Free 1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1 by Frederick Ramsay Page A

attached a four-inch arm to the shaft and fastened a hand crank to that. Finally, he locked the diamond-bitted cutting tool to the arm and began rotating it with the crank. The tip incised an eight-inch circle in the door. When the inner face was breached, he stopped. Now came the hard part. He backed the arm out, removed the tool, and replaced it with a toothed clamp, drawing the clamp tight to hold the new circle to the arm. He advanced the arm again, a millimeter at a time, allowing the cutout to protrude into the room, but so that the movement could not be detected by motion alarm inside. When he had three inches clear, he stopped.
    He reached into the bag for the magnets that would bypass the contact alarms on the door. With the same painstaking slowness, he reached through the hole he had just made, holding the wafer-thin magnetized plates between his thumb and index fingers. His second and third fingers felt for the contacts. He found them. Harry removed his hand and cranked the cutout back into place. Twelve minutes. Well ahead of schedule.
    Now, he thought, we come to the first make-or-break. He had to swing the door open far enough to slide his deflector panel and himself through, and he had to account for the difference in movement caused by the fact the door was hinged and its outer edge would move more rapidly than its hinged edge. Because the door, no matter how slowly opened, would create an angle that would deflect the sonic beam and trip the alarm, he wasn’t sure how far he dared open it—one inch, two, three—enough.
    He slipped the six-foot three-inch transparent Teflon-coated clear plastic screen through the gap, positioned it in front of the door and parallel to the wall. He eased the door open until there was enough room for him to slip through. Harry shouldered his bag, stepped out of his shoes, and entered the building. Once in, he closed the door and surveyed his surroundings. The motion detector was eight feet in front of him, its cord running to an outlet just to his left, beyond the edge of the door—his first break. Plugged in anywhere else, he would have had to inch his way to the device itself and cut the line. This way, he could slide left sixteen feet and just pull the plug. Thank God for slow security guards unable to clear the distance from the back wall to the door within the fifteen-second delay built into the system.
    It took Harry five minutes of slow lateral movement to get to the plug and pull it from the outlet.
    He laid the panel down and padded over to where the laser grid was located. He had to look hard to find the red glowing dots on the floor, ceiling, and walls. He assembled a shallow trough from snap-together sections, filled it half full with water from the canteen strapped to his waist. Returning to his bag he removed a brick of dry ice. Placed in the trough, the dry ice boiled, and within minutes the room was filled with a dense fog. Now the grid was visible, its bright red beams crisscrossing in front of him
    Harry lay on his back, tied the bag to his left foot, and using the palms of his hands and his shoulder blades slithered between two vertical beams and the lowest horizontal. Like doing the limbo, he thought. Once on the other side, he dragged his bag through, stood up, and walked to the master panel.
    Disconnecting the remainder of the alarms at their source came next. The panel was mounted flush to the wall and its contents protected by a locked door. Harry reached for his lock picks and then paused. The lock looked different somehow. The key slot seemed normal, but something.…He looked closer, and then ran his fingernail over its face. It was plastic. The face, the key slot, the whole lock assembly was plastic. Harry studied the lock. He had not noticed it two days ago. He had inspected the panel, but from where he stood, the lock’s metallic face looked just like any other. Good news and bad news. The good news is that the door was probably not rigged, just