“Jenna. That’s your best friend, correct?” Hillary asks.
“Yes.” Josh is uneasy, lost in thought. “Hill, I need to talk with you about something. I know you don’t like to discuss it, so I’ve never asked.”
“Honey, you can ask me anything.”
“Do you know why Walter felt the need to hire a bodyguard?”
Hillary’s eyes wander around the room. “What, dear?”
“Was he in danger?”
She pats her lap. “Come here, Adele.”
Her discomfort is palpable to Josh. He watches as she rakes her fingers across Adele’s forehead.
“I’m sorry, Hill,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make—”
“No need, dear.”
He can hear the cat purring. “It’s just that over these past few months, Jenna and I have been finding out more and more about the company.”
“Shh!” she says.
Josh doesn’t know if she’s talking to the cat or to him. “We’ve discovered a boatload of information that could explain—”
“I said shh!” She looks around in what looks like three different directions, then whispers, “They’re listening.”
Josh tracks Hillary’s eye movements around the room. Medium-gray walls with ornate rectangular trim surround a fireplace with a few silver knickknacks, candlesticks, and photos on the mantel, a slender glass lamp with a Tiffany shade sitting atop a side table hugging the sectional he is currenting sitting on.
He walks to the mantel, picks up the knickknacks one by one.
“Walter already did that.”
“So he knew. That’s why he hired—”
“We used to talk in the study. Walter and I.” She nods her head to the room on the other side of the rounded foyer.
Josh turns toward Hillary, puts his arm up like an usher. “Shall we?”
“WALTER CONSTANTLY COMBED this room for cameras and bugs. And I’ve barely left the house since he died. I think we’re safe here.”
Hillary takes a trashcan from underneath the desk in the study and untapes a key. She takes the top piece of trim that forms one of the rectangles along the wall and flips it upward. She takes the bottom piece and flips it downward. Then she takes the left piece and flips it toward the window, revealing a tiny keyhole.
“He didn’t trust anybody, not even our contractors.” She slides the key inside. “He was quite the handyman, though. He fashioned this pathetic excuse for a safe. Simple drywall and hinges. But it works.”
“It’s kinda brilliant.” Josh holds his latest breath as Hillary opens the door.
At first glance he sees a large cylindrical tube, neon yellow in color.
“About a week before he was killed, they ransacked the place,” Hillary says. “Thank God he’d already moved this stuff into the safe, but that didn’t stop them from looking here in the study. All the books there behind you? All on the floor.”
The enormity of the collection in front of him causes his mouth to drop. The wall-to-wall bookcase extends from the floor to the fourteen-foot ceiling, with thousands of novels, reference compendiums, and art anthologies, all standing at attention, spine out.
“Whoa.” Josh’s head rolls a full one-eighty, his gaze landing back at the contents of the safe. “What was he trying to protect?”
“Himself.”
She grabs the neon tube and hands it to Josh.
“What’s this?”
“You’re holding original plans for the building.”
“The new skyscraper?” He squeezes the yellow tube like an excited kid, Greg Brady bunching his father’s architectural plans. He pops the top, pulls out two blueprints, and begins to unroll them onto the desk.
“Yes, Élan’s ‘eighth wonder of the world,’ as they call it,” Hillary says. “This particular blueprint and elevation explorations are the only early designs he stole. See if you can guess why.”
Josh scans the blueprint of the South Tower, his eyes moving from top to bottom—penthouse office space, no doubt for James West and his minions; fourteen floors of ancillary office space; two floors of meeting spaces, connected to an enormous lobby; then sub-basement floors for storage and additional underground parking.
“This is the South Tower,” Josh says. “It was the first of the three towers they completed. I’ve been there. Am I missing something?”
Hillary points to a section of blank space. “This.”
Josh correlates the space where Hillary is pointing on the blueprint to the same space on the elevation. By looking at both, he can tell there’s an entire half floor divided in between the sublevel two and sublevel three, from midway between the storage rooms all the way to the far-right foundation wall. The area is unmarked, with no direct elevator access.
