Vertical Run

by Joseph Garber

I didn’t do that.

  Oh yeah, take a look at the grease and grunge on your clothes.

  The numbness had begun to fade. He bent over, placed his hands on his knees, and forced himself to take deep, gulping breaths. Jesus! It had been bad. It had been the worst. He hadn’t frozen like that since …

  Don’t think about it.

  Helen! Why? How? What could …

  Don’t think about that, either. Think about something else. Like maybe how cruddy your mouth tastes.

  He wanted a drink of water. Badly. A little soap and a washcloth wouldn’t hurt either.

  He looked around dully. It seemed he was … where? … it didn’t look familiar, but …

  The second floor. That had to be it.

  What was on the second floor? What the hell occupied the second floor of any New York office building? Most Park Avenue high-rises don’t even have second floors. Their elevator lobbies, all marble and modern sculpture, extend up two or three stories. And, as for those few buildings that do make use of their second floors, it is the least desirable office space on the premises — eye level with roofs of buses, sitting atop the cacophony of New York street life, cursed with perpetually dirty windows that have no view. The second floor is an unrentable albatross around every landlord’s neck.

  In Dave’s experience, real business people didn’t have offices on second floors. They were always higher — up in the aeries where corporate eagles nest. No one would be caught dead with a second-floor address — at least no one who was not engaged in some odd and arcane form of endeavor, wholly alien to normal New York business practices. DO-do-DO-do DO-do-DO-do. You are traveling in a different dimension.…

  Suddenly it came back to him. He had been on this floor. New York landlords use their second floors for temporary space, renting offices like rooms in a hot pillow motel to people who need (don’t ask why) an office for an hour or two or a day or two. Or alternatively, the landlords put luncheon clubs on their second floors — private restaurants available on a members-only basis to the elite tenants of the upper floors. Mediocre foods, overpriced wines, but decent service and convenient privacy when you want to impress that out-of-town customer (“I’ve asked Suzy to make us lunch reservations at the club.…”).

  Like all Senterex executives, Dave held a membership in his building’s club. He hadn’t used it in years. He wasn’t even sure he remembered what the landlord called the place. It was something British. It was always something British. The Churchill Club? The Windsor Club? The Parliament Club?

  No matter. There would be water in the club, and a washroom. Dave was grimly eager to visit a washroom. One with soap and hot running water.

  He stepped out of the second floor elevator corridor and turned left. The hall was papered with a dark scarlet design and hung with gilt-framed oil paintings of deceased prime ministers, Tories to a man.

  Right, the Prime Minister’s Club.

  The entrance was a thick, heavy-looking door, veneered to give the appearance of improbably venerable Tudor oak. A small brass plaque was nailed at eye level: MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY.

  The door swung open to a velvet-lined anteroom and more pictures of dead English politicians. The maître d’s podium, with leather bound reservation book and brass inkwell—complete with quill pen, for God’s sake—stood to the left. Heavy plush draperies with ridiculous golden tassels separated the anteroom from the restaurant proper.

  The toilets are at the far end of the restaurant.

  The dining room was large, and brightly lit. The tables were covered with snowy linen, laid with gleaming silverware. At a center table, facing the door, a half-empty glass of orange juice resting near his left hand, sat Ransome. His right hand held his gun level and well-aimed at Dave’s chest. The expression on his face was as neutral as ever. He didn’t say a word, but simply pulled the trigger.

  2

  The firing pin snapped. A wisp of smoke drifted out of the automatic’s silenced muzzle. The bruise beneath Ransome’s eye — a souvenir of Dave’s shoe — reddened. A look of faint irritation flitted across his face. He lifted his left hand to pull back the slide and chamber another round. By that time Dave had drawn his own weapon. Ransome dropped his hand back to the table.

  The two men looked at one another in silence. Dave felt a small smile grow on his face. Ransome’s expression did not change.

  Ransome broke the ice. “Mr. Elliot, you are truly a bird of rare plumage. I am beginning to develop a certain affection for you.”

  “Not to be rude, but I feel exactly the opposite.”

  “Mr. Elliot, I sympathize with you completely.”

