The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  I was isolated and lonely. Every day was a struggle; both financial and psychological. I would stumble out of bed and go to work and then return in the evening and go straight to bed again. I’d fall asleep to the smell of greasy fries cooked in rancid oil in the takeout joint downstairs, and the shrieks of drunken laughter from Fiona’s friends partying outside my thin bedroom walls.

  My old life faded into a surreal blur. Like an old movie that I’d once seen. Faintly recognisable but out of sync somehow; a tripped-up remake too fantastical to be the real thing.

  There were days where I almost believed that I’d never left Chicago to work at Stanhope. Days when it felt as if my life in New York had happened to someone else and that I’d woken from a deep coma to find myself trapped in a hellish existence that I couldn’t escape.

  Sometimes, when the medication wore off, my memory would come back into focus. I’d remember the injustice. The public humiliation. The way they’d chipped away at my self-esteem until there was almost nothing left of me. The way they’d ruined my future with Kevin.

  It was during those moments that I thought about revenge.

  The ceiling vent that had been chugging out thick streams of heat suddenly shifted, of its own accord, to pumping ice cold air into the elevator.

  Vincent was so cold that he put his blood-splattered shirt back on. Over that, he put on his jacket and his cashmere overcoat all buttoned up. Other than the faint shadows of a beard and the cuts to his knuckles, he looked much as he’d done when he stepped into the elevator all those hours earlier. Sylvie shivered uncontrollably because of her bare legs. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm.

  If the men noticed that she was shivering then they didn’t care enough to offer her a jacket or overcoat to keep warm. They huddled under their own coats as the elevator turned from a sauna into an arctic wasteland. They didn’t want to be near each other, but it was so cold that they were slowly drawn to one another’s body heat. They became less focused on their meagre water supply and more focused on staying warm. They knew hypothermia would get them long before dehydration.

  ‘Sam, you’re wasting our energy rehashing what happened in the past with Lucy. We can do that another time. We need to work out who locked us in here,’ Jules stuttered through chattering teeth. ‘Seems to me that might be our best hope of figuring a way out.’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ said Sam wildly, his face flushed. ‘It’s all connected to Lucy. I knew that we’d never get away with it. That one day we’d have to pay for what we did.’

  ‘It’s Eric Miles, he lured us here,’ said Sylvie, ignoring Sam. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do. He did it to Lucy and now he’s doing a version of the same thing with us. Didn’t he have beef with you, Vincent? I heard he blamed you for being kicked out of Stanhope, and by extension he blamed the rest of us.’

  The Stanhope rumour mill suggested that Eric was let go over his conduct with female graduates and interns. It was an open secret that Eric was incapable of keeping his hands to himself and acted as if female interns were his personal harem.

  Vincent was the only one among them who knew why Eric was really dismissed. It was because he’d provided false information to help nail a deal, in return for kickbacks. Straight out corruption. That was why the firm had lost its biggest account right before Christmas. Stanhope could handle sexual harassment with payoffs and non-disclosure agreements, but fraud was another matter entirely. It crossed a red line. Eric had to go.

  ‘Eric didn’t lure us here. He’s not smart enough. If he wanted to get me, he’d have hired a goon to beat us up,’ said Vincent. The elevator rattled slightly as a draft of wind blew up the shaft. ‘And anyway, I heard he checked into a clinic in Switzerland, for sex addiction. His wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t get treatment.’

  ‘If not Eric, then who’s behind this?’ Sylvie said. ‘What do they want? Because I sure as hell want to get out of here. I’ve never been so cold in my life.’

  ‘Let’s look at the clues again,’ said Jules. ‘They’re telling us something.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Vincent said. ‘They’re random. Unconnected. They were meant to fool us into thinking this was an escape room.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the anagram that formed Sara Hall’s name, or the Sun Tzu quote?’ said Jules. ‘It’s obviously connected to Lucy. Only those that worked closest with Lucy knew that she hero-worshipped Sun Tzu. And we’re all here. Except for —’ He stopped talking abruptly.

