Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Danielson’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

  Pierre lowered himself back down. “Ah, now that’s more like it. What I want, Ivan, is five million dollars—enough to look after my wife and daughter after my Huntington’s disease finally takes me.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It will buy my silence.”

  “If I’m the monster you believe I am, what makes you think you could possibly get away with blackmailing me? If I’ve killed as many people as you say, surely I’d not stop at killing you?” He paused and then looked directly at Pierre. “Or your wife and child.”

  For once, Pierre was glad of his chorea; it masked the fact that he was trembling with fear. “I’ve taken precautions. The information is in the hands of people I trust, both here in the States and in Canada—people you will never find. If anything happens to me or my family, they have instructions to make it public.”

  Danielson was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m not a man who likes to be cornered.”

  Pierre said nothing.

  The old man was silent a while longer. Then, finally: “Give me a week to get it ready, and—”

  Just then, the door to the office burst open. A husky uniformed security guard entered. Danielson rose to his feet. “What is it?”

  “Forgive the interruption, sir, but we’ve detected a transmitter in this room.”

  Danielson’s eyes narrowed. “Search him,” he snapped. And then, loudly, as if to make sure it was part of the official record, “I admitted nothing. I merely humored a mentally deficient person.”

  The guard grabbed Pierre under the left shoulder, hoisted him from the chair, and began roughly patting down his clothes. In a matter of moments, he found the small radio microphone clipped to the inside of Pierre’s shirt. He tore it loose and held it up for Danielson to see.

  Pierre tried to sound brave. “It doesn’t matter. There are seven assorted cops and government agents waiting outside the building to take you in for questioning, and we have two positive IDs of you from Treblinka survivors—”

  Danielson thumped his fist on his desktop. At first Pierre thought it was a gesture of frustration, but a small section of the desktop popped up at an angle, revealing a hidden control console within. Danielson tapped a series of buttons, and suddenly a thin metal wall dropped down from the ceiling, slicing right in front of Pierre’s kneecaps. If his feet hadn’t just then been moving backward because of the chorea, they would have been sheared off.

  The guard looked dumbfounded—either he hadn’t known about this secret wall or had never expected to see it actually in use. Pierre was agog, too—but Marchenko/Danielson was a multimillionaire fugitive who had been preparing for all eventualities for five decades. Doubtless there was a secret exit in the part of the office he was still in.

  “Come along, pal,” said the guard, pocketing the microphone and again grabbing Pierre roughly by the arm. He propelled Pierre out of Danielson’s office, through the astonished secretary’s office, through the antechamber, and out into the elevator lobby. The man stabbed at the elevator call switch, but the little square of plastic didn’t light up. He tried again, then cursed. Marchenko must have shut off the elevators to slow down the OSI agents from getting up here. It would take them a while to climb thirty-seven floors, even if they could get into the building past Marchenko’s security people.

  The beefy guard let go of Pierre, who, without his cane, which was still back in Marchenko’s office, promptly crumpled to the ground. The guard looked at him, a sneer of disgust across his face. “Christ, you’re a fucking crip, ain’t you?” he said. He looked at the closed elevator doors again, as if thinking, then back at Pierre. “Suppose you can’t do any harm if I leave you up here.” He headed around the corner. Pierre could hear a door opening and the sound of the big man’s feet slapping against stairs as he headed down, presumably to the lobby to join in defending the building’s entrance.

  Pierre was all alone in the elevator lobby. He looked up, though, and could see Marchenko’s secretary through the glass doors of the antechamber and the outer office. She was looking at him, as if unsure what to do. He reached out a hand toward her. She got up, turned her back on him, and disappeared into the inner office. Pierre exhaled. He wished he could just lie there without moving, but his legs were dancing incessantly and his head was bobbing left and right.

  The woman reappeared—and she was holding Pierre’s cane! She came out to him and helped him to his feet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she said, “but no one should treat a person the way they’re treating you.”

  Pierre took the cane and leaned on it. “Merci,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened to Mr. Danielson?”

