He walked down the long hallway to the emergency exit at the end and jacked into the low-tech monitoring box with the net-tool of his arm. He easily disabled the alarm and pulled the door open. These stairs were pitch black. He flipped on a small lamp on his arm and ascended the stairs two at a time.
The hall he emerged into could have been the same as the one he’d left one story below, from the dim lighting and dusty artificial plants to the neglected light fixtures and the inoperable security cameras: like a mind-warping image of stairs circling up and down upon themselves; the hallucinogenic vision of a Mezoamerican snake eating itself.
He padded down the threadbare carpet, counted the office numbers until he arrived at his destination: an unlabeled office door. It could have been a janitor’s closet, but for the small metal decal of the office number on the door jamb and, he noted as he approached, the pinhole of a tiny camera mounted directly above.
He kept walking, barely slowing his pace, hoping that whatever was monitoring the other side of that high-tech camera hadn’t noted his interest.
The hallway continued back to the elevator landing. He hit the call button and stood, waiting and thinking, for the car to arrive. The door opened. The car was empty. Lux leaned in, punched the button for the ground floor, and stepped back into the lobby. He retraced his steps to McDonald’s office, staying close to the same wall as the camera. When he was within a meter of the door he extracted a length of transmission wire from a storage slot in his arm. This he pressed against the door and slid up to the slot that housed the camera.