Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  He turned and kept running up the stairs.

  Washington called after him, “Look for Detectives Bourque and Delgado! They’re up there somewhere!”

  If Headley heard, he gave no indication.

  He just kept running. And climbing.

  As he passed a door marked Floor 5, he started doing the math in his head. First, he needed to know how long it would take him to get from the fifth floor to the sixth. He counted.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Okay, he thought. Roughly ninety floors to go. Ninety times fifteen was 1,350.

  So what was that in minutes?

  Headley had always been good at doing math without a calculator. He could look at city budget projections and do calculations in his head as quickly as any of the bean counters from the financial department.

  So, take 1,350 seconds and divide by the number of seconds per minute, which was, of course, sixty, and—

  Twenty-two and a half minutes.

  “God, no,” he said aloud, rounding the landing between the eighth and ninth floors.

  Vallins had given him twenty minutes, but the clock had started ticking the moment he got onto the elevator. He couldn’t have more than fourteen or fifteen minutes left.

  There was no way he was going to make it.

  He increased his speed. Ten floors up now, his calves and thighs were already screaming in pain. He was still taking the steps two at a time, grabbing the railing each time and using it to pull himself upward. Like so much of the rest of his body, his shoulder was hurting like a son of a bitch.

  His chest felt as though it would explode.

  This is what he wants. He wants me to have a heart attack. I’m going to die the same way his mother did.

  What was that last thing the chief had shouted at him? Bourque and Delgado? Weren’t those the two detectives who’d come to City Hall looking for Glover? They were already in the building, somewhere?

  Glover.

  Headley thought his heartache was more likely than a heart attack to do him in. He thought about those last, accusatory words he’d said to his son before Vallins had pushed him into the shaft. Believing that his son could have had anything to do with this.

  How he would have to live with that forever.

  However long forever was.

  As he passed the door marked Floor 14, he thought about what a curse he’d been to so many around him.

  All those tenants in his father’s buildings.

  His wife.

  His son.

  All the bad luck he’d brought them.

  Maybe it was fitting he’d think of that at this moment, passing the fourteenth floor. Given people’s superstitious nature, it was actually the thirteenth.

  Seventy-Three

  Vallins nibbled on one of the shrimps Barbara had taken from the buffet table, put on a plate, and slid across the floor to him.

  “These are excellent,” he said, biting on one, then tossing the tail into the elevator shaft. He raised his voice. “Everyone, please! Eat up! Enjoy!”

  While we can, Barbara thought.

  While none of the guests had much of an appetite, she’d seen more than a few head over to the bar. But most were huddled in pairs, standing quietly, eyes trained on Vallins, wondering what he might do next, terrified by what he might do next.

  Vallins shrugged when he didn’t see anyone taking his advice, then looked over at Barbara and Arla, who were standing closer to him than anyone else.

  “Sorry,” Vallins said to Barbara. She could not take her eyes off the device in his left hand, and the gun in the other. “You were right, of course. I was following you when you stepped out in front of that van. I saw you two at breakfast earlier. Then when I saw Arla at City Hall, I put it together, and ratted her out to the boss.” He gave Arla a regretful look.

  “I don’t understand, either,” said Barbara. “You want to bring the mayor down, but you still were doing his dirty work.”

  Vallins nodded. “I’ve been doing his dirty work for some time. That’s how I got close. Anyway, it’s all in the email.”

  Barbara said, “Why didn’t you just let the van run me down?”

  He shrugged. “I told you. I like you.”

  “Enough to let me—my daughter—go?”

  “How would that look, playing favorites?” he said. “If anyone survives, I hope it’s you. Otherwise the email’s pointless. I’ve always thought you were a good writer. You’re the best one to tell the story.”

  “Chris, please. Let everyone go.”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater goal. If anyone here is really, truly innocent.”

  Barbara’s head twitched. “That was you. The comments on my article. You’re the one calling himself Going Down.”

  Vallins smiled. “That was a bit cute, I know.”

  “Help me out here, Chris. Haven’t you sacrificed enough innocents already? Like my friend Paula? Wasn’t your mom an innocent? What’s happening to these people, is it any more unfair than what happened to her? Does anything you’ve done make sense? Does hurting all these people, here tonight, serve any purpose? You’ve taken his son from him, Chris. What more do you want?”

  He was stonefaced. “How’s our time?”

  Barbara looked at the phone in her hand. “Seven minutes, twenty seconds.”

  Vallins nodded. “Do you think he’ll make it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he’s even trying? Maybe he got off in the lobby and buggered off home.”

  “I doubt that,” Barbara said, although she was not 100 percent sure. It hadn’t even occurred to her, until Chris had posed the question, that Headley might not even try to make the climb.

  He’ll try, she thought. He’s a bastard, but no one could be that big a bastard.

  “Is this how it ends for you?” Barbara asked. “I mean, you can’t be thinking you’re going to walk away from this.”

