Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“Richard.”

He stopped, turned, and standing there was Chief Annette Washington.

She reached out, touched his arm, and asked softly, “Do you know?”

It took him a beat to understand what she was asking him. Everyone in the lobby, he realized, would have seen his son plummet past one of the open elevator doors. Glover would have had only a few below-ground-level floors left to fall after they’d seen him. Headley nodded solemnly and said, “Glover.”

She nodded back.

“Can I... can you see him?”

“There’s four levels below street level,” she said. “He’s down there. We’re going to get him out, Richard.” She paused. “I don’t think you should look.”

“I will,” he said. “But not now. I have to go back up. There’s not much time.”

“What’s going on? What were those explosions?”

He spotted a door to the stairs. “I’ll have to run and talk,” he said, breaking away from her.

She ran after him. In the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, he told her, in bullet form, what had transpired. That his aide Chris Vallins was behind the elevator events. That he’d given the mayor only a few minutes to climb his way back to the ninety-eighth floor. That if he didn’t make it, another bomb would go off, killing everyone at the party.

“Why?” asked Washington, one step behind him. “Why is he doing all this?”

Headley stopped, briefly, on the landing of the third floor and looked at her. “I’ve done terrible things,” he said.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “We’ll send up a team. We’ll find a way—”

He gripped both her arms above the wrists and forced her to look into his eyes. “Annette, there is no time . Good-bye.”

He turned and kept running up the stairs.

Washington called after him, “Look for Detectives Bourque and Delgado! They’re up there somewhere!”

If Headley heard, he gave no indication.

He just kept running. And climbing.

As he passed a door marked Floor 5, he started doing the math in his head. First, he needed to know how long it would take him to get from the fifth floor to the sixth. He counted.

Fifteen seconds.

Okay, he thought. Roughly ninety floors to go. Ninety times fifteen was 1,350.

So what was that in minutes?

Headley had always been good at doing math without a calculator. He could look at city budget projections and do calculations in his head as quickly as any of the bean counters from the financial department.

So, take 1,350 seconds and divide by the number of seconds per minute, which was, of course, sixty, and—

Twenty-two and a half minutes.

“God, no,” he said aloud, rounding the landing between the eighth and ninth floors.

Vallins had given him twenty minutes, but the clock had started ticking the moment he got onto the elevator. He couldn’t have more than fourteen or fifteen minutes left.

There was no way he was going to make it.

He increased his speed. Ten floors up now, his calves and thighs were already screaming in pain. He was still taking the steps two at a time, grabbing the railing each time and using it to pull himself upward. Like so much of the rest of his body, his shoulder was hurting like a son of a bitch.

His chest felt as though it would explode.

This is what he wants. He wants me to have a heart attack. I’m going to die the same way his mother did.

What was that last thing the chief had shouted at him? Bourque and Delgado? Weren’t those the two detectives who’d come to City Hall looking for Glover? They were already in the building, somewhere?

Glover.

Headley thought his heartache was more likely than a heart attack to do him in. He thought about those last, accusatory words he’d said to his son before Vallins had pushed him into the shaft. Believing that his son could have had anything to do with this.

How he would have to live with that forever.

However long forever was.

As he passed the door marked Floor 14, he thought about what a curse he’d been to so many around him.

All those tenants in his father’s buildings.

His wife.

His son.

All the bad luck he’d brought them.

Maybe it was fitting he’d think of that at this moment, passing the fourteenth floor. Given people’s superstitious nature, it was actually the thirteenth.

Vallins nibbled on one of the shrimps Barbara had taken from the buffet table, put on a plate, and slid across the floor to him.

“These are excellent,” he said, biting on one, then tossing the tail into the elevator shaft. He raised his voice. “Everyone, please! Eat up! Enjoy!”

While we can, Barbara thought.

While none of the guests had much of an appetite, she’d seen more than a few head over to the bar. But most were huddled in pairs, standing quietly, eyes trained on Vallins, wondering what he might do next, terrified by what he might do next.

Vallins shrugged when he didn’t see anyone taking his advice, then looked over at Barbara and Arla, who were standing closer to him than anyone else.

“Sorry,” Vallins said to Barbara. She could not take her eyes off the device in his left hand, and the gun in the other. “You were right, of course. I was following you when you stepped out in front of that van. I saw you two at breakfast earlier. Then when I saw Arla at City Hall, I put it together, and ratted her out to the boss.” He gave Arla a regretful look.

“I don’t understand, either,” said Barbara. “You want to bring the mayor down, but you still were doing his dirty work.”

Vallins nodded. “I’ve been doing his dirty work for some time. That’s how I got close. Anyway, it’s all in the email.”

Barbara said, “Why didn’t you just let the van run me down?”

He shrugged. “I told you. I like you.”

“Enough to let me — my daughter — go?”

“How would that look, playing favorites?” he said. “If anyone survives, I hope it’s you. Otherwise the email’s pointless. I’ve always thought you were a good writer. You’re the best one to tell the story.”

“Chris, please. Let everyone go.”

He shook his head. “Sometimes innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater goal. If anyone here is really, truly innocent.”

Barbara’s head twitched. “That was you. The comments on my article. You’re the one calling himself Going Down.”

Vallins smiled. “That was a bit cute, I know.”

“Help me out here, Chris. Haven’t you sacrificed enough innocents already? Like my friend Paula? Wasn’t your mom an innocent? What’s happening to these people, is it any more unfair than what happened to her? Does anything you’ve done make sense? Does hurting all these people, here tonight, serve any purpose? You’ve taken his son from him, Chris. What more do you want?”

He was stonefaced. “How’s our time?”

Barbara looked at the phone in her hand. “Seven minutes, twenty seconds.”

Vallins nodded. “Do you think he’ll make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he’s even trying? Maybe he got off in the lobby and buggered off home.”

“I doubt that,” Barbara said, although she was not 100 percent sure. It hadn’t even occurred to her, until Chris had posed the question, that Headley might not even try to make the climb.

He’ll try, she thought. He’s a bastard, but no one could be that big a bastard.

“Is this how it ends for you?” Barbara asked. “I mean, you can’t be thinking you’re going to walk away from this.”

Vallins looked thoughtful. “You know, I always used to think those suicide bombers, those Islamic terrorist crazies screaming ‘ Allahu akbar ’ as they fire their machine guns into a crowded theater, with no chance of getting out alive, what the hell is wrong with them? But I also sort of get it, you know? Because when you’ve been angry for so long, when the only thing you care about is justice, your own life stops having much meaning. What are we down to?”