The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  I spent my post-surgery recovery at the local library, searching for names in records and yearbooks and anything else I could get my hands on to create the authentic identity that Darryl had asked for.

  I settled on the name Stephanie Anderson. I’d found thousands of women by that name in my searches. Several were exactly my age. I chose a Stephanie Anderson from Indianapolis and memorised scraps of her biography that I dug up in research so extensive I might as well have been stalking her.

  I’d managed to get her date of birth, her parents’ names and even the names of her high school and college, together with her graduation years. I went back to Mick’s Tattoos three weeks later, once the swelling was down and I’d been able to take decent passport photos with my new face. Darryl was in the same place where I’d seen him last, watching those tropical fish swim around in circles.

  ‘Now, that is much better,’ he said, looking up from the tank and taking in my new appearance. I’d also cut my hair and dyed it dark brown, and I had my eyebrows reshaped, which surprisingly made almost as much difference as the surgery.

  I handed him a notepaper with the details of my new identity. He snatched the paper and examined the information approvingly. ‘I’ll see you in two weeks,’ he said.

  When I returned to get my documents, Darryl was in the front of the store, tattooing a cobra across the belly of a college kid with a try-hard wispy beard. The kid’s face was red as he tried not to scream. His girlfriend sat next to him, checking her phone.

  I handed Darryl the money in an envelope, which he quickly glanced into before shoving it into a console next to his tattoo inks. He pulled out an even larger brown envelope from a bottom drawer.

  Inside I found a new social security card, birth certificate and various other forms of identification all for Stephanie Anderson.

  ‘Nice knowing you, Steph,’ he said as he bent over the kid to resume work on the cobra.

  I knew that it was best if I left with no trace at all, so with my new identity in my purse and a duffel bag of my meagre possessions, I headed to the bus station.

  As I came up with my plan, I asked myself how Lucy would have done it. She was a master strategist. She would have thought ten steps ahead of every move. That’s how she played chess, and that’s how I was going to play my own version of the game.

  I’d found an elevator company in Houston that was advertising a number of roles. I managed to get an interview, but that would be in person, meaning I had to endure a twelve-hour Greyhound ride with three transfers to get there. When the bus drove into the bus station in downtown Houston, it was not long after dawn. I found a room in a rundown hostel nearby, where I showered and had a nap on a narrow single bed in a room not much bigger and probably more spartan than a prison cell.

  By the afternoon, following two interviews, I was hired as a service assistant at the Cortane Elevator Company. My starting salary was $37 350 a year.

  I was thrilled. Once I started the job, I rented a dingy one-room apartment near the office to build up some more history for Stephanie Anderson. I was done with roommates, and didn’t want anyone keeping track of how I spent my time.

  At Cortane I worked hard and kept my head down. I was the fastest learner they’d ever had, or at least that’s what my supervisor told me, admiring how quickly I’d learned the ropes. He didn’t know the half of it. He thought I was super-motivated when I asked if I could go out with the installers and repair technicians in my free time to see what it was like in the field. I explained that it would make my job working with customers so much easier.

  I spent the better part of a year asking endless questions of the technicians, studying blueprints of the elevators and reading anything and everything I could get my hands on relating to elevator design, electronics and installation. I signed up for courses in programming and electronics at a community college. I loved the coding. It was the first thing that I’d done in a long time that challenged me intellectually. I quickly learned C, C++ and Java, and within months was writing my own code for a program that allowed me to hack into an elevator system and then control it with an app on my phone.

  In between semesters I attended drama classes. I learned how to alter my walk and gestures to suit my new persona. They taught me how to change my speech, too, and I adopted a lower pitch and different intonations that became second nature over time. I even picked up a slight Texas drawl.

  A year after moving to Houston, I went back to Vegas on a weekend trip. I found Darryl working on a tattoo of intertwined initials on the arms of a couple who’d just married at the all-night wedding chapel next door. They were too drunk to feel any pain, I noticed, as I flicked through the well-thumbed pages of a celebrity magazine while I waited for Darryl to finish.

