Elevator Pitch

Thirty-Five

I will never come to this hotel again.

Elliot Cantor pressed the Down button for what had to be the tenth time. No, not pressed. He stabbed the button. He was angry at the button. Elliot wanted to kick this button’s ass. He wanted to put this button in a blender and slice and dice it to death.

Elliot loathed this elevator. This one, and the one next to it. A thirty-story hotel with a dozen or more rooms per floor needed more than two elevators. Both of them were always busy.

“I don’t believe this,” Elliot said.

His partner, Leonard Faulks, said, “It’s okay. It’ll get here eventually.”

“I’ve got my doubts,” Elliot said.

Elliot and Leonard, both thirty-one years old and both from Toronto, were on a weeklong trip to New York. They’d both been here before on business in their respective jobs — Elliot was a financial adviser and Leonard a freelance book editor — but they had never visited together. A friend had recommended to Elliot that they stay at the Klaxton 49, one of four Manhattan hotels owned and managed by the small Klaxton chain. Elliot did the booking online after reading good things on TripAdvisor. Well, his review was not going to be like the others. He’d already been writing it in his head. It was going to read something like this:

“This 30-story hotel may be clean and centrally located and the staff are nice enough but DO NOT GO HERE UNLESS YOU LOVE TO WAIT FOR FIVE FUCKING HOURS FOR THE ELEVATOR TO ARRIVE.”

This had been their experience since day one. They were on the fifteenth floor, the building’s midpoint. Had they been given a room on a lower floor, they would have used the stairs. And even now, Elliot was considering them. Descending was a lot easier than ascending. Not that the two of them weren’t in good shape, but sometimes, after seven or eight hours of walking all over Manhattan, the last thing you wanted to face when you got back to the hotel was a grueling climb.

Elliot was watching the numbered lights to see where the two elevators were. One was at the fifth floor and moving up. The other was on the twentieth floor and moving down. And the time the elevators were spending on each number was evidence that many guests were boarding and exiting.

The ascending elevator stopped at seven, then nine, then twelve. Elliot was hopeful that last person to disembark would be at fifteen, meaning they could step right on and go down. But the descending elevator was now on the move, heading toward them. Only two floors away now.

“Why don’t you press it again?” Leonard said.

Elliot gave him a look, knowing he was being needled, but that didn’t stop him from doing exactly what Leonard asked. He hit the button.

He attacked the button.

The descending elevator stopped one floor above them.

“This has to be it,” Leonard said, striking an optimistic note, hoping his partner would calm down.

The elevator moved. They heard it whiz past in the shaft.

It did not stop for them.

The light flashed at fourteen, twelve, nine. It was heading straight to the lobby.

Elliot, in a sign of defeat, slowly leaned his head forward and rested it on the