  “Did you know about that emergency wall?”

  She shook her head. “I was terrified when I heard it crash down. I thought we were having another quake.”

  “There may be men with guns coming into the building,” said Pierre. “You should get off this floor. Go down a few floors and find someplace to hide.”

  She looked at him, overwhelmed by it all. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He tried to shrug, but the gesture was lost amid the chorea. “This is as good as I get.” He flapped an arm toward the stairwell. “Go on, get yourself somewhere safe.”

  She nodded and disappeared around the corner. Pierre wasn’t sure what to do next. He decided to hobble over to the secretary’s desk. He picked up the phone, but it, too, was dead.

  Pierre tried to imagine the scene below, the agents and cops storming in the front door, badges flashing—surely they would have started in upon hearing that the microphone had been discovered. They’d be trying to make their way past guards who might well have drawn their pistols. Pierre remembered what this building looked like more from when he’d last seen it, at the shareholders’ meeting, than from today. He’d been so nervous preparing for this confrontation that he hadn’t really looked at it as he’d driven in this time. A tall building, all glass and steel, with a helicopter landing on its roof…

  Sweet Jesus—a helicopter. Marchenko wasn’t working his way down to the ground floor; he’d probably already gone up to the roof, three stories above.

  Pierre hobbled around the corner. The door to the stairs was clearly marked, next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms. He pushed it open and felt cold air rushing over him. The interior of the stairwell was naked concrete, with steps painted flat gray. He began slowly, painfully, making his way up the first flight. Each flight covered a half floor—there would be at least six before he reached the roof.

  His cane was unnecessary as he pulled himself up using the banister, but he didn’t dare let it go, and so it twirled, Charlie Chaplinesque, as he held it in his free palsied hand.

  He could hear faint echoes of footfalls far, far below. Others were using the stairs to try to climb up. But thirty-seven flights—even for a young man, that was a lot of potential energy. He pulled himself higher and higher, turning around now as one flight of stairs gave way to the next. He hoped Avi would also figure out that Marchenko had gone up, not down.

  Pierre continued his ascent. His lungs were pumping and his breath came in shuddering wheezes. His heart jumped at the sound of a gunshot from far, far below.

  Pierre was rounding the thirty-ninth floor now—the number had been crudely stenciled in black paint on the back of the gray metal fire door. For a brief moment he cursed his Canadian upbringing: it had never even occurred to him to ask Avi for a gun before going in.

  Pierre grabbed the handrail and hauled himself up some more, but suddenly he tripped—his leg had moved left when he’d told it to go forward. His cane pushed out sideways, wedging between two of the vertical metal rods that supported the banister. Pierre fell backward, grabbing on to the cane for support. There was a cracking sound as that one point in the middle of the cane’s shaft took all of Pierre’s weight for a second, but then P
ierre lost his grip and found himself tumbling down to the bottom of the current flight. His left elbow smashed into the concrete floor. The pain was excruciating. He reached his right hand over to touch the elbow, and it came away with freckles of blood on it. His cane had landed about two meters away. He crawled over to it and then fought to bring himself to his feet. He stood, unable to go on, waiting for his lungs to stop gulping in air. Finally, with an enormous effort, he started up the stairs again.

  Up one half-flight, around the corner, then up another. He was now opposite the door labeled “40.” But—damn it, he wasn’t thinking straight—the heliport was on the roof, another two staircases above him. And all his efforts were predicated on the assumption that there was an exit to the roof at the top. If not, he’d have to come back down to the fortieth floor and try to find the correct way up to the helipad.

  He yanked himself up, step after agonizing step. The footfalls below sounded closer; the Justice agents had perhaps made it as high as the twentieth floor by now.

  Finally Pierre reached the top. There was a door here, painted blue instead of gray, with the word ROOF stenciled on it. Pierre turned the knob, then pushed on it, and the door swung outward, revealing the wide concrete top of the Condor Health Insurance tower. After all that time in the dim stairwell, the late-afternoon sunlight, positioned directly in front of him, pierced his eyes. Pierre held on to the doorjamb for support. High winds whipped by him, their sound masking that of the door opening.

