Gridiron - Philip Kerr

Mitch turned to face the room. Everyone was just sitting around the long, polished ebony table, or lounging on the big leather sofa underneath the floor-to-ceiling window, waiting for something to happen. Looking at their watches. Yawning. Anxious to get out and go home and take a bath. Mitch decided to say nothing. There seemed to be no point in alarming them without good cause.

'Seven o'clock,' said Tony Levine. 'What the hell's keeping Aidan?' He stood up and went over to the phone.

'He's not answering,' Mitch said dully.

'I'm not calling him,' explained Levine. 'I'm calling my wife. We were supposed to be going out to Spago's tonight.'

Curtis and Coleman appeared at the door of the boardroom. The older man looked questioningly at Mitch, who shrugged back at him and shook his head.

'Couldn't we at least open a window?' said Curtis. 'This place smells worse than a dog kennel.' He began to take out his police radio.

'These windows were not designed to be opened. And they're not just bullet-proof.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means,' said Beech, 'that you won't be able to use that radio in here. The glass is an integral part of the Faraday Cage that surrounds the whole building.'

'The what?'

'The Faraday Cage. Named after Michael Faraday, who discovered the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction. Both the glass and the steel framework are designed to act as an earthed screen, to shield us from external electrical fields. Otherwise the signals emitted by the VDUs could be captured with the aid of some simple electronic surveillance equipment. And used to reconstruct the information appearing on those computer screens. A corporation like this one has to be extremely careful of electronic eavesdroppers. Any one of our competitors would pay a lot of money to get their hands on our data.'

Curtis pressed the send/receive button on his radio a couple of times as if seeking to verify what Bob Beech had told him. Hearing nothing but white noise he put the unit down on the table and nodded.

'Well, you learn something every day, I guess. Can I use your phone?'

Tony Levine cleared his throat. 'I'm afraid you won't be able to do that either,' he said perplexedly. 'The phone isn't working. At least, the outside lines aren't. I just tried to call home. It's out.'

'Out? What do you mean, out?'

'Out. As in not working.'

Curtis crossed the room angrily, snatched up the phone and stabbed out the number of New Parker Center as if he was killing ants. Then he tried 911. After a minute or so he shook his head and sighed.

'I'll check the phone in the kitchen,' volunteered Nathan Coleman. But he was soon back again, his face wearing an expression that indicated no improvement on the situation.

'How could this happen, Willis?' said Mitch.

Willis Ellery leaned back in his chair. 'All I can think is that there's been some kind of spurious tripping of the magnetic circuit-breaker that controls the telecommunications power distribution unit. That might have been caused by powering up equipment. Or it could be that Aid had to shut something down and then start it up again.'

He stood up to consider the matter further and then added, 'You know, it could be there's a general problem with all the fibre-distributed data interface. There's a local equipment room on this floor with a horizontal local area network that's connected to the computer room via a high-speed backbone LAN. I can go and check that out.'

Curtis watched him leave the room and grinned. 'High-speed backbone,' he said. 'I love that. There are times when I could use a little of that myself. You know, with all these technical experts around, Nat, it beats me that we're stuck inside an office building at seven o'clock at night.'

'Me too, Frank.'

'But doesn't it give you a good feeling? To know that we're in such capable hands? I mean, thank God we've got these guys with us, y'know?

I'd hate to think what might have happened if we'd been here on our own.'

Mitch smiled and tried to shrug off the detective's sarcasm. But there was something he had said that he couldn't shift from his mind. The time. Seven o'clock. Why did that of all things seem to nag at him?

And then he remembered.

He returned to the work-station and clicked the mouse to get the CCTV camera view of the computer room and Kenny still typing away, trying to solve the glitch. Everything looked normal. Everything except the hands of the clock on the wall. They read six-fifteen and had done so for the last forty-five minutes. And now that he looked more closely at the television picture, he began to see small repetitions in Kenny's behaviour: the same little jerk of the head, the same frown, the same finger movements across the keyboards. Mitch felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He had been viewing nothing more than a tape recording of what had happened in the computer room. Someone had wanted them to think that Aidan Kenny was working at trying to debug the building management systems. But why? For the moment, Mitch kept the discovery to himself, hoping to avoid alarming everyone. He turned around in his chair and looked at David Arnon.

'Dave? Have you got that walkie-talkie?'

'Sure, Mitch.' Arnon handed over the set he always carried on site to speak to the construction people.

'They've got one of those in the security office, right?'

