Of course, if she didn’t just slip or misplace her foot, if instead the rope broke, and if she was on a single line, the harness would not stop her fall. However, Connie didn’t have to worry about that, for he was taking extraordinary safety measures with her: she would be going down on two independent lines. In addition to the main rope, he intended to fix her to a second which he would belay all the way to the street.
He would not be so well looked after as she was. There was no one to belay him. He would be descending last—on a single line.
He didn’t explain that to her. When she got outside, the less she had to worry about, the better her chances were of coming out of this alive. Tension was good for a climber
;
but too much tension could cause him to make mistakes.
Both harnesses had accessory loops at the waist. Graham was carrying pitons, carabiners, expansion bolts, a hammer, and a compact battery-powered drill the size of two packs of cigarettes. In her harness loops, Connie had a variety of extra pitons and carabiners.
Besides the equipment hung on their harnesses, they were both burdened with rope. Connie had hundred-foot lengths of it at each hip
;
it was heavy, but so tightly coiled that it did not restrict her movements. Graham had another hundred-foot coil at his right hip. They were left with two shorter lengths: and these they would use for the first leg of the descent.
Last of all, they put on their gloves.
At every floor, Bollinger got off the elevator. If the entire level was occupied by one business firm, he tried the locked doors at opposite ends of the alcove. If it was an “open” floor, he stepped out of the alcove to make certain there was no one in the corridor.
At every fifth floor, he looked not only into the corridor but into the stairs and the elevator shafts as well. On the first twenty floors, four elevator shafts served the building
;
from the twentieth to the thirty-fifth floors, two shafts
;
and from the thirty-fifth to the forty-second, only one shaft. In the first half of his vertical search, he wasted far more time than he could afford, opening the emergency doors to all of those shafts.
At ten-fifty he was on the fifteenth floor.
He had not found a sign of them. He was beginning to wonder if he was conducting the search properly.
However, at the moment he was unable to see any other way to go about it.
He went to the sixteenth floor.
Connie pulled on the heavy cord and drew back the office draperies.
Graham unlatched the center window. The two rectangular panes wouldn’t budge at first, then abruptly gave with a squeal, opened inward like casement windows.
Wind exploded into the room. It had the voice of a living creature
;
its screams were piercing, demonic. Snowflakes swirled around him, danced across the top of the conference table and melted on its polished surface, beaded like dew on the grass-green carpet.
Leaning over the sill, he looked down the side of the Bowerton Building. The top five floors—and the four-story decorative pinnacle above them—were set back two yards from the bottom thirty-seven levels. Just three floors below, there was a six-foot-wide ledge that ringed the structure. The lower four-fifths of the building’s face lay beyond the ledge, out of his line of sight.
The snow was falling so thickly that he could barely see the street lamps on the far side of Lexington Avenue. Under the lights, not even a small patch of pavement was visible.
In the few seconds he needed to survey the situation, the wind battered his head, chilled and numbed his exposed face.
“That’s damned cold!” As he spoke, breath pluming out of him, he turned from the window. “We’re bound to suffer at least some frostbite.”
“We’ve got to go anyway,” she said.
“I know. I’m not trying to back out.”
“Should we wrap our faces?”
“With what?”
“Scarves—”
“The wind would cut through any material we’ve got handy, then paste it to our faces so we’d have trouble breathing. Unfortunately, the magazine didn’t recommend any face masks in that buyer’s guide. Otherwise, we’d have exactly what we need.”
“Then what can we do?”
He had a sudden thought and went to his desk. He stripped off his bulky gloves. The center drawer contained evidence of the hypochondria that had been an ever-growing component of his fear: Anacin, aspirin, half a dozen cold remedies, tetracycline capsules, throat lozenges, a thermometer in its case ... He picked up a small tube and showed it to her.
“Chap Stick?” she asked.
“Come here.”
She went to him. “That stuff’s for chapped lips. If we’re going to be frostbitten, why worry about a little thing like chapped lips?”
He pulled the cap off the tube, twisted the base to bring up the waxy stick, and coated her entire face-forehead, temples, cheeks, nose, lips and chin. “With even a thin shield of this, the wind will need more time to leech the warmth out of you. And it’ll keep your skin supple. Loss of heat is two-thirds of the danger. But loss of moisture along with loss of heat is what causes severe frostbite. The moisture in bitterly cold air doesn’t get to your skin
;
in fact, subzero wind can dry out your face almost as thoroughly as desert air.”
“I was right,” she said.
“Right about what?”
“There’s some Nick Charles in you.”
At eleven o’clock, Bollinger entered the elevator, switched it on, and pressed the button for the twenty-second floor.
32
The window frame was extremely sturdy, not cold-pressed and not of aluminum as were most of the window frames in buildings erected during the past thirty years. The grooved, steel center post was almost an inch thick and appeared to be capable of supporting hundreds of pounds without bending or breaking loose from the sash.
Harris hooked a carabiner to the post.
This piece of hardware was one of the most important that a climber carried. Carabiners were made of steel or alloy and came in several shapes-oval D, offset D, and pear or keyhole-but the oval was used more often than any of the others. It was approximately three and a half inches by one and three-quarter inches, and it resembled nothing so much as an oversized key ring or perhaps an elongated chain link. A springloaded gate opened on one side of the oval, making it possible for the climber to connect the carabiner to the eye of a piton; he could also slip a loop of rope onto the metal ring. A carabiner, which was sometimes referred to as a “snap link,” could be employed to join two ropes at any point along them, which was essential when the ends of those lines were secured above and below. A vital-but not the only-function of the highly polished snap links was to prevent ropes from chaffing each other, to guard against their fraying through on the rough, unpolished eye of a piton or on the sharp edge of a rock
;
carabiners saved lives.
