Face of Fear by Dean Koontz Page A

walls, a high ceiling and fluorescent lights. Two metal desks stood just inside the door ; they held typewriters, letter trays, vases full of artificial flowers, and the detritus of a day’s work. The two well-dressed matronly women behind the desks were cheerful in spite of the drab institutional atmosphere. There were five cafeteria tables lined up, short end to short end, so that whoever sat at them would always be sideways to the desks. The ten metal chairs were all on the same side of the table row. Except for the relationship of the tables to the desks, it might have been a schoolroom, a study hall monitored by two teachers.
    Frank Bollinger identified himself as Ben Frank and said he was an employee of a major New York City firm of architects. He asked for the complete file on the Bowerton Building, took off his coat and sat at the first table.
    The two women, as efficient as they appeared to be, quickly brought him the Bowerton material from an adjacent storage room: original blueprints, amendments to the blueprints, cost estimates, applications for dozens of different building permits, final cost sheets, re-modeling plans, photographs, letters ... Every form—and everything else required by law—that was related to the Bowerton highrise and that had passed officially through a city bureau or department was in that file. It was a formidable mound of paper, even though each piece was carefully labeled and both categorically and sequentially arranged.
    The forty-two-story Bowerton Building, facing a busy block of Lexington Avenue, had been completed in 1929 and stood essentially unchanged. It was one of Manhattan’s art deco masterpieces, even more effectively designed than the justly acclaimed art deco Chanin Building which was only a few blocks away. More than a year ago a group of concerned citizens had launched a campaign to have the building declared a landmark in order to keep its most spectacular art deco features from being wiped away during sporadic flurries of “modernization.” But the most important fact, so far as Bollinger was concerned, was that Graham Harris had his offices on the fortieth floor of the Bowerton Building.
    For an hour and ten minutes, Bollinger studied the paper image of the structure. Main entrances. Service entrances. One-way emergency exits. The placement and operation of the bank of sixteen elevators. The placement of the two stairwells. A minimal electronic security system, primarily a closed-circuit television guard station, had been installed in 1969 ; and he went over and over the paper on that until he was certain that he had overlooked no detail of it.
    At four forty-five he stood up, yawned and stretched. Smiling, humming softly, he put on his overcoat.
    Two blocks from City Hall he stepped into a telephone booth and called Billy. “I’ve checked it out.”
    “Bowerton?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What do you think?” Billy asked anxiously.
    “It can be done.”
    “My God. You’re sure?”
    “As sure as I can be until I start it.”
    “Maybe I should be more help. I could—”
    “No,” Bollinger said. “If anything goes wrong, I can flash my badge and say I showed up to investigate a complaint. Then I can slip quietly away. But if we were both there, how could we explain our way out of it?”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    “We’ll stick to the original plan.”
    “All right.”
    “You be in that alleyway at ten o’clock.”
    Billy said, “What if you get there and discover it won’t work? I don’t want to be waiting—”
    “If I have to give it up,” Bollinger said, “I’ll call you well before ten. But if you don’t get the call, be in that alley. ”
    “Of course. What else? But I won’t wait past ten-thirty. I can’t wait longer than that.”
    “That’ll be long enough.”
    Billy sighed happily. “Are we going to stand this city on its ear?”
    “Nobody will sleep tomorrow night.”
    “Have you decided what lines you’ll write on the