Vertical Run
Joseph Garber
You think YOU had a killer workday…
Get ready for the FASTEST thriller of the summer!
Each morning in his 45th floor executive office, David Elliot savors the quiet
moments until the workday begins.
Until today, when his boss walks in and aims a gun at him.
For the rest of the day, he will be trapped in his midtown office building, and
everyone David Elliot meets will try to kill him.
He has 24 hours to find out why…
In *Vertical Run*, you can escape into a world on fast forward, a drama
that plays out with electrifying intensity. No one who reads this book will
ever see the office the same way again.
Vertical Run is available now — run for it!
Joseph Garber
Vertical Run
DEDICATION
For Steve Oresman, known as Magpie, a better sort of bird than those found herein.
EPIGRAPH
Dessencions, discordes, contencions, stryfe, great manslaughter, murmuracions, feares … noughty enterprises … moch pyllage, theftes, robberies, lyes, great noyses, tumultes, comocions … great mischiefe, hatred and wrath … deceite, treason, burnynge, adulterye … warre, envy, hatred, rancour … and finally all kinds of wickednes.
— Vaughan’s Almanacke and Prognostication for 1559
Man, biologically considered, and whatever else he may be into the bargain, is simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey …
— William James
PROLOGUE
Then we began to ride. My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll
Freshening and fluttering in the wind.
— Robert Browning, “The Last Ride Together”
Two young men on horseback.
The taller, David Elliot, is lank and dark and long of limb. His brown eyes are solemn, but he wears a subtle smile. The shorter, Taffy Weiler, is squat as a bulldog; his wiry hair is as startlingly red as the tie-dyed T-shirt he wears, and his blue eyes sparkle with no small deviltry.
Dave comes from Indiana. Taffy is a New Yorker born and bred. They met in San Francisco, which, this summer, is the only place to be. Now they are fast friends.
In September Taffy will start to work for a medium-sized electronics company near San Jose, an outfit called Hewlett-Packard; not many people at NYU have heard of it. Dave, having passed through Indiana State’s R.O.T.C. program, is entering the Army; he will report for duty the third week of August. It is certain that he will be sent to Vietnam.
This ride is their last journey together. Adulthood awaits them at summer’s end.
Today they are in the high Sierras, more than two hundred miles east of San Francisco. They crossed the mountain divide yesterday, picked up their horses and pack mule from a leathered-looking man who was waiting for them in a pickup truck, and began riding west into the mountain fastness.
Here, on a cobbled slope well above nine thousand feet, their horses have become short of breath. There is no trail; the mountainside is steep. The ground is granite, grey shot with streaks of black. Small white quartzes tumble beneath the animals’ hooves, and are so bright with afternoon sun that they cannot be looked at.
From time to time, Dave brushes a hand across the extravagant moustache he has grown this summer. He’s proud of it, thinking that it makes him look older. It does not.
Taffy leers at him. “You gotta give me one thing, compadre. You gotta give me that the day you show up to take the oath, you’ve still got the moustache.”
“The moustache goes. I’ll be a crewcut, clean-shaven, all-American boy.”
“Oh man!”
“Oh man, yourself, and pass me a brew. Arguing with you makes me sooooo thirsty.”
Taffy pulls a lukewarm can of Ballantine from his saddlebag. He passes it to Dave together with a churchkey. Dave opens the beer and swiftly lifts it to his mouth, catching the foam on his tongue. Then he lifts the brim of his floppy straw hat, using a handkerchief, one of the six that his mother made him pack, to wipe away a line of sweat. “How much further?” he asks.
Taffy shoots him a lopsided grin. “According to my sources, we should have already been there. Of course my sources were stoned at the time.”
Dave snickers.
The two ride on.
It is nearly sunset when they arrive, a holy hour in which the heavens glow, and upon which a sacred mountain silence falls. They breast a small rise, and look down. Dave catches his breath. The loveliness is heart-stopping.
