Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  “Let me walk you out.”

  “I can find my way.”

  He followed her as far as the door. She turned, went up slightly on her toes, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for the Oriental veggies.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I know you were following me,” she said.

  He smiled. “Then you won’t be surprised the next time it happens.”

  On her way out, she gave Jack a ten.

  Twenty-Nine

  They had to walk up twenty-seven floors.

  They couldn’t be sure that the other elevators in the York Avenue building had been sabotaged in any way, even though there was no evidence that they’d been fitted with pinhole cameras.

  Martin Fleck offered to save the mayor the hike, saying he could take video and email it to him. But Fleck had also set the hook, promising to show something significant to the mayor, and Headley wanted to see it for himself.

  “I still hit the StairMaster four times a week,” the mayor said. “So lead the way.”

  Brian Cartland, of Homeland, was okay with making the climb, as well, but police chief Annette Washington begged off, but not because she wasn’t up to it. She had a meeting at One Police Plaza.

  In the lobby, Arla had found Glover and was going to tell him about the exchange she had just witnessed between the mayor and the boy, but she didn’t have a chance. The sound of a text notification came from inside Glover’s jacket. He looked at the phone to find a message from his father.

  On second floor but on the move. Get up here.

  “Gotta go,” he said. “You might as well head back to the office. The others should be back by now and you can get started.”

  Arla was dismissed.

  Glover found the entrance to the stairwell and was just about to exit onto the second floor hallway when the fire door opened and his father, Fleck, and Cartland entered.

  “We’re going up,” Headley said.

  “How far?” Glover asked.

  “You’ll see,” his father said.

  Fleck led the way, followed by the mayor, then Cartland, and finally, Glover. Everyone except Glover was careful to pace himself, taking the stairs at a steady rate. Glover, however, in struggling to keep up, occasionally took the steps two at a time, which only tired him out even more, causing him to stop several times to catch his breath.

  Once they’d reached the twenty-ninth floor, Cartland said of the yet-to-be seen Glover, “Shall we wait for your son, Mr. Mayor?”

  Headley had a hand on his chest, feeling the pounding inside. “That … really was a workout,” he said. “You think you’re in shape, but … No, let’s get started. Glover will get here when he gets here.”

  Fleck led them down a corridor around the corner from the elevators until they reached a locked, green door marked Equipment Room Keep Out. Fleck produced a key to open the door, and once he had, they heard the soft humming of machinery and cooling fans.

  Cartland and Headley followed him in. As the door was about to shut, a hand shot in to keep it open. A breathless Glover stepped into the room behind the others.

  “Good of you to join us, Glover,” Headley said.

  The room, about thirty feet square, was filled with several tall, locker-like units in the center that were constructed of green metal. Along one wall were the tops of the machines—massive pulleys that housed the belts and cables responsible for raising and lowering the elevators through the shafts. They were, at this time, idle, given that all the elevators were shut down.

  Attached to one of the locker units, at eye level, was a black box about the size of a thick, paperback novel, or an oversized TV remote.

  “Whoa,” said Glover, scanning the machinery like a wide-eyed kid. “Never been in a room like this.”

  Fleck walked over to one of the green metal units and, with another key, opened one. Inside, from top to bottom, were countless wires and circuit panels. Lights flickered on and off while small digital readouts provided information.

  Headley glanced at it all, clearly flummoxed by what any of it meant.

  “This is the brains and the guts of the elevator system,” Fleck told the other men. He reached for the black box attached to the next unit and dislodged it. It had evidently been attached magnetically. It had a small screen at the top and several rows of small buttons below. A cable with a jack at the end dangled from the bottom. Fleck plugged it into one of the circuit boards, and the screen came to life with a series of numbers and symbols.

  “Okay,” Fleck said. “I’m now, with this box, in control of the elevator system to this building. I can move them from floor to floor, open the doors and close them, send them straight to the bottom or the top. I can do any damn thing I want.”

  He continued. “Before I can do any of this, of course, I have to punch in a slew of codes to establish an interface between this device and the elevator system. But if you know the codes, you’re in business. And here’s the thing.” At this point, he unplugged the unit, and started tapping the various buttons with his index finger.

  “If I’m outside the building, at home, or at my office, and if I want to do all these same functions, I can, as long as I have this box or one just like it with me. Admittedly, that’s a little trickier, because first I have to get through the entire building’s security system to access the elevator system. But if I know those codes—and it would be easier to get them if I’ve already been in here to set things up—I’m in business. I can make this elevator do whatever I want, and I don’t even have to be here. So if you’re thinking of reviewing the surveillance tapes from the time of the event, well, that’s not necessarily going to be of any help.”

  “Jesus,” said Headley. “But the codes and everything, those can’t be easy to crack.”

  “They aren’t,” Fleck agreed. “But it can be done.”

  “So,” Cartland said, “you’d either have to work in the elevator business and understand all this shit, or—”

  “—know someone who did,” said Glover, who had been watching intently.

