“Sure,” he says, then reaches into his coat pocket. He pulls out a set and hands them to me. “I’m guessing what you’re asking me to get is a disguise. Anything else?”

“Baby powder.”

“What kind of party are we starting, here?”

“Just shut up and get it.”

“Where are you going while I’m off doing the shopping?”

“Copy shop down the block,” I tell him. “Meet you back here in fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later I’m standing by the SUV with a thick cardboard documents envelope in my hand. Mike comes walking down the ramp with a plastic sack stuffed with items. He’s got everything, even the hoodies.

As we get back in the rental and shut the doors, I take the papers I’ve printed out of the envelope. “Here. Put that on the clipboard.”

“Sure,” Mike says. He slips the paper under the spring clip. “Sign-off sheet. I assume we’re doing a delivery. That only gets us to the front desk.”

“We need to make them evacuate the tower,” I tell him. “In a building like this, the fire alarms are zoned, so only certain floors get evacuated first. Keeps the whole place from being shut down at once, and makes evacuations easier. But to trigger the fire alarm for his floor, we’d have to be in his penthouse, or the security center.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“No. Which is why we need the whole building out at once. We need Rivard to come to us.” I hold out my hand. I see him register that I’ve got on the latex gloves he gave me earlier. “Baby powder.”

“Oh shit,” he says, even as he hands over the small container. “You’re not serious, Sam. Shit. You get any prints on that envelope?”

“No,” I tell him. I pour a generous amount of powder into the manila envelope and use the bottled water to wet the flap and seal it. Then I slide everything in to the thicker cardboard envelope, turn it over, and press on the printed label I created at the copy shop. It has a bogus but official-looking address from a local legal firm, and it says PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: BALLANTINE RIVARD, and on a separate line, URGENT: OPEN IMMEDIATELY. “Trust me, I don’t want adjoining cells.”

“Okay. So what do I do?” Mike asks.

“You wait here. Only one of us needs to be on that camera.” I zip up the hoodie, put on the ball cap and sunglasses. I secure the cardboard envelope under the sign-off sheet so all I have to handle is the clipboard, then strip off the latex gloves. I have to be careful now with what I touch. Clipboard’s okay. I can’t put my fingers on the paper, or the package.

Mike knows I’m doing it to keep him out of it, in case this goes bad. “Keep your head down and sunglasses on. Good thing you’re an average-looking white boy.”

When I hit the lobby, I’m walking fast. It’s nearly quitting time, so a lot of people are already streaming toward the doors. I head like an arrow straight for the reception desk. I don’t recognize anybody on duty, and as I shove the clipboard across the desk at the man behind the computer, he barely spares me a glance anyway. “Sorry,” I tell him. “Signature. Package for”—I pretend to squint at the label—“Ballantine Rivard. Personal and confidential. Urgent delivery.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. Why would he? He scrawls a signature, fills in the date, prints his name, and takes the envelope without any prompting from me. He shoves the clipboard back. Now the man in the Rivard Luxe jacket looks harassed. “Great,” he says. “You know it’s almost five, right?”

“Must be nice,” I tell him. “I got four more stops before quitting time, man.”

That’s it. I exit fast out the front doors and walk around to the parking garage. I get back in the SUV and toss the clipboard in the back. Mike’s got his own blue hoodie on now. “Went about as well as it could. So what’s standard protocol for these things?”

“In a high-rise building? When somebody identifies possible anthrax in the mail, they pull the alarms and call hazmat, cops, FBI, everybody. It’s a big scramble. Building security evacuates everybody, all floors, to a safe distance. Circulating air gets shut down. It’s a zoo and a circus, and the bigger the building, the bigger the chaos.”

Sounds perfect. “And I just committed an act of terrorism,” I say.

“Better make that we,” he says. “This had better fucking work.”

“Rivard must have a private elevator,” I tell him. “They’ll bring him down that way. We need to find it.”

“Oh, I already know where it is,” he says. “When Rivard got involved in all this, I dug into him, top to bottom. Didn’t find much, but I remember the elevator. It’s one floor above us in the parking garage. A secured exit, but we don’t need to go in. They’re going to come out.”

I nod. “Then we disarm his guys, and we make him talk. You got a problem with that?”

“Nope,” Mike says. “Let’s find your lady.”

It takes another twenty torturous minutes for the alarms to start sounding, and I can’t stop thinking about where Gwen could be. If she’s in Wichita, if Absalom gave us the right info from the beginning . . . but why would they? No, that’s a misdirection. It has to be.

But I can’t turn my brain off. Gwen’s alone, and she thinks I abandoned and betrayed her. Every second we’re waiting counts in drops of blood, and screams, and I have to work to keep my nerves in check. Not moving feels like another betrayal.

We wait in a corner by the unmarked private exit, and finally we see a sleek, oversize Mercedes SUV pull up the ramp and park. It’s been fitted for a wheelchair, and the driver gets out to open the back and pull down a ramp.

I exchange a look with Mike, and Mike shrugs. The chauffeur is a black man of approximately Mike’s height and build. This area of the parking garage is relatively clear of other vehicles—probably a badge-only level—and nobody’s come in or out of the place since we took positions. It’s a risk.

But it’s worth it.

With the unconscious chauffeur tied up and left behind a retaining wall, Mike stands right out in the open in the tireless stance of someone used to waiting. His cap shades his face, and in my experience, people see what they expect to see. Shapes, not features. When the exit door opens, a flood of security men piles out—more than we could take without gunplay, and even then, I don’t think it would be likely we’d come out on top. But we no longer need to.