The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  “He doesn’t have to guess.”

  Leonard turned at the sound of Veronica’s voice. Her severe eyes were staring him down and her posture was suddenly hard, but Leonard didn’t notice that. He had been so intent on Eliot that he hadn’t even felt what she had done. And now the only thing he saw was that in her right hand she was holding the gun from the back of his waistband.

  “Veronica.”

  “What good does it do to come armed, Leonard, if you can’t keep your wits about you.” He hadn’t even noticed it was gone. She had been standing right behind him while Eliot was speaking and slipped it away.

  “You told me that Eliot was in charge of the scheme.”

  “You wouldn’t have gone to Davenport’s apartment if I had told you that you were working for me.”

  “You’ve been behind the whole thing. You orchestrated the collapse. You’re going to blow up the building.”

  “No, Leonard. Your friend the cop is going to blow up that building. I’m just going to make a fortune off of it.”

  “Why tell me it was Eliot?”

  “Your friend Mulino killed my best source. I have sources all over the world. Feeding advance notice of when they are making attacks. Sleeper cells need start-up funding too. And I had an inside line on the most effective stateside operation.”

  “Detective Rowson.”

  “He knew it was risky. He had been in charge of the rats in the restaurant. He had been in charge of the water taxi. He was supposed to be afraid. But once I told him how much money he could make by telling me, he wasn’t so afraid anymore.”

  “So what about the e-mails? What about all the other countries?”

  “Rowson told me what was going on in New York. I have a source in Indonesia who tells me when a gas pipeline will be targeted. I have a friend in Yemen who tells me which convoy is at risk. And each of those interests is owned by public companies. And the stock in each of those companies suffers when the attack goes down. And I know how to make money off of suffering. Detective Rowson’s operation was local. And it was never going to be found by the police. Because it was being run by the police.”

  “And when he got found out, he was set up and he was killed.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just got shot by someone who thought he looked suspicious. Or maybe he really was going to take down that ship and Mulino saved the day. I know it cost me plenty when I woke up and the ship was still afloat. I’d ask Rowson what happened, but he’s too dead to tell me.”

  “And once Rowson was dead, Davenport found out.”

  “She did. And the police have ways of taking care of people who are going to betray them. She wasn’t going to tell me anything either. But I knew I could count on you to find out for me. You climbed right up into her home and brought me just what she had been trying to hide.”

  So Veronica herself was just catching the crumbs of other people’s conspiracies. Only in it for the money: she didn’t care if the bombs were being set by terrorists abroad or police at home, what mattered was knowing ahead of time and turning it into profit. The information age. But right now, no matter what Leonard knew about her, there was nothing he could do to stop her. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Leonard had the same gun pointed at him. If he had followed her orders and called her, told her to meet him somewhere, then she probably would have just taken the flash drive and killed him. By forcing her to confront Eliot, he had probably saved his life.

  Eliot himself was quietly shifting himself up in his chair. With a gun pointed his way, he sat oddly stronger. He crossed his hands in his lap and pointed his chin at Veronica. “So the plan is to kill us both now? Shoot us and then walk to your office and make the trades, then take the elevator to the lobby and saunter over to your apartment? Mr. Mitchell here just showed you the sergeant’s plans for the first time, I am led to believe. You haven’t even made your bet against the bank yet? As far as you know, this attack is going to happen today. It would be a shame for you to miss it because you were so busy murdering us.”

  Veronica guided the gun down to hip level, watching both men carefully, calmly. For the first time since she had taken out the gun, Leonard saw a hint of fear in her eyes. He was too cowed now to attack her himself. But Eliot was right: She had let Leonard lure her in here before she had a chance to make any trades. She hadn’t been able to take him outside and kill him. She hadn’t been able to get on the phone and short Idlewild Construction. He had made her confront Eliot, and now she was as stuck here as they were.

  And Leonard wasn’t alone anymore. Now he had Eliot. Not the villain after all, Eliot could get a senator or the head of the FBI on the telephone if he deigned to pick up such a device. For a woman holding a gun, Veronica looked peculiarly cornered. She walked backward toward the door out to the trading floor.

  “I’m going to go into my office for a few minutes, gentlemen. You can both stay here. When I finish what I’m doing, I’m going to put this gun in my purse and leave the building. I never had any intention of hurting either one of you. Once I leave, neither one of you will ever hear from me again. You can do your best to stop Sparks from doing what he’s planning, but I’m not sure you can. In fact, I’m about to go bet against it.”

  As she backed away, she lifted the gun and waved it before the two men, just to let them know she was serious. She tugged at the door, slipped out through the trading room to her office, and rushed to her desk. Eliot’s door slowly drifted shut, cutting out the noise from the crowded hallway.

  Eliot burst up from his hardwood chair and dusted his slacks, suddenly bright, brisk, and full of energy. He tugged at the hem of his jacket to smooth out the crease from sitting so long. Leonard saw the trim elegant man in a new light: not the evil mastermind of a plan to profit off of misery, but a sage from another time, scornful of the world he was born into and what you had to do to succeed in it.

