Lemuria by Burt Clinchandhill (most popular novels of all time .txt) 📗

see what we have here.” Ignatowski worked his laptop.

“You do that while I get us something to drink. Iced tea?”

“Yes, please.” Ignatowski didn’t look up from the screen.

For the next five minutes, Ignatowski typed and swiped the touch screen.

Lindsey returned and handed Ignatowski his drink. “Any luck, Iggy?” she asked.

“Luck has nothing to do with it.” He grinned. “The hotel now has a new employee called Robert Langdon.”

“Who’s Robert Langdon?”

Ignatowski's eyes pierced Lindsey’s. “You don’t... you never heard of...? Amazing.” He shook his head. “It’s a fictional character in one of my favorite series of books who.... Ah, never mind. Anyway, Langdon has a fake account as a desk manager that I control.”

“So, we can look at everything?”

“Everything a desk manager can see and do, we can see and do.” Ignatowski turned the screen to Lindsey.

“Great. Can you pop up the guest list?” Ignatowski turned the screen back and worked the keyboard.

“Sure. Here you are.” He turned the screen back to her.

“Do you mind?” She put the computer in her lap. “Aha. Okay, yes.”

“Anything interesting?” Ignatowski asked, rubbing his temples.

“I think so.” She pointed to the screen. “You see over here, a hotel floor plan, and here, the guest list. You notice anything peculiar?”

Ignatowski scrutinized the screen. “There are no visitors, not one on the top floor of the east wing?”

“Exactly.” Lindsey raised a thumb. “And from what I read in the past weeks’ logs, there hasn’t been anyone in there all that time.”

“Maybe they are remodeling?”

“You think so?” Lindsey pointed through the window at her right.

“That’s the east wing?”

“According to this floor plan, it is,” Lindsey confirmed.

Through the lobby windows, the fourth and top floor of the east wing was plainly visible. Although many of the curtains on the wing were closed, a deck chair on the balcony of one of the rooms was clearly occupied.

“There’s not much going on,” Lindsey remarked, “but it’s also not unoccupied.”

Ignatowski bobbed his head. “I see what you mean. What do you want to do?”

“You wanna come and check it out?” She rose from her chair, handed him the laptop and walked to the elevator at the back of the lobby.

“Awesome.” He quickly tucked the laptop back into the briefcase and followed her. “This is going way too easy,” he mumbled.

“What’s that?” Lindsey glanced back.

“Nothing. What could go wrong?” he joked.

As they neared the elevator, the doors opened and two young women dressed in bathing suits and flip flops, complete with a towel over their shoulders, exited.

“Afternoon, ladies,” Ignatowski said, greeting the women.

Without replying, the women passed them.

Lindsey put her hand on his shoulder, entering the elevator. “You’ll get over it.”

“Ha ha.” Ignatowski pushed the button for the fourth floor.

The elevator took them up, and when the doors opened, Lindsey stepped out without looking and gasped as she almost bumped into a cleaning cart that blocked the exit.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said a young woman dressed in white overalls. She immediately pulled the cart away. “Are you okay?” she asked as she tossed some dirty sheets into a bin on the cart.

“Yeah, sure, thank you. It just startled me. No problem.”

Opposite the elevator, a sign read “400-424 West,” with an arrow pointing right. The sign below showed an arrow pointing ahead of them that read “425-451 North” and a third one read, “476-501 South,” with a curved arrow pointing back behind the elevator.

“No East?” Ignatowski asked.

“Obviously not.” Lindsey walked up to the signs on the wall. She gently ran her fingers over the wall below the signs.

“I see it too,” Ignatowski agreed. “Something’s been removed.”

Both of them simultaneously turned their heads to the left. A short corridor ended at a set of large dark brown doors. They approached them, and Ignatowski first pushed, and then pulled, the left door and then the right, before shaking his head.

Lindsey tapped him on the shoulder and nodded to the right side of the door where a small gray box was placed on the wall.

“Electronic access,” he pointed out.

“How good are you with hacking electronic doors?”

Ignatowski took a deep breath. “If you give me a day or two, then maybe. I would need administrator access to the system, and that’s quite a different deal, I’m afraid.”

Lindsey pushed and pulled both doors again. Nothing happened. She turned her back into the door and bounced her weight against one of the doors. Again nothing. “Iggy, help me,” she demanded.

“Sure, why not,” he said and turned and put his back against the door next to hers.

“Three, two, one.” Both now banged their behinds against the doors, nothing still.

“Damn,” Lindsey groaned.

“What do you want to do now?”

After a long moment, Lindsey said, “I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

“Wait here,” she said and took off around the corner, toward the south corridor.

Ignatowski shook his head.

A ping sounded, and the elevator doors began to open. A few steps away from the door, he quickly looked left and right. There was no way he could disappear into one of the corridors in time. When the doors opened entirely, the same two women from the ground floor walked out, laughing loudly. One of them glanced his way.

“Ladies,” he said, feeling that she must have seen him. Nothing.

The women walked into the north corridor.

He shook his head. Invisibility has its advantages.

Lindsey darted around the corner. “Quick,” she said, grabbing his arm and dragging him back to the double doors. She slapped a key card against the box. Both doors opened sluggishly. Lindsey and Ignatowski worked themselves through the half-open doors.

“Close, close,” Lindsey whispered as they tried to force the doors to close more quickly. But they would have to wait for the hydraulic system to close the doors. It felt like minutes before the doors were closed again.

Lindsey sighed.

“How did you get that?”

“Remember the young woman with the cleaning cart?”

“Uh huh,” Ignatowski confirmed.

“Well,” Lindsey held up a roll of toilet paper. “I just might have asked her for an extra roll of toilet paper because of my husband’s... well, you know. And when she took it from