The Swiss Suitcase (LSD, #1)

12. Get Off Of My Cloud

Get Off Of My Cloud

My first concern isn't about the guests of the hotel; a little darkness doesn't harm anyone. If they want to scream and jump on tables and call for the police and fire department and ambulances, that's their business and not mine. My first concern is to find Mister White (to give him back his jacket and gun) and Miss Franklin (to get her safely out of the war zone).

Rostov and I struggle through a mob of fighting people who want to get off the terrace into the hotel, throwing each other into the water while several voices shout: "Please, calm down. This is not a terrorist attack. Please, sit down." When authorities shout messages like that, even the most dignified group of people panics.

I use the flashlight of my spiPhone to see where we're going. We manage to reach the stairs and start climbing the 25 floors to suite 2539.

I'm trained. To keep in shape, I run at least once a week between five and ten kilometres, and try to spend at least two hours in the gym. For me, climbing 25 floors of stairs is just another day in the office. Rostov spends his days in the office with nothing heavier to lift than a cup of coffee. When he has to visit the bathroom, he orders a taxi. He's breathing heavily when we reach the third floor, puffs and pants on the sixth floor, needs a break on the tenth floor, begs me to carry him in my arms on the fifteenth floor, but when he crashes like a plane without fuel on the twentieth floor, I get mad: "Get up on your high heels and behave like a man. You're making your dress dirty."

Finally, we reach suite 2539. Jake Elwood, worried, opens when we knock. I tell him what happened (everything went great, but some chap from the audience caused the tumbling of the lights in the water, and therewith the short circuit of the power in the hotel and the canton), check on Miss Franklin (she's still asleep and didn't notice anything), tell Rostov to change back into his Mesut-outfit, and explain that I go back to my own room to check the info that I stole from the phone of Mister White.

The power (and therefore the Wi-Fi Internet connection in the hotel) is still down, but my laptop works with the LSD satellite connection so I can reach my secret backup space in the cloud as long as I have battery power. The information from Mister White's mobile phone is interesting. There are files with info about Mister Camponelli and his network of clients, mp3-files with tapped phone conversations, photos of our four friends of last night's dinner, meeting several others, copies of letters from Nixon to Trump with instructions on how to win elections, in short: too much to go through. The only files I read are last week's short daily reports from Mister White to his superiors: no trace of the suitcase and no trace of Mister Nikolai either.

I send a copy of the most interesting files to #2, The Nerd, with the request to analyse and forward a summary to #4, The Agent, to help him with his mission. Then I switch off the laptop and climb the stairs again to suite 2539. When I'm on the 23rd floor, the lights go on. Two floors later, I open the door of the stairwell and surprise a pretty lady in the corridor. She looks in my direction like I caught her in some sort of illegal activity and starts knocking on the door of the suite: "Please, open up, dear. It's me. I've lost the key card. Are you in the bathroom?"

I smile my reassuring chamberboy smile at the lovely lady.

Any other chamberboy would go on with his business, but I'm not any other chamberboy: I see the iron cylinder, standing between her left leg and the door. I see the connected rubber hose disappear under the door of the suite, the door of suite 2503, the abandoned suite of Mister Nikolai. I've seen enough.

I stop.

It's intuition.

It saves my life.

An explosion in room 2503 blows the front door to the other side of the corridor, hitting the pretty lady unconscious on its way. Hadn't I stopped two seconds ago, I would have been there, between that door and that wall.