At Graham’s direction, Connie had stripped the manufacturer’s plastic bands from an eighty-foot coil of red and blue hawser-laid nylon rope.
“It doesn’t look strong,” she said.
“It’s got a breaking strength of four thousand pounds.”
“So thin.”
“Seven-sixteenths of an inch.”
“I guess you know what you’re doing.”
Smiling reassuringly, he said, “Relax.”
He tied a knot in one end of the rope. That done, he grasped the double loop that sprouted above the knot and slipped it through the gate of the carabiner that was attached to the window post.
He was surprised at how quickly he was working, and by the ease with which he had fashioned the complex knot. He seemed to be operating on instinct more than on knowledge. In five years he had not forgotten anything.
“This will be your safety line,” he told her.
The carabiner was one of those that came with a metal sleeve that fitted over the gate to guard against an accidental opening. He screwed the sleeve in place.
He picked up the rope and pulled it through his hands, quickly measuring eleven yards of it. He took a folding knife from a pocket of his parka and cut the rope, dropped one piece to the floor. He tied the cut end of the shorter section to her harness, so that she was attached to the window post by a thirty-foot umbilical. He took one end of the other piece of rope and tied it around her waist, using a bowline knot.
Patting the windowsill, he said, “Sit up here.”
She sat facing him, her back to the wind and snow.
He pushed the thirty-foot rope out of the window
;
and the loop of slack, from the post to Connie’s harness, swung in the wind. He arranged the forty-five-foot length on the office floor, carefully coiled it to be certain that it would pay out without tangling, and finally tied the free end around his waist.
He intended to perform a standing hip belay. On a mountain, it was always possible that a belayer might be jerked from his standing position if he was not anchored by another rope and a well-placed piton; he could lose his balance and fall, along with the person whom he was belaying. Therefore, a standing belay was considered less desirable than one accomplished from a sitting position. However, because Connie weighed sixty pounds less than he, and because the window was waist high, he didn’t think she would be able to drag him out of the room.
Standing with his legs spread to improve his balance, he picked up the forty-five-foot line at a point midway between the neatly piled coil and Connie. He had knotted the rope at his navel
;
now, he passed it behind him and across the hips at the belt line. The rope that came from Connie went around his left hip and then around his right
;
therefore, his left hand was the guide hand, while the right was the braking hand.
From his anchor point six feet in front of her he said, “Ready?”
She bit her lip.
“The ledge is only thirty feet below.”
“Not so far,” she said weakly.
“You’ll be there before you know it.”
She forced a smile.
She looked down at her harness and tugged on it, as if she thought it might have come undone.
“Remember what to do?” he asked.
“Hold the line with both hands above my head. Don’t try to help. Look for the ledge, get my feet on it right away, don’t let myself be lowered past it.”
“And when you get there?”
“First, I untie myself.”
“But only from this line.”
“Yes.”
“Not from the other.”
She nodded.
“Then, when you’ve untied yourself—”
“I jerk on this line twice.”
“That’s right. I’ll put you down as gently as I can.”
In spite of the stinging cold wind that whistled through the open window on both sides of her, her face was pale. “I love you,” she said.
“And I love you.”
“You can do this.”
“I hope so.”
“I know. ”
His heart was pounding.
“I trust you,” she said.
He realized that if he allowed her to die during the climb, he would have no right or reason to save himself. Life without her would be an unbearable passage through guilt and loneliness, a gray emptiness worse than death. If she fell, he might as well pitch himself after her.
He was scared.
All he could do was repeat what he had already said, “I love you.”
Taking a deep breath, leaning backward, she said, “Well ... woman overboard!”
The corridor was dark and deserted.
Bollinger returned to the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-seventh floor.
33
The instant that Connie slipped backward off the windowsill, she sensed the hundreds of feet of open space beneath her. She didn’t need to look down to be profoundly affected by that great, dark gulf. She was even more terrified than she had expected to be. The fear had a physical as well as a mental impact on her. Her throat constricted
;
she found it hard to breathe. Her chest felt tight, and her pulse rate soared. Suddenly acidic, her stomach contracted sickeningly.
She resisted the urge to clutch the windowsill before it was out of her grasp. Instead, she reached overhead and gripped the rope with both hands.
The wind rocked her from side to side. It pinched her face and stung the thin rim of ungreased skin around her eyes.
In order to see at all, she was forced to squint, to peer out through the narrowest of lash-shielded slits. Otherwise, the wind would have blinded her with her own tears. Unfortunately, the pile of climbing equipment in the art director’s office had not contained snow goggles.
She glanced down at the ledge toward which she was slowly moving. It was six feet wide, but to her it looked like a tightrope.
His feet slipped on the carpet.
He dug in his heels.
Judging by the amount of rope still coiled beside him, she was not even halfway to the ledge. Yet he felt as if he had lowered her at least a hundred feet.
Initially, the strain on Graham’s arms and shoulders had been tolerable. But as he payed out the line, he became increasingly aware of the toll taken by five years of inactivity. With each foot of rope, new aches sprang up like sparks in his muscles, spread toward each other, fanned into crackling fires.
Nevertheless, the pain was the least of his worries. More important, he was facing away from the office doors. And he could not forget the vision: a bullet in the back, blood, and then darkness.
Where was Bollinger?
The farther Connie descended, the less slack there was in the line that connected her to the window post. She hoped that Graham had estimated its length correctly. If not, she might be in serious trouble. A too-long safety line posed no threat
;
but if it was too short, she would be hung up a foot or two from the ledge. She would have to climb back to the window so that Graham could rectify the situation—or she would have to give up the safety line altogether, proceed to the setback on just the belayer’s rope. Anxiously, she watched the safety line as it gradually grew taut.