  “Thank you.” Dave made a small gesture with his gun hand. “By the way, I’d appreciate it if you would drop your piece. Just let it slide out of your fingers. And then …”

  The weapon, a twin of the pistol in Dave’s hand, thumped on the carpet. Ransome spoke before Dave could finish his thought, “Kick it away, Mr. Elliot? That’s traditional, and I am, if nothing else, a believer in the traditional values.” He shot out the toe of his shoe. The pistol skidded three yards forward. Ransome continued, “Just as a matter of curiosity, would you mind telling if you gimmicked all the rounds in the magazine?”

  “Only the first one. When you don’t have the right tools, it takes a lot of time to jimmy the slug out of the case and empty the powder.”

  “As I well know.” Ransome seemed thoroughly relaxed, a quiet man having a polite chat with a distant friend. “However, given the direction our relationship has taken this morning, I believe I’ll inspect the rest of my bullets when I have the chance.”

  His control is amazing. The man must be the coolest dude on the planet. “What makes you assume that you will have a chance?”

  Ransome arched an eyebrow at the muzzle of Dave’s pistol, now pointed at the center of his midriff. He shook his head. “You don’t have it in you. Oh, certainly, in the heat of combat you can kill a man. I’ve seen you do it. But in cold blood? I think not.”

  Right on schedule Ransome casually began toying with a table knife. His expression was poker-faced, but his pupils dilated. The muscles in his neck tensed. He was ready to move. “No, Mr. Elliot, you won’t shoot me.”

  Dave shot him.

  The silenced pistol made a small thump, sounding like a fist punched into a pillow. Ransome howled. He clutched his thigh where, just below the groin, blood welled out. “GODDAMN YOU SONOFABITCH YOU SHOT ME YOU SONOFABITCH RATFUCK BASTARD!”

  Dave ignored him. He was on the floor, had begun to drop while squeezing off the shot. He rolled left, once, twice, three times, looking for where Ransome’s backup man should be.

  And was.

  Dave aimed, breathed, squeezed. Another fist punched the pillow. Twice. Three times. The sound was so soft. The backup man’s face disappeared in a red rain. He never even managed to lift his gun.

  “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU YOU COCKSUCKER YOU BASTARD YOU SHOT ME!”

  “Shut up, you’re behaving like a baby.” Dave had rolled one more time, bringing his pistol around toward Ransome.

  “FUCK YOU JACK THAT’S WHAT I HAVE TO SAY YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” Ransome was doubled over, pressing both hands against the wound. His face was turned up, and his lips were drawn back. His eyes rolled, and he looked like a Doberman gone berserk.

  Dave blew through his lips with no little disgust. “Come off it, Ransome. It’s a flesh wound. I doubt if I nicked more than a millimeter of meat. If I’d wanted to do you any real damage, you know I could have.”

  “JUST FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU MAN HOW DARE YOU FUCKING SHOOT ME!”

  Three tables — four counting Ransome’s — were set for breakfast. Someone had been having a morning conference when Dave called in his bomb threat. Dave snatched a beaker of ice water off one of the tables and flung its contents in Ransome’s face. “Ransome, take a table napkin, hold it up against your thigh, and shut the hell up. The way you’re acting, you’ll die of a heart attack before you die of that w
ound.”

  The ice water plastered down Ransome’s hair. Rivulets dripped down his cheeks. The look on his face made Dave shiver. It was First Sergeant Mullins’s face, just before the end. In a voice low and very, very cold, Ransome hissed, “Elliot, you lousy shit, you could have blown my balls off.”

  “Risks of the game, my friend. Besides, you said you read my 201 file. You should remember my marksmanship rating.”

  “I’m going to kill you for this.”

  Dave sighed with exasperation. “So what else is new?”

  “How I do it, asshole. How much it hurts and how long it takes. That’s what’s new.”

  “Thank you for defining our relationship. Meanwhile, don’t sit there like a jerk dripping blood all over the place. Put a piece of ice up against the cut. It’ll ease the pain and slow the bleeding.”

  Ransome snarled, pursed his lips, and swiveled to fumble an ice cube out of a water glass. As he turned, Dave whipped the gun against the back of his skull. Ransome sprawled across the table and slid gently to the floor.

