Gregg Hurwitz - The Kill Clause

Slinging the dry-cleaned shirt over his shoulder, the plastic wrap rustling against him, he poked his head out in the back hall. Infrared motion strobes every ten yards along the ceiling, virtually no blind spots. A perfect opportunity for Robert to hang Tim out-if he hadn’t rendered the strobes bad-operating as promised, Tim would be trapped by a screaming alarm on the tenth floor of a building stuffed with cops, guards, and private-militia goons. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out into the line of the first two lenses. The green pinpoint dots atop the units shone steady-no blinking to indicate either strobe had been tripped.

The first door he encountered was a facing push-handle as Robert had reported; the floor had been designed to protect mostly against inward-moving intrusions. Tim removed the stack of flat magnets from his pocket and worked the top one off with his thumbnail. It was thin and silver, shaped like a stick of Wrigley’s. He went up on tiptoe and located the mag strikes by the intruding shadow that interrupted the lit seam at the top of the door. He slid the magnet between the two mag strikes until he felt it pulled; when he released it, it snapped into place, covering the top strike.

He pushed the door open and passed through the jamb, glancing up at the magnet clinging to the top mag strike, ensuring that the connection hadn’t been broken. He moved from the hall through an enormous room filled with partially dismantled cubicles; they rose shadowed from the darkness like an elephant graveyard, a requiem odeum for the dot-com bubble burst. It turned out he encountered only five more doors; the three leftover magnets he stuck behind the print tray of a discarded Hewlett-Packard.

He leaned against the stairwell door, listening for the footsteps of Susie-Take-The-Stairs, the exercise-minded receptionist from eleven. 8:42. She was running late for her nine o’clock shrink appointment five blocks over; she’d called this afternoon to confirm. Tim waited, controlled his breathing, faked patience. He had an 8:49 checkpoint upstairs, needing to pass Craig Macmanus in the west-east-running hall as Macmanus headed back to his office to answer the emergency page the Stork was going to send his way. By 8:45 Tim figured Susie-Take-the-Stairs had either canceled her appointment, decided to stay on site for Lane’s interview, or taken the elevator.

Whistling casually, he popped open the door to the stairwell and stepped on the tenth-floor landing. The door swung shut behind him and locked. As if on cue, the door opened one floor up, and he heard the cushioned tap of Reeboks heading down the stairs. He hugged the railing, raising the dry-cleaned shirt high on his shoulder so it blocked half his face.

Susie swept by, a blur of curls and nylon. “Hi! Bye!”

Tim murmured a greeting and kept moving. By the time he reached the eleventh-floor landing, he had the hanger out from the shirt and untwisted, bent into an L terminating with the hook. He slid the hook beneath the narrow gap at the bottom of the door and rotated it until he felt it grab the handle inside. He tugged and got a satisfying click. Easing the door open, he entered the empty back kitchen.

The TV on the counter showed Melissa Yueh leaning over Lane as a tech affixed a mike clip to his shirt. “Just relax and make eye contact with me, not the camera. We’re gonna get you your earpiece in a few minutes here so the producer can talk to you while we’re live.”

Several of Lane’s militia groupies stood in the background, bodyguards with oversize arms and no idea where to put them. They were working hard at looking tough, trying to ignore the cameras and doing a bad job of it. A feisty production assistant moved them out of the shot, and they shuffled clumsily under his command, cattle driven by a sheepdog.

Tim triple-folded the hanger and stuffed it and the shirt into the trash bin beneath the sink. He pulled a Baggie, a plastic earpiece, and a single thread of dental floss from his back pocket. He pried open the earpiece, nestled the tiny detonator within the wiring, and snapped it shut. Dropping the earpiece into the Baggie, he then sealed the bag, knotted the top, and tied the dental floss around it. He swallowed the Baggie, holding the end of the floss. The floss pulled taut, holding the Baggie midway down his throat. He waited for his gag reflex to cease, then strung the floss between two of his molars.

Grabbing two small bottles of Evian from the fridge, he stuffed them into his back pockets and stepped into the hall. 8:46.

A stiff-postured LAPD cop and a tired KCOM guard sat on stools in front of a metal detector that led into the main corridors. Tim nodded and stepped through. The detector beeped loudly.

“You carrying a cell phone, keys?”

Tim shook his head.

The guard slid off his stool and wanded Tim, starting at his feet. When the wand reached his throat, it gave off an intense beeping. The guard stared at the gold cross resting on Tim’s Adam’s apple, rolled his eyes at the cop, and waved Tim through.

Tim turned into the men’s room just past the guard station and ducked into a stall. Plucking the dental floss from between his molars, he gagged up the Baggie. It slid out, slick with saliva. He removed the earpiece, dropped it into his pocket, and flushed the Baggie. He stepped back out into the hall at precisely 8:49.

Craig Macmanus, all jaw and toothy grin, was barreling down the hall with a coworker, glancing at his beeper and winding up a joke about bicycling nuns. Tim timed the lowering of his head to fake-check his watch and brushed against Macmanus’s side, lifting the ID and access-control cards clipped to his leather-weave belt.

“Oops. Sorry, Craig.” Tim kept moving, not turning for a face-to-face. His hands worked quickly to remove Craig’s ID card from the clip and replace it with his fake. The hall was completely empty, save three TVs suspended at intervals from the ceiling. Tim reached the forbidding double doors at the hall’s end and flashed Macmanus’s access-control card at the pad. The red light blinked green, and he stepped into the inner sanctum.

Here in the interview suite, impervious to binoculars and the probing eyes of window washers, Tim was on his own. Lane and Yueh were positioned at an immense wooden table, Charlie Rose style, and PAs were scurrying about, adjusting lighting and wincing under Yueh’s orders. A black digital clock suspended above Yueh’s head counted down to airtime-less than five minutes. The guard in the small booth to Tim’s right was munching a powdered doughnut without apparent appreciation for caricature. Tim flashed his ID card, and the guard gave it a cursory glance, leaving a sugary thumb whorl over Tim’s dour photo.

A tech wearing headphones fussed with a control board, the cables and wires threading back beneath a folding table to his side. Tim headed in his direction, brandishing one of the Evian bottles.

“Someone called over for water?”

The sound tech waved him off, barely looking up. Tim spotted an open metal briefcase on the table, a few pieces of gear nestled within its gray foam filling, including Lane’s earpiece; as he’d guessed, Lane’s men, extensively experienced with death threats, had brought all their own equipment for Lane’s use.

“I’ll just leave it here.”

Another arm wave, this one vicious.

As Tim set the bottles on the counter, he quickly swapped earpieces.

“Live in two,” someone shouted.

“Diffuse the fill light!” Yueh shrieked. “You’ll have my pores looking like potholes.”

One of Lane’s no-neckers, his forearm decorated with a bald eagle tattoo, swept past Tim, heading for the metal briefcase. As Tim walked toward the door, he gestured for the guard to wipe powdery residue from his chin. Back in the sterile hall, he got Yueh screaming commands in stereo, her voice moving through the walls and shrilling from the monitors overhead. The first note of the KCOM jingle announced the show’s start, granting the building blissful respite from her stridency.