Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

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.”

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.