“It’s perfect,” Taffy whispers. “Just like they said, the perfect place. Am I right, or am I right?”
Dave doesn’t answer. He is rapt at what he sees, a small valley, five, perhaps six times larger than the stadium at Indiana State. It is nearly a perfect circle, bounded by steep white cliffs on three sides, a towering stand of conifers at its farthest reach, a small green lake, emerald green, greener than a green bottle, in its center. Soft evening shadows lie across it. Nothing moves. The air is wine. Dave feels something that he has never felt before, and does not expect to feel again. He is uplifted; he is whole.
With a sudden rush, the sound of a feathered arrow through the air, a red-tailed hawk explodes from the sky. Its talons snatch a small grey animal. The hawk screeches in triumph as it flashes out of sight. All in a matter of seconds, here and gone, with only a burnished pinion floating in the air to mark its passage. Dave’s horse backs up nervously. Dave pats its neck.
“We camp by the lake, right, compadre?”
“Fine by me,” Dave answers. He is not really paying attention. Rather, he is cloaked in wonder, lost in dreams. Shangri-la, Bali Hai, Avalon, Armenia-in-the-Sky, Oz, Wonderland, Barsoom — everyone has a private place of dreams. This valley is his. The beauty of the place has seized him, and made him its own. He knows that he’ll never forget this valley, knows that for the rest of his life, no matter what troubles may come, the remembrance of this moment and this spot will comfort him and bring him peace.
This one moment has been the finest in his life, the finest he shall ever experience, and down all his days he will remember it with longing. He knows this, and the knowledge makes him sad.
PART 1. A BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE
Though fraud in all other actions be odious, yet in matters of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes his enemies by stratagem, is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.
— Machiavelli, The Prince
CHAPTER 1
HOW DAVE LOST HIS JOB
1
On the morning of the day he disappeared, David Elliot awoke, as he did every weekday, at precisely 5:45 A.M. Twenty-five years earlier in a hot, green place, he’d learned the trick of waking whenever he wanted. Now it was just another habit.
Dave slid his legs out from beneath Pratesi sheets. He glanced neutrally at where his wife, Helen, lay curled into a small, tight ball, on the right-hand side of the bed. The Panasonic clock radio on her nightstand was set for 8:20. By the time she awoke to her more cultured business day, he’d be in his midtown office, hard at work.
He stepped into the closet and swept his Nikes, sweatsuit, socks, and headband off a shelf. Then, padding over to the long, low, far-too-modern bureau — the most recent fruit of Helen’s obsessive redecorating — he fumbled a fanny pack out of a drawer, dropping a rolled-up change of underwear and his wallet, keys, and gold Rolex President watch into it.
After visiting the guest bathroom to relieve himself and brush his teeth, he went to the kitchen. The Toshiba coffee maker’s brew light glowed green. The timer’s digital display read 5:48. He decanted the pot into a large enamele
d mug decorated with a picture of the 47 Ronin, the souvenir of a visit to the Sengakuji Temple during a business trip to Tokyo. He emptied the grounds from the brewer basket, filled the machine’s reservoir, and reset the timer for 8:15. Helen needed her morning coffee just as much as he did. Or maybe more so — Helen was far from sociable upon rising, and it was not until she opened the doors of her Lexington Avenue gallery that she put on her best behavior.
Warm, thick coffee slid down Dave’s throat. He shivered with pleasure.
Something soft brushed his pajama leg. Dave reached down to tickle the cat’s chin. “Bon matin, ma belle,” he said, knowing that all cats speak French of preference. The cat, who was named Apache, arched her neck, stretched, and purred.
Helen loathed Apache’s name. She had insisted more than once that Dave change it. Second marriages produce more compromises than first marriages. Dave knew that, and knew that he should accede to his wife’s request. But a cat’s name is a cat’s name; it has nothing to do with its owner’s wishes. And so after five years of marriage Dave still called the animal “Apache,” while Helen (who, being blonde, was used to having her way) icily referred to it as “that cat.”
