Here at his bolthole in Santa Cruz on the Californian coast, he's a world away from the claustrophobia of his writer's lair in New York, where for seven long years he worried away at the story of the Lambert family.
The way you do that is you cut off their bolt-hole so that there's nowhere that they can hide, and you cut off their sources of supply, both of money and of arms, and that has, that is going to be an ongoing operation.
From a traffic flow point of view, the hole in the support on the far side of the box was occupied by a machine bolt with a nut loosely screwed into the end.