Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  It had been up on the eighteenth floor, but was heading their way.

  About ten seconds later, the doors parted.

  The man and woman who’d been standing closest each took a step forward without looking up from their phones.

  And went down.

  There was no car.

  Odds were, they might have survived. It was not as though they stepped into the shaft twenty floors up.

  They plunged, but only as far as the basement. There was only one floor below the lobby level. There was no parking garage beneath the Gormley Building, so the elevator did not go any great distance below the street.

  The shaft, however, did extend slightly farther than the basement level, into a pit that accommodated elevator servicing.

  It was into this pit that the two people fell.

  As they pitched forward through the open doorway, screams erupted from those directly behind them. No one else blindly followed them into the shaft.

  Once the cries of “Oh my God!” and “Holy shit!” and “Fuck!” subsided, a casually dressed man with buds in his ears leaned into the opening and looked down. The two people were rag dolls, their arms and legs a twisted mess. The floor of the shaft was dirty, and the grimy cement walls were lined with cables and tracks.

  The fallen man was struggling to move one of his arms. The woman could be heard moaning.

  “They’re alive!” said the earbuds guy, glancing back at the others as he yanked on the wires that led up to his head. “Call 911!”

  Someone with a phone in hand was already punching in the three numbers.

  The man with the earbuds leaned back into the shaft and shouted down to the two injured people. “Help’s coming! Hang in there!”

  A breathless uniformed security guard arrived, pushing his way through the onlookers until he got to the opening. “What’s going on? What’s happened?”

  The earbud guy said, “Door opened, no car, they went straight in.”

  The security guard’s eyes went wide. “Basement,” he said. “We can get closer to them if we open the elevator doors in the—”

  And that was when they heard a mechanical noise. They both looked up.

  What they saw was the bottom of the elevator car, which had been, all this time, sitting at the second floor.

  It was now slowly moving in a downward direction.

  “Fuck me,” said the security guard, backing out of the shaft and pulling the other man with him.

  The car’s descent was bafflingly and maddeningly slow.

  The base of the car had now moved below the top of the opening to the shaft. The inner doors of the elevator car were closed. While there was still a chance to see to the bottom, the earbud guy noticed that the fallen man had actually managed to get to his knees. He was leaning over the woman, checking on her.

  As the car descended halfway past the opening, the security guard said, “Shit.” He reached over and hit the Up button, hoping that would halt the elevator’s progress, or at least make it come to a stop at the lobby level.

  That way, rescue crews would still be able to reach the injured by way of the basement elevator door. All the security guard had to do was grab the special elevator key. All elevators had a small, peepholesized opening in the door into which the key could be inserted. Once turned, it would open the doors.

  It seemed like a plan.

  Briefly.

  The elevator car maintained its slow descent.

  It did not stop at the lobby level.

  It continued, slowly, on its inexorable downward path.

  The injured man, no longer visible, could be heard shouting, “Make it stop! Stop the fucking thing!”

  Frantically, the security guard, unable to think of anything else to do, kept jabbing at the button. “Come on! Stop, you son of a bitch!”

  The top of the elevator car now dropped below the level of the lobby floor.

  The screams from the man in the pit grew more intense, and were joined by the woman. A bone-chilling, two-person chorus of death.

  The elevator car, like some cunning animal moving in on its injured prey, maintained its slow descent until it finally came to a stop.

  The screaming ceased.

  Thirty-Seven

  Eugene Clement was reading a print edition of the New York Times while, across the table from him in the hotel restaurant, his wife was looking at stories on a tablet. On the plate before her was her unfinished breakfast. Some scraps of scrambled eggs, one and a half slices of toast, a rasher of bacon.

  They’d exchanged only a few words since the night before, when Estelle had started asking him about that man he’d been talking to, then tried to move on to the subject of their sex life, which he had no interest in discussing. He’d been partly honest with her when he’d used stress as an excuse. He had been under a considerable mental strain lately. But the real truth was, he had lost interest. Not in sex. Just in sex with Estelle.

  He’d found ways, back in their hometown, and when he traveled the country, without her, on business, to meet his needs.

  Discreetly.

  What worried him as he sat here at breakfast had nothing to do with coming up with excuses for why Estelle didn’t get his motor running the way she once did. What had him worried was her suspicion that their trip to New York had nothing to do with their anniversary.

  Which was, of course, correct.

  He’d been having to enjoy the Flyovers’ activities from afar. It just wasn’t very satisfying, watching a bombing in Seattle when you were several hundred miles away. But he wanted to have a front row seat to see how the New York coastal elites reacted when the rubes struck back. Clement believed he had been successful, up to now, in keeping his wife from thinking that the Flyovers would ever resort to violence. She appeared persuaded that the criticisms of the Flyovers were unfounded.

  But then she started asking about the man he’d spoken to briefly. Said she had seen him on more than one occasion.

  Clearly, Clement and Bucky had to be more careful moving forward.

  Eugene looked over his newspaper to find his coffee, noticed the food still on his wife’s plate, and asked, “You didn’t like your breakfast?”