  “I’m not proud of myself, Mr. Mitchell. I never have thought any more highly of what I do for a living than of what anyone else does. But there are lines I don’t cross and there are rules that are in place for a reason. I should have noted what she was up to sooner. It took me a few days of auditing to be sure. Now, we have about five minutes. If you’ll come with me.”

  Leonard stared dumbfounded as Eliot crossed the empty expanse of his office toward the fireplace. Eliot reached around the side of the mantle and twisted an unseen latch, opening a false door to a grim industrial stairwell.

  “I am required to have a separate fire stairwell in this office, given its size and its distance from the stairwell on the other side of the floor. I found the proposition ghastly and had my designer cover it with the fireplace, which is also not permitted. My own little inside joke, I suppose. It never occurred to me that it would come in so handy.”

  The door open, Eliot stepped into the cold concrete atrium, thick metal handrails guiding him toward a narrow set of dark solid stairs. The stairwell exposed the lie of the manicured office; Eliot worked in just another anonymous corporate husk, no matter how many knickknacks he had collected to warm it.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Down twenty flights, and then to the Bank of Bremen. There is a disaster to avert yet, young man.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  DOWNSTAIRS

  Leonard was trailing as the old man skipped downstairs quickly, nearly giddy. His shoulder had started throbbing again; he could feel the ache in his back from sleeping on the floor of Roshni’s office—and for only a few hours at that. But below him, a man more than thirty years older was swinging along, negotiating the sharp turns of the bright descent while singing softly to himself. Leonard couldn’t make out the tune. He was nearly two full flights behind when Eliot looked up at him.

  “Hop to it, my friend. She’s going to find out that we’re gone soon enough. She may even be smart enough to simply t
ake the elevator and beat us down.”

  Eliot had seemed creepily lethargic when he had been glued to his chair. Now, bounding across the steps, it was as though all the energy he had been saving while curled up behind his desk had been let go at once. Leonard lunged forward and skittered down the last few steps of a landing, holding to the iron rail and swinging himself round the corner. His right arm was practically useless, numb from where the bandage had dug in and cut off the blood. He gave it another go and sprang ahead. He was nearly even with Eliot, still singing and clattering to himself. Close enough, at least, that he could ask some questions, even as his breath was giving out on him.

  “She told me it was you.”

  “Well, of course she did. And of course you believed her. I’m a man who sits behind a desk wearing a suit all day. So obviously I am capable of anything. My name is on the door of a Wall Street firm. So you think I’m likely to murder tourists for a few thousand dollars.”

  Leonard was jogging, huffing along behind Eliot, whose breath was crisp and controlled despite the fact that his feet were shuffling frantically down the stairs.

  “I believed her, is all. It’s not that I would have suspected you.”

  “If I had come to you and said I had found out that she was running this very same scheme, would you have believed me?” Eliot stopped on a landing to look back at Leonard, who stood silent. “I didn’t think so.”

  “I think she was telling the truth when she said she had only learned about it. The cops thought they were trying to scare the city. And after all, the only thing she has to bribe them with is money. But the men working on this have been paid in fear.”

  Eliot smiled, looking brighter and younger. “Well then we have one puzzle left, don’t we?” Having a problem to solve seemed to fill him with new energy.

  “How long have you known?”

  “I knew there was something wrong when your boss gave me the binder. But I didn’t know it was Veronica until a few days later. After Ms. Davenport had been killed. And even then, there is something of a distance between knowing and having proof.”

  Even Eliot was beginning to slow. Leonard couldn’t count how many stories they had descended, and he couldn’t see how many were left below them. They had started at the eighteenth floor, and it seemed as though they had been going down forever.

  “We have proof now.”

  “We have a woman who has pointed a gun in our faces. We are a long way from proof.”

  “She has the gun. That gun belonged to a cop who has been killed. We just need to get downstairs and call the police. They will storm the office.”

  Eliot stopped for a moment on the stairs. “What good will it do, young man, to catch her? She tricked you. She tried to kill you. So I understand that you think she deserves punishment. And she most likely does. But the truth of the matter is that she is a parasite. My industry, unfortunately, breeds parasites. You squash one and another blooms in its place. We should be looking for the source. She used you to find out what Davenport knew. And what Davenport knew is more important than Veronica herself.”

  Leonard thought on this for a moment. Eliot was right. They could call the police, they could sound the alarm, and when they arrived the only person they would catch would be a woman who had made a little money off of other people’s crimes. They would have lost the original wrongdoers. Not to mention that if the police storm the building and are suddenly called to an emergency at the Bank of Bremen, they wouldn’t even catch her at all. It would not take long for her to disappear while the city convulses over another skyscraper coming down.

  “Okay. We go to the building. I think I know who we are going to find there too.”

  “Do you?”

  Leonard nodded. “At least one. Maybe more. And I know a detective who will listen.” And he thought of the call he had made that morning. He had only been able to leave a message. But if that message was heard, there would be more help still.