Arnon nodded.

'I'm going to get the security guy, Dukes, to see what's keeping Richardson.' He caught the tiny pupil in Birnbaum's pale blue eye and added, 'I don't give a fuck what he's doing.'

Birnbaum shrugged. 'It's your funeral, Mitch.'

'Maybe.'

Curtis was still wearing his sarcastic face. Mitch looked at him and nodded towards the door.

'Could I have a word with you please, Sergeant? Outside?'

'I'm not doing anything right now. Why not?'

Mitch said nothing until they were further up the corridor. 'I didn't want to say anything in front of everyone in there,' he said at last. 'I guess I didn't want to scare them the way I'm scared now.'

'Jesus, what's up?'

Mitch explained about the time on the clock in the computer room and his suspicion that for the last three-quarters of an hour they had been viewing a tape recording, a recorded loop of what was happening.

'Which means that something may have happened in the computer room just after six-fifteen. Something that someone is trying to hide from us.'

'You think Aidan Kenny is all right?'

Mitch let out a sigh and shrugged. 'I really don't know.'

'This someone,' Curtis said after a moment, 'do you think it could be your friend from the garage? The one who knocked you out?'

'The thought had crossed my mind, Sergeant.'

'How far do you think he would go?'

'I really don't figure Grabel for a murderer. But if Sam Gleig disturbed Grabel sabotaging the computer, then it's just possible he could have been killed for it. Maybe that part was an accident. Anyway, I think Grabel may have come back here to warn me. It could be that he had second thoughts about the whole thing.'

'Either way, we're in trouble.'

'Yes, I'm afraid so,' said Mitch.

'Well, hadn't we better go down to the computer room and find out if Mr Kenny is OK?'

'Sure. But if I'm right it means that we don't dare use the elevators.'

Curtis looked blank.

'Abraham controls the elevators,' explained Mitch. 'The whole building management system could be screwed.'

'Then we'd better take the stairs,' suggested Curtis.

'I'm not walking. We'll get Dukes to check on Kenny on his way up here. You see, if we are going to be trapped in the building for a while, it would make more sense for them to come up stairs where there's food and water, rather than remain down there where there's none.'

Curtis nodded. 'Sounds sensible.'

'At least until we can get help.'

Mitch pressed the call-button on the walkie-talkie and lifted the set to his ear. But as they came alongside the open space of the atrium it was the ground-level security alarm that he heard.

-###-

After he had recovered from the toxic effects of his futile attempt to revive Kay Killen, Ray Richardson had gone to a phone and tried, without success, to call the boardroom. A call to Aidan Kenny proved equally fruitless. So Richardson returned to the atrium to find Joan. She was sitting on the one of the big black leather sofas where he had left her, beside the still-playing piano, a handkerchief pressed to her nose and mouth against the foul smell that filled the building. Richardson sat down heavily beside her.

'Ray?' she protested, recoiling from his wet body. 'You're soaked. What happened?'

'I don't know,' he said quietly. 'But I don't see how anyone could say that it was my fault.' He shook his head nervously. 'I tried to help her. I jumped in and tried…'

'What are you talking about, Ray? Take it easy, dear, and tell me what's happened.'

Richardson paused as he tried to collect himself. He drew a big breath and then nodded.

'I'm OK,' he said. 'It's Kay. She's dead. I went into the pool and she was just floating there. I jumped in and pulled her out. Tried to revive her. But it was too late.' He shook his head. 'I don't understand what could have happened. How could she have drowned? You saw her yourself, Joan. She was a terrific swimmer.'

'Drowned?'

Richardson nodded nervously.

'You're sure she was dead?'

'Quite sure.'

Joan put a sympathetic hand on her husband's trembling back and shook her head. 'Well, I don't know. Maybe she dived in and hit her head on the bottom. It happens all the time. Even to the best of swimmers.'

'First Hideki Yojo. Then that security guy. Now Kay. Why does this have to happen to me?' He chuckled uncomfortably. 'Christ, what am I saying? I must be crazy. All I'm thinking about is the building. I was trying to pull the poor kid out of the water and you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking, a swimming accident. Like Le Corbusier. Can you believe it? That's how obsessed I've become, Joan. That beautiful girl is dead and what's going through my fucking mind is that she went the same way as a famous architect. What's the matter with me?'

'You're upset, that's all.'

'And that's not the only thing. The phones aren't working. I just tried to call upstairs. To tell them that she's dead.' Richardson's jaw quivered a little. 'You should have seen her, Joan. It was terrible. A beautiful young woman like that, dead.'

