Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  The cell phone in his pocket rang. He brought it out, saw who it was, and put the phone to his ear.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where are you?” Lois Delgado asked.

  “On my way in.”

  “Yeah, well, get a move on. We’ve been reassigned.”

  “To what?”

  “They’re pulling together some kind of task force on the elevator accidents. There’s three now.”

  “Three?”

  “Yeah. Two might be coincidence. But three’s a clusterfuck. When the captain told them about our Otto guy, they pulled us in.”

  “We don’t know that there’s a connection.” He paused. “But we don’t know that there isn’t.”

  “I’m hearing Homeland is involved.”

  Bourque said nothing. He looked up the street, saw the nanny and Amanda turn the corner.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think they must be expecting mass panic. The mayor’s about to make some kind of statement.”

  “I feel calmer already,” Bourque said.

  Forty-Two

  Thanks for coming,” Mayor Richard Headley said to the gathered media in the press room at City Hall.

  Valerie had emailed all the usual suspects a release saying the mayor would be making an important statement at noon. She offered no further details. At least a dozen reporters and news editors emailed back, asking what he’d be talking about. Valerie did not respond.

  That pretty much guaranteed everyone would show up.

  The room was jammed with reporters. Print, network, radio. Many of them were chatting, asking each other if they had any idea what was going on. Valerie provided a short introduction that amounted to little more than “Mayor Richard Headley,” before turning over the podium to her boss.

  Standing well off to the side were Glover and Vallins. Onstage with the mayor were Police Chief Annette Washington and Martin Fleck, the elevator expert.

  The mayor cleared his throat after his thank-you and welcome, and took a drink of water from a glass left for him on the podium. He was about to speak when someone shouted out a question.

  “Was the taxi explosion terrorism related?”

  The question appeared to throw off the mayor before he’d had a chance to begin reading from his prepared text. That one reporter’s question was a dam burster. Others began shouting questions.

  “How many were killed in the explosion?”

  “Was the driver a terrorist? Is this a suicide bombing?”

  “Was the bomb left in the car by a passenger?”

  The mayor held up a hand and waited until everyone had quieted down.

  “Any questions about the taxi incident I will leave for Chief Washington here. Right now, I’m going to address another potential concern for the citizens of New York. As you know, there have been three tragic incidents involving elevators in the last three days. The first, on Monday, claimed four lives, including well-known entertainment producer Sherry D’Agostino and lawyer Barton Fieldgate. A terrible loss to the city, and to their families. At the time, it was believed some sort of random malfunction was the cause. But then, on Tuesday, another elevator incident took the life of a renowned Russian scientist, Fanya Petrov, who was here doing work at Rockefeller University. I have been in contact with the Russian ambassador and assured him we are doing everything we can to find out what happened. But even before I could make much headway there, we had another incident this morning in which two people were killed.”

  A stirring went through the crowd.

  Headley said, “We have reason to suspect that these three incidents are not coincidental and are in fact related.”

  “How?” shouted one reporter.

  “I’m getting to that,” the mayor said, giving the reporter a harsh shut the fuck up and let me finish look. “Without getting into the details, there is a commonality to all these events that has raised our concern level. So I have directed the city’s inspection force to begin a comprehensive check of all elevators in all five boroughs. Needless to say, this is a time-consuming task, so we are asking for the assistance of property management departments to initiate their own inspections.”

  The assembled media was getting increasingly restless. Another reporter shouted out, “So are we talking a mechanical issue here? Some failed part that’s in lots of different elevators across the city? And if so, why are the failures happening at the same time?”

  “This is the sort of thing we’re looking into,” Headley said, irritated. The constant interruptions were throwing him off his game. “I can say that—”

  “My information is that the FBI or Homeland Security are involved, which would be kind of weird if it’s just a mechanical issue.”

  A different voice. Female. Headley squinted, trying to see past the lights to spot who had asked the question.

  “Would that be Ms. Matheson?”

  “Yes,” said Barbara. “Am I wrong about that? That the feds have taken an interest?”

  The mayor paused a moment. “DHS is involved, yes,” he said slowly.

  “Was it Homeland Security, then, that was going to the families of the deceased and asking them to keep a low profile? To not ask too many questions, at least at this stage?”

  “I’m not in a position to answer that,” Headley said. “We’d need someone from Homeland to field that.”

  “Is it because they didn’t want to cause a panic before they had more details?”

  “I’d encourage you to give them a call.”

  “Oh, I’ve been trying,” Barbara said. “Wouldn’t Homeland’s involvement suggest what you’re dealing with here is, in fact, terrorism? That these elevator malfunctions are actually sabotage? That they’re deliberate acts?”

  The buzz that was moving through the room began to grow louder.

  A reporter from the Daily News shouted out, “If this is deliberate, who’s doing it? Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

  The mayor looked to Chief Washington. She nodded and stepped forward to the microphone.

  “No one has claimed responsibility,” she said. “And just to clarify what the mayor was saying, we do not know with one hundred percent certainty that there was deliberate tampering. But we are seriously looking at that possibility.”

