Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

Danielson was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m not a man who likes to be cornered.”

Pierre said nothing.

The old man was silent a while longer. Then, finally: “Give me a week to get it ready, and—”

Just then, the door to the office burst open. A husky uniformed security guard entered. Danielson rose to his feet. “What is it?”

“Forgive the interruption, sir, but we’ve detected a transmitter in this room.”

Danielson’s eyes narrowed. “Search him,” he snapped. And then, loudly, as if to make sure it was part of the official record, “I admitted nothing. I merely humored a mentally deficient person.”

The guard grabbed Pierre under the left shoulder, hoisted him from the chair, and began roughly patting down his clothes. In a matter of moments, he found the small radio microphone clipped to the inside of Pierre’s shirt. He tore it loose and held it up for Danielson to see.

Pierre tried to sound brave. “It doesn’t matter. There are seven assorted cops and government agents waiting outside the building to take you in for questioning, and we have two positive IDs of you from Treblinka survivors—”

Danielson thumped his fist on his desktop. At first Pierre thought it was a gesture of frustration, but a small section of the desktop popped up at an angle, revealing a hidden control console within. Danielson tapped a series of buttons, and suddenly a thin metal wall dropped down from the ceiling, slicing right in front of Pierre’s kneecaps. If his feet hadn’t just then been moving backward because of the chorea, they would have been sheared off.

The guard looked dumbfounded — either he hadn’t known about this secret wall or had never expected to see it actually in use. Pierre was agog, too — but Marchenko/Danielson was a multimillionaire fugitive who had been preparing for all eventualities for five decades. Doubtless there was a secret exit in the part of the office he was still in.

“Come along, pal,” said the guard, pocketing the microphone and again grabbing Pierre roughly by the arm. He propelled Pierre out of Danielson’s office, through the astonished secretary’s office, through the antechamber, and out into the elevator lobby. The man stabbed at the elevator call switch, but the little square of plastic didn’t light up. He tried again, then cursed. Marchenko must have shut off the elevators to slow down the OSI agents from getting up here. It would take them a while to climb thirty-seven floors, even if they could get into the building past Marchenko’s security people.

The beefy guard let go of Pierre, who, without his cane, which was still back in Marchenko’s office, promptly crumpled to the ground. The guard looked at him, a sneer of disgust across his face. “Christ, you’re a fucking crip, ain’t you?” he said. He looked at the closed elevator doors again, as if thinking, then back at Pierre. “Suppose you can’t do any harm if I leave you up here.” He headed around the corner. Pierre could hear a door opening and the sound of the big man’s feet slapping against stairs as he headed down, presumably to the lobby to join in defending the building’s entrance.

Pierre was all alone in the elevator lobby. He looked up, though, and could see Marchenko’s secretary through the glass doors of the antechamber and the outer office. She was looking at him, as if unsure what to do. He reached out a hand toward her. She got up, turned her back on him, and disappeared into the inner office. Pierre exhaled. He wished he could just lie there without moving, but his legs were dancing incessantly and his head was bobbing left and right.

The woman reappeared — and she was holding Pierre’s cane! She came out to him and helped him to his feet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she said, “but no one should treat a person the way they’re treating you.”

Pierre took the cane and leaned on it. “ Merci , ”he said.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened to Mr. Danielson?”

“Did you know about that emergency wall?”

She shook her head. “I was terrified when I heard it crash down. I thought we were having another quake.”

“There may be men with guns coming into the building,” said Pierre.

“You should get off this floor. Go down a few floors and find someplace to hide.”

She looked at him, overwhelmed by it all. “Are you going to be okay?”

He tried to shrug, but the gesture was lost amid the chorea. “This is as good as I get.” He flapped an arm toward the stairwell. “Go on, get yourself somewhere safe.”

She nodded and disappeared around the corner. Pierre wasn’t sure what to do next. He decided to hobble over to the secretary’s desk. He picked up the phone, but it, too, was dead.

Pierre tried to imagine the scene below, the agents and cops storming in the front door, badges flashing — surely they would have started in upon hearing that the microphone had been discovered. They’d be trying to make their way past guards who might well have drawn their pistols.

Pierre remembered what this building looked like more from when he’d last seen it, at the shareholders’ meeting, than from today. He’d been so nervous preparing for this confrontation that he hadn’t really looked at it as he’d driven in this time. A tall building, all glass and steel, with a helicopter landing on its roof…

Sweet Jesus — a helicopter . Marchenko wasn’t working his way down to the ground floor; he’d probably already gone up to the roof, three stories above.

Pierre hobbled around the corner. The door to the stairs was clearly marked, next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms. He pushed it open and felt cold air rushing over him. The interior of the stairwell was naked concrete, with steps painted flat gray. He began slowly, painfully, making his way up the first flight. Each flight covered a half floor — there would be at least six before he reached the roof.

His cane was unnecessary as he pulled himself up using the banister, but he didn’t dare let it go, and so it twirled, Charlie Chaplinesque, as he held it in his free palsied hand.

He could hear faint echoes of footfalls far, far below. Others were using the stairs to try to climb up. But thirty-seven flights — even for a young man, that was a lot of potential energy. He pulled himself higher and higher, turning around now as one flight of stairs gave way to the next. He hoped Avi would also figure out that Marchenko had gone up, not down.

Pierre continued his ascent. His lungs were pumping and his breath came in shuddering wheezes. His heart jumped at the sound of a gunshot from far, far below.

Pierre was rounding the thirty-ninth floor now — the number had been crudely stenciled in black paint on the back of the gray metal fire door.

For a brief moment he cursed his Canadian upbringing: it had never even occurred to him to ask Avi for a gun before going in.

Pierre grabbed the handrail and hauled himself up some more, but suddenly he tripped — his leg had moved left when he’d told it to go forward. His cane pushed out sideways, wedging between two of the vertical metal rods that supported the banister. Pierre fell backward, grabbing on to the cane for support. There was a cracking sound as that one point in the middle of the cane’s shaft took all of Pierre’s weight for a second, but then Pierre lost his grip and found himself tumbling down to the bottom of the current flight. His left elbow smashed into the concrete floor. The pain was excruciating. He reached his right hand over to touch the elbow, and it came away with freckles of blood on it. His cane had landed about two meters away. He crawled over to it and then fought to bring himself to his feet. He stood, unable to go on, waiting for his lungs to stop gulping in air. Finally, with an enormous effort, he started up the stairs again.