"She's coming with us," Malone said, pointing to Dorothea.
Boyd shrugged. "Malone," he said, "who do you think you are? The Pied Piper of Hamelin?"
Malone wheeled and went ahead. Opening the door, he played his I-R flashlight on the room inside and he, Boyd and Dorothea trailed in, going through rooms piled with huge boxes. They went up an iron stairway to the second floor, and so on up to the roof.
They moved across the roof quickly under the cold stars, to the wall of the warehouse, which was two stories higher than the building they were on. Of course, there were no windows in the warehouse wall facing them, except on the top story.
But there was a single, heavy, fireproof emergency exit. It would have taken power machinery or explosives to open that door from the outside without a key, although from the inside it would open easily.
He took it out and stepped aside. "Give that lock the works," he whispered to Boyd.
Boyd took a lubricant gun from his pocket and fired three silent shots of special oil into the lock. Then he shot the hinges, and cracks around the door.
They waited for a minute or two while the oil, forced in under pressure, did its work. Then Malone fitted the key carefully into the lock and turned it, slowly and delicately. The door swung open in silence. Malone slipped inside, followed by Boyd and Dorothea Fueyo.
Infrared equipment went on again, and the eerie illumination spread over their surroundings. Malone tapped Boyd on the shoulder and jerked his thumb toward the back stairs. This was plainly no time for talk.
From the floor above, they could hear the murmur of youthful voices.
They started for the stairway. Fortunately, the building was of the steel-and-concrete type; there were no wooden floors to creak and groan beneath their feet.
At the bottom of the stairs, they paused. Voices came down the stairwell clearly, even words being defined in the silence.
"... And quit harping on whose fault it was." Malone recognized Mike Fueyo's voice. "That FBI guy was on to us and we had to pull out; you know that. We always figured we'd have to pull out some day. So why not now?"
"Yeah," another voice said. "But you didn't have to go and vanish right under that Fed's nose. You been beating into our heads not to do that sort of stuff ever since we first found out we could make this vanishing bit. And then you go and do it in front of a Fed. Smart. Sure, you get a big bang out of it, but is it smart? I ask you--"