Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  A short black woman with closely cropped black hair moved forward. “Hi. Diane Darrell. This taxi bombing does have some of the earmarks of other acts that adherents of the Flyovers have said they perpetrated. What’s interesting is that the man who leads the activist group—who has, at least publicly, disavowed all acts of violence—is currently in New York, supposedly on a pleasure trip with his wife. Do we have that shot of Clement?”

  A new picture came up on the screen of Eugene Clement and a woman crossing a New York street.

  “This was just after he did a TV interview. We’ve been keeping an eye on him.”

  Delgado leaned in close to her partner and whispered, “Could that be our guy?” When Bourque gave her a puzzled look, she added, “Standing by the car. Talking to Otto? In the picture?”

  Bourque gave a noncommittal shrug.

  Darrell was still talking. “Is it just a coincidence that he’s here in New York when that taxi thing goes down, and the Flyovers say it was their doing? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never been a big believer in coincidences.”

  Diane Darrell cracked open a bottled water and took a sip.

  “A straightforward bombing is easy enough to understand. You’re a group with a message, and the easiest way to get it across is blow something up. Or get behind the wheel of a truck and mow some people down. All in the name of Allah. Or, perhaps in this case, to express contempt for left-wing ideology. It may not make sense in our minds to make a statement by murdering innocents, but we’ve come to understand the profile.”

  She paused.

  “The elevator thing is trickier. What’s the message? What’s the statement someone’s trying to make? So far, no one’s claimed responsibility. We’re looking for a motive here, and so far it’s elusive.” She looked at Cartland. “Unless you’d like to share your theory.”

  Cartland made a tiny shake of the head.

  “Okay, then,” Darrell said. She looked to the chief. “What about this homicide your people have been working?”

  Washington nodded and scanned the room. “Where are Bourque and Delgado?”

  Delgado raised a hand as Bourque said, “Here.”

  Washington said, “Fill us in.”

  Delgado told them about finding the body of Otto Petrenko on the High Line more than forty-eight hours earlier. “An elevator technician.”

  A murmuring went through the room.

  “Fingertips cut off, face beaten beyond recognition. To slow us down on an ID, in case he was in the system. Which he was, for a minor event a few years ago.”

  “Where are you on this?” the chief asked.

  Bourque weighed in this time. “Workin’ it. His boss says he didn’t service any of the buildings where elevators were sabotaged. But he might have been doing something on the side. But a couple of curious things. Petrenko had been in touch with relatives—those living outside the city—to warn them to be on guard. Told his sister, living in Vegas, that she should think about getting a gun.”

  “Why the paranoia?” Cartland asked.

  “Don’t know,” Bourque said. “Couple of other things. He’d expressed views that sounded sympathetic to the Flyovers, according to his wife. But I don’t have anything to suggest it went beyond that. We’ve done a check of his computer. No communications that stuck out.”

  “But there was someone he’d met with a couple of times,” Delgado said. “Came to his place of employment. Nobody Petrenko works with has any idea who this guy was. We’re trying to get a lead on him.”

  Cartland, who looked as though he’d been scowling ever since Delgado started talking, said, “Petrenko?”

  The homicide detectives nodded.

  “Is that a Russian name?” Cartland asked.

  Bourque said, “His wife said he was born there, and his parents escaped to Finland shortly after he was born, then moved to America when he was four. Been in the U.S. ever since.”

  “So far as we know,” Cartland said.

  Bourque nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So if he ever made any trips back to Russia in his later years, you don’t know that.”

  Delgado said, “No, we don’t. We can look into that. Can you tell us why that might be relevant?”

  Cartland hesitated. “Agent Darrell, a moment ago, alluded to a theory I have, which I was not particularly eager to share because it’s a bit out there.” A pause. “But I think we’re in a situation where every possibility needs to be explored, no matter how far-fetched it might seem.”

  The room waited.

  “The sole fatality in yesterday’s incident was Dr. Fanya Petrov, a renowned Russian scientist temporarily attached to Rockefeller University. Her area of expertise had something to do with nonge-netic hereditary characteristics, and not for a second do I understand any part of it. But Dr. Petrov also had considerable background in another area of study, one that made her very valuable, potentially, to the United States. That was pathogens. Bacterial pathogens. She knew a lot about the Russian government’s research into bioterrorism. She did not want to go back to Russia. She wanted to stay here.” He paused. “And we believe the Russians knew that.”

  “Jesus,” said Bourque. “Are you saying—”

  Cartland held up a hand. He wasn’t finished. “Not long after Dr. Petrov literally lost her head, the Russian ambassador was on the phone to the mayor very quickly. He wanted answers. What I’d like to know is how the ambassador found out about this accident so quickly. I think they knew she didn’t want to go back to Russia. They’d been watching her.”

  At this point, Cartland scratched his forehead, then crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “I think the ambassador’s call of outrage to the mayor was a performance. He had to have been pleased by this turn of events. Things couldn’t have worked out better for him than if he’d planned it that way.” He paused. “Then again, maybe he did.”