  ‘Except for who?’ Vincent asked.

  ‘Sara Hall,’ said Jules. ‘She used to sit near Lucy’s desk. She was part of our team when Lucy was alive.’

  ‘It can’t be Sara Hall,’ Sylvie interrupted. ‘Sara Hall has been dead for years.’

  Through my thin bedroom door, I could hear Fiona and her friends getting drunk and increasingly rowdy. I would have gone out for the evening to get away from the noise but it was raining and, frankly, I had nowhere to go.

  I stayed in my room, a prisoner to the torpor that had infested me for months since being fired and dumped.

  Someone put on trance music. The beat was so loud that my room vibrated. I tidied my bedroom while I waited for them to leave for the club they were going to. Cigarette smoke wafted into my room. It was soon followed by the distinct smell of weed so strong that it overwhelmed the greasy hamburger odour that usually infused the apartment.

  The doorbell rang, more people arrived. I restrained myself from going into the living room and yelling at Fiona for having a party on a work night. I couldn’t risk another blow up with her, especially with a dozen drunk friends taking her side. We were one argument away from her kicking me out. I needed that room until I sorted out my life.

  I tried to find some peace in the mundane task of tidying up my closet. I was folding a sweater when I noticed the cover of the vinyl record Sara that Lucy had left for me. I honestly don’t know why I’d kept it. I guess it was as a keepsake to remember Lucy, because it was unlikely that I’d ever actually play the record. I’d never owned a record player and wasn’t planning on buying one.

  Someone in the living room threw an empty beer can at my door. Laughter erupted. ‘It’s raining,’ someone shouted. ‘Let’s party here instead.’

  Great, just great, I thought to myself. I pulled out the liner notes from inside the record sleeve to read the lyrics, in lieu of actually listening to it. The back of the lyrics sheet was filled with small, precise handwriting. I sat slowly down on the corner of my bed to study it more closely. It was Lucy’s writing. She’d written formulas and mathematical calculations and other information in upside-down mirror writing.

  It took me ages to decipher the sheet. It was well into the early morning by the time I was done.

  From what I could understand, the formulas determined the impact on the shares of one company from a sudden shock in another. For example, the effect of an acquisition of a car manufacturer on shares in a company that supplied car parts for them. If someone could accurately predict such effects then serious money could be made. If they worked at Stanhope and had inside information then they could make exponentially more money. They would also be breaking the law.

  Halfway down the first page, Lucy meticulously recorded a list of securities traded, with the prices, profit and dates of the trans actions. Alongside each, she detailed a deal that our team at Stanhope was handling, which wouldn’t have been public knowledge at that time. It was the smoking gun, proof that insider trading had taken place. The crime carried a maximum sentence of twenty years in a federal prison.

  Lucy had pulled together a complete trail of evidence. It had been her insurance policy and she’d entrusted it to me. She knew that I had enough inside knowledge of the firm to piece it together pretty quickly – I bet she’d never imagined it would take me so long to find it.

  Someone had harnessed Lucy’s brilliance to make an awful lot of money, using a highly sophisticated scheme that, at best, skated
on the edge of the law. According to Lucy’s notes, the trades were conducted by a shell company called ‘The Circle Inc.’. I remembered the name being on her sketch of the team in which she’d drawn Vincent as the devil. A quick web search came up with nothing except for an address for a company by that name at a serviced office in the Cayman Islands.

  I remembered how Cathy was convinced that Lucy’s personal computer had been stolen after she died. She must have been right. Whoever did it was probably trying to erase any trace of The Circle. What they hadn’t realised was that Lucy had written down all the information by hand before she died. She had a photographic memory and must have memorised every document that she’d seen over the years. Knowing Lucy’s lateral thinking, she figured that nobody would look for a handwritten copy of the information, hidden inside the sleeve of an old-fashioned analogue record, no less. They’d look for digital copies on USB drives or her computer’s hard drive, or even in the cloud.