  * * *

  A caesura of the clock. Time at full stop. He had (hello, old friend) a loaded firearm in his hand. His enemy was unconscious at his feet. Merely out of curiosity, no malice in his heart, Dave aimed the muzzle at the base of Ransome’s skull. The gesture felt comfortable, felt right. He thumbed back the hammer. That felt even better.

  It would be a very, very easy thing to do.

  It is the easy things that damn you, not the hard.

  Twenty-five years earlier, David Elliot, not entirely sane at the time, stood in the heart of horror and promised God that he would never, never, again fire a gun in anger. I will, he prayed, hurt no one, never again, no act of anger, no deed of violence, oh God, I will war no more.…

  Now, in the course of a single morning, he had killed two men. It had been easy — easy as it ever was — and quite automatic. He hadn’t felt a thing.

  However, now, at just this moment, a pistol in his hand and a worthy target in his sights, he was feeling something — feeling a sense of accomplishment, the comfortable emotion of a skilled man who has exercised his skills with perfection. With two fresh deaths on his hands and the perfume of cordite on his fingers, he knew he was at no small risk of feeling fine, quite fine, and feeling better every minute.

  Never again, he thought. Never. He’d almost lost. They’d almost won. Now it was happening again. If he let it. But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, let himself be turned back into the kind of man they once had wanted him to be.

  Ransome expected otherwise. Ransome and his people. They’d think they knew what he’d do. Take a civilian hostage or two. Set up an ambush. Build up the body count. Start a firefight. Try to shoot his way out of the building.

  Dave smiled grimly. He lifted the pistol’s sights from Ransome’s head, flicked on the safety, uncocked the hammer, and slid the weapon beneath his belt. Although he knew his enemy could not hear him, he spoke to Ransome anyway: “How many people have you got watching the exits, buddy? Twenty? Thirty? More? Whatever the number is, I’m not going to get by them, am I?” Dave glanced down at his trousers, torn and thick with grease. “Nope, I’m a real eye-catcher. Hell, looking the way I do, they’d shoot me on general principle. But I will get out, Ransome. Count on it. Also count on me doing it my way, not your way. I’d sooner take a gun to my head than do anything that way.”

  3

  It was dark, warm, cozy, and safe. Nearby, the equipment made a soothing humming sound. The air was a little stale, but not bad. Dave lay on his side, curled comfortably. His stomach was full and he felt like taking a nap. He liked it here.

  Always wanted to go crawl back into the womb, didn’t you, pal?

  The perfect hiding place. Dave was delighted to find it, and a little surprised. Senterex had long since moved its Management Information Systems department out to suburban New Jersey. He had thought that just about every other company in New York, including the Wall Street brokerages, had done the same. Manhattan office space was too expensive to waste on computer hardware. Besides, programmers are a delicate sort of breed, and more productive when removed from the pressures of city life.

  However, at least one New York company hadn’t relocated its computers yet. The outfit was a subsidiary of American Interdyne Worldwide. American Interdyne, perpetrator of one of the 1980s’ last great kamikaze junk bond raids, was operating under the protection of the bankruptcy courts and an especially senile federal judge. Maybe that was why the company still had its computers located on the twelfth floor of a very expensive Park Avenue office tower.

  What does space in this joint rent for, anyway? Forty bucks a square foot, plus or minus.

  American Interdyne’s computer room was in the grand old style — weighty with heavy-duty mainframe computers, whirring peripherals, and blinking consoles. Other companies were dismantling their enormous centralized systems empires, replacing banks of balky $15 million IBM behemoths with sleek workstations and high speed client/server networks. American Interdyne had not. Its systems department sprawled across an entire floor, a quarter of which was given over to the sort of ponderous mainframes that most executives, Dave among them, thought of as dinosaurs.

  He was happy to see them now, though. The nicest thing about the monsters, he thought, was their finicky complexity The pampered giants demanded endless care and feeding. Legions of high paid technicians to coddle them. Custom power systems. Heavy-duty air conditioning. Endless rows of peripherals. Special monitoring and control equipment.

  And wire.