Apache padded away on her morning rounds. “Au revoir, Apache,” Dave whispered, thus satisfying in some small way a sense of honor sullied by too many concessions.
Thinking improper thoughts about the difference between cats and cattiness, Dave retrieved the morning’s New York Times from outside the apartment door. For the next several minutes, he sat at the dining room table nursing his coffee and flipping through the newspaper. He did not read it closely. His early morning ritual of scanning the paper was merely an excuse to enjoy the day’s first cup of coffee.
As he turned to the business section he noticed that, quite unconsciously, his right hand had crept up to pat the left side of his chest. Dave grimaced. A sly, sardonic inner voice — Dave always thought of it as his guardian angel — whispered, Still looking for a pack of cigarettes. Twelve years after you quit, and the body still wants its morning hit of nicotine. Say, pal, maybe you should get back into tobacco stocks after all.
“Mornin’, Mr. Elliot. Nice day for a run.” The doorman believed it to be his duty to assure the building’s joggers that every day was a “nice day for a run.”
“Good morning, Tad. Anything in the papers today about Lithuania?”
Tad’s ancestors had migrated to the United States in the 1880s. As far as Tad was concerned, it had been only yesterday. He was staunchly nationalistic about the land of his ancestors. Dave did not think that one day had passed, in the three years since he and Helen had purchased their apartment, upon which Tad had not had something to say about Lithuania.
“Nothin’ in the News or the Times, Mr. Elliot. But I get the papers from Vilnius, you know, by mail. They usually show up on Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll letchya know what’s happening tomorrow.”
“Great.”
“Say, whatchya do to your hand?” Tad pointed at the gauze pad taped around Dave’s left palm.
“An employee bit me.”
Tad blinked. “Ya gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“Nope. We … my company that is, bought a research outfit out on Long Island. I was there yesterday on a tour. One of the … production workers expressed its disapproval of the new management.” Dave grinned wryly. “And it wasn’t even a hostile takeover.”
Tad guffawed as he pushed the front door open. “You’re makin’ this up, right?”
“Nope. You get a lot of that in corporate life — biting the hand that feeds you.”
Tad chortled again. “I guess I’m glad I’m just a doorman, Mr. Elliot. Have a nice day.”
“Same to you, Tad. See you tomorrow.”
“Sure, Mr. Elliot. Have a nice day.”
On Saturdays and Sundays, Dave ran west, jogging across Fifty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue, then north to Central Park. On those days, the running was purest pleasure. There were fewer menacing crazies on the street — or so it seemed — and the runner could concentrate on the running. Best of all, it was on the weekends that Mark came down from Columbia University to run at his father’s side. Mark, his son, his and Annie’s, was Dave’s special pride. Running with Mark was the best part of Dave’s week, the thing to which he most looked forward.
Dave always made a point of asking Helen to join them on their weekend runs. She never accepted. Helen found a jogger’s sweat lacking in gentility, favoring instead chic perspiration extracted by pricey exercise centers, by even pricier private trainers.
No matter. Mark was with him, and, rain or shine, the running was a delight.
Less so the weekdays. No matter how you ran, no matter where you ran, watchfulness was called for. Certain blocks were to be avoided; alleys were a risk; none but the reckless jogged beneath bridges and overpasses; nor did the prudent begin their runs before dawn. On a morning run even a man like David Elliot, a man who did not have an enemy in the world, sometimes glanced warily over his shoulder.
His workday route took him east on Fifty-seventh to Sutton Place, then north on York Avenue until he reached a pedestrian bridge across FDR Drive. He ran up the path by the East River until he reached the high Nineties. Once there, he turned south again, retracing his steps. After crossing the bridge a second time, he jogged west to Park Avenue, and then south to the corner of Fiftieth and Park.
It usually was just after 7:00 A.M. when he entered his office.
