Chapter 30: The Balcony
The elevator doors closed.
Simon pulled Meg close and kissed her with the specific enthusiasm of two people who had survived an unexpectedly complicated evening and were choosing to focus on each other rather than process it.
Meg kissed back.
Chuck, standing eighteen inches to their left, looked at the elevator ceiling with the expression of a man reconsidering every decision that had led him to this moment.
The two men flanking Chuck — Kovacs's people, one of whom still had a hand in his jacket — watched Simon and Meg with the bored assessment of professionals who had seen every kind of civilian behavior and found none of it interesting.
Which was exactly what Simon was counting on.
He kept Meg between himself and the door panel, kissed her for exactly long enough to confirm that none of the four people in the elevator were paying attention to anything except the floor numbers, and then, through the curtain of Meg's hair, read the display as it climbed.
Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The doors opened on twelve.
The group moved out — Kovacs's men directing Chuck with the unhurried confidence of people who had done this before. Simon and Meg followed at the natural pace of a couple navigating the same floor.
He tracked the room numbers on the right side of the corridor. The group stopped at 1206.
Simon slid his keycard into 1208 — two doors down, same side — and pushed it open, pulling Meg with him into the room without breaking the impression of a couple who had somewhere to be and were preoccupied with getting there.
He did not close the door all the way.
Through the two-inch gap, he watched 1206's door close behind Chuck and the three men.
Then he let it shut.
Meg pulled back and looked at him.
"They're next door," she said.
"Room 1206. I counted from the elevator." He was already moving toward the window, checking the layout. "I need to call Sarah."
He picked up Meg's phone — his was in his jacket downstairs, checked at the coat station — and dialed.
Sarah answered on the second ring. "Meg, I'm a little—"
"It's Simon. Chuck's been taken. Room 1206, twelfth floor. I'm in 1208." He paused. "I can hear him talking. Move fast — whoever has him isn't patient."
"We're four minutes out. Do not engage."
"Understood." He ended the call.
Meg was already looking at the connecting balcony through the sliding glass door. "The rooms share the building face," she said.
"Yeah." Simon was calculating the gap — approximately six feet between the balcony railings, with a narrow decorative ledge running between them at mid-height. Not easy. Manageable.
"Simon." Meg's voice had the quality she used when she'd already accepted something and was moving to the next question. "How dangerous is this?"
"The people who have him will hurt him if nobody intervenes in the next three minutes," Simon said. "Sarah is four minutes out."
A pause.
"Go," Meg said. "I'll watch the door."
He shrugged off his jacket, left it on the bed, and stepped onto the balcony.
The night air was cool and smelled like the city — exhaust and jasmine and the particular ozone of a warm evening after a brief coastal wind. Below, twelve floors down, the street moved at its ordinary pace, indifferent to what was happening above it.
Simon went over the railing in one motion, right hand on the rail, left foot finding the decorative ledge, and moved laterally across the face of the building with his back to the city and his eyes on the balcony to his right.
Six feet. The ledge held. He grabbed the neighboring railing, pulled himself over, and landed on the balcony of 1206 in a controlled crouch that made no sound.
He pressed his back to the wall beside the sliding door and listened.
Inside, Chuck's voice — earnest, nervous, explaining something in the way he explained things when he was trying to manage a situation through sheer force of technical detail.
"— and the error code specifically means the operating system can't locate the boot sector, which is actually a pretty common issue on older machines, what you want to do is run the diagnostic utility from the recovery partition, which is accessible by pressing F8 during startup, most people don't know about this but—"
A woman's voice, flat and unimpressed: "Enough. I believe you're a technician."
Chuck: audible relief. "Oh thank God—"
Woman: "Which means you're useless to my employer. And you saw something you shouldn't have."
Chuck: "I didn't see anything, I was just looking at the painting because I was bored, I do that at galleries, it's a habit, completely innocent, I once stared at a Rothko for twenty minutes without understanding it, this is exactly like that—"
Woman: "It will be fast."
The sound of a weapon being readied.
Simon scanned the balcony. Two ceramic planters with ornamental grasses. A small table. Nothing useful for anything except being a projectile, which was something.
He picked up the larger planter.
Then the corridor outside 1206 exploded with noise — voices, a crash, the specific controlled chaos of Casey making entry. The sound moved the attention in the room toward the door.
The woman fired once — not at Chuck, at the door, buying herself three seconds.
And then the balcony door slid open and she came through it, moving fast, already calculating the drop.
She went over the railing to the balcony below before Simon could close the distance.