“What is this? Some sort of workaround to an existing subterranean feature?” Again, he compares the elevation to the blueprint. The areas around the vacant space are somewhat of a maze, with hallways looping around it to access other rooms. “No, this is something else.”
“Here.” Her finger points to a wall at the end of a hallway. “This is the entrance. Walter told me you can access a stairway that leads down into the secret floor.”
“I’ve seen that hallway many times. I have a storage room around the corner, where I keep our event prep. There’s nothing at the end of that hallway, just a wall with a thermostat and a security camera in the corner.”
She laughs.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“You think a state-of-the-art building is going to have floors run by a thermostat?”
“You think the thermostat is fake?”
“I think it’s how you enter the space. Some sort of key system.”
“Or maybe it’s a real thermostat. This entire space is simply storage, maybe they need a thermostat to regulate the temperature.” Josh points to the blueprint. “See, here’s my storage room. Right here around that corner.”
“Don’t believe me?” She reaches into the safe, pulls out what looks like an inhaler. She hands it to him.
He takes the white, oval-shaped, flat piece of plastic with red and yellow bulbs embedded on top, rubs it in his hands. It’s thinner than his, with no USB port. “What is this?”
“The key.”
“To the secret floor?” His eyes light up.
The key is in the details, he thinks.
“Yes. Walter said he had a few meetings on the missing floor. Some group he was a part of.”
“What kind of group?”
“That’s what he was trying to figure out. He said he got mixed up with a group that West brought in to help with mergers and acquisitions. Walter didn’t talk about it much. But whenever he did, it made him angry.”
“I’ve never heard of such a group.” Josh looks at the key, pats his pants to make sure his is still there. “May I keep this? I want to compare it to something I already have.”
He pulls out the SSD, shows it to her.
She takes it, turns it around. “Definitely similar. Looks like somebody had it fashioned into something else.”
“May I take yours, have somebody compare them? Jenna’s lawyer says he has a guy who knows about this kind of—”
Hillary shakes her head. She places Walter’s oval key back in the safe, then she rolls up the plans and places them back in the tube. She hands it to Josh. “I can’t have them link anything back to me.”
“I wasn’t going to try to use it, I just want to figure out what it is.”
“Josh, how long have you been coming by now?” she asks.
“I don’t know, maybe four, five months?”
“And how many times have you talked about Jack Ryan, or The Americans?”
“That doesn’t mean I want to—”
“If you want to break into the secret room, you’ll have to use your own key.” She hands him the plans. “Here, you can take these. There were plenty of these floating around.”
“No problem.” As Josh takes the pla
ns, his face lights up.
Hillary notices. “See?”
“A secret group. That meets on a missing floor. I can hardly believe it.”
“Be safe, sweet Josh.” Hillary pats him on the shoulder. “Just remember, they’re the ones who killed my Walter.”
C h a p t e r 2 2
“I COULD KILL them. They are still breathing down our necks about the goddamn hard drive.”
James West places his oval key back in his pocket as his guest walks down the stairs in front of him. In a thundering crawl, the wall closes behind them.
They descend into the secret floor.
On the wall to the left of them hangs a computer monitor, with a view of the hallway outside. A wire extends from the monitor down to a small laptop resting on a vintage school desk. The computer has logged them in:
7:40pm JAMES WEST, ÉLAN CEO ID#00101
7:40pm BILLY DONOVAN, CONSULTANT ID#00109
“Who?” Billy asks.
“Penance and the other detective from Union Square.” West follows his guest down the stairs. “Pricks won’t let it go.”
The two men proceed down a long narrow hallway, the swathe of cement blocks broken only by three metal doors. On each door is a full-bleed presidential photo etched in steel with a burgundy fill—George Washington on the left, Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover on the right. West uses his key to enter Reagan and flips the light switch.
