He typed STAIR RE-ENTRY — FIRE CODE — DO NOT MODIFY. He pulled in the doors, one at a time, from the hardware tree on the left side of the screen: C-21, C-17, C-13, C-09, C-05, and then the same five in stairwell A and the same five in stairwell B. Fifteen doors. He right-clicked the group and chose Door Mode and then Unlocked and then Override Schedule: Always, and a box came up asking him to enter a reason, and he looked over his shoulder at Anselm.
"Life safety," Anselm said. "Authorized by A. Voight. Put the time."
Kiran typed it. He pressed Enter. On the right side of the screen the live event monitor began to scroll, a line for each door, the font clean and modern now, not the old dot-matrix gray, but the columns the same as they had always been. Date. Time. Reader. Event. C-21, 9:46:12, Door Mode Changed: Unlocked. C-17, 9:46:12. C-13. C-09, 9:46:13. Fifteen lines. Agata read every one of them.
"Send somebody to try them," she said. "Don't trust the screen."
"I'll go," Kiran said, and stood up, and then stopped, and looked at her. "Do you want to?"
She thought about it. She thought about the quarter inch of a lever going down and stopping. "No," she said. "You go. Take Danita's radio, the stairs are dead on the regular channel between eighteen and eleven. Call me when you get to the bottom."
He went. Twenty-two minutes later his voice came over the console speaker, slightly out of breath, from the Allyn Street alley. "All fifteen open from the stair side. I opened every one. I walked through every one." A pause, a gust of wind across the microphone. "Agata, the sign on C-nine's crooked. I fixed it."
She did not trust herself to answer. Anselm leaned over and pressed the talk key and said, "Thank you, Kiran," and let it go.
The Hartford Fire Marshal's office sent a lieutenant at one-thirty in the afternoon. Her name was Renée Desjardins and she was about Agata's age, small and wiry, with reading glasses on top of her head and a clipboard and the bored, patient voice of a woman who had been lied to by building managers in every possible way and no longer took it personally. She met Alvin at the desk. She went with him and Anselm and the building's chief engineer into the fire command room off the loading dock, where the alarm panel lived behind a red steel door, and she had them put the panel into test mode and then into a live drill with the monitoring company on the phone so that nobody's trucks would roll, and Agata, who had been told she could stay as long as she was escorted, stood in the doorway of that small hot room with its humming cabinets and its binders and watched the doors on the annunciator screen that should have gone green when the alarm went off. They stayed red. All of the non-re-entry doors in all three stairwells, which should have released, stayed locked. It was exactly what Kiran had found on Thursday, exactly what Agata had found in April. The only ones that showed open were the fifteen in the new group, and those were open because a man had typed a reason into a box that morning.