Crisscross

by F. Paul Wilson

  Margiotta looked surprised at the offer. And well he should be. Jensen didn’t play gopher for anyone. But he wanted Margiotta to stay alert as he followed those hits.

  He stepped out into the hallway and began making the rounds.

  3

  The elevator stopped on the twenty-first floor. As the doors slid open, Jack pressed the lobby button and stepped out of the car—just barely. He stopped as close to the doors as he could without trapping the back of his shirt when they closed.

  On his previous tour of the temple he’d noticed stationary visual surveillance cameras in the elevator area of every floor, high in the corners above the doors, facing out. The TPs—if they were of a mind to do so—could watch you in the elevator car and then catch you again when you stepped out onto the floor. The meditation floor was no different.

  But Jack had noticed that the fixed angle needed to capture the longest view of the hallway inevitably left a blind spot just outside the elevator doors.

  Right where Jack was standing.

  He looked longingly at the EXIT sign over the door to the stairwell on his right. That way would be so much simpler but the security cameras covered the approach and he was sure opening the door would be flagged in the security computer.

  He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, then fished out the big screwdriver and heavy-duty coat hanger hook he’d brought along. He’d freed the hook from its wooden hanger, then tied and glued a length of sturdy twine to its straight end. He hoped he’d done it right. He hadn’t had time to call on Milkdud Swigart for a refresher course on how to hack a building.

  Back in December he and Milkdud had hacked a Midtown building through the elevator shaft so that Jack could eavesdrop on a conversation in one of the offices. Jack hadn’t attempted anything like that since. This would be his first solo hack.

  He worked the hook through the space between the top of the elevator door and the lintel. Keeping a grip on the string, he let the hook drop on the far side of the door.

  Now the hard part: catching the lever that would open the door.

  He fished the hook around, twisting the twine this way and that, then pulling up. If he found no resistance, he went through the process again.

  He began to sweat with frustration and maybe a little anxiety. Jack remembered Milkdud saying that old buildings with old elevators had the easiest doors to open. Well, this former hotel was an old building, so why—?

  The twine resisted his pull—the hook had caught something.

  He sent up a prayer to the goddess of building hackers: Please, let this be the lever.

  He tugged and saw the doors move—just a fraction of an inch, but enough to tell him he was in the right place. Pulled a little harder and the doors spread farther, allowing enough space for Jack to slip the screwdriver through. He let go of the string and used the screwdriver to lever the doors open until he had room for his fingers in the gap. He slipped them through, then forced the doors apart. Once past a certain point, they opened the rest of the way on their own.

  The open elevator shaft yawned before him. Thick cables ran up and down the center of the shaft, their coating of grease reflecting the glow from the caged incandescent bulb set above the doors.

  Jack poked his head into the shaft and looked down. Bulbs lit the way into the dimness below. He couldn’t see his elevator car, but the other, marked with a “2” on its roof, waited midshaft about ten floors down.

  He looked to his right and found what he wanted. Between the two sets of doors a row of rusty metal rungs had been set into the wall. They ran the length of the shaft.

  He pocketed the screwdriver, the hook, and the twine. He grabbed a rung, placed the ridged rubber sole of his work boot on another, lower rung, and swung out into the shaft. He brushed against a spring switch along the way and was startled by the ding! of the elevator bell.

  So that’s what makes it ring.

  He would have expected a more sophisticated system, but then again, these elevators were antiques.

  He grabbed the lever and pushed down to close the doors, then began the short climb to the top floor.

  Brady’s floor.

  No problem opening the elevator doors from this side: A simple push on the lever admitted him to floor twenty-two.

  The only question was whether or not he was alone up here. The lights were on, but that didn’t mean much. He listened. Not a sound.

  Jack closed the doors but left the screwdriver between them. He stepped through the deserted receptionist area and crossed the office, passing Brady’s huge desk as he made his way toward the living quarters.

  He tried the door—locked. He knocked, a series of triplets, waited, then repeated. No response. He pulled out his cell and dialed the “personal” number Brady had given him last week. A phone began to ring on the far side of the door. On the fifth ring a voice—not Brady’s—told him to leave a message. Jack was reasonably sure Brady would have answered a call at this hour.

  So…nobody home. But that could change any minute.

  Jack turned and hurried to Brady’s desk.

  4

  “All quiet on the Western Front?”

  The TP in the lobby kiosk jumped as if he’d heard a shot. He dropped his newspaper and blanched when he saw who was speaking.

  “Sir!” He shot to his feet. “You startled me, sir!”

  “At ease,” Jensen said, holding back a laugh.

  He rarely used the elevator when he traveled from his office to the lobby. He’d found it much faster to take the stairs from the third floor. He’d eased through the stairway door at the south side of the lobby and silently made his way toward the security kiosk. He’d wanted to see how close he could get before the TP on duty realized he wasn’t alone.

  It had been easy. Too easy. The TP, whose name was Gary Cruz, had been so engrossed in the Sunday paper’s sports section that Jensen had had to announce himself.

  Jensen should have been angry, but he was too pleased with his own stealth to take Cruz’s head off.

  “Everything under control?”