Can lights from the ceiling struggle to clarify the room—a dark metal conference table surrounded by twelve folding chairs, a stand-alone storage unit made of ebony-stained particle board, a black wine fridge resting in the corner. West grabs a bottle of Chardonnay and two plastic cups.
As Billy Donovan takes his usual seat at the conference room table, West paces back and forth on the cement floor. The sound of his shoes reverberates through the chamber in a muted clip clap, a drumbeat in harmony with a strange hum in the background.
“And now we have another problem.” West sips his wine, slides the second cup to Billy.
“We?” As usual, Billy Donovan is too tall for the folding chair. He shifts his torso side to side to settle in. “No thanks, I’m more of a brown liquor kind of guy.”
“Yes, we. You’ve still got the hard drive, right?”
“Which problem are we talking about first? I’m confused, because you just said we have another problem, and now you wanna talk about why the detectives are breathing down our necks again.”
“I swear, Billy. For a hired hitman, you sure have a lot of opinions.”
“What?” He laughs. “You’re so goddamn paranoid.”
“We need to show control of the situation. They like reassurance.”
“Who?”
West points to the camera in the far corner. “Them.”
“Oh, them.” Billy looks at the camera. He waves. “A camera? Down here? That’s new.”
“Their trust is waning.” West takes a seat in a folding chair across from Billy. He interlocks his fingers to keep his hands from shaking and bangs them on the table. “They want answers, they want the money.”
“They’ve made billions off of companies just like us, what’s a couple hundred million?”
“It’s quite a lot to them.” West throws back his wine, then pours another glass. “Lennox’s hard drive. There’s evidence of the account, right?”
“Evidence, yes. From his ledgers, we know a ballpark of how much he skimmed, roughly 230 million. Took some time, but I’ve combed the drive—all the deleted files and messages, Internet history. I don’t see any indication of where he put the money.”
West leans back, folds his arms. “Jenna knows.”
“Jenna’s in police custody. Her old Élan laptop has been secured by the police as well.”
West claps his hands. “There’s our answer.”
“No. No, it’s not. I thought I could break in again, but since the last time, the NYPD seems to have learned their lesson. It’s like Fort Knox over there, and my back-pocket buddies were both fired for incompetence.”
“Why wasn’t it backed up before she left?”
“Because back then, Élan didn’t back up laptops, just desktops. Lennox and Jenna knew what they were doing.”
“So the hard drive you stole from police evidence, the one these pricks have been screaming about, is absolutely worthless?”
“Uh, no. It’s got some pretty damning information about the way we’ve been doing business. Lennox was keeping track of where a chunk of the profits went.” Billy points to the camera, whistles. “And those messages he sent back and forth to you, the goddamn CEO of Élan, talking about who, what, and why. They’re on there too.”
“So the hard drive could implicate me conspiring with a foreign entity about the grand opening plan, and it’ll look like we killed Lennox Holcomb to keep it quiet.”
“Yep.” Billy’s lips smack on final consonant, the sound bouncing off the cement walls.
C h a p t e r 2 3
JOSH CROUCHES DOWN even more, his shoes digging into a pile of concrete remnants.
He had planned to visit the secret room at the still-under-construction Élan International headquarters the first chance he got, but the planning of the grand opening had gotten in the way, not to mention that his anxiety had prompted some hesitation to go alone. A few days passed before he finally lured Jenna’s old roommate Tracy Heissman into joining him by appealing to her innate journalistic curiosity.
After taking the new subway line to the nearly completed building, they had to go around to the Hudson River entrance due to construction restraints.
“Yep, that’s West,” Josh says.
“Oh my God, do you think he saw us?” Tracy asks. She smiles.
“No, we’re standing behind a cement mixer. In a construction parking lot.”
“Exactly. Then why are you hiding?” Tracy walks out into the light a bit, her navy jumper outlined by the harsh floodlights behind them. She sees West drive off his in his car. “Black Mercedes; you were right. Good thing we didn’t go inside, he could’ve spotted us.”
