When he finished a second cigarette, the thief picked up the code book and the unwieldy blueprint binder and stepped into the darkened hallway. The executive suite was empty. The annual directors' dinner began in an hour. All the hustlers and hotshots would be there early.

"All the hustlers, Danny," he muttered through his teeth. He would be late and would miss the cocktails. But he wasn't so important that his tardiness would be noticed, he thought with a touch of bitterness.

Down two floors was the security library. The thief carried the books down the fire stairs and through another dark hallway and opened the library door with a key from a steel ring. Inside, he went to a separate room in the back, opened the fire door with another key, and put the books back on the shelves from which he'd gotten them three hours earlier.

As he shut and locked the library door, he was seized by a graveyard chill. Footsteps? No. There was no one there. He pulled the key out of the lock and hurried-scurrying, he thought, like a rat-back to his office, suddenly afraid of the dark. Afraid that somebody would step out of a doorway and say, "We know what you're doing."

Inside the office, his heart pounding, the thief put the original bulb back into the drafting lamp, dropped the floodlight into a brown paper sack, and crushed it under his heel. He would dump the sack in a trash basket on the way out.

The film cassettes he tucked under his cummerbund, like so many bullets in a cartridge belt. The camera, on a short strap, went over his shoulder, under and slightly behind his armpit. With the tuxedo jacket covering it, the camera would be invisible. Satisfied, he turned out the light, picked up his alligator briefcase, and rode the elevator down eight floors to the lobby.

The guard at the front desk was watching an Orioles-White Sox game on a grainy black-and-white television. He turned his head at the sound of the elevator.

"How are we doing?" the thief said as he crossed the marble floor.