As an executive vice president of his company, David Elliot was entitled to, and enjoyed, the perquisites of rank. His forty-fifth floor suite consisted of eight hundred square feet of expensively understated space, a walk-in closet, a discreet wet bar, and a full bathroom with tub and shower.
Dave liked his water hot. Steam filled the bathroom as he lathered himself from top to bottom twice over. Still in the shower, he took a Gillette safety razor and a can of shaving cream from the shelf above the spigots. He never used a mirror when shaving, and hadn’t for so long he couldn’t remember. It was another habit he had picked up in a war unwillingly remembered.
7:20 A.M.
David Elliot, with a towel around his waist, stepped out of the bathroom and into his office. On the mahogany credenza behind his matching mahogany desk, a Toshiba brewer, the twin of the model at home, beeped three times, signaling that his coffee was ready. Dave filled a chocolate-brown mug with it. The cup was decorated with a raised, angular, silver-enameled design: the Senterex corporate logo.
Dave took a sip and sighed. Life without coffee is too awful to contemplate.
He noticed, damnit, that the watercolor over his credenza was askew. Every week or two, some dust-rag-wielding vandal from the nightly cleaning crew knocked the thing sideways. It was a minor irritation, but one that was growing in its power to annoy.
He put his coffee cup on a brass coaster (also embossed with the Senterex logo), and straightened the painting — Hua Yen, a portrait of a sleeping tiger dating from the mid-1700s — quite lovely, quite valuable, one of the nicer perquisites of working for Senterex. The company’s chairman, Bernie Levy, savvier than most corporate moguls, let the purchase of executive artwork fall into the hands of neither high-priced interior designers nor, worse, his corporate officers’ wives. Rather he demanded that quality art, only the work of masters, decorate the company’s headquarters offices. For this reason a sextet of Leonor Freni chalks decorated the forty-fifth floor reception area. Orozco, Rouault, Beckmann, Barlach, and Ensor could be found in the hallways. Elsewhere, on the walls of various corporate offices, a visitor could find Picasso, Munch, Thomas Eakins (in the office of Senterex’s chief counsel, of course), a most expensive Matisse, and a startlingly abstract Whistler. Bernie himself had a special affection for Camille Pissarro, two of whose oils hung on proud display in the corporate boardroom. Of course Bernie, being Bernie, denied that Senterex acquired art for aesthetic reasons; rather, when guests commented on the company’s collection, he boasted of how much it app
reciated in value, and the cash the company could accumulate were it sold. But Bernie lied. He’d never sell the Senterex collection, not a single piece of it. He loved it too much.
Dave stepped back, eyeing the tiger. It was straight again, or straight enough.
And now for a little music. He switched on his stereo. The opening bars of Ding Shan-de’s Long March Symphony came softly through the speakers. Idly, Dave wondered why the American music establishment ignored the Chinese romantics.
Having no answers to his own question, and caring about cultural politics even less than he cared about the civic kind, Dave put the thought out of his mind. Instead, he reached for his coffee cup and took another sip. God, that’s good!
Almost invariably Dave was the first person in the office — or at least the first in the executive suite. Bernie Levy, master of the corporate ship, didn’t show up until 8:00 or so, his limousine leaving Short Hills, New Jersey, at 6:50 sharp. The rest of the executive cadre drifted in between 8:15 and 8:45, depending on what train they caught from Greenwich, Scarsdale, or Darien, and always much conditional upon that train running on time. The first of the secretaries arrived at 8:30 punctually.
For this reason, Dave knew he could, as was his unvarying morning habit, lounge buck naked (but for a towel) at his desk, savoring the day’s second cup of coffee, and studying the pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Several peaceful minutes later, with a third cup of coffee in his hand, he ambled into his walk-in closet to select his suit for the day.
Today he chose a lightweight tan, almost khaki, number. Although the brutal humidity of the past summer had broken, the late September weather was still warm. Dave’s wool suits would remain on their hangers for a few weeks longer.
Vertical Run Page 1