  “How do we call him? Your detective. I don’t carry a cell phone. Do you?”

  Leonard had left Roshni’s phone in the locker when he stole the suit. It had been that or the gun. “No.”

  “And we are to walk up to a pay phone and dial this detective? You know his number by heart? Or we should call 911 and tell the operator we know that a police sergeant is about to blow up a bank, and see if she puts us straight through to the commissioner?”

  “No. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

  Eliot stopped for a moment and smiled at Leonard. As he stared at Leonard, the manicured face and the seamless hair appeared suddenly soft, a little bit undone. A very serious man who had shed his mask and let loose with the fact that he was secretly mischievous.

  “Right you are.”

  Just below them, Leonard could see a bright-red sign. EXIT. Finally. The sweat had flourished across the back of his neck now, but it would only be worse outside. He pressed on. Eliot was right. Their only chance was to get to the building before Sparks. They were two unarmed men planning to take on a uniformed police sergeant carrying a semiautomatic weapon and most likely a load of explosives. It was worth a shot.

  “All right, Eliot. Let’s go.”

  “Lovely. And do you have a plan, exactly?”

  “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

  This suited the dapper man just fine. “My thoughts exactly.” Eliot turned the corner toward the doorway. Leonard reached him just as he stood touching the matte-gray metal, its fire bar cocked in place.

  “Now, the moment I push this open, Leonard, a fire alarm will sound throughout the whole building. They will have to evacuate it. Our friend will be asked to leave with everyone else, whether or not she has made her trades, and whether or not she has the gun with her. But chaos is going to be to our advantage, at least for a little while.”

  Leonard put his hand on the door. It was cool. It was quiet. There would be no more cool and no more quiet for a while once they slipped out into the trash-covered streets.

  “Come on,” said Eliot. “This is going to be fun.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  UNDERGROUND

  James Sparks had always figured that he was going to have to do the hard work himself. Rowson and Del Rio had been just short of incompetent. He wasn’t surprised that either one of them was dead. It’s what you get for recruiting dirty cops. Not that the clean ones wouldn’t have been on their side: as far as Sergeant Sparks was concerned, every officer in the city should have backed the project. But a dirty cop is easier to control. Someone who owes you something. Someone who knows he is one slip away from explaining to his wife and kid that he’s been fired and is losing his pension and will have to live off of Social Security after all. Sparks’s ultimate boss had given him the chance to recruit them. Had cleaned the records of Rowson, Del Rio, and the rest of them. All Sparks had to do was instill enough fear in them. But someone who was sloppy enough to get caught once can only take you so far.

  He had spent all night convincing himself that Mitchell would get taken care of by morning, then woke up to the cold truth that he was wrong. No word from Intake. Leonard Mitchell was on the loose. No telling what Del Rio had said to him before getting killed. He could have gone to the three-letter agencies by now. And someone just might have believed him. Sergeant Sparks didn’t fear getting caught, though, as much as he feared failing. After all he had done over the past year, he wasn’t going to fail now.

  Which was why he had spent all morning in the basement of the new building. It had been easy enough to get in. No one asks questions when you’re in uniform, not even if you’re carrying a bulging backpack that was obviously not issued by the department. Without the schematic he had to guess where to put the clay to be most effective. Then again, even if he didn’t take the whole building down, even if all he managed to do was make the thing shudder and force the insurance company to spend an
extra six months shoring it up, that would be enough. That would make people wonder who was protecting the city. Whether they would be safe.

  He’d started in the corners, laying thin strands of the Semtex behind the boiler room, the elevator shaft. He had about a pound left and had bundled it near the center of the building. He hadn’t been able to cram as much as he’d hoped into the backpack, but the small load he had brought would be plenty.

  After he laid out the explosives, he deftly tucked the wire and detonators into each molding. He had learned to do this part right, to always be careful. The whole thing was going to be set off with a cell phone, and while it had to be sensitive enough to get the signal even below ground, you had to be careful not to set the stuff on too much of a hair trigger. Sergeant Sparks was not interested in dying for his work.

  He set in the last detonator and stepped back to admire his craftsmanship. He didn’t need the two cops, and he didn’t need to wait until nighttime to set up the building. He could sidle away now and watch the whole riot on television. He walked back up the stairs and past the guard. It was just two o’clock.

  As he made his way through the lobby he saw a harried man talking to the security desk. The building wasn’t officially open for business yet, but plenty of people had stopped in now and again. Something about the man was out of place. Sparks couldn’t see his face, just the back of his suit, his slightly ragged hair, his posture crouched as though trying to shield his right shoulder from something. As Sergeant Sparks cocked his head to watch the man, who was gesturing frantically now at the poor schlub behind the desk, he walked face first into another man at the door of the building.

  He sprung back, but the other guy had fallen to the floor. Around seventy by the look of him. Frail, in a double-breasted suit on one of the hottest days of the year. Probably had come into the building to take in the air conditioning. He was sprawled now across the great green marble tiles, clutching his right knee with both hands.