  “Is this related to the Flyovers?” asked a woman from Fox News.

  “We have no reason to—”

  “Because,” she continued, “someone claiming to be inspired by them just claimed responsibility for the taxi bombing. It’s on Twitter.”

  Washington blinked. Everyone in the room turned to look at the woman from Fox.

  “I’m not familiar with that tweet,” Washington said, grimacing. “Twitter is not my number one news source.”

  “Is it possible the explosion and the elevator incident at the Gormley Building on Seventh Avenue are linked? They happened at exactly the same time.”

  “Again, that will be part of our investigation. We’re in the very early stages. I’d like to turn it back over to the mayor.”

  The mayor resumed his spot at the podium and said, “Thank you, Chief. Moving on, I’d like to point out that—”

  “Is it safe to take an elevator in this city?”

  It was Barbara’s question. The room went silent as everyone waited for the mayor’s answer. But instead of doing that, the mayor turned to Fleck and waved him forward.

  “Um, I’d like to introduce Martin Fleck, from the Department of Buildings. He can speak to the issue of elevator safety and deal with the more technical questions.”

  As Fleck approached the mike, the mayor whispered, “Try to keep it upbeat.”

  Fleck gave him a sharp look, as if to say, Seriously? But as he stood before the podium he did his best to project calm.

  “To address that last question,” he said, “the facts bear out that elevators are very, very safe. Accidents are extremely rare. In fact, most fatalities related to elevators involve servicemen, n
ot the general public. There are many safety features built into any elevator system that—”

  A woman from the Post cut him off: “Yeah, but we’re not talking about that kind of thing. We’re talking about terrorists cutting the cables.”

  Fleck held up a palm to the crowd. “No one said anything about cutting cables, and no one up here used the word ‘terrorist.’ The cables were not, as you say, cut on these elevators.”

  “Then what did happen?”

  Fleck said, “It’s more like they were hacked.”

  There was a sudden eruption of questions. With everyone shouting queries at once, Fleck looked like a bunny cornered by a wolf pack.

  “How,” Barbara managed to shout over the others, “do you hack an elevator? Is that actually possible?”

  “Well, it would be very difficult,” Fleck said. “It would demand a very high level of expertise. And even if you had that kind of knowledge, you would need a device that—”

  “What kind of device?” It was the woman from the Post again.

  “In simplest terms, it’s like a TV remote that allows one to control all of an elevator’s functions.”

  The guy from NY1 said, “That sounds like something out of a Mission: Impossible movie. You can’t do that in the real world, can you?”

  “If you knew all the various security codes, yes, in fact, you can. It can be plugged right into a building’s elevator system. Now, if someone were outside the building, and knew how to access the overall security system, one could then tap into the elevator system.”

  Fleck, now that he was really getting into his area of expertise, was starting to look more comfortable, but Headley appeared increasingly uneasy.

  “Holy shit,” one of the reporters exclaimed.

  A tall, handsome man from the local NBC affiliate finally got a question in. “But a device like that would be very hard to get hold of, wouldn’t it?”

  “In fact,” said Fleck, “no. You can buy one for about five hundred dollars on—”

  The mayor came up alongside Fleck and edged him away from the microphone. “Thanks very much, Martin. I’ll take it from here. The reason I called this news conference was to inform the public that we are investigating all of these incidents very carefully and asking that if anyone sees something that is remotely suspicious, to please alert—”

  Barbara called out, “Excuse me!”

  The mayor ignored her. “What we are imploring people to do is—”

  “I had a question that never got answered,” Barbara said, making herself heard above the mayor.

  Headley, looking visibly pained, looked at Barbara and asked, “What question was that?”

  Barbara took half a second to compose herself, then said, sounding out each word clearly and succinctly, “Is it, or is it not, safe to take an elevator in the city of New York?”

  The mayor looked grim. Everyone in the room seemed to be holding their breath.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  Forty-Three

  Within minutes of the mayor’s “I don’t know,” the story was the lead item on all city, state, and national newscasts. CNN interrupted regular programming with its BREAKING NEWS logo, and a grim-faced Wolf Blitzer told the world how the mayor of one of the biggest, and most vertical cities in the world could not say, with any assurance whatsoever, that the city’s thousands of elevators were safe.

  “After three elevator tragedies in as many days,” Blitzer said, “New York is now facing the possibility of a serial saboteur. There is evidence to suggest that all three incidents, in random buildings across the city, are connected. Stunningly, it was revealed moments ago that these elevators may have been hacked, raising the horrifying specter that these conveyances that carry millions of people everyday could be remotely manipulated. This startling news comes at the same time as the Flyovers, a militant domestic group believed to be responsible for terrorist acts in several coastal cities, has claimed responsibility for a taxi bombing in New York that claimed not only the life of the driver but two visitors from Canada who had just stepped out of a hotel on East Forty-Ninth Street. The head of the New York Police Department could not say, one way or another, whether the Flyovers group is actually behind the taxi bombing, or if it has a hand in the elevator crisis.”