  Marchenko was standing about twenty meters away, his back to Pierre, waiting by a small green-and-white metal shed that presumably held tools for helicopter maintenance. There was no helicopter in sight, but the rooftop near Marchenko was painted with a circular yellow landing target, and the old man was impatiently watching the skies.

  The wind shrieked as it went down the stairwell. Pierre stepped out. The rooftop was square, with a meter-high lip around its edges. Gulls were perched in a neat row along the southern lip. Nearby were two cement enclosures, presumably housing the elevator equipment. Three small and two large satellite dishes sat at one corner of the roof and a microwave relay jutted up from another. There was a rotating red light mounted on top of one of the elevator houses, and two searchlights, both off, on top of the other.

  Marchenko hadn’t noticed Pierre’s arrival yet. The old man was holding a cellular phone at his side in his left hand—doubtless he’d used that to call for a chopper to come and get him.

  Pierre tried to assess his chances. He was thirty-five, for God’s sake. Marchenko was eighty-seven. There should be no contest. Pierre should be able to simply walk up to the old geezer and haul him back downstairs into the arms of justice.

  But now—now, who could say? Pierre leaned on his cane. There was a good chance that Marchenko could kill him—especially if he was armed. There was no indication that he had a gun, and, indeed, a lead pipe had been Ivan Grozny’s favorite weapon half a century ago. But even unarmed, Marchenko might well be able to take Pierre.

  Maybe he didn’t have to do anything. He looked up, scanned the sky again. There was no sign of an approaching copter. Avi’s agents would be up here soon enough, and—

  “You!” Marchenko had turned around and spotted Pierre. His shout startled the gulls into flight; their cries were faintly audible above the whipping wind. The old man started moving toward Pierre with a slow and ancient gait. Pierre realized he should move away from the open door leading to the stairwell. All it would take for Marchenko to defeat him would be a good, swift shove down the stairs.

  Pierre hobbled to the north. Marchenko changed course and continued to close the distance. Pierre thought of the Pequod and Moby Dick, wallowing in high waves, each ponderously maneuvering around the other. Marchenko continued to circle in.

  He tasks me, thought Pierre, and I shall have him. With an Ahab-like gait, his cane substituting for the peg leg, Pierre moved forward as quickly as he could. He knew that retreating would be stupid. If he allowed himself to be backed up against the meter-high wall around the edge of the roof, Marchenko would have little trouble pushing him over the side to plummet forty stories to a splattering death. Pierre moved toward the center of the roof, wind whipping his hair, cutting through him with fingers of ice.

  Marchenko’s broad face was contorted in fury—not just at him, Pierre guessed, but also at whomever he had called to come and get him. There was still no sign of an approaching chopper, although several jet contrails crisscrossed the sky, like lash marks on a prisoner’s back.

  Just five meters separated them now. Marchenko’s bald head glistened with a sheen of sweat, looking, in the ruddy late-afternoon light, almost like a film of blood. The climb up the stairs had been hard on him, too; whatever secret exit he’d had from his office had apparently given him access to the stairwell rather than the elevator lobby.

  Marchenko stretched his arms out, as if he expected Pierre to try to slip past him. Pierre wanted to lift his cane high enough to use it as a weapon—something he could only do, he realized, if he were backed up for support against the toolshed or elevator houses. He started crabbing sidewise, moving toward the closest of the concrete structures.

  Marchenko narrowed the distance between them. He was still holding the phone in his left hand, but swung out with his right. His fist hit Pierre on the shoulder, but it wasn’t hard enough to really hurt. Marchenko apparently realized that; his right hand dug into his hip pocket and came out with a set of keys, which he proceeded to intertwine between his skeletal fingers—just as Pierre had done more than two years before when Marchenko’s henchman, Chuck Hanratty, had tried to kill him.

  They were now about three meters from the elevator house. Pierre thought he heard another gunshot coming from the still-open door to the stairs. The OSI men were apparently being held at bay by security guards on one of the upper levels. Still, Avi would have doubtless called for reinforcements by now.