  “It was fine,” Estelle said, not looking away from the tablet.

  “I liked mine,” he said. “Not that you asked.”

  She looked up from the tablet. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Estelle said, “Maybe you need to let someone else lead the charge.”

  Clement blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You say you’re stressed out,” she said. “So let someone else do it. Let someone else speak for the Flyovers.”

  “The work’s not done,” he said. “I have much to do.”

  “And when will it be done?” she asked. “Tell me. What is it, exactly, that you’re hoping to achieve? What is it you want?”

  This was not like her. Challenging him on his mission.

  “Awareness, Estelle,” he said. “I want to raise awareness.”

  She sighed. “Like with that godforsaken occupation?” she asked, loudly enough to be heard beyond their table.

  Clement glanced around quickly to see whether any of their fellow diners had noticed, then leaned over the table and glared at her. “For God’s sake, keep your voice down,” he whispered. “And we achieved a lot with that.”

  Estelle shook her head sadly. “A bunch of grown men having a sit-in in a national park, looking like fools. Ten days you were there. It was ridiculous. God knows how long it would have gone on if one of your brilliant partners in crime hadn’t tried to sneak out to get Kentucky Fried Chicken and got himself nabbed by the FBI.”

  Clement leaned back in his chair. “What’s gotten into you lately?”

  “Certainly not you,” she said icily.

  He felt his cheeks go hot. “You don’t win a war with a single battle,” he told her. “What we achieved with the occupation may not be evident for some time. The
se things are cumulative.”

  She kept her voice to a whisper this time, but her anger was evident. “Who are you at war with, Eugene? Tell me? The other people in this restaurant? Our waiter? The people at the front desk? Are you at war with them?”

  Eugene breathed in slowly. Estelle had never been able to see the big picture.

  “A revolution takes time,” he said.

  “A revolution,” she said dismissively. “You’re Paul Revere, is that it?”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “And all these people who follow you, your acolytes. Half of them are out of their minds, you know. They’re lunatics. Blowing up coffee shops. The things you write, the things you say, they get people riled up.” She paused. “I know you’d never want them to do those things, but you have to know you have an influence.”

  Clement took a moment to compose himself. Slowly, he said, “I am here, right now, in this city, to celebrate our anniversary. I do not want to talk about my work. I do not want to talk about … us. So get out your goddamn guidebook and pick some goddamn thing for us to do today while I go take a goddamn piss.”

  Estelle’s jaw dropped.

  He threw his napkin onto the table and pushed back his chair. As he walked away, he took out his phone, opened an app, and scanned the latest headlines. There were two breaking stories. Details were sketchy, but there had been another elevator accident. Two people were believed dead. And on West Forty-Ninth Street, a taxi had exploded, killing two on the street, and the driver.

  Clement slipped the phone back into his jacket and continued to the men’s washroom, which was down a short hallway off the lobby. He pushed open the door and walked in slowly.

  The room appeared, at first, to be empty. He stood, briefly, in front of the mirror, ostensibly checking his appearance, running his hand over his thinning gray hair. He turned and took a step toward a row of urinals, glancing over his shoulder at the three stalls. Two of the doors hung open, but the third was closed. In the gap at the bottom could be seen two shoes.

  Eugene chose the middle urinal and unzipped. While he stood there, he cleared his throat. Not once, but three distinctive times.

  From behind the closed stall, a voice Clement recognized as Bucky’s said, “You up to speed?”

  “Yes,” Clement said. “It’s been quite a morning for the good folks of New York.”

  “Yeah,” Bucky said from inside the stall.

  “Any problems?”

  “No.” Bucky paused, then said, “The cab was a Prius.”

  “Nice touch,” Clement said, giving his dick a shake.

  “I set it to go off sixty seconds after I got out. Any longer than that and another passenger might have noticed it in the back.”

  “Where exactly did it go off?”

  “Out front of the Klaxton Hotel.”

  “Nice that it wasn’t this one,” Clement said. Sarcastically, he added, “I would hate for anything to put a damper on our anniversary weekend.” He paused, then said, “Speaking of which, you need to be more careful. My wife’s noticed you.”

  “Shit. What’d you say?”

  “I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Clement zipped up. “At least Estelle isn’t going to find us talking in here.”

  He went back over to the row of sinks, where he washed his hands slowly and methodically. The door opened and another man walked in.

  Clement said, “Morning.”

  Just loud enough to send a signal to Bucky that their conversation was over.

  He held his hands under the dryer, but they were still damp when he returned to the hotel dining room. When he went back to the table, Estelle was not there. He scanned the room for her before sitting down.

  She’d gone back to their room, he figured. She was still angry with him. Fuck it, he thought. I’m going to have another cup of coffee.

  He spotted the waiter and waved a hand in the air. But then Estelle appeared and sat back down in her seat. She had several flyers in her hand advertising various city attractions.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Just sorting out what I’m going to do today,” she said. “I got tired of hunting through the guidebook. I got these by the front desk.”

