The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(59)

I jiggled a doorknob in my hand. It was firmly locked. Odd, when the rest of the house lay wide open. Curious, I crouched and dug my lockpick case out of my pocket. The antique tumblers rolled over like a dog doing tricks. I let myself in. Shelves, drafting tables, and cluttered cubbyholes lined the walls of the octagonal study beyond the door, lit by a frosted-glass ceiling globe. The centerpiece of the room stood upon a wooden table, a scale model of the Enclave some four feet tall and built to exacting precision.

I circled the model warily. Something about the scalloping spear of its tower, the reproduction so pristine I could see my warped reflection in the curve of its windows, set my teeth on edge. Little smiling people, refugees from a model train set, streamed into the black maw of the casino’s front doors. None were walking back out.

A chrome thermos sat on the edge of a messy desk next to a half-finished mug of coffee. I touched the side of the mug. Still warm. If Tony and Amber were both gone, I needed to figure out where he’d taken her. Rummaging through the documents and clutter, leafing through bid bonds, construction reports, and tattered memos, my sense of uneasiness grew. I was no architect, but even I could see something was inherently wrong with the tacked-up blueprints. Stairwells leading to nowhere. Curving halls doubling back on themselves. Most of the plans were perfectly mundane, but the more I looked, the more the little details stood out, the incongruities that had no reason to exist.

The corner of a book poked out from under a stack of drafts. The title caught my eye: Torments of the Inquisition. Most of the book was a dry history, the pages as pristine as the day they were printed. A fat chapter on torture methods though, illustrated with woodcuts and diagrams, had more highlights and margin notations than a college calculus textbook.

“Reproduce w/16v electric motor, connect to pneumatic tube system.”

“Plexiglas again—Meadow always wants Plexiglas.”

“Hold design until L. does final work-up of the Throne. Still need de Rais’ help to finish the connecting patterns.”

Tucked in next to the depiction of a ferocious, spike-lined chair for heretics was a sketch on engineer’s graph paper. Tony’s twenty-first-century version was lined with hypodermic needles and connected, at the back, to a cluster of rubber hoses. Flowery script on a yellow sticky note read, “Love the design, but can we make the whole thing transparent? -M.”

I looked back at the scale model of the Enclave.

What the hell are you people building? I thought, rummaging through Tony’s cubbyholes and shelves. I grabbed anything that looked relevant. Blueprint scraps, notes, their little catalog of torture, stacking it all up to take with me. Then I tugged open a drawer, and everything went wrong.

It felt like that sickening stomach lurch as your car slides toward a collision, when you pump the brakes even though you know nothing is going to stop the impact. The drawer pulled out stiffly, too stiffly, and I looked down and saw the cord on the inside of the empty wooden nook just a second too late.

The cord sprang free, slithering back into the wall. The study door slammed closed. I ran over and yanked on the knob, but a hydraulic arm at the top of the doorframe kept it wedged firmly shut. Tony’s mechanical genius extended to his own home: there were worse ways to trap a would-be thief. Taking a few steps back, getting ready to throw my weight at the door, I froze. From behind me came a soft, relentless hissing.

I had snakes on the brain after Lauren’s death-curse, but the pungent scent rising in the room alerted me to a more dangerous threat.

Gas!

The lid of Tony’s thermos sat slightly open and off-center. I pulled at the flask and found it bolted to the table, nothing but a piece of clever camouflage. I lifted the lid to reveal a brass-tipped nozzle connected to a tube. It looked like he’d rigged an extension of the house’s natural gas line to pipe into the study. Inhaling natural gas isn’t fatal right away, but I needed to find a way out before the sheer amount of it choked the breathable air out of the sealed room.

Shick, echoed a faint but insistent sound. Shick. A grating rasp every ten seconds or so, like the hammer of a gun falling on an empty chamber.

Or the striker on a spark ignition, I realized, horror dawning as the entirety of the design became clear. Tony Vance was serious about protecting Carmichael-Sterling’s secrets. Serious enough to destroy his entire life’s work with a raging inferno, along with anyone locked in the room when his trap went off.

Shick.





Thirty



I had to find that striker. I started to tear the room apart, trying to find the source of the sound, pulling out drawers and yanking down shelves, a whirlwind of paper around me as—

Shick.

I looked up. Inside the frosted globe on the ceiling, a black shadow slid sharply forward, the glass softly rattling. I climbed up on the table, balanced precariously next to the casino model, and strained toward it on my tiptoes. My fingertips slid feebly off the bottom curve of the glass. It was just too far to reach.

One wing of the Enclave model, linked to the spear-like tower, sported a roof with a gentle slope. I put one experimental foot on it, adding a little weight. The model quivered but didn’t collapse. Delicately, moving as fast as I dared, I settled both feet on the tiny rooftop and gained a few inches of height. I held my breath as I unscrewed the frosted-glass sphere.

The sphere came free. It slipped from my strained fingers and plummeted, smashing and sending shards of snowy glass skidding across the floor. A naked light bulb glared in my eyes as I studied the mechanism mounted beside it. It was simple, a chunk of flint mounted on a short iron rail across from a striking pad that resembled a thumb-sized match head. A timer rattled as the flint pulled back again to strike, riding the rail like the sole passenger on a roller coaster to hell.