  Vallins looked thoughtful. “You know, I always used to think those suicide bombers, those Islamic terrorist crazies screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ as they fire their machine guns into a crowded theater, with no chance of getting out alive, what the hell is wrong with them? But I also sort of get it, you know? Because when you’ve been angry for so long, when the only thing you care about is justice, your own life stops having much meaning. What are we down to?”

  Barbara looked. “Six minutes, twenty-five seconds.”

  “My mother was a wonderful woman. Strong and proud and good. Not … confrontational. She didn’t like to make waves.”

  “Would your mother be proud of you now?” Barbara asked. “Would she want you to get even this way?”

  He just smiled. “Save your breath.”

  Barbara sighed. “I’m guessing you were something of a techie,” she said.

  “Yup. Always messed about with computers. Taught myself, mostly. Same was true with elevators. Studied every manual I could find, memorized them. But I still needed some help with that. Found someone to fine-tune my skills. Help me figure out all the security stuff. But he and I, we had a bit of a falling out Sunday night. I had a feeling he was going to talk to the police. He’d stopped believing I had people watching members of his family. He was right about that. It was only ever just me.”

  He paused, surveyed the room full of his hostages. Someone, over by the window, was softly crying.

  “Where are we on the clock?” he asked Barbara.

  She looked at the phone in her hand, the tenths of seconds flying past on the counter.

  “Four minutes, fifty-five seconds,” she said.

  Vallins nodded. “Doesn’t look good.” He glanced toward the bar. “Last call, folks.”

  Seventy-Four

  They were making good time.

  They were winded, their hearts were pounding, and their legs were killing them, but Bourque and Delgado were nearing the top.

  Delgado had slowed, briefly, as she took a call from s
omeone on the ground who wanted her to know that at some point, they might run into the mayor, who was also in one of the four stairwells, heading back up. She was quickly briefed. When she got off the phone, she called out to Bourque, three steps ahead of her, “There’s some bad shit up ahead.”

  She told him the body they’d seen flying by in the shaft was the man they’d come to talk to, and that he had been pushed by one of the mayor’s aides, who evidently was the guy behind all the elevator mayhem.

  And that aide, Chris Vallins, was holding court on the ninety-eighth floor, ready to blow the whole thing up if Headley didn’t make it back up in time.

  “Why?” Bourque asked between pants.

  “Beats me,” said Delgado. “From what I gather, if we can’t get to this guy in the next ten minutes or so, it’s not going to matter.”

  As they reached the landing between the ninety-fifth and ninety-sixth floors, Bourque stopped. Some painting equipment had been left there, tucked into the corner, a not-unfamiliar sight on their trip skyward. Paint touch-ups being done throughout the building, but for the opening, workers’ supplies had been tucked out of sight. To steady himself, Bourque placed a hand on one of the steps of a five-foot ladder and took a few breaths.

  Delgado stopped. “Are you okay?”

  “I just need one second,” he said.

  “Wheezing?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Just exhausted.”

  “You’re a fucking medical miracle, you are,” Delgado said. “Or a psychological one. Not sure which.”

  “Okay,” Bourque said, “I’m good.”

  They continued on with the climb.

  Bourque still couldn’t believe he was okay. His doctor, Bert, had been right on the money about how he might come out of the shortness of breath that had been plaguing him for so long. Or maybe there was another explanation. Maybe it had something to do with duty. Duty to the job. Duty to his partner.

  Duty to Lois.

  He was not going to abandon her. He was not going to let her continue to the top of this building and face whatever was up there without him. And maybe that determination, that sense of conviction, was stronger than the mental dysfunction that had been converting his stress into a constriction of his windpipe.

  And what the fuck did it matter, anyway? He could breathe, and he was doing this.

  One thing he knew with absolute certainty. If he got out of this alive, he was not going to make a cardboard replica of this goddamn building.

  Delgado, behind him at this point, said, “What’s this?”

  The steps were starting to be littered with tiny pebbles of concrete.

  “Must have something to do with the explosions we heard,” Bourque said. “We’re almost there.” A pause, then, “Hello.”

  They had just passed the door marked Floor 97. Just one floor to go. But there was a small problem.

  There was a four-step gap in front of them.

  “Holy shit,” Delgado said.

  “There are three other stairwells,” Bourque said, reaching for the handle of the door to the ninety-sixth floor.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “I told you. The plans are in the book I got.”

  Delgado nodded, briefly impressed. But she was still visibly worried. “If the other stairways were passable, wouldn’t people already be scrambling down them?”

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check. And if they’re blown up, too, I saw something that might be able to help us.”

  “No, we shouldn’t split—”

  “Two minutes,” he said, and started running back down the stairs.

  Not much more than a minute later, he reappeared with the painter’s aluminum ladder, the one they had passed moments earlier, slung over his shoulder.

  “Oh, God,” Delgado said. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “The other stairwells are no good. This is our best shot.”

  He rounded the top of the stairs, nearly clocking Delgado with the ladder as he went by.

  “Is it long enough?” she asked.

  “It’ll have to be.”

  He went to the last step before the gap and placed the ladder across it. It was long enough, but there was nothing to brace it against. Once anyone actually got on the ladder, it would slide and drop into the opening.

