The Cage

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Interval

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part II

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Bonnie Kistler

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The fog hovered high over the city, invisible in the cold night sky except for the diffused reflection of the urban skyglow. The only surface it touched was Marketplace Tower, the city’s newest and tallest office building, where it painted a coat of rime over every sparkling facet of the spire. If anyone could see it, they might imagine a sugar-frosted fairyland. But no one could, in the fog, in the dark.

Down on the street, a van stopped at the entrance to discharge a crew of three men. As they unloaded their machines from the back and wheeled them to the door, one of the men, the new one, paused on the pavement and looked up, and up some more. The thirty stories that loomed over the street were dark except for two gauzy glimmers on the topmost floor. He craned his head back farther. The two lights glowed on opposite sides of the building, and as the fog drifted through the sky, they dimmed and brightened like lighthouse lanterns warning of two separate hazards.

In the building’s lobby, a guard sat at a security console that faced the three sets of revolving doors. CCTV videos lit up four screens in front of him; on the fifth he was watching the game. Behind him stretched the bank of elevators, five cars on either side with a destination dispatch console between them. Their doors were etched with a gridwork of black bars, an homage to the old cage-style elevators of the Edwardian era.

The three men buzzed for entry, and the guard looked up and pushed a button to release the lock. They signed in and stowed their coats in an empty office off the lobby, rubbernecked the TV, and asked for the score. Twenty-two–nothing, the guard told them. They whistled, then started up their machines and tugged on their headphones to listen to the game as they worked. The lobby floor was Siena marble inlaid with geometric diamonds of onyx, and the polishers glided over it like Zambonis.

Thirty floors up a woman stood very still at her office window. On a clear day she could see the Manhattan skyline. Tonight she saw nothing but her own reflection. She was in her early forties, slender and petite, with alabaster skin and faded blond hair cut in a stylish swoop. Although it was a Sunday night, her makeup was flawless, and she was dressed for a workday, in a silk blouse and tailored trousers and pointed-toe heels with the distinctive red soles that marked them as a high-three-figure purchase. She gazed at herself in the darkness, her face utterly still, until at last she turned and picked up her coat and pulled her office door shut behind her. A beep sounded as the electronic lock engaged, and she headed down the corridor.