  He glanced down at the laptop, searched briefly for something, then clicked.

  On the screen there appeared a photo of a man walking along a New York sidewalk. It was a side shot taken across the street without the subject’s knowledge. He was tall and trim with dark hair, dressed in a black suit.

  “This,” Cartland said, “is Dmitri Litvin. A freelancer for SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.”

  “Just what sort of freelance work does he do?” asked someone in the room.

  “Pretty much what anyone needs. Want someone to disappear? Litvin can make it happen. But his skills go beyond assassination. He’s also believed to be a brilliant computer expert.”

  “By ‘expert,’ do you mean ‘hacker’?” Delgado asked.

  “Possibly,” Cartland said. “Litvin met this morning with the ambassador, in Grand Central. Dr. Petrov was described, essentially, as a neutralized threat. And Litvin made a joke about not going up the Empire State Building.”

  “He’s not the only one,” quipped someone.

  Cartland acknowledged the comment with a nod. “True. Their conversation was interesting but not conclusive. But we have to consider the possibility that the scientist’s death was a hit.”

  Bourque said, “So you create a series of accidents, a kind of smokescreen. The only one you want to kill is the doctor, but if you only kill her, you raise too many red—no pun intended—flags. It looks like a Putin hit, plain and simple. But you let a few others perish in the process, we don’t know where to focus our attention.”

  Cartland nodded. “Like I said, it’s kind of out there. But someone has gone to a lot of trouble to sabotage these elevators, and the Russians have people with the expertise to get it done. Now you tell me you’ve got a Russian-born elevator technician who was murdered two days ago. That lengths were taken to make it difficult to ID the body. That members of his extended family had the fear of God put into them.”

  He uncrossed his arms. “My theory’s starting to sound slightly less fanciful.”

  Forty-Eight

  Follo
wing the mayor’s disastrous media event, Barbara could have wandered the city—and she would not have had to wander far—compiling stories about the chaos that had been launched by shutting down all the elevators in New York.

  But that was the story every other media outlet in the city was chasing, and the truth was, they could do a much better job of it. Hundreds of people working their way down concrete stairwells, person-in-the-street interviews, frustrated tourists who’d come all the way from Flin Flon, Manitoba, wanting to go to the top of the Empire State Building and being turned away—these were tales made for TV. Lots of visuals. Angry people. Collapsing people. Network news crews were fanning out across the city.

  Barbara figured, let ’em have it. Let them do what they’re good at. After her brief meeting with Chris Vallins, she hurried back to her apartment, hoping she could get there before her landlord shut down the elevators. If they were working, she was going to take one of them, figuring the odds it would take her to her death were slim. But she was too late. The elevators were plastered with two signs written in Sharpie that read: Closed by Order of Mayor Richard Shithead.

  Barbara had always harbored a fondness for her landlord.

  Once she’d reached her apartment and had taken a moment to catch her breath, Barbara put on a pot of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and fired up her laptop.

  Barbara didn’t need to know how many elevators New York had. Barbara didn’t need to know how many millions of people were inconvenienced. Barbara didn’t need to know how many people would drop dead of heart attacks by the end of the day from taking the stairs up to their thirty-fifth-floor apartments, although that would be an interesting statistic. Barbara thought it was entirely possible more people would die not using elevators than would die in them.

  No, what Barbara needed to know was why, and who.

  Why would someone who wanted to kill people decide to do it by sabotaging elevators? Why not just pick up a gun and shoot them? Why not run them down with a car? Why not start a fire in an apartment hallway in the middle of the night? If you wanted to kill a few people, any of these methods would be easier.

  Why not, well, blow up a taxi?

  A bomb in a cab was very effective at taking out a few innocent people. It was pretty random, but if you were looking to make some kind of demented statement, it would do the trick.

  Was the elevator saboteur trying to make a statement with the elevator deaths?

  Were the victims random? Were the buildings random?

  Barbara thought about that.

  Even if you could take over an elevator’s controls, could tell who was in it at any given time by looking at them with a camera—thank you very much for that tip, Chris Vallins—it didn’t strike Barbara as a very efficient way to kill a specific person.

  How long would you have to wait for your potential victim to board the elevator? What if the person took the stairs? What if the person went out of town? And if there were several elevators in this particular building, how long might you have to wait for the person to take the one you had rigged to fail?

  Let’s say this person you wanted to kill finally got on the right elevator at the right time. Was there any guarantee that when the elevator went haywire, the person you wanted dead would actually die? Paula Chatsworth had survived, at least for a while. And from what Barbara knew of the second incident, that Russian scientist would still be around if she hadn’t decided to crawl out of that stalled elevator when it was stuck between floors. No one could have predicted she’d do that.

  And the event this morning, where two people fell into the bottom of the shaft?

  Barbara pictured people crowded around an elevator first thing in the morning, waiting for the elevator to arrive. The people who might be standing closest to the doors, waiting for them to open, would be totally left to chance. Completely random. And if someone had pushed them into the shaft, they would have been seen.