  The New York Times website updated within minutes of Mayor Richard Headley’s news conference. Its banner headline read: “Elevator Plunges Linked, Sabotage Suspected.” Below that ran a secondary headline: “Mayor Headley Fails to Calm a Nervous City.”

  The New York Daily News, predictably, was less subtle about the mayor’s inability to reassure his constituents that it was safe to get into a city elevator. Paired with a picture of the mayor looking glumly down at his notes was the headline “Nice Going, Dick,” followed by a secondary headline reading: “Head Case Doesn’t Know If Hacked Elevators Safe.”

  Immediately after the news conference, with two thumbs working at lightning speed, Barbara wrote a column on her phone and emailed it to her editor at Manhattan Today. It was posted to the website less than a minute later, under the headline “Mayor Gives City the Shaft When it Comes to Elevator Safety.”

  By Barbara Matheson

  In what has to go down in the books as one of the most disastrous press conferences in New York City history, an inept Mayor Richard Headley told the city two startling things. The first was that someone, or some group, is deliberately killing New Yorkers by taking over the operation of elevators with malicious intent. But as troubling as that news is, the second tidbit is worse: our mayor hasn’t got a clue what to do about it.

  Appearing with the chief of police and a flunky from the city department that oversees elevator safety, the mayor offered a blunt “I don’t know” when asked whether you can get into one of these devices and expect to get out of it alive. Consider what has happened since Monday. Four dead when an elevator in the Lansing Tower plunged. A visiting Russian scientist beheaded as she attempted to escape her car when it was stuck, with the doors open, between floors. And early this morning, two people crushed to death in the Gormley Building after they fell into the bottom of the shaft, and the car came down on top of them. What may happen tomorrow, and what plan, if any, does the city have to deal with this?

  As if that weren’t enough to worry about, a New York cab blew up this morning killing at least three people, but don’t ask the mayor if that has anything to do with the elevator mishaps, because he doesn’t know. What we do know is that someone claiming to be part of the Flyovers activist group posted on Twitter to claim responsibility for the bombing. Maybe they’d have copped to the elevator sabotage, too, but ran out of characters. So, bottom line is, we don’t know whether it’s safe to ride in an elevator, or a taxi. Have a nice day.

  The hashtag #goingdown started trending on Twitter within ten minutes of Headley’s remarks.

  And then big news broke.

  Media outlets were alerted to a second City Hall press conference less than an hour after the first one.

  Mayor Headley, instantly feeling the heat about not knowing how to respond to the crisis, issued a statement that he was, after consultation with the city’s police and fire chiefs, ordering that every elevator in the city be taken out of service until it could be determined that they were safe.

  Every. Single. One.

  But rather than face the press again after his disastrous earlier appearance, Headley sent someone to speak on his behalf.

  His son.

  A nervous Glover Headley took to the podium to say that the city was calling on landlords and property managers everywhere to make their elevators inoperable until they could be inspected and deemed safe, and by “safe,” he meant “not tampered with.” Instructions on how to determine whether they had been would be posted on the city’s website so as to expedite the process. Among other things, inspectors would be told to look for unauthorized modifications to the cars, and to change any passwords into building and elevator security system
s.

  Glover said the mayor appreciated the magnitude of the inconvenience this would pose to the people of New York, but he was hopeful the measure would be short-lived. Inspections were to start immediately, and it was possible many elevators would be back in operation by the end of the week, many much sooner. The non-news networks canceled regular programming to give the story blanket coverage.

  “This is an outrageous overreaction,” said one male political commentator on CNN, part of a Hollywood Squares–like cluster of pundits. “You simply cannot shut down every elevator in the biggest city in the country. We have no idea how real this threat is, and chances are more people will get hurt not being able to use elevators than might be hurt in them. This is like shutting down every road in America because there might be a couple of weak bridges out there somewhere.”

  A woman in the box next to him shot back, “Are you kidding me? Would you get on an elevator in New York today?”

  The man shot back, angrily, “Yes I would, and you know why? Because this is all a load of fake news designed to frighten people and make them submit to the will of—”

  Another man in the box above him cut in and said, “For the love of God, that’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard from you, and that’s saying something. Every time you’re warned about a possible threat, you think it’s some conspiracy to make you submit? Come on, what are you—”

  “Oh,” the first man shot back, “and I suppose you think 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. Well, I have it on good authority—”

  On Fox, the conspiracy theories went even further, where one guest speculated that the mayor, with his left-leaning, Democratic background, had manufactured the crisis as a way to make New Yorkers more fit by forcing them to take the stairs. After all, this was the same mayor who wanted all the city vehicles to be emissions free. Could you really trust someone like that? “This is the most ridiculous thing since former mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to legislate the size of soft drinks,” the guest said.

  Over on NBC, a so-called expert had been brought into the studio to tell viewers how to survive an elevator plunge.