  “I’ll hold it,” Delgado said.

  “What?”

  “I hold the bottom of it in place while you climb across. Then you hold it and I’ll follow.”

  Bourque was skeptical. “Are you sure? I’m not the svelte athlete I once was.”

  “Yeah, like you were ever an athlete. Get a move on.”

  Delgado planted her feet firmly on a lower step, knelt down, and placed both hands on the bottom rung of the ladder, which lay on a forty-five-degree angle across the opening. Bourque, delicately, grabbed hold of a higher rung, then, careful not to hit his partner in the head, put his feet on a lower one that was just above her head.

  Now, all his weight was on the ladder.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She grunted. “Move it, fatso.”

  Carefully, he made the crossing, looking ahead and not at the stairs a flight below, or the sliver of space between sets of steps that appeared to go down to the depths of hell. Gingerly, he got himself onto the step on the other side of the divide, taking his weight off the ladder.

  Delgado let out a long breath as Bourque planted his butt on the second step after the gap, leaned over, and gripped the top of the ladder.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Delgado got onto the ladder as tentatively as her partner had. She made the crossing slowly. As she reached the other side, Bourque leaned over slightly to give her room to get a grip on the closest concrete step.

  As her legs were coming off the last step of the ladder, her foot slipped, and pushed hard on the upper rung. Bourque lost his grip, and the ladder fell, hitting the lower stairwell with a loud, metallic crash.

  Delgado clung to the step, her legs dangling in space.

  Bourque got his hands under her arms and pulled. She scrambled to get hold of the next step, and once she had it, and her waist was over the threshold of the step below, she pulled herself up the rest of the way.

  “I guess we better hope there’s another ladder at the top so we can get back down,” she said.

  They both got to their feet and, after taking a second to pull themselves together, walked up the rest of the way to the door marked Floor 98.

  They each took a moment to take out their weapons. Once they both had a gun in hand, Bourque grasped the handle of the fire door.

  “Kinda wish I’d worn a vest,” Delgado said.

  Bourque slowly opened the door.

  Seventy-Five

  Richard Headley knew there was no way he’d make it.

  He wasn’t using anything as accurate as a stopwatch app on his phone, but he’d been glancing regularly at the Rolex strapped to his wrist, and his twenty minutes were nearly up. And he had some thirty floors to go.

  Not. Gonna. Happen.

  Those people are all going to die. Because of me.

  But even though he knew it was hopeless, he kept going. He’d taken off his bow tie around the twentieth floor so he could open up the collar of his shirt. He was soaked with perspiration. Once he’d hit the thirtieth floor, he slipped off the jacket of his tux and dropped it on the steps, making sure before he did it that he had his phone.

  His white dress shirt was translucent with sweat. It was running down his neck and forehead, getting into his eyes and stinging.

  Keep going. Keep going.

  He glanced again at his watch. The twenty minutes had to be up.

  What the hell am I going to—

  And then it hit him.

  Stall.

  He had the messaging app open, the name Vallins at the top of the screen. He stopped long enough to text one word.

  Here.

  He kept going, looking e
very few seconds to see if there would be a reply. It came within ten seconds.

  Wow. And with 3 seconds to spare.

  Headley kept climbing.

  Very impressive. Sending your ride to 97.

  So the elevator was on the way. But it would be there, waiting for him, long before Headley could get to it.

  How long would it take for the elevator to come from the lobby—or wherever else Vallins might have sent it in the interim—to the ninety-seventh floor? A minute?

  Headley kept going, one foot ahead of the other.

  His phone chimed.

  Are you aboard?

  Headley stopped, typed his reply with a sweaty thumb.

  No.

  Several seconds passed. Headley managed to ascend another story.

  Get on.

  Headley stopped.

  Elvtr not here.

  Headley knew it was a lie that would not buy him much time. All Vallins had to do was look down the shaft to know the elevator was where it was supposed to be. The elevator car would be one floor below. He’d be able to see its roof.

  And then, just as he feared:

  Its there.

  Think, think, think.

  What couldn’t Vallins see?

  Headley put his thumb to the screen.

  Doors closed. Open the door.

  Let him think on that for a moment.

  Headley ran past Floor 72.

  Still so far to go.

  Three dancing dots appeared on the mayor’s phone.

  It should be open.

  The mayor wrote back:

  Its not.

  And then the phone in the mayor’s hand rang.

  Vallins.

  Headley stopped, took the call.

  “What do you mean the doors aren’t open?” Vallins shouted.

  “I’m right here,” Headley said. “The other four doors are wide open, but the doors in front of the elevator aren’t.”

  “That’s not fucking possible!” the man said angrily.

  “Look, you’re the guy hogging the remote, not me,” Headley said. “Send me one of the other elevators. And this time, if you’re such a fucking genius, make sure the doors open.” He paused. “Remember, we had a deal. I get back in time, you let everyone go. Well, I made it. Only reason I’m not up there now is you fucked up. That’s on you. Not me.”