  The TP nodded. “Only one mouse in the house.”

  That wasn’t unusual, even at this hour. A certain number of FAs would stay late or come in early to study, or catch up on assigned duties, or simply spend time on the Communing Level. The busiest after-hours periods tended to be Friday into Saturday, and Saturday into Sunday. The early hours of Monday usually found the Temple deserted. Except, of course, for the security detail.

  “Thought he was a homeless guy at first,” Cruz added.

  “You’re sure he wasn’t?” This TP had better be damn sure.

  “His card read him out as LFA, so that explained his looks.”

  “A lapser?” A sour note chimed in Jensen’s head. “What’s his name?”

  Cruz sat and tapped at his keyboard. “John Roselli, sir. Came in about twenty minutes ago.”

  Roselli…he knew that name. He knew all the lapsers. He kept an eye on them to make sure they were complying with their punishment. But that wasn’t the only reason. He’d kept a special watch ever since Clark Schaub. He’d been depressed because he thought his LFA designation was unjust—they all thought that—and killed himself.

  A Dormentalist suicide was news under any circumstances, but when it happened in the Temple itself, and when the member did it in such dramatic fashion, it created a field day for the press. And not just rags like The Light—all the papers.

  Schaub had seated himself in the center of the Great Room on the twenty-first floor, removed a straight razor from his pocket, and slit his own throat.

  Covering it up had appeared impossible at first, but Jensen found a way. The only witnesses had been devout Dormentalists and they took a vow of silence to protect their Church. Jensen and Lewis and Hutch moved the body to a grove in Central Park. A police investigation listed Schaub as murdered by an unknown suspect. The case remained unsolved.

  “Where’d Roselli go?”

  Cruz check
ed his screen again. “Straight to twenty-one.”

  Shit. Like any other LFA, Roselli thought he’d gotten the shaft. He’d always struck Jensen as pretty stable, but you never knew. And the last thing Jensen needed now was a replay of the Schaub mess.

  “Access the cameras up there. Let’s see what our lapser is up to.”

  Cruz complied with practiced efficiency, alternating between mouse and keyboard. But as he worked, his brow began to furrow; a puzzled expression wormed onto his face.

  Jensen didn’t like that look. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t find him.”

  “Well, then he must have left the floor.”

  Cruz pressed a button under one of his screens. “Not by the elevators. They haven’t moved.”

  “Check the stairwell doors.”

  Jensen’s mind raced. Each floor had access to the north and south stairways, but the doors were monitored. Access to the twenty-second floor from the stairways was blocked by password-protected steel doors that would have been at home in a bank vault.

  “No record of either being opened.”

  “Then rerun the tapes, damn it. Let’s see where he went when he left the elevator. No, wait. Do the elevator first.”

  Like a giant TiVo, the security computer stored each of the digital feeds on huge hard drives that made them accessible at any time.

  Jensen moved behind Cruz and waited as he fiddled with the monitoring system. A bank of eight small screens arced across the inner front of the kiosk, just below the counter. Images from each security camera were supposed to rotate through the screens. The rotation had been halted while Cruz accessed specific cameras.

  “Coming up on screen eight,” Cruz said.

  The black-and-white image of an elevator interior lit the screen. Car I blinked in the upper-left corner; a digital clock ran in the upper right. The camera showed the knit-capped head of a scruffy-looking guy staring at his shoes. Jensen got a glimpse of beard but never the face.

  According to the clock, Roselli stepped off the elevator onto twenty-one at 11:22:14. Something about the way he kept his head down bothered Jensen. But no problem. The other cameras would provide a good head-to-toe look.

  “Roll the floor cameras back to 11:21.”

  Cruz did just that and Jensen watched as he scrolled through every feed from the twenty-first floor.

  John Roselli didn’t appear on one.

  Cruz kept shaking his head as he made a second run through the feeds. “This is impossible! Something’s got to be wrong!”

  Jensen looked toward the elevator doors.

  No, it wasn’t impossible. Every surveillance system had blind spots. And yes, something was definitely wrong. Because whoever had gone up in that car had taken advantage of gaps in the system. Jensen doubted very much that John Roselli had the know-how or even the inclination to do that.

  A thought hit like a horse kick in the chest.

  Roselli—the Farrell-Amurri-Robertson guy had seen him during his tour…tried to talk to him…even asked questions about him…

  Could it be him? But even so, Jensen didn’t know what the guy hoped to accomplish up on twenty-one.

  But the floor above…

  “The elevators—did either go to twenty-two?”

  Cruz looked up at him. “How could they? Mr. Brady left around—”

  “Since Roselli checked in.”

  Cruz manipulated the mouse, then, “No, sir. Nothing’s gone to two-two since Mr. Brady called for it earlier.”

  Jensen hid a sigh of relief. And yet…

  What if this Farrell-Amurri-Robertson had somehow got hold of Roselli’s card? And what if he’d found a way to twenty-two?

  Jensen cursed Brady for not allowing surveillance on twenty-two. He understood it—after all, Brady lived there—but it left a major gap in security.

  “Call Roselli’s home. See if he’s there. And if he is, ask him if he’s still got his swipe card.”