  All of which led Barbara to conclude that the victims really were random.

  But what about the locations? Why was the Lansing Tower on Third Avenue targeted on Monday? What was it about the Sycamores Residences, just south of Rockefeller University, that made it the saboteur’s choice for Tuesday? And today it had been the Gormley Building on Seventh.

  Was there a common thread tying these locations together?

  The coffee machine beeped. Her fresh pot was ready.

  “What was I thinking?” Barbara said, getting up and walking right past the coffee machine to the refrigerator. She took out a bottle of chardonnay, unscrewed the top, and found a glass to fill.

  She sat back down and began an internet search on the buildings, starting with the Lansing Tower, site of the first incident. There were, not surprisingly, hundreds of stories that mentioned the building. It housed a company devoted to movie and TV production—Cromwell Entertainment, the one Sherry D’Agostino had worked for—as well as top legal firms, even an office for the Department of Homeland Security.

  That last tidbit of information was interesting, Barbara thought. She filed it away for possible future reference.

  There was also a profile of New York real estate developer Morris Lansing, who had named the building after himself. Hey, if Trump could do it …

  Lansing, sixty-nine, had been one of the city’s more illustrious characters for the better part of thirty years. And in those thirty years, he had probably made himself a few hundred friends and a few thousand enemies. You didn’t get that far up the city food chain without pissing off a lot of people. Had Lansing angered someone to the point that they’d fuck up his building?

  Finally, there were real estate type ads. While the Lansing Tower was mostly commercial, there were some residences on the upper floors. Barbara had to fend off pop-up inquiries.

  Next, she did a search on the Sycamores Residences. What came up first, of course, was the tragedy from the previous day. She ignored the recent news items, refining her search so it excluded this week.

  Once she had done that, up came more real estate ads. There were several available units in the Sycamores. Some of them offered a view of the East River, and all touted the building’s amenities, including a playground for kids, a gym, and large party rooms that could be rented for special occasions. Did Barbara want to buy or rent? Boxes kept popping up on her screen, inviting her in to chat with an agent. She kept clicking on X’s to get rid of the boxes, which couldn’t have been more annoying if they were a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around her head.

  Once she got through the real estate ads, she found a couple of other news stories. A kitchen fire on the sixth floor that was quickly extinguished, an entertainment feature about a visiting stage director who happened to be staying there.

  Half an hour and two-thirds of a bottle of chardonnay later, nothing in particular had jumped out at Barbara. Maybe the answer to her question was there in what she had read, but if it was, she had failed to spot it.

  Barbara sighed.

  She rubbed her weary eyes and flopped herself onto the couch for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, trying to think of her next step. The only thing she could come up with was to finish off that bottle.

  She got back up, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into her glass, and sat back down in front of her laptop. The screen had gone dark. She ran her finger over the mouse pad and brought the computer back to life.

  One more building. The Gormley.

  Here was another developer who believed you couldn’t go wrong naming a building after yourself. The structure had been started in 1967 and finished in 1969 under the able direction of Wilfred Gormley, who had passed away in 1984. Again, there were real estate listings advertising residences and office space.

  Barbara scanned through the names of businesses that occupied the building. An insurance company, a talent agency, accounting services. On the first floor, a barber and a florist.

  I am wasting my time.

  Barbara put the glass to her lips, tipped it back
and emptied it. She folded the screen down and slowly leaned forward until her forehead was touching it. She had to find another angle, another strategy, think of someone new to talk to, check in with her various contacts, make a call to—

  I’m an idiot.

  She raised her head and reopened the laptop.

  If you wanted to find out what was common about the three buildings, she thought, you did a search on all of them at once.

  So she typed in the names of the three buildings and hit Enter.

  The results loaded in a millisecond. Barbara blinked when she saw what popped up first. She wasn’t quite sure whether to believe it.

  It was an itinerary for mayoral candidate Richard Headley.

  It covered one week during his election campaign a couple of years earlier. Barbara scrolled through the listing of events, looking for the highlighting of the words she had entered into the search engine.

  The Sycamores reference came up first. Headley attended a fundraising party hosted by Margaret Cambridge, who lived in the York Avenue building’s penthouse. Margaret was one of the city’s major, and aging, philanthropists. She’d never be able to go through all her husband’s money, so she liked to give it away, and Headley was someone she wanted to give it to. Of course, there were rules governing large donations, but Margaret had strong-armed enough of her friends to come and give the max.

  Barbara went back to the itinerary, looking for the word “Lansing.” The reference turned out not to be about the Lansing Tower, but about Morris Lansing, another major financial backer of Headley’s who’d hosted a campaign rally for Headley. Searching his name and the mayor’s together, Barbara learned that they were longtime friends.

  On to “Gormley.”

  The day after the Lansing rally, Headley had paid a visit to the Gormley Building because the person who lived in the penthouse was holding yet another fund-raiser for him. That person turned out to be Arnett Steel, president and CEO of Steelways, which was the firm the mayor had been pressing the city to hire for major, multimillion-dollar improvements to the city’s subway switching system.