In fact, there was only a narrow railing and some ropes keeping Talon from dropping down to the street. He stood ten stories up on the window-washer platform descended from the top of one of the most recognizable structures in the world: the Secretariat Building of the United Nations. Talon turned back to one of hundreds of windows that made the outside of the U.N.’s tallest building look like a towering wall of glass. There were thirty-nine floors, but Talon had done his calculations carefully and he was interested only in floors five through twelve. That would make enough of a statement for his purposes. Shane Barrington had come through as instructed and managed to get Talon some of the security-defying access he needed to carry out his task. He had told Barrington what he wanted and left it up to Barrington, whose many subsidiaries designed communications, security, and utilities systems for thousands of businesses, to figure out how to get him what he required.
