Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “How’d he get to the lobby so fast?”

  “Good question.” Brian looks at Tessa for the answer.

  She shrugs. She’s shaking. Brian, all around her, is shaking.

  He holds a finger to his lips. Then he points to the jounce of wide steps mounting the stairs. Brian and Tessa should be panicking. Even a seasoned professional, in a situation such as this, might panic. Even a team of them. Brian and Tessa are afraid, pale with fear. Brian has wiped the blood from Tessa’s cheek with his right hand, and has wiped his right hand on his jeans. Now, as they listen to the Killer—who knows exactly where they are, via text message—it might occur to Brian, as confusion sharpens his eyes, how strange it is that the Killer isn’t doing a floor-by-floor search. Tessa’s eyes are wide, but then they narrow, thinking the same thing. It’s Tessa whose neck slowly rotates to the smoke detector in the hallway, where the hallway surveillance cameras are hidden. It’s Tessa who slips from Brian’s grasp and pulls him up silently. He’s protesting; the steps are close. The Killer is two risers from the concrete landing on the fourth floor. Tessa pulls Brian to the opposite bend in the hallway—the right side instead of the left side. Brian looks at her like she’s insane, but she motions him to be still, as the fourth-floor door clicks open and the Killer’s boots sink into the plush carpet.

  The Thinker texts twice, hurriedly, placing his phone on my royal flush—“Other corner!” “She’s figured out the cameras!”

  The Killer’s pocket lights up, but he isn’t expecting a text message. A ring tone would eliminate his stealth.

  The Thinker springs for the secret elevator, boards, and presses and presses the button for the fourth floor.

  The Killer, if he were smart, would be watching the floor for anomalous shadows, and he would see there is an irregularity to the right instead of to the left at the bend in the hallway. Tessa and Brian are flat to the wall. Tessa is closer to the bend than Brian is. He doesn’t like this; it’s written all over him. The two of them are watching the Killer’s undaunted shadow. Then the toes of the Killer’s boots. The bloodied nose of the Killer’s mask, as it turns away from them, to the left of the bend. He raises his knife—and Tessa kicks, again with the bare hard arch of her foot, into the back of the Killer’s left knee. At the same moment, she lets fly a fist into his right kidney, as hard as she can. Brian goes for the knife, wrenching the Killer’s arm back and to an angle. The angle is unnatural for a human, but it looks oddly like a chicken wing. The Killer flails in a delightfully chickenlike way toward the floor, crashing to one knee as Tessa kicks the other knee and begins kicking him in the ribs. Brian attempts to make the angle of the Killer’s arm still more dramatically wrong, but that’s when a sliding noise happens inside the cleaning closet, which is right in front of them. Neither Brian nor Tessa notices; they are occupied.

  The cleaning closet door crashes open, and the Thinker slashes with his standard issue Navy SEAL field knife toward Brian’s heart, but the Killer’s knife is flailing, and the Killer’s knife clatters against the Thinker’s knife with a sound like a small bell.

  Brian jumps backward on reflex, and the Thinker’s knife’s downward trajectory catches Tessa in the right shoulder. It embeds, shallowly. She screams. The Thinker jerks it out, and Tessa screams. The Killer is struggling to get up, but Tessa’s fallen onto him. The Thinker goes for Brian again, but the Killer—jostling his feet around for purchase—accidentally trips the Thinker. Brian catches the Thinker with two hard punches to the face, while Tessa sees Vivica inside the secret elevator. Her mouth falls open and snaps shut. She covers it, swallows hard, and remembers the Killer, flailing under her insubstantial weight. She walks on her knees to his right hand and kneels on it. The Killer lets go of his knife. But now his body is free. He dodders to a crouch. Tessa uses her only opening and stabs him in the side. He howls. The Thinker took Brian’s punches to get a good shot at his body cavity. He plunges for Brian with the knife, but Tessa is a dervish. She turns and plunges, blindly, and catches the Thinker in the thigh. She is screaming, pulling the blade out and stabbing the Thinker in the thigh—his right—twice more, before the Killer takes a handful of her hair and grabs her neck in both hands to break it. Brian is screaming. Brian has lost his mind. He head-butts the Killer five times in such fast succession that his movements blur on the monitor. Tessa eels out of the Killer’s hold and shoves Brian into the secret elevator. She hits the button for the nineteenth floor. The Killer and the Thinker grunt in protest, but the elevator door slides shut. The cleaning closet remains open, the shelves sideways. Brian and Tessa don’t have a controller. The Thinker laughs.

