“I’ll be there in 25 minutes. Send somebody for me. I’m not making it over the bridge in my truck tonight.”
Sadie was in the kitchen doorway in a sweatshirt and socks. She watched him pull his boots on sitting on the bench by the door and the unfairness of it rose in her so fast she could not keep it out of her voice. “Dad. She stood up in a room and said, ‘You were worth nothing.’ 4 days ago she did. So let somebody else go.”
He got the second boot on and looked up at her. “There isn’t anybody else. That’s not me being important. That’s the whole problem. And I’ve been saying it for 2 years.” He stood and took his coat off the hook. “I’m not going back for that company, Sadie. I’m going back because there’s a person on a floor and I know the way in.”
She did not answer. She went and got the steel box out of the truck herself in her socks in the snow and put it in his hands at the door.
The ride took 22 minutes in a security company sedan with chains on the tires. The lobby was full of equipment and wet bootprints. And when Nolan stepped off the elevator onto his old floor, Graham Pembroke was waiting for him.
“Nolan, I appreciate you coming.” His voice was warm and his body was in the way. “I can’t let you pass this point. You’re not an employee and this is an active scene. Frankly, if something goes wrong with that door while you’re touching it, you’re the one who gets destroyed by it. I’m trying to protect you here, Caleb.”
Nolan said without taking his eyes off Graham, “Who’s the incident commander?”
Bo Tran came up the corridor pulling off a glove. He had been given the drawings 4 minutes earlier and had already found the conduit run exactly where his crew had been about to cut. He looked at Nolan’s canvas coat and the steel box under his arm, and he asked two questions: How long had he worked the building, and did he know what was behind the finish panel?
“11 years. And yes, I can show you the access port and I have the tool for it. And I’m telling you up front, I’ve never operated it on this door with the live latch. I’ve operated it on the identical assembly on 39.”
“That’s more than anybody else in this building has got.” The lieutenant turned to Graham. “He’s with me. Step back to the elevator lobby, sir.”
Graham stepped back. He did it smoothly with a small nod. The way a man yields a point he intends to recover later.
Nolan knelt where he had knelt on the 28th and put the brass key into the lock of the steel box. Inside were the drawings, soft at the creases, and Pete Duval’s squared steel tool. He laid the sheet on the carpet and put his light on it so the lieutenant could follow. Over the original frame, and the access port in pencil in Nolan’s hand, was the one thing on it that appeared in no company document. The renovation’s new finish panel had been set 2 and a quarter inches proud of the old wall line, which meant the port was no longer where the drawing said it was. It was behind the walnut, 11 inches to the left and 4 inches lower, under a seam that looked exactly like every other seam on that wall.
“Here,” he said, and put two fingers on it.
The rest took 19 minutes, and most of it was waiting. The lieutenant would not let anyone near the housing until the panel in the mechanical room had been opened and the latch circuit isolated and verified dead with a meter because a multi-point bolt that re-energizes while a man’s hand is in the frame takes the hand. Nolan sat on his heels with the tool across his knees and watched the radio traffic go back and forth and did not once ask them to hurry, and Caleb standing behind him found that harder to watch than anything else that night.
When the call came, Nolan cut out a panel section the size of a dinner plate with a utility knife along the seam, found the cast housing exactly where his pencil said it would be, seated Pete’s tool in the squared recess, and turned it. The lever inside the frame moved about 3/4 of an inch. All three bolts retracted at once with a sound like a drawer closing, and two firefighters had the door open before the sound finished.