  Headley gave his son a dismissive look. “Thanks, Glover. I think we’d all pretty much figured that part out.” To Fleck, he said, “Or anyone who works for the city’s elevator inspections division.”

  “Yes,” said Fleck.

  Headley looked at Cartland. “What do you suggest?”

  “Off the top,” he said, “we need to get people checking every single elevator in the city, looking to see if a camera’s been surreptitiously installed. So far, the two elevators where people have been killed have had that camera.”

  “Christ. How long could that take?” Headley asked Fleck.

  “Seventy thousand elevators, and roughly a hundred and forty inspectors,” Fleck said. “Do the math. That’s about eighteen hundred elevators per person, you figure maybe they can do half a dozen a day, and—”

  “That’s insane,” Headley said.

  “But,” Fleck said, “if we make this public, get every building maintenance team involved and they do the inspections themselves, at least a simple visual, well, that would speed up the process.”

  Headley looked back to Cartland. “Go public?”

  Cartland’s face was granite.

  “We go public with this,” Headley said, “and let everyone in New York know that somebody may be fucking with the elevators, and they know that every time they get into one of these things they’re gambling with their lives …”

  “Pandemonium,” said Glover.

  “Yeah,” said Cartland. “This is a vertical city. You got eight and a half million people afraid to go to work. Terrified to ride the elevators in their own building.”

  “The city’ll come to a fucking standstill,” Headley said. “Unless we can find the son of a bitch who’s got one of those boxes there.”

  “Yeah,” said Cartland. “And if this is, as we suspect, sabotage, we have to start asking why anyone would want to do this.”

  “Do terrorists need a
reason?” Headley asked.

  “This is a very sophisticated way to go about killing people. It would take a lot of thought and planning and expertise. To go to all this trouble, you can bet your ass there’s a reason. Even if it’s one that might not make sense to us.”

  Headley had turned his attention back to the box Fleck was holding. “How many of those can there be? Not that many, right? You go to every elevator maintenance company, find out if one of these has been stolen.”

  Fleck looked grim.

  “Mr. Mayor, you remember, before we came up here, I said what I had to tell you was worse than what you already knew?”

  Headley made a face that suggested he’d had a bad burrito. “I think we know what that is now. A paralyzed city.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s pretty bad. But what I wanted to tell you was about this box.”

  Fleck held it up in his hand, next to his face, like a Price Is Right girl, but without the fake smile.

  “Anybody can get one of these off eBay for five hundred bucks.”

  Thirty

  Jerry Bourque was slipping on his jacket and getting ready to leave the station at the end of his shift when his desk phone rang.

  Lois Delgado had left early to look after her sick kid, so he couldn’t hand it off to her. Before departing, she’d gotten back to Gunther Willem to find out if he’d learned whether Otto Petrenko might have worked on one, or both, of the elevators that had killed people in the last two days. Bourque, checking his phone on the way back into Manhattan, got up to speed about the York Avenue elevator mishap that had claimed the life of some Russian scientist.

  “I hate coincidences,” he’d said. “Two elevators drop and we’ve got an elevator technician beaten to death.”

  Once they were back at the station, she’d called Willem. He promised to get back to her as soon as he could. Shortly before Delgado left, he phoned in and reported that according to company records, Petrenko had never done work in those two buildings, but the company had in years past.

  Even so, Delgado had made a point of telling their captain that while there might be no connection whatsoever, she and Bourque were investigating the death of an elevator technician. The captain said that if those two elevator incidents were anything more than straightforward accidents, the information hadn’t been made its way to their precinct yet.

  Now, on his own, Bourque was standing by his desk, thinking about what he would pick up from the hot table on his way home, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver and put it to his ear.

  “Detective Bourque,” he said.

  “Is this Detective Bourque?” a woman asked.

  It never mattered that you gave your name when you answered. People had to make sure.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Misha Jackson? You were trying to reach me?”

  “Yes,” he said, slipping back into his chair, reaching for a notepad and taking a pen in hand. “Thanks for returning my call.”

  “I work in the casino and don’t get off work till about four in the morning, and I turn off all the phones so I can get a decent sleep. When I woke up”—and at this point she started to cry—“I had calls from my brother and Eileen. I can’t believe this. Who would do something like this to Otto?”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Bourque said.

  “I can’t get my head around it! Otto was … he was an okay guy. I don’t know why anyone would do this.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Anatoly—my brother—said you’d already talked to him.”

  “Yes. I’m wondering if your story is similar to his.”

  Misha Jackson made sniffing noises at the other end of the line. “Yeah, I guess. It was weird. I mean, we didn’t hear much from Otto. He was always the odd one out of the three of us, you know?”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, he was always more of a loner, more to himself. Me and Anatoly had lots of friends, but Otto was the one who kept to himself. He was kind of a mechanical geek from the get-go. He’d have never gone outside the house if our mother hadn’t forced him.”

  “Mechanical geek?”