“Is he gone?”
“Yes. Wait, there’s someone else coming out.” Tracy walks backward toward Josh. She squints, then her eyes bulge. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“What?” Josh peeks his head above the hood of the cement mixer, sees a handsome young man with a crew cut looking at his phone, lighting a cigarette. “Who is that?”
“Easy, boy,” she says. “That’s the guy I saw on the stairs the night Walter was killed.”
“Billy Donovan? You sure?”
“Yes! Remember I told you I saw him at the office not long after, got his name from the sign-in sheet. I remember faces, especially that one. Hard to believe he’s a murderer.”
Josh watches the man walk back and forth, looking at his phone.
“From that angle, he kinda looks like that model from the—”
“From the jeans campaign!” Tracy remembers. “Yes, I was just thinking the same thing. God, he was hot, remember?”
“Oh, I remember. I booked you both for that gig. One of our top male models at the agency. You kept trying to get me to test him, figure out if he was gay or not.”
“Remember after the makeup girl went missing from the set, and you volunteered to touch up his chest.”
“I was young, Trace. We both were.”
A car enters the lot, shines its headlights on them.
“Duck!” Josh says.
“Josh, the night crew have so many cars and trucks around here, they’re not going to notice us way over here.”
“You don’t know that,” Josh says. “Take a picture. Shawn says we need more proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“Any of it. West, Billy Donovan, the shady company. Shawn’s not believing any of what Jenna and I have been telling him.”
She pulls out her phone, zooms in on him, sees him flick a cigarette on the ground. “Josh, we’re too far away. It’s too dark. It’ll
be too grainy.”
“Oh my God. Just take it.”
“No! This is a company phone. God, I almost took it too. You need to calm down.”
“You need to get a new phone.”
She ignores him, watches the car slow to a stop right in front of Billy.
The man walks to the car’s passenger window.
“What are they doing?” Josh is still crouched, almost on the ground. “What’s happening?”
“Shh, he’s talking to the driver. Oh, I see you found me, Mr. Uber. Yes, yes, I did, handsome man with a crew cut. Why are you looking at me funny, I’m just a white guy alone at a construction site late at night. Oh that’s okay, no problem, get in, you look trustworthy. Don’t mind if I do.”
“Are you seriously Mystery Science Theater-ing them?”
“They’re gone.” Tracy walks back into the light. “You ready for this?”
“Wait.” Josh stands, takes the SSD out of his front pocket. “I’m not even sure this is a key.”
“What the hell, Josh? Then what are we even doing here?”
“Even if it is a key, it’d probably log us in on some computer somewhere. You know, like it does at the old building? Come to think of it, that’s probably why Hillary wouldn’t let me take Walter’s.”
“You fucking serious?” She turns, looks at Josh, who’s clutching the key next to his heart like a teddy bear. Tracy folds her arms. “You’re just now thinking about this?”
“I’m sorry. I was excited.”
“So you talk about this for days, I finally agree, you pull me outta my house, away from my writing, promising some sort of secret floor access, and now you’re just gonna chicken out?”
Josh swallows, smiles, scrunches his face. “Yes?”
C h a p t e r 2 4
“MY MOUTH IS getting dry.” Haylee continues to breathe in and out, in and out, in and out. “I think I’m gonna faint.”
“You’re doing great.” Micah holds her hand even tighter. He looks to his left at the other men in the room, each holding their partner’s hand, each woman in varying stages of pregnancy. On paneled walls behind the couples are framed pictures of the life of Jesus—Mary pregnant on a camel with Joseph by their side, Mary with the baby in the manger, Mary at the cross praying to Jesus. On an easel next to a window rests a bright white sign standing in stark contrast to the night sky peeking in from outside. The sign reads “CHURCH OF ST. LUKE AND ST. MATTHEW’S LAMAZE CLASS, EVERY FIRST WEDNESDAY AT 8 P.M.”
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