  Lots of wire. More wire than you can imagine. Large mainframe installations consume oodles of cabling. And you don’t simply hook these suckers up once and then forget about them. No way. You always have to fiddle with the cabling, reconnecting ports, plugs, and interfaces. Oh, the DASD’s connected to the mainframe, and the mainframes connected to the frontend, and the frontend’s connected to the multiplexer, now hear de word of de lawd!

  Which meant raised flooring. American Interdyne’s computer room, like that of every other big mainframe user, was built on a raised floor. The wires and the cables snaked beneath. The floor was paneled so that, as was required every so often, the computer staff could open it up and reconfigure the wiring.

  Dark, warm, and cozy. It really was quite peaceful under the floor.

  Dave needed the peace. Twice after leaving the Prime Minister’s Club he had almost bumped into members of the NYPD Bomb Squad. If they had seen him … tattered, filthy, stinking of vomit, his arms full of stolen food and supplies, and with a brace of exceptionally illicit pistols stuck in his belt …

  Would’ve had a little trouble talking your way out of that one, pal. Especially explaining the shootin’ irons.

  The pistols were automatics. One belonged to Carlucci, and one to Ransome’s backup man. They were the same make and model, although what that make and model was, Dave could not say. Neither bore a manufacturer’s stamp nor a serial number. Both had lightweight polymer fiber frames, factory silencers, laser sights, and staggered clips holding twenty-one rounds of ammunition.

  Those rounds were cause for reflection — TUGs, they were called, short for Torpedo Universal Geschoss. Dave had never known that pistol versions were manufactured. The bullets were hunting ammo, designed to penetrate deep, mushroom inside the body, rip a target’s heart out. A man hit in the torso with one of those rounds would die where he stood; even a grazing wound would render him immobile.

  Just above their safety levers, the pistols had slightly recessed slide bars. Dave guessed that pushing these slides forward converted the pistols to fully automatic operation, turning the pistols into handheld machine guns.

  Room brooms. Not quite your old Ingram MAC with the WerBell Sionics suppressor, but wicked enough. Thirty-eight auto, 130 grains for a muzzle velocity just a skosh below the sound barrier. Optimal silencing that way. Punches your target up with a bit more than three-hundred foot pounds of energy. Ouch.

&
nbsp; Also ouch if the authorities ever caught a civilian carrying one. Dave suspected that even thinking about such a gun was a violation of the Sullivan Law.

  Which raises a few questions about where they come from — and the people who carry them.

  * * *

  Safe beneath the floor, his head pillowed on a nest of comfortable, rubber-clad 22 AWG wire, Dave tried to doze. His argumentative guardian angel wouldn’t let him. The issue was Helen, of course. Why had she materialized at the side of Ransome’s men? How had they persuaded her to turn on her own husband?

  Dave doubted that she’d betrayed him intentionally. Ransome’s people probably had told her some godawful lie (or worse, cautioned his inner voice, some godawful truth) to trick her into identifying him.

  What lie? he asked himself. What truth? the angel countered.

  He could find answers to neither question. Nor could he — not quite yet — allow himself to explore the alternative explanation to Helen’s behavior. Maybe she is on their side. Maybe she wants you dead the same as everybody else.

  Nonsense. He’d spent five years working as hard as he could to turn the marriage into a success.

  How hard has she worked?

  Shut up! I don’t need this!

  You know what they say about guys who argue with themselves, and then lose.…

  Dave growled and rolled over, trying to find a more comfortable posture. As he turned, the radio that he’d taken, together with sixty-seven dollars, from the corpes of Ransome’s backup man, slipped away. He retrieved it and placed it close to his ear. The volume was low. Sooner or later American Interdyne’s technical staff would be coming back to the computer room. Dave didn’t want them wondering where that odd noise—sounds like a walkie-talkie to me, Frank—was coming from.

  A conversation was in progress: “… like someone had dropped a ketchup sandwich and smeared it all over the floor. Half of New York City must’ve stepped on the poor bastard’s face.”

  Another voice answered. “Aww, man, that’s nasty. That’s just a nasty way to go. Somebody’s gotta call Don … Robin and get us some goddamned orders around here.”