  As it happened, Lucy’s plan almost failed. I had came close to throwing out that record with all the other stuff that I got rid of when I moved back to Chicago. It was saved in a moment of sentimentalism.

  At the bottom of the page was more upside-down mirror writing, which I soon realised was the bank details and codes for The Circle’s bank account. When Lucy had written these notes, there was well over $95 million in the account. The signatories to the account were listed as Jules, Sam, Sylvie and Lucy. Vincent was listed as the principal signatory and he was the only one with the master password to the account. Lucy had somehow found out what it was and carefully documented it in her tiny writing at the bottom of the page.

  Lucy’s drawing of Vincent as the devil finally made sense. He was the ringleader of a massive insider-trading conspiracy.

  They huddled together, pressing close for warmth despite their distaste of each other. They were in survival mode. They weren’t worried about whether they had enough food or water anymore, or whether they’d be able to alert the throngs of office workers who arrived on Monday morning that they were stuck in an elevator. They worried whether they’d be alive on Monday morning. With no other recourse, they crammed together to share body heat, clutching each other in an intimate embrace.

  It was ironic, thought Jules, that they were helping each other survive when it was not really in their individual interests. They all had good reason to want each other dead. Here in the elevator, it would be easy. Sylvie in her skirt and without a proper coat could easily die of hypothermia. Sam was getting weaker by the hour, his eyes were sunken and his face ashen. It wouldn’t take much for him to lose his battle to stay alive. It would be so easy to gently press a hand over his nose when everyone was sleeping. Sam would be too weak to struggle. He’d die of suffocation and nobody would ever suspect anything.

  If Sam and Sylvie were gone, there would only be two of them left. Him and Vincent. If there was only one survivor, he would get to claim the greatest prize of all: The Circle’s assets, all neatly tied up in their Cayman Islands bank account.

  When they formed The Circle they’d never expected it would be around this long. They were working on a deal and realised they could all profit from inside information without actually breaking the law. It was a deal on behalf of a global mining company, and they knew the announcement would affect palladium prices. They formed a company in the Cayman Islands to take a joint position on metals options ahead of the news of the deal breaking. It netted them just under three million dollars.

  It was supposed to be one trade. But a few months later another opportunity presented itself and that time they made close to five million. By the third trade, they’d become addicted.

  Vincent insisted on complete secrecy. He put into place a series of measures to protect them from any government or law-enforcement investigation. He knew that by sharing the money via The Circle it would be in their collective interest to keep their mouths shut. He made sure they all had too much at stake to go to the authorities.

  They weren’t happy when Vincent brought Lucy into The Circle. It meant they had to share the profit five ways. None of them trusted her. She was unpredictable. Weird. Vincent wouldn’t listen to their concerns, his only concession was that Lucy would be the last member. Nobody else would join.

  ‘Lucy’s brilliant,’ Vincent reassured them. ‘She’ll make us a fortune.’

  Jules had the impression that Lucy went along with it out of intellectual curiosity rather than greed. She’d never struck him as the type to put much store in money. The formulas she devised were sheer genius, her algorithms made them millions. The more money they made, the more they threw caution to the wind. Insider trading, tax evasion. They were in deep. If they were caught they could spend the rest of their lives inside a federal penitentiary.

  ‘It’s a victimless crime,’ Vincent told them, ‘but technically we’re still breaking the law. We have to be discreet and, most importantly, we have to be patient.’

  Vincent said they’d have to wait a decade to access the money, in order to ensure they went under the radar of law enforcement.

  Then Lucy died. They started losing money. They hadn’t realised just how much work Lucy did to fine-tune the algorithms to make smart investment decisions. When the market dropped, they took significant losses. As The Circle’s bank balance went south, dropping down to $50 million, their relationships became more fractious. They wanted to cut their losses. Vincent refused. He said it was too soon. That it was dangerous and might alert the authorities.

  They worried that Vincent would find out the role they’d played in Lucy’s death and punish them by refusing to give them their share of The Circle’s assets. Vincent had a soft spot for Lucy. He had a thing for strays, and a ruthless streak underneath his urbane exterior that made him capable of almost anything when he was crossed.

