maybe three times, passing through the building in the way that a maintenance worker sees executives peripherally, briefly, one directionally. Webb had never looked at him.