The slashing, sidelong rain whipped his face, but his Baltimore Ravens cap stayed fixed to his skull. He was halfway to the rooftop. Climbing down at this point would be just as hazardous as continuing the climb up, and it wouldn’t get him to his goal anyway. His arms were tired, but the prospect of plummeting to his death on the asphalt below strengthened his resolve, and he took advantage of the steel brackets supporting the pipe for extra foot grips. As he finished looping an arm around the top of the roofline, the rain suddenly stopped—of course!—and he hauled the rest of his rain-drenched body over the edge and headed for the roof access door.

Jack had taken a flathead screwdriver he’d borrowed from the garage and was working against the latch bolt in the door when the rain came crashing down again. When Feng had shown him the roof his first day on the job, Jack noticed that the strike plate was hardly worn, suggesting that the strike plate was set too deep in the door frame. That meant the deadlocking plunger probably didn’t engage when the door was shut.

Sure enough, it took only a couple twists with the flat blade of the screwdriver to push back the latch bolt and open the door. Jack had also noticed that the door hadn’t been secured with an electronic alarm or even a magnetic sensor. There weren’t any cameras on the roof, either. Feng’s sand-filled coffee can was flooded over with water, the butts washed out onto the roof, all around Jack’s feet.

Jack slipped inside and took a second to pull off his cap and coat and shake them out, trying to dry off as much as possible. Once he was inside he would get picked up on security cameras; if the guard on duty bothered to check the cameras and if they actually saw him dripping wet, he might guess Jack’s entry into the building was less than conventional.

Jack sped down the steel stairwell but did his best to keep as quiet as possible. No point in alerting anybody by thundering down the steel steps. He reached the third-floor access door and paused for a moment, listening to see if anybody was nearby. He didn’t hear anything, so he waved his security card past the reader and the door clicked open. He wondered how he’d explain his actions when Dalfan checked their security logs tomorrow, but that was another problem for another day.

The first thing he did was dash into the men’s room, where cameras were thankfully not present, and he used fistfuls of paper towels to finish drying off before heading back out to the main floor. Nobody was around. He had the place all to himself.