Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“No one has claimed responsibility,” she said. “And just to clarify what the mayor was saying, we do not know with one hundred percent certainty that there was deliberate tampering. But we are seriously looking at that possibility.”

“Is this related to the Flyovers?” asked a woman from Fox News.

“We have no reason to—”

“Because,” she continued, “someone claiming to be inspired by them just claimed responsibility for the taxi bombing. It’s on Twitter.”

Washington blinked. Everyone in the room turned to look at the woman from Fox.

“I’m not familiar with that tweet,” Washington said, grimacing. “Twitter is not my number one news source.”

“Is it possible the explosion and the elevator incident at the Gormley Building on Seventh Avenue are linked? They happened at exactly the same time.”

“Again, that will be part of our investigation. We’re in the very early stages. I’d like to turn it back over to the mayor.”

The mayor resumed his spot at the podium and said, “Thank you, Chief. Moving on, I’d like to point out that—”

“Is it safe to take an elevator in this city?”

It was Barbara’s question. The room went silent as everyone waited for the mayor’s answer. But instead of doing that, the mayor turned to Fleck and waved him forward.

“Um, I’d like to introduce Martin Fleck, from the Department of Buildings. He can speak to the issue of elevator safety and deal with the more technical questions.”

As Fleck approached the mike, the mayor whispered, “Try to keep it upbeat.”

Fleck gave him a sharp look, as if to say, Seriously? But as he stood before the podium he did his best to project calm.

“To address that last question,” he said, “the facts bear out that elevators are very, very safe. Accidents are extremely rare. In fact, most fatalities related to elevators involve servicemen, not the general public. There are many safety features built into any elevator system that—”

A woman from the Post cut him off: “Yeah, but we’re not talking about that kind of thing. We’re talking about terrorists cutting the cables.”

Fleck held up a palm to the crowd. “No one said anything about cutting cables, and no one up here used the word ‘terrorist.’ The cables were not, as you say, cut on these elevators.”

“Then what did happen?”

Fleck said, “It’s more like they were hacked.”

There was a sudden eruption of questions. With everyone shouting queries at once, Fleck looked like a bunny cornered by a wolf pack.

“How,” Barbara managed to shout over the others, “do you hack an elevator? Is that actually possible?”

“Well, it would be very difficult,” Fleck said. “It would demand a very high level of expertise. And even if you had that kind of knowledge, you would need a device that—”

“What kind of device?” It was the woman from the Post again.

“In simplest terms, it’s like a TV remote that allows one to control all of an elevator’s functions.”

The guy from NY1 said, “That sounds like something out of a Mission: Impossible movie. You can’t do that in the real world, can you?”

“If you knew all the various security codes, yes, in fact, you can. It can be plugged right into a building’s elevator system. Now, if someone were outside the building, and knew how to access the overall security system, one could then tap into the elevator system.”

Fleck, now that he was really getting into his area of expertise, was starting to look more comfortable, but Headley appeared increasingly uneasy.

“Holy shit,” one of the reporters exclaimed.

A tall, handsome man from the local NBC affiliate finally got a question in. “But a device like that would be very hard to get hold of, wouldn’t it?”

“In fact,” said Fleck, “no. You can buy one for about five hundred dollars on—”

The mayor came up alongside Fleck and edged him away from the microphone. “Thanks very much, Martin. I’ll take it from here. The reason I called this news conference was to inform the public that we are investigating all of these incidents very carefully and asking that if anyone sees something that is remotely suspicious, to please alert—”

Barbara called out, “Excuse me!”

The mayor ignored her. “What we are imploring people to do is—”

“I had a question that never got answered,” Barbara said, making herself heard above the mayor.

Headley, looking visibly pained, looked at Barbara and asked, “What question was that?”

Barbara took half a second to compose herself, then said, sounding out each word clearly and succinctly, “Is it, or is it not, safe to take an elevator in the city of New York?”

The mayor looked grim. Everyone in the room seemed to be holding their breath.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

Within minutes of the mayor’s “I don’t know,” the story was the lead item on all city, state, and national newscasts. CNN interrupted regular programming with its BREAKING NEWS logo, and a grim-faced Wolf Blitzer told the world how the mayor of one of the biggest, and most vertical cities in the world could not say, with any assurance whatsoever, that the city’s thousands of elevators were safe.

“After three elevator tragedies in as many days,” Blitzer said, “New York is now facing the possibility of a serial saboteur. There is evidence to suggest that all three incidents, in random buildings across the city, are connected. Stunningly, it was revealed moments ago that these elevators may have been hacked, raising the horrifying specter that these conveyances that carry millions of people everyday could be remotely manipulated. This startling news comes at the same time as the Flyovers, a militant domestic group believed to be responsible for terrorist acts in several coastal cities, has claimed responsibility for a taxi bombing in New York that claimed not only the life of the driver but two visitors from Canada who had just stepped out of a hotel on East Forty-Ninth Street. The head of the New York Police Department could not say, one way or another, whether the Flyovers group is actually behind the taxi bombing, or if it has a hand in the elevator crisis.”

The New York Times website updated within minutes of Mayor Richard Headley’s news conference. Its banner headline read: “Elevator Plunges Linked, Sabotage Suspected.” Below that ran a secondary headline: “Mayor Headley Fails to Calm a Nervous City.”

The New York Daily News , predictably, was less subtle about the mayor’s inability to reassure his constituents that it was safe to get into a city elevator. Paired with a picture of the mayor looking glumly down at his notes was the headline “Nice Going, Dick,” followed by a secondary headline reading: “Head Case Doesn’t Know If Hacked Elevators Safe.”

Immediately after the news conference, with two thumbs working at lightning speed, Barbara wrote a column on her phone and emailed it to her editor at Manhattan Today . It was posted to the website less than a minute later, under the headline “Mayor Gives City the Shaft When it Comes to Elevator Safety.”

By Barbara Matheson

In what has to go down in the books as one of the most disastrous press conferences in New York City history, an inept Mayor Richard Headley told the city two startling things. The first was that someone, or some group, is deliberately killing New Yorkers by taking over the operation of elevators with malicious intent. But as troubling as that news is, the second tidbit is worse: our mayor hasn’t got a clue what to do about it.

Appearing with the chief of police and a flunky from the city department that oversees elevator safety, the mayor offered a blunt “I don’t know” when asked whether you can get into one of these devices and expect to get out of it alive. Consider what has happened since Monday. Four dead when an elevator in the Lansing Tower plunged. A visiting Russian scientist beheaded as she attempted to escape her car when it was stuck, with the doors open, between floors. And early this morning, two people crushed to death in the Gormley Building after they fell into the bottom of the shaft, and the car came down on top of them. What may happen tomorrow, and what plan, if any, does the city have to deal with this?