  When he was done we went into the back room. I paid him five grand for a fake Bachelor’s degree for Stephanie Anderson and another five grand for fake references from an ex-lawyer who’d spent time in jail on drug charges. The arrangement was that the lawyer would take whatever calls came his way from prospective employers and talk enthusiastically about my work.

  He had a deep voice that sounded impressive on the phone and an ability to speak with authority on topics he had no idea about. In short, a typical lawyer. When I met him in person to explain the sort of questions he might be asked, he didn’t look at all how I’d expected. He had a greying pony tail and a face sunken from too much weed and acid. He told me that he was on the wagon after a cancer scare and had become a holistic vegan. Whatever that meant.

  When I got back to Houston, I quit my job at Cortane with the teary-eyed explanation that I needed to go back home to nurse my dying mother. They threw me a party on my last day; a pink-iced cake with a message in chocolate-cream piping.

  Again I travelled by bus, crisscrossing through the Midwest, all the way back to New York. I didn’t want my name appearing on any flight manifests.

  Getting a job at Stanhope was easy enough. I built a fake resume that detailed a work history that went back two decades. To go with my new face I bought blue contact lenses, gold-framed glasses and invested in a bland wardrobe that turned me into a slightly frumpy-looking administrative assistant.

  Stanhope always struggled to keep support staff because they routinely stiffed them on pay, unlike the executives, who made small fortunes. That worked in my favour. My references from the Vegas lawyer – he claimed I’d been his assistant at a boutique West Coast consulting firm – and the fake degree I’d bought from Darryl were enough to get me the job. My one interview was with a PA who’d once worked in my department. Walking out of that room, I knew my disguise was bulletproof. She had absolutely no idea who I was.

  For eight months, I worked at Stanhope as an administrative assistant. I prepared documents, did photocopying and carried out a hundred other menial tasks. I’d come in and out of meeting rooms and hand documents to Vincent and the other members of The Circle without them ever knowing who I was.

  They were as self-absorbed as ever. That was a huge advantage. They glanced in my direction but they never saw me. I cultivated ordinariness as camouflage, to blend into their narcissistic corporate lives. Vincent, Jules and Sam wouldn’t give a dowdy secretary like me a second glance. Even if they had given me the time of day, I looked totally different from the Sara Hall they’d known.

  The lack of recognition on their arrogant faces amused me. If they knew who I was – what I was planning – none of them would have lowered their guard so easily.

  Some mornings I took elevator rides with the team, inhaling the sharp tang of aftershave hanging over us like an acid cloud. It burned my lungs and seared my resolve. It was almost like old times, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the confines of the elevator, dangling hundreds of feet above the ground. If something went wrong, we’d share the same fate. Death, after all, was the ultimate equaliser.

  If they took any notice of me it was only to throw me a pitying glance. A hint of distaste that warned me off bringing my ord
inariness into their privileged space. They acted as if mediocrity was an infectious disease. I didn’t mind. It allowed me to get up close and personal, to study every nuance of their regimented lives without raising any suspicion.

  Nothing had changed. They were creatures of habit. They arrived a few minutes before 7.30 a.m. holding takeout coffee with their names written crookedly in black marker by baristas serving the impatient early morning Wall Street crowd.

  With their free hand, the men in the elevator texted the girl from the night before, or their wives. Often both. Or they swiped through dating apps to find a date for the evening ahead, pausing occasionally to check if London’s FTSE had rallied in the afternoon.

  Sylvie texted her latest squeeze in Paris, Marc, while setting up her trades before the morning bell. Sylvie had great instincts when it came to predicting market movements, but she’d never been as astute when it came to picking men. I found it remarkable that she never noticed me standing behind her, practically looking over her shoulder. But then Sylvie never truly had eyes for anyone except herself.