As if on cue the piano stopped playing Bach's Goldberg Variations in the style of Glenn Gould and, in the style of Artur Rubinstein, began to play the insistent tolling bass of the funeral march from Chopin's Sonata in B-Flat Minor.

Even Ray Richardson recognized the unrelenting, sombre tones of the piece immediately. He stood up, fists clenched with outrage.

'What's the fucking idea?' he yelled. 'Is that someone's idea of a joke?

If so, then it isn't funny.'

He marched back to the hologram desk as indignantly as his wet shoes allowed.

'Hi!' said Kelly in her brightest-button-in-the-class voice. 'Can I help you, sir?'

'What's the idea with this music?' snapped Richardson.

'Well,' smiled Kelly, 'it's very much in the tradition of funeral marches born in the French Revolution. In the contrasting central episode, however, Chopin — '

'I didn't ask for the fucking programme notes. I meant that the music is in very bad taste. And why aren't the phones working? And why does the place smell like shit?'

'Please be patient. I'm trying to expedite your inquiry.'

'Cretin,' shouted Richardson.

'Have a nice day.'

Richardson stamped his way back to Joan.

'We'd better go back upstairs and tell everyone what's happened.' He shook his head. 'God knows what that fucking cop is going to say.' He turned on the heel of his squelching shoe and started towards the elevators.

Joan stood up and caught him by the sleeve of his wet shirt.

'If the phones aren't working,' she said, 'then probably the elevators aren't either.'

She pointed to the blank floor-indicator panel above the car that Declan and the two painters had taken a short while earlier.

'I noticed it went out when they passed the fifteenth floor.' She shrugged as Richardson frowned back at her with blank incomprehension. 'Well, they were going back up to twenty-one, weren't they? It never got there.'

A bell rang as the doors to one of the other five elevators, summoned automatically to the atrium floor by Abraham, opened in front of them. Richardson stared into the car suspiciously.

'It looks OK,' he said.

Joan shook her head. 'I don't like it,' she said.

Richardson stepped into the waiting car.

'Ray, please come out,' she pleaded. 'I've got a bad feeling about this.'

'Come on, Joan,' he urged. 'You're being irrational. Besides, I'm not climbing twenty-one flights in wet shoes.'

'Ray, think about it,' she insisted. 'The front door is locked. The HVAC has stopped working. The aromatizer has gone screwy. The phones are out. You want to be trapped inside an elevator on top of all that? If you do, go right ahead, but me, I'm taking the stairs. I don't care how many floors it is. I can't explain it, but no, I'm not going in there.'

'What is this, Navajo wisdom or something? Actually it's nice and cool in here.'

He put his hand against the wall of the elevator car, then snatched it away as if he had been burned.

'Jesus Christ,' he exclaimed and stepped smartly out of the car, rubbing his fingers against the palm of his other hand.

'What's the trouble now?' The voice belonged to Dukes, the security guard.

'Something is wrong with the elevator,' Richardson admitted, looking baffled. 'The wall of the car is freezing cold. Like the inside of an ice-box. My hand just stuck to it.'

Dukes stepped inside and touched the wall with his forefinger. 'Man, you're right,' he said. 'How is that possible?'

Richardson rubbed his chin and then pinched his lower lip thoughtfully. 'There's a high-velocity duct from the central plant on the roof,' he said after a moment or two. 'Air is passed over refrigerant in the direct expansion coil. That feeds cool air into a fan assisted terminal variable volume box that is supposed to feed into low-velocity duct work. I can only think that somehow the building's entire supply of cool air must have been re-routed down the elevator shafts. That must be why it's so hot out here.'

'Sure is cool standing in here. Man, look,' he observed. 'I can see my breath.'

'The freezer effect must be like wind chill or something. Like the Midwest in winter.'

Dukes shivered and stepped out of the car. 'I'd sure hate to be in there with the doors closed.'

'My wife thinks there may be three people stuck in one of the other cars,' said Richardson. 'Around the fifteenth level.'

'The three guys who were here earlier?'

Joan nodded.

'In this kind of cold storage they've got no more chance than a bag of T-bones.'

'Fuck,' said Richardson. 'What a fucking fuck-up.' He put his hands on top of his head and walked around in a small circle of frustration. 'Well, we've got to get them out of there. Good drivers aren't so easy to find these days. Declan's practically one of the family. Any thoughts?'