  She fanned them out on the table like playing cards, saw one she liked, and picked it up.

  “The Guggenheim,” she said.

  Clement nodded. “Sure, we can do that.”

  Estelle shook her head. “That’s what I’m doing.” She gathered up the other flyers and tossed them to his side of the table. “I’m sure you’ll find something just as interesting.”

  Thirty-Eight

  Barbara saw a tweet about the exploding taxi on East Forty-Ninth Street. She went to the link but there wasn’t much more detail there than there had been on the Twitter feed.

  She was in her kitchen nook, the laptop on her table, sipping on cold coffee, and had been thinking maybe she should get dressed, wishing she had an apartment as nice as Chris Vallins’s, when she saw the news.

  “God,” she said, reading about the taxi.

  Another ISIS-inspired nutcase, she figured. Once or twice a year, it seemed, New York had to endure some numbnut, would-be terrorist, acting alone, who had put together some half-assed bomb and then tried to detonate it in Penn Station or the Port Authority or Times Square. Sometimes these assholes did real damage, and other times the things went off before they could even get them out of their apartment. The ones that often created the most mayhem didn’t have to build a bomb at all. They just got behind the wheel of a truck and ran people down.

  These days, any time anything bad happened, the first thought was: Is it terrorism? But what happened on Forty-Ninth Street might turn out not to be a bombing. Maybe a gas main under the street blew up as the taxi was driving over it. It was possible the cab blew up for reasons unrelated to a bomb. The incident had only happened in the last half hour, and not much was known.

  Barbara briefly considered turning on the TV, then decided she’d check later.

  She reread the column she had posted late the previous day. There were a few more comments, none remotely helpful. She was going to try again today to get some kind of statement from any governmental body that would talk to her. Homeland, FBI, the NYPD, somebody. She’d call Animal Control if she thought anyone there had a clue. Why, she wanted to ask them, had at least two families connected to these elevator deaths been asked to keep their mouths shut?

  Barbara looked through her own contacts in her phone, making a note of those who might be helpful, then went online looking for other possible leads. She made a list of the people she wanted to reach.

  She had a source inside the NYPD. Not an actual cop or a detective, but a woman in the city’s public information office. Barbara had her private cell phone number. She brought up the contact on her own phone and tapped it.

  Several seconds later, a woman said, “Hey.”

  “Yeah, hi. It’s me. Long time no chat.”

  “I was starting to feel neglected. And relieved at the same time,” the woman said.

  “Look, I’m trying to nail something down and I’m not getting anywhere yet.”

  “On what?”

  “The elevator accidents on Monday and Tuesday. I’m getting the sense interest in those has gone way up the food chain but I don’t know why. Like maybe Homeland or the FBI is sniffing around. Why the hell would that be happening?”

  “If that’s true, I haven’t heard anything. But—”

  “They’re like industrial accidents. But some of the families of the victims have been told to keep a low profile on this. Not raise a fuss. So—”

  “Shut up and listen.”

  Barbara paused. “Okay.”

  “It’s not two. It’s three.”

  “What?”

  “Are you near a TV?”

  “No, I live on Neptune. Of course I’m near—”

  “Turn it on.”

  Barbara got up out of the kitc
hen chair and strolled into the living area of her apartment, the cell phone still glued to her ear. She picked up the remote with her free hand, fired up the flat screen, and went to one of the twenty-four-hour news channels.

  “—in three days,” said a woman with a mike in hand. While Barbara recognized the reporter, Liza Bentley, she did not recognize the building she was standing out front of. But she watched the crawl at the bottom of the screen, which read: Two Dead in 7th Avenue Elevator Disaster.

  “This is not happening,” Barbara said under her breath.

  “You talking to me?” said her source.

  “What’s going on?” Barbara asked. “This can’t be coincidence.”

  “Well,” the woman said slowly, as if debating if she should continue, “I did hear something.”

  Barbara muted the TV. “What did you hear?”

  “There was nothing on paper, no emails. But a lot of calls have been made to landlords.”

  “Landlords?”

  “Building owners, property managers, that bunch. The word was to keep it on the down-low.”

  “‘Down-low’?”

  “I’ve always wanted to say that,” the woman said. “Anyway, the city doesn’t have enough elevator inspectors to do this on their own, so everyone’s been asked to check their buildings.”

  “For what?” Barbara asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever’s happening—a defect or whatever—they’re afraid it’s going viral.”

  “Can elevators get a virus?”

  “I don’t mean it like that.” The woman paused. “Unless, you know, maybe I do. Thing is, there’s more than sixty thousand elevators in the city. It’s going to take a while to get to all of them.”

  “Then why not go public?” Barbara asked. “Get the word out? Why haven’t you put out a statement?”

  “Hey, I just work here. They want to tell the world something, I’m on it.”

  “Panic,” Barbara said.

  “What?”

  “They don’t want to start a panic.”

  “If there’s anything to actually panic about.”

  Barbara laughed. “People don’t always need a sound reason to go into panic mode.”

  “Look, I gotta go. Let me leave you with one bit of advice.”