One of the men followed her, vaulting the railing in the same motion, dropping twelve feet to the eleventh-floor balcony with the practiced ease of someone who had trained for exactly this.
The third man was halfway over the railing when Simon swung the planter.
The ceramic connected with the back of his skull with a sound that was less dramatic than the movies suggested and considerably more conclusive. The man dropped back onto the balcony floor and stayed there.
Simon set the broken planter down.
The sliding door burst inward — Casey first, weapon up, sweeping the room. Sarah right behind him.
Simon had his hands up before Casey finished the sweep.
"Hands—"
"Already up," Simon said.
Casey stared at him. Lowered the weapon. Looked at the unconscious man on the balcony floor. Looked at the broken planter. Looked at Simon.
"I was already here," Simon said. "I climbed over from 1208."
"You climbed—"
"Chuck was about to be shot."
Casey turned to look at Chuck, who was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room with his hands still loosely bound behind him, looking at Simon with an expression that was somewhere between deeply grateful and profoundly exasperated.
"Guys," Chuck said. "Could someone maybe untie me."
Sarah was already there.
Thirty seconds of activity — Casey securing the man from the balcony, Sarah checking Chuck over, the brief professional debrief that happened between field operatives after something resolved. Simon stood to one side, out of the way, and let it happen.
"Two subjects went over the balcony to eleven," he said, when there was room to say it. "One woman, one man. They had the drop calculated — probably preplanned exit."
"We'll pick them up downstairs," Casey said, already on his radio.
"The woman had the weapon. She's the principal." Simon thought about what the Intersect flash had given him earlier. "She's probably connected to Kovacs's support network. She wasn't here for the painting — she was here to make sure nobody who saw the painting talked about what they saw."
Sarah looked at him.
"You can tell me how you know these things," she said, "or you can let me continue to decide it's not worth investigating."
"The second option is better for everyone," Simon said.
A pause.
"Fine," Sarah said. "Go back to your room."
"Can I go through the door this time?"
"Yes." She looked at him for a moment. "Simon."
"Yeah."
"Thank you. Again." She said it the way she said things that cost her something — directly and quickly, before she could change her mind about saying them.
"Chuck's my friend," Simon said. "It's not complicated."
He walked out through the door of 1206, down the corridor, and knocked on 1208.
Meg opened it.
She looked him over — the same efficient check she always did. Satisfied with the result.
"Done?" she said.
"Done."
She stepped back to let him in. "The planter on their balcony is broken," she said.
"I noticed."
"Are we going to be charged for that?"
"Probably not." He picked up his jacket from the bed. "Casey will handle the room."
Meg sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"Simon," she said.
"Yeah."
"I want to have one date where nothing happens." She said it without heat. "Just one. As a baseline."
"That's a reasonable goal."
"I'm going to set a very low bar. Dinner. No federal operations. No helicopters. No balcony climbing." She looked at him. "Think we can manage that?"
"I think we can try," he said.
She held out her hand.
He took it. They sat on the edge of the bed and let the evening wind down at its own pace, and neither of them tried to make it into anything more than what it was — two people at the end of a long night, together.
Sunday morning, Simon slept until eleven, which was the most sleep he'd gotten on any morning in three weeks.
He ate, drove to the Buy More for his afternoon shift, and was crossing the parking lot when his phone buzzed.
Not a call. A text from Chuck: Inside. Need to keep low.
Simon looked up from his phone.
Two men were moving through the Buy More's main entrance — both large, both dressed in the casual-but-deliberate way of people who were trying to look like they were shopping and were not, in fact, shopping.
Simon recognized one of them.
He'd been in the hallway of the twelfth floor of the Hilton the previous night. Third of Kovacs's men, the one who hadn't gone over the balcony.
Which meant the man had gotten out. Which meant he was here for a reason. Which meant Chuck was in a problem that was still running.
Simon called Chuck's number.
Chuck answered in half a ring, voice low and compressed: "Simon, I'm really busy right now—"
"I'm in the parking lot," Simon said. "I can see two of them. One is from last night." He walked toward the entrance at a normal pace. "Where are you?"
A pause.
"Home theater demo room," Chuck said. "Casey's in the store. Sarah's on her way."
"Okay." Simon pocketed the phone. "I'm coming in."
He pushed through the main entrance, took a vest from the hook by the door, clipped on his badge, and stepped onto the floor.
The two men were near the laptop display, not looking at laptops.
Simon picked up a tablet, moved toward them with the purposeful ease of a floor associate doing his job, and began talking about screen resolution.
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