  He points at his hip, where his controller is clipped to his coveralls. He taps his temple to indicate his own superior intelligence. The Killer nods tiredly. The Killer and the Thinker examine their wounds while they wait for the secret elevator to journey to the nineteenth floor and arrest behind the juice concentrate shelf, Brian and Tessa panicking and screaming inside about why there is a wall in front of them when the secret elevator door slides open. Their shouts and battering at it will earn them nothing, no exit. And the secret elevator will time out after ninety seconds, if the juice concentrate shelf is not signaled to move aside by a controller. Then, per programming I designed in order to reduce the risk of security team infiltration, it will return to the fourth floor, with Brian and Tessa trapped inside.

  CAMERA X, 34, 33

  What’s actually happening is that Tessa is clinging to Brian, whimpering, and Brian is trying to stay between Tessa and Vivica’s body. He’s telling Tessa, “Don’t look at her. Keep it together. Keep it together, Tess. I need you here. Little Tasmanian devil. Right? Like fourth grade all over again.” Brian is checking her shoulder and shaking his head. And the secret elevator is opening into the walk-in refrigerator, where Delores boarded several hours ago, leaving the juice concentrate shelf wide-open. Brian is guiding Tessa out of the secret elevator, manually keeping her lines of sight to the front of his chest and walking sideways. He clears the disheveled barricade Delores erected and the Killer shoved past at the walk-in refrigerator door. Tessa jumps when the secret elevator hums alive and sinks out of sight.

  Brian turns to her. “Tess? Are you here? Are you with me?”

  She nods and makes a glugging sound.

  Brian takes a rope of her hair just in time as Tessa aims sideways and vomits. She hasn’t eaten much today. Bile sprinkles the red and green peppers on the walk-in refrigerator’s floor. When she’s done, Brian takes a corner of his shirt and cleans her mouth.

  “How are you so calm?” Tessa says.

  “I don’t know,” says Brian.

  I’d hazard flying through the air with a running motor vehicle that you have to land on two wheels requires a certain stress tolerance.

  The Thinker flicks blood off his thigh cantankerously. The Killer unbuttons a few buttons on his coveralls and palpates a gouge well below his right kidney. It’s regrettable—but, come on, understandable—that I never taught Tessa how to inflict stab wounds for maximum damage. She asked for self-defense training, not kill tactics.

  Brian and Tessa cross the kitchen. Tessa sees the cell phone and runs to it. She reaches for it, or tries to, but her right arm won’t lift. She looks at it, away from it. She sways as if trying not to pass out.

  “I’ll do it, Tess, siddown.”

  “No.” She’s dialing with her left hand. “They’ll ask for a security clearance code.”

  Brian checks her wound again. The knife slit her shoulder blade like an envelope. The bone is visible through a tear in her wife-beater. Brian goes to get the first aid kit, pauses by the knife block. He takes a big butcher knife and a meat cleaver.

  The secret elevator is sinking past the fifth floor. The Killer and the Thinker stand ready on the fourth floor. They are angry. They are agog with anger when the secret elevator sinks into view, and in it, only the pile of Vivica. The Thinker turns to the Killer, and the Killer shrugs. The Thinker points
to him, to the secret elevator, and the Thinker himself goes to the stairs. The Killer is getting on the secret elevator. Why would he check his hip for a controller that, until now, has reliably been there? He wouldn’t. He doesn’t. But if he did, he would see that it unclipped from his hip pocket when Tessa leaped on him and that it fell to the carpet, where it still lies.

  The Thinker takes his time coming up the stairs. He believes this will be simple now, with the element of surprise and the Killer arriving ahead of him, doing most of the work.

  Tessa is whisper-shrieking into the phone, “This isn’t a scenario! People are dead!” while Brian puts a large bandage on her bleeding shoulder and watches the ballroom’s stairway door and the walk-in refrigerator’s door simultaneously.

