Page 28 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

Not that an alarm would go off. It’s just that I’ve assessed that for Carrie’s size of apartment building, the number of residents, the time of early morning, I can afford to be crouched in front of her door for no more than a half minute. Beyond that time, the risk is unacceptable.

SecurPoints can be bumped—that is, opened by brute force, achieved by jamming a blank key into the passage over and over and occasionally hitting the key with a hammer or mallet. But I despise bumping. Again, the artistic element. The elegance.

It’s also noisy.

I know very well—from the incident in 2019—the disaster that noise can lead to during a Visit. A simple thing like a latch clicking can result in tragedy.

No, I’ll rake open the SecurPoint, and I’ll do it quickly andsilently, so that Carrie Noelle won’t hear a thing and will continue to slumber in innocence. And vulnerability.

I inhale and exhale slowly, concentrate all my being on the SecurPoint 85.

Locks have been picked by actually looking into the keyway. The greatest picker of all time, a lock salesman named Alfred C. Hobbs, cracked the supposedly unpickable Detector lock at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Britain. Some of his tools had tiny mirrors on them (which was considered cheating, and the event became known as the Great Controversy).

I don’t have such tools. But I do “peer” inside the lock in a way. I close my eyes and visualize the pins and tumblers with the same clarity as if seeing them under a brightly lit microscope.

I become one with the device.

Lock picking has been called a dark side of zen.

A tap on the stopwatch.

In goes the tension tool, in goes the rake.

Five seconds, ten, twenty, twenty-five … thirty, forty.

Click.

The lock opens.

Forty-one seconds. At a recent lock-picking convention, the record for cracking a SecurPoint 85 was one minute and four seconds.

I’ve done it in nearly half that time.

But still not good enough.

I step back, make a cup of herbal tea. As I do I picture Carrie Noelle, who is a tea lover too. She’s wildly appealing in spandex—hip huggers and tank tops are her outfits of choice. She tends toward bright colors.

I wonder what kind of kitchen knives she has. She’ll have some. Everybody does. They’re a perfect Christmas present.

Once again I study my prey, the SecurPoint.

Seductive, sexy, coy.

Whom I want to be inside,needto be inside.

From my hundreds of tools, I select a different rake.

Inhaling and exhaling. I reset then hit the stopwatch again.

Tension bar inserted.

Rake inserted.

The tools are moving slowly, back, forth. Up, down.

My eyes are closed, feeling the pins as if with the tips of my fingers.

Click.