  “Even as a kid, he always took apart everything to see how it worked. Toaster, TV, you name it. Computers, too. He could just see the inside of a machine in his head, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure. His boss said as much.”

  “I’d get a Christmas card from him and Eileen every year. But even that, she wrote it and put the stamp on it and walked it down to the corner mailbox. Otto didn’t give us much mind. But we were still family, you know? Just because he didn’t pay much attention to us didn’t mean he didn’t give a shit. If something happened to either one of us, he’d be there. Four years ago, my husband had a heart attack, and it was looking bad there for a while, and when Otto heard about it, he was on the first plane out to see how I was doing.”

  “Sounds like, on balance, a good brother.”

  Another sniff. “Yeah.”

  “Tell me about his recent calls.”

  Bourque heard the woman take a breath. “It was strange, him calling for no obvious reason. Wasn’t my birthday or Christmas. He just calls and asks how we’re doing. But here’s the part that’s strange. He wanted to know what hours I work, and I told him, and next thing you know he’s calling me at the casino, and not from his home phone. A different phone.”

  “Hmm,” said Bourque.

  “And on this call, he’s all, hey Misha, you need to watch yourself. Make sure you lock your doors, make sure you put on the alarm at night. He even wanted to know if I carried a gun. Why the hell would I want to do that? He tells me it’s legal to carry a concealed gun in Nevada, that I should think about doing that, and I’m thinking, where is this coming from? And I ask him, and he says it’s nothing, but the world’s changing, you can’t be too careful.”

  “That sounds like what he told your brother. He wanted him to carry a gun, too.”

  “I asked him if he was in trouble and he said no. But I could tell he was lying. It was in his voice. He was definitely on edge about something.”

  “Did he say whether he was being threatened in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Did he talk about the Flyovers?”

  “The who?”

  “An activist group.”

  “I don’t remember any talk about that.”

  “It sounds as though your brother was trying to put you on guard, that he believed there was some threat to you that he wasn’t willing to share.”

  “Well, no one’s threatened me, except for a guy who lost a hundred grand the other night on blackjack. He wasn’t too happy, and security had to remove him. But that’s work stuff. Happens now and again. But outside the casino, going about my business, I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. No one waiting by my car when I finish work. No one watching the house, at least that I’ve been able to see.”

  “Is that what Otto was suggesting? That there could be someone watching you?”

  Misha Jackson paused. “That reminds me of something he said. I only just thought of it now.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I kind of forgot about it, because it seemed so crazy, I thought he had to be joking. He said, just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Kind of a variation of the line about being paranoid. It doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. That’s why I thought it was a joke, that he was referring to that. But now that I think about it, maybe he meant it. Why would anyone be watching me and my brother? That makes no sense.”

  “And yet, someone did kill Otto. Can you think of anyone who might have a grudge against your entire family?”

  “Christ, you think we’re next?”

  “I don’t know anything like that, Ms. Jackson. But Otto was murdered, and clearly he was trying to warn you.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

  “Ms. Jackson?”
r />   “I’m gonna get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “That gun.”

  Thirty-One

  So how’d your first day go?”

  Glover Headley raised an eyebrow as he asked Arla the question. He was nursing a Stella while Arla was waiting to take her first sip of a Kir Royale. They were seated at a table at Gran Morsi, an Italian place a short walk from City Hall.

  “Yeah, right, wow,” she said. “It’s not every job where the first thing you see is some dead scientist in an elevator.”

  “That’s why I wanted to check in on you. I hope this wasn’t too forward, asking you here for a drink. I wanted to get away from the building, see how you are. That was a pretty traumatic thing to have to deal with.”

  “Yeah, sure, I get that. Look, aside from the decapitation, it was a pretty good start. You know, like, ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?’”

  Glover couldn’t help but chuckle. “God, that’s awful. But the way you put it, that made me laugh. When you got back, the rest of the department was there?”

  Arla nodded. “Everyone was great. I think, tomorrow morning, I can really hit the ground running.”

  “That’s terrific.”

  “But listen, I’m glad we’ve got a second to talk, because I saw something kind of interesting today.”

  Glover took a swig of his beer. “Oh, yeah? In the office?”

  “No, at the building where it happened.” She described how his father had dealt with the boy who’d been in the elevator when the woman was killed. “He was great with that kid. That’s a side of the mayor we don’t see often enough.”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure,” Glover said, an edge to his voice.

  Arla caught the tone. “What?”

  Glover put his elbows on the table and leaned in. “My dad is a guy with … many sides. There was a time, from all accounts, when he was a complete jerk. Back when he worked for his own father, looking after the buildings he owned. There are stories, and they’re not pretty. But once he got out from under his dad’s thumb and started out on his own, I think he started to change, become more empathetic. To actually care about people, you know? At least to some degree, and with some people. But there’s always been this part of him, a side he tries to keep buried, where he’s still that young man who’s stuck doing Daddy’s dirty work. A cold son of a bitch. It comes out every once in a while.”