  “But—” Cruz began, then the light dawned. “Oh, I get it.”

  He placed the call, waited a long time with the receiver against his ear, then hung up.

  “No answer, not even voice mail.”

  Okay. Then it was probably Roselli up there. He could have stepped out of the elevator, sat himself down right in front of the doors, and killed himself: knife, poison, whatever.

  But then again, it was possible, just possible, that it was someone else.

  “I’m going up for a look.”

  “I’ll go, sir.”

  “No. You man the fort.”

  Either way, a dead Roselli or a live mystery guy, Jensen wanted to handle it alone.

  But he hoped—no, he prayed—it was the mystery guy. He needed to slip his hands around the bastard’s scrawny neck and watch his eyes bulge out of his head.

  5

  Jack pressed the button under the lip of Brady’s desktop. As the doors on the opposite wall began to slide open, he pulled the Beretta from the desk drawer. He ejected the magazine from the grip and inspected it. Full. He thumbed out three rounds—not too easy wearing latex gloves—then slipped it back into its well. Next he removed the slide assembly, which included the barrel and the firing pin. He put the frame back into the drawer and placed the slide assembly on the desktop.

  Then he pulled his new-bought Beretta from the small of his back and removed its slide assembly as well. This he fitted onto the frame of Brady’s. That done he closed the drawer and fitted Brady’s slide onto his own Beretta.

  As he holstered his hybrid pistol he walked over to the now exposed globe. The little lights where pillars had been buried winked on automatically as it started its slow rotation. Was someone buried, like Jamie, in each of those spots?

  Jack wanted to smash it—knock it over, pull it apart, and shatter every single one of those glowing bulbs. But he held back. He couldn’t leave a hint that he’d been here.

  He returned to the desk, pressed the button to close the doors, then headed for the elevator bank. After levering the doors open with the screwdriver, he swung back onto the rungs, closed the doors, then began his descent.

  He’d gone two rungs when he heard the pulleys above begin to spin. He looked down and saw an elevator car with “I” on its roof moving his way.

  Jack chewed his lip as he watched it rise, urging it to stop on one of the lower floors. But it kept coming. And coming.

  Brady? Was the bossman home from his night of pedophilic debauchery?

  Okay. No problem. Jack had done what he’d intended. He could return to the Communing Level and hang out for twenty minutes or so, then take an elevator down and stroll back through the lobby to the real world.

  Expecting the car to pass him, Jack leaned away from its path. To his horror it began to slow as it approached the twenty-first.

  Shit.

  He hurried down the rungs and reached the door level just as the car stopped. He peered through the gap between the car doors and the floor doors to see who was trying to rain on his parade.

  When he saw the black uniform and glistening chocolate scalp, he stifled a groan and pressed his forehead against the cold steel of one of the rungs.

  Jensen…what the hell was the Grand Paladin doing here at this hour?

  But the question vanished as he felt a scarlet rush flash through him, saw Jamie’s mutilated finger protruding from the concrete. Here was the guy who’d helped bury her alive.

  After coming down off the black fugue that had propelled him through his night with Cordova, Jack had been cool, almost detached in dealing with Brady. Maybe that was because he was miles away.

  But Jensen…Jack had been planning to catch up with him eventually to settle Jamie’s score. Now Jensen was here, within reach.

  But Jack had to hold himself in check. This wasn’t the time or place. This was Jensen’s home field. As much as he hated to, Jack would have to wait. And improvise.

  Jack hated to improvise.

  6

  Jensen held
his pistol against his right thigh as he walked through the Communing Level.

  “Mr. Roselli?” he called, keeping his tone gentle. “John Roselli?”

  Come out, come out wherever you are…

  …if you’re here at all.

  Not many places to hide on this level. He obviously wasn’t in the big open area; that left the private Communing Booths along the south wall. Jensen would have to check them one by one…

  And if he found no one…what then?

  Jensen had no idea.

  Jack watched Jensen’s elevator car descend on its own to maybe the tenth or eleventh floor and stop. It had started down a minute or so after Jensen stepped off. Apparently the cars were programmed so that one waited at lobby level and the other stayed midshaft when not in use.

  If nothing else it gave him some room.

  To do what?

  One thing he knew: He couldn’t hang on these rungs till dawn.

  The omnipresent surveillance cameras on the floor limited his options. Brady’s lair and this elevator shaft were the only places he could move about unobserved. He could climb down to the base of the shaft and hide there until he could figure an escape route. Or…

  Or what?

  Jack noticed a metal inspection plate in the wall between the elevator doors. Desperate for some direction, for any sort of plan, he pulled out his screwdriver and went to work on the rusty screws. When he pulled off the plate he found half a dozen or so wires running to and from a pair of switches embedded in the opposite side. It took him a moment to realize he was looking at the rear innards of the elevator call buttons.

  Fat lot of good that did him.

  And then…an idea…

  Jack had planned to catch up with Jensen later. But maybe he could do that now and then simply walk out of here.

  He went to work on the wires.

  “Where the fuck is he?” Jensen muttered.

  He pulled his two-way from a pocket and called the lobby.

  “Cruz? Any sign of Roselli?”