  They were like capitalist soldiers in their two-thousand-dollar suits, pressed razor-sharp. Impeccably groomed. You’d think they’d never been touched by perspiration, dirt, or excrement. But no one gets to make the kind of money those four did without tarnishing their soul. Their hands were soft, and clean, and free of calluses. But only because they never touched the blood they spilt.

  Over the months, I glanced at their phone screens whenever I could – usually while standing behind them in the elevator – and mentally noted down even the most mundane snippets of their lives. I knew how much money they had in their bank accounts, the state of their investment portfolios, as well as a myriad of seemingly inane details: restaurant preferences, their next holiday destination, their taste in alcohol, lovers and food. The name of their cleaner, dry-cleaning service and their burglar alarm codes. I looked for their soft underbellies. Prodding and poking until I found a weakness. I memorised all of it. Over time, I built a comprehensive picture of every facet of their lives.

  I even found out enough about the team’s business deals to leak information about the bids to a competitor. Stanhope lost key deals twice in the space of six months. Almost $60 million in lost revenue. I couldn’t resist the temptation of undermining them, even though it was probably dumb to risk blowing my cover like that. But I loved seeing Vincent, Jules, Sam and Sylvie’s panicked faces as things went wrong in their otherwise perfect lives.

  Every day I politely weaved my way around them with a breathless, deferential ‘excuse me’. They assumed that I was overwhelmed by their success, that I was timid, because I lowered my eyes subserviently when I passed them in the corridor. They’d never been more wrong about anything in their lives. I kept my eyes low to hide the ice-cold rage I could never fully disguise.

  They thought I was no better than the janitor who mopped their urine splatter off the toilet floor. I consoled myself with the thought that they’d find out soon enough who I was and what I was capable of. The key was patience. And I was very, very patient.

  They never thought twice when, one afternoon at the end of a long and tedious meeting, I went around the table handing them a tablet for their electronic signature. I’d spent many sleepless nights working on the app running on the tablet, which surreptitiously used the front-facing camera to take perfect scans of their irises.

  Not long after, I arranged holiday leave and went to Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Antigua, Lichtenstein and The Channel Islands in the space of twelve days. In each country I set up bank accounts in Stephanie Anderson’s name.

  By the time I got back, all that was left was setting and baiting the trap. I snuck into the building I’d carefully selected and rigged up an elevator, including climbing into the elevator shaft to leave a transponder on the roof of the elevator’s cabin, allowing me to control it remotely. While I was there, I tightened the screws on the escape hatch so there was no way in hell any of them were getting out.

  Crucially, I made sure they wouldn’t be able to use their phones. No way messages or calls could be made or received by anyone in the elevator. For my plan to work, I needed them all totally incommunicado for at least 24 hours.

  When every part of my plan was in place, I sent them a fake meeting invitation using the generic Stanhope human resources email address. I’d done work for the HR team and knew the password for the account. I simply logged in on a colleagues’s laptop when they were out to lunch. I sent the emails to Sylvie and the others mid-afternoon on a Friday so they wouldn’t have time to ask too many questions. In the email to Vincent, I added a line stressing that attendance was compulsory and that he’d be held accountable if anyone didn’t turn up.

  They all came, just as I knew they would. They always did when Stanhope snapped its fingers. With the layoffs in the offing, I figured none of them would have the guts to disregard the meeting invitation, even if it was at an inconvenient time.

  Once they were inside, I was able to control the elevator remotely using my app on a burner phone. I had full control over the elevator’s movement, thermostat and lights.

  I imagined what it might be like if I was locked inside; the emotions that I would have felt, the stress and fear as time passed without rescue. Then I amplified that feeling because I knew the four of them would get on each other’s nerves in no time at all. When I thought of what Lucy had endured in the elevator that night, it hardened my resolve further.

  I came up with the escape room ruse to keep them off-balance and buy me time. It would keep them distracted while I executed the most crucial part of my plan. Coming up with the puzzles was the most fun. Stupid, meaningless clues that would turn them against each other and keep them confused.