  Pierre got his back against the elevator house’s wall. He lifted his cane high and smashed it down as hard as he could. He’d been aiming for the top of Marchenko’s head, but his arm had shaken coming down and the impact had been on Marchenko’s right shoulder instead. There was a loud cracking sound. Pierre hoped it was Marchenko’s scapula, but it turned out to be the cane. As Pierre pulled it back, he saw that it was partially broken in the middle, at the point that had taken the brunt of his weight during his earlier tumble down the stairs. Still, the impact had knocked the cellular phone from Marchenko’s gnarled hand. It hit the concrete and its black battery pack popped loose.

  More gunshots in the background. Pierre looked beyond Marchenko and now saw a helicopter on the horizon, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming toward them. Marchenko started to back away. He was unaware of the copter, but apparently realized he was putting himself at a disadvantage by letting Pierre have both hands free.

  “Come on, you piece of shit,” taunted Marchenko in his reedy, accented voice. “Come and get me, you fucking piece of shit.” He swiped his hand out, the keys glinting in the sunlight. “Come on, you—”

  “Morceau de merde,” supplied Pierre, pushing off the elevator house’s wall with his left hand and leaning on his damaged cane, hoping it would continue to support him as long as he only put pressure straight down on it.

  Marchenko was dancing backward now, baiting Pierre closer to—to the toolshed, it looked like, where the old man could probably find a better weapon than a set of keys. Pierre hoped Marchenko would trip as he walked backward. Pierre might not be able to club him into submission, but he still outweighed the geriatric by at least ten kilos. Just sitting on him might be enough to subdue him.

  Marchenko looked behind him to make sure the way was clear, and saw the helicopter, now only a couple of kilometers away. Pierre stole a glance behind himself, too, but there was no sign of anyone emerging from the stairwell.

  They continued creeping across the roof, wind slapping them like invisible hands. Finally, gathering all his str
ength, Pierre jumped forward. It wasn’t much of a jump, but he did succeed in slamming into Marchenko’s chest, and the old man tumbled backward onto the hard concrete. Pierre straddled Marchenko. The hand with the keys lashed out, and Pierre felt them biting into his cheek. He arched his back and tried a roundhouse punch aimed at Marchenko’s face. It connected, and there was a cracking sound. Marchenko’s mouth opened to yowl in pain, and Pierre saw that his top teeth were all off-kilter—Pierre’s punch had knocked his upper denture loose.

  Pierre tried to swing again, but this time he missed and the movement threw him off-balance, allowing Marchenko to push him off and struggle to his feet. Pierre could see that the back of Marchenko’s bald head was scraped raw from where it had hit the concrete.

  Marchenko hobbled to the toolshed. It had a padlock on its door, but one of the now bloody keys in his hand unlocked it. Pierre, lying on his back, fought to catch his breath and struggled to bring his legs, which were dancing wildly, under control. Marchenko ducked into the shed and emerged a moment later holding a long black crowbar, presumably used to open crates shipped by helicopter. He came over to stand above Pierre.

  “Before you die,” said Marchenko, as he raised the crowbar above his head, “I have to know. Are you a Jew?”

  Pierre shook his head slightly.

  Marchenko sounded sad. “Too bad. It would have made this perfect.” He swung the crowbar down. Pierre rolled aside just in time, the crowbar’s splayed end taking a divot out of the roof.

  The sound of the helicopter was now quite clear above the wind. Pierre glanced at it. It wasn’t the same yellow-and-black chopper he’d seen all those months ago. No, this seemed to be a private, civilian bird, all silver and white. Marchenko had probably called for one of his Millennial Reich cronies to come rescue him.

  The old man swung the crowbar again. Pierre rolled to the right; the crowbar sparked against the concrete. Pierre rolled onto his back again, and, praying he could maintain a steady grip, lifted his cane high. But Marchenko parried with the crowbar, and the wooden stick split in two, one part pinwheeling high into the sky.