Calhoun shook his head. When it came to watching Jolie, he knew all the angles.

“Is Daddy on TV?” The boy had clambered halfway up Calhoun’s stool, balancing on it for a better look.

“You want to be careful up there, partner,” Calhoun said. “That thing ain’t real steady.” He looked over to see if Sarah was going to say anything, but she was still watching Jolie on the monitor.

“You’re sure there’s not a better view of the room?” she asked.

“Why? I told you—”

“There’s someone else down there.”

Calhoun scowled. “There is?”

“Look.” Sarah pointed at the upper corner of the screen, where a blurry swarm of pixels hovered immediately behind Jolie’s back, just a shadow outside the camera’s scope. At first Calhoun didn’t see it, but when he got closer, sure enough, there was the outline of a man in profile standing behind her at the edge of the digital void.

“That’s not Mike, is it?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Is there some kind of intercom you could call down there with?”

“It’s in the operator’s office.”

A vivid red light began to pulse on the control panel next to the keyboard.

“What’s that?” Sarah asked.

“Dammit.” Calhoun checked the label above the blinking light. “Something’s wrong.”

7.

They hadn’t overloaded the elevator; even with Walker and the cops onboard along with Snow, they still weren’t anywhere near its four-thousand-pound weight capacity. Yet the cables had shuddered to a halt just the same, the car jolting like it had struck something halfway up the shaft, everybody jammed together so closely that Mike could feel the officers on either side of him sucking in a breath.

“Somebody forget to pay the electric bill?” one of them asked.

Nobody laughed. Mike looked at the control panel, where half the lights had come on at once in an irregular checkerboard that reminded him somehow of the boarded-up windows outside. The change in atmosphere was instantaneous. A moment earlier a big officer named Oz had been teasing Repko, the sunglasses cop, about leaving Jolie behind downstairs, while Repko treated all of them to a long and loving description of what he’d do to Jolie given a moment of privacy. Now the banter was done, and Mike sensed air molecules getting stickier, a mesh of stale atmosphere. On the litter in front of them, Snow twitched and rolled his eyes, made a low foggy groaning sound through barely parted lips. White curds of spit formed at the corners of his mouth and he opened and closed his jaws with a series of sticky smacking sounds. His smell had become almost palpable now, a moist second layer that pressed against Mike’s skin. Walker leaned forward, gave Snow another breath through the plastic CPR shield, watched his chest go up and slowly fall again, then checked his pulse.

Mike reached past Officer Repko to the control panel and picked up the red telephone. It beeped twice and he heard Calhoun’s voice on the other end: “Security.”