  The bonus letters were the coup de grâce. Stanhope had an iron-clad security procedure for bonus letters. I managed to get myself assigned to the admin team printing out the letters and putting them into the envelopes, before they were locked away.

  It was easy enough to find out the bonuses for the people in Vincent’s team, and to produce a letter listing the amounts. When Vincent and his personal assistant were both in a meeting upstairs, I marched into his office with his mail, leaving it on his desk like an efficient secretary, and used the opportunity to quickly slip the envelope I’d prepared into the outside pocket of his briefcase. I laughed to myself as I did it. If there was anything guaranteed to turn those four into enemies, it was finding out each other’s bonus. They’d be weak if they were divided. That would work to my advantage as I played them all.

  At midnight that Friday, when they were still locked in the elevator, I walked through a metal detector at LaGuardia and boarded my flight. I was still using my burner phone to torment them, but also using it to implement the most beautiful part of my plan.

  Meanwhile the four of them would be found on Monday morning, alive and well. I wasn’t too worried about them. How much trouble could four investment bankers get into in a locked elevator?

  Vincent sat bolt upright, still half asleep. He sensed a brooding shadow looming over where they lay huddled, clutching each other to stay warm. His heart quickened. His eyes were blurry from sleep as he stared at the hazy silhouette. It took on a familiar appearance.

  It was Jules, standing over them. The remote expression in Jules’s black eyes sent a chill down Vincent’s spine.

  ‘What’s wrong, Jules?’ Vincent’s breath turned into vapour in the cold.

  ‘You set this up, Vincent.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Vincent scrambled to his feet. When Vincent was halfway up, Jules pushed him in the chest with his foot. Unbalanced, Vincent immediately toppled clumsily to the ground.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ warned Jules. He gave a faint shake of his head.

  It was only then that Vincent noticed Jules’s outstretched arm. In his hand was a gun. Jules’s grip was tight. It didn’t waver. The barrel was aimed at Vincent’s chest.

&n
bsp; ‘How …’ Vincent began to ask. He’d spent hours looking for the Glock, even through the blinding pain of his concussion. It had worried him greatly that he hadn’t found it.

  ‘I took my gun back when you were knocked out,’ said Jules. ‘Don’t give me that look. It is mine, after all.’

  Vincent felt the reassuring weight of the metal ammunition clip resting in his pocket. As if anticipating what he was thinking, Jules moved his grip so that Vincent could see the clip of ammunition he’d pushed into the gun. Jules pulled back the slide with a loud metal click, pushing a round into the chamber.

  ‘You think I only carry one clip with me? I had a spare in my bag. This thing is locked and loaded and I have no qualms about using it.’

  The noise of the two men talking roused Sam and Sylvie from their sleep. Sylvie looked up at Jules and quickly processed the situation, much as Vincent had done a moment earlier. Sam lay feebly on the floor, too weak to rise, or speak, or do anything other than watch them helplessly.

  ‘What are you doing, Jules?’ Sylvie’s voice was hoarse from lack of water.

  ‘It occurred to me,’ said Jules, ‘that it was Vincent who lured us here. We got a vague email from HR, but Vincent was the one who texted us to tell us it was a compulsory meeting.’

  ‘I thought the email from HR was authentic,’ said Vincent, angrily. ‘I truly thought it was a team building activity to help the firm make its final decision on the lay-offs and maybe choose Eric Miles’s successor. I had no idea about any of this,’ he said, looking around at the blood-smeared elevator, the cracked mirrors, exposed ceiling, the rubble of discarded silver ceiling tiles and broken glass scattered across the floor.

  ‘Then why did you stash food and water in your briefcase? Why come dressed in your thickest overcoat?’ Jules said. ‘No. You knew it would be like this. You planted the clues – about Sara Hall, about Lucy and that Sun Tzu quote, to divert our attention. You pretended it was a game so that we wouldn’t realise your real objective in bringing us here: to kill us.’