  The recent uncertainty at Stanhope meant they might all soon be without jobs. It created a fresh impetus to break up The Circle so they could finally access their money. Jules’s divorce had nearly killed him financially. Ironically, Sam’s marriage had done the same, thanks to Kim’s extravagant spending. As for Sylvie, she was tired of fighting for her place at Stanhope. She was more than ready to live the rest of her life with Marc and a passive, tax-free income from her share of The Circle’s assets.

  Vincent insisted the safest course of action was to leave the money alone for another few years. He was more cautious than the others and less in need of cash. Crucially, he had the master password required to close The Circle’s accounts and distribute its assets. It helped cement his iron grip over them.

  ‘How did Lucy really die?’ asked Vincent without warning. It had been weighing on his mind ever since Sam had broken ranks with the others and begun his rambling confession. ‘I know that some questions are better left unasked, but I never believed that Lucy killed herself.’

  Sam’s body trembled from the cold, or nerves, or perhaps both. His tongue felt thick and unwieldy amid his chattering teeth. When he finally spoke it was rapidly, as if he welcomed the opportunity to relieve himself of a terrible burden.

  ‘Lucy came to work the day after the elevator incident, even though Sylvie had told her to stay home,’ Sam recounted. ‘She pulled me aside. She was distraught. Slightly crazed, really. She said that something horrible had happened to her the night before. That it made her realise that she’d become a terrible person and that it was time to make amends.

  ‘She said we should all come clean about The Circle. I told her that was out of the question. She insisted that it was inevitable the feds would find out. That if we confessed, the punishment would be far more lenient than if we were caught.’

  ‘So you three killed her?’ Vincent interrupted. ‘Just like that.’ He snapped his fingers to emphasis his point. ‘Because she was hysterical after being assaulted in an elevator and made a few empty threats?’

  ‘No. Not the three of us. Sam is the one who killed her,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘Lucy knew enough about Th
e Circle to destroy us financially. To get us sent to prison.’ Sam was quick to defend himself. ‘I tried to reason with her, Vincent. I really did. I reassured her that we’d covered our tracks so well nobody would ever find out unless one of us opened our mouth. I reminded her that she was implicated as well, she’d go to jail too, but she said she didn’t care. Lucy wouldn’t listen to reason.’

  ‘She was probably in shock after what happened. She wasn’t thinking rationally,’ said Vincent.

  ‘I thought so too,’ said Sam. ‘I convinced her to go home and sleep on it before making a decision. I came to her apartment later that night to talk it over with her.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She threatened to bring us down. Me, you, The Circle. If anything she was more agitated. She said the money we’d made was blood money and she’d see us all in hell where we belonged. Or failing that in a federal penitentiary. She was serious, Vincent. She was going to the cops, the SEC, the feds.’

  ‘Jesus, Sam,’ Vincent muttered.

  ‘Lucy left me with no choice,’ Sam answered. ‘I put a roofie in her drink to make her compliant. The drug worked within minutes. She was almost robotic. I dictated the suicide letter to her and she wrote it down. Then I told her to have a bath. I figured she’d fall asleep and drown. It would look like suicide. The drug I’d chosen metabolised quickly. There would be no trace by the time they did an autopsy.’

  ‘Except that’s not what happened,’ said Vincent.

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘She sat upright in the tub like a zombie. I realised that I hadn’t thought it through very well. One capsule wasn’t strong enough to knock her out. I switched to plan B to help things along a little. I put on my leather gloves. Up until then, I’d kept my hands in the pockets of my jacket.’ He glimpsed a skeptical expression on Vincent’s face. ‘Look, I wasn’t sure how things would turn out when I went into that apartment. But I realised at that point that there was no choice, I had to take matters into my own hands. I plugged Lucy’s tablet device in the bathroom. The cord was badly frayed. I put the device in her hands as she sat in the tub. I knew that she’d drop it sooner or later, electrocuting herself.’