  Why would it be a problem that the Killer doesn’t have his controller? If Brian and Tessa successfully gained the nineteenth floor, then the juice concentrate shelf must be opened aside—goes the logic, and the logic is correct. It wouldn’t be a problem, except the controllers work like garage door openers. There have been issues with garage door openers being coded too alike and opening other garages if they’re in close proximity. This has been a problem, sometimes, with the controllers in the hotel. Specifically, with the head of security’s controller, which was scheduled to be fixed this week. My controller sometimes opened the door on the floor I was on, as well as the door on the floor below me (which is currently the nineteenth floor’s shelf of juice concentrate). It was frustrating.

  It was frustrating to feel a knife sever my spinal cord while I was in midreach for my gun, on my hip, where my controller is clipped. It is a physical fact that parts of the brachial plexus attach higher than the third vertebra.

  It’s impossible. But try. Move your finger. Find where it is in space—there. It is visibly moving, on the monitor for the twentieth floor. The Killer is passing the twelfth floor. He’s angry; he’s trembling with anger. Tessa is on the nineteenth floor, slapping the dishwasher and yelling, “He hung up! He said he’s sending one unit and it’ll be ten minutes and he fucking hung up. Brian, Jesus, Jesus Christ, what now?”

  And Brian is taking her face in his hands. “Now? We live.”

  Tessa is breaking down.

  “Tess? Say it to me.”

  My finger is wiggling an inch and a half from the button of my controller. The Killer is passing the seventeenth floor. The Thinker is climbing past the tenth floor, on the stairs, and Tessa is saying, “We live. We’re gonna live,” but she doesn’t sound convinced.

  Brian is saying, “Like you mean it.”

  Mean it. Reach. Remember diving underwater and swimming until you fell unconscious, brother SEALs dragging you back up to air, and seven-minute miles for ten miles, and rappelling out of choppers with a rifle already aimed, and loving her, you loved her, you still do. It’s folly, but so what. She’ll visit you in the hospital when all this is over, when you’ve rasped to the men who find you that you’re alive, I’m alive, and she’ll weep on your hospital sheets and you can know, then, that you did this, this inch and a half. You won’t tell her, but you’ll know.

  Tessa is fearsome when she means to be. “We’re gonna live. They’re gonna die, and we’re gonna live.”

  The Killer is passing the eighteenth floor.

  The sinews in my fingers ache. It feels so good; it feels. The tip of the nail on my right index scrapes across the controller’s button. And the wall on the twentieth floor slides shut.

  And the shelf of juice concentrate, on the nineteenth floor, slides shut.

  The Killer, in the secret elevator, rising to the nineteenth floor, tilts his head. He reaches for his hip. The controller isn’t there. The secret elevator arrives at the level of the nineteenth floor, and the Killer pats and pats his hip as if hoping his hip will magically become a controller.

  The inert skull, on the twentieth floor, on the security counter, smiles.

  The Thinker is tiring. He’s stomping up the stairs, passing the fourteenth floor. His thigh drips.

  Brian puts the cell phone in his back pocket. He gives the knife to Tessa and keeps the meat cleaver. They leave the kitchen, unknowingly using perfect two-man SEAL team formation, back-to-back but alternating isosceles directions, to cover all ground. They’re in the center of the ballroom, surrounded by tables with white tablecloths. Hundreds of white napkins have been folded into sailboats. Tessa and Brian are like scared gods in a bleached sea.

  “Cops are here in ten minutes?” says Brian.

  “Yeah. One car.”

  “That one car gets a look in the lobby, he’ll call the National Guard.”

  “Right.” Tessa’s examining the disturbed areas by the bandstand, the abandoned squeegee, the table sprinkled in bits of crystal. “Won’t even need to open the door. Entryway’s all glass.” She sees the glass behind the bandstand, noting its crackled appearance.

  “You know this place,” Brian says. “Do we take that hidden elevator back down?”

  “I didn’t know that was there. I don’t know how it’s controlled. Main elevator?”

  “It’s too damn slow. If they figure out we’re on it, they’ll be waiting for us.”

  Tessa blows hair out of her lashes, puts the knife on a dinner plate, and winds most of her hair into a bun. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “Tess, I’d rather be with you here than with anybody else anywhere.”

  Her laugh sounds strange. She takes up the knife again. “That’s crazy, Bri. That’s Mitch-level crazy.”

  The Thinker has slowed. Saunters past the fifteenth floor.

  The Killer, in the secret elevator, has used up his ninety seconds, and sinks. He punches the secret elevator’s wall, and a hole appears.

  Brian says, calm, eyes fixed and wide on the stairway door, “Do you believe in angels?”

  “Nope,” says Tessa.

  “Mitch appeared to me the night before I did the triple. He told me I was going to over-rotate on the third turn, compensating for how he under-rotated on it. He said that’s what I was going to do and it’d get me killed. He told me to shoot for even rotation, except on the third turn, because that’s when inertia would start to flatten.” Brian is too calm. “He said he’d help.”

  Tessa’s silent.

  “And I did it.”

  “You were dreaming,” Tessa says.

  “I was awake.”

  “You projected him.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Brian must hear the Thinker’s footfalls on the stairway because his stare lasers in that direction.

  On the fourth floor, the secret elevator opens and the Killer tears out of it, surging into the stairway like a rogue wave and taking the steps three at a time.

  Brian tells Tessa, “Stay here,” and says as he walks toward the stairway door, “It’s just weird. The photo in the magazine. I knew you wouldn’t sleep with a jerk like that. But I still had to see you. I thought about it every day for the past month and a half at least, but it was like somebody was telling me to wait. Then this morning, I knew this was it. Tonight, I had to be with you tonight. The whole ride up here, it was like somebody was at my back, pushing me.”

  “Mitch?” Tessa says. She says it not like it’s a confirmation of something, but like she’s talking to someone. She’s looking at the cracked window behind the bandstand. Outside it, nothing is visible but night, glittering like a flawed cut of onyx.

  “Yeah. Mitch,” Brian says. “Quiet. He’s coming.”

  Tessa turns from the window and grabs a dinner plate. She does it decisively, as if someone in high authority gave her a direct order. She flips the plate upside down as the stairway door pulls violently open, and Brian strikes with the cleaver, but the Thinker isn’t there; the Thinker is smart, the Thinker stood to the side, knowing Brian would strike because there were no screams from the ballroom, meaning the Killer hasn’t gotten there yet. And the Thinker is aiming a gun, having evidently decided these two final victims are sufficient pains in the ass that a f
irearm is preferable to a knife. Brian is bent forward with his assault at empty air, but Tessa throws the plate like a Frisbee, as hard as she can, and it cuts through the distance like a bad special-effects spaceship. It shouldn’t smash into the Thinker’s mask, but it does, it does, it hits him on the chin. The plate fairly disintegrates. There’s a thunder of footsteps coming up the stairs, a primeval yell of irate pain. The Thinker shakes ceramic from his rubber face, and his dropped .45 fires a hole into the ballroom’s east wall. Brian overbalances, wobbles, and chops into the backmost part of the Thinker’s right shoulder.

  I scream, “Why always the shoulders?” My voice comes out a croak from nearly twelve hours of silence, but it feels lovely to vent.

  The Thinker shouts, drops his knife, and Brian takes two fists of coveralls and throws. The Thinker totters into a pair of tables, falls in a thoroughfare of dishes and linens and flowers, and Tessa is advancing toward him with her own knife as Brian picks up the Thinker’s knife from the floor. “Brian!” Tessa screams as the Killer appears behind him, but too late—the Killer’s fist still glances Brian’s forehead as Brian weaves to avoid it. The Killer is exceedingly angry. He propels Brian backward, through the tables. Brian is bleeding from the forehead. The Killer picks him up and propels him past Tessa, who tries to catch him. She tries to stab the Killer, but the Killer backhands her, and she falls. Brian has dropped his knife. The Killer hits and kicks him. Directing him toward the bandstand, the stage, as if this murder will be a piece of performance art, and it will doubtlessly be exactly that. It will be what the Killer wishes he’d done to Delores, compounded by what these two have done to him, the annoyance of pain, the inconvenience. It will be pieces on every plate in every place setting, morsels left for the morning shift of the security team, who will be the first to walk through the nightmare Manderley has become. Though, somehow, the pyramid of a thousand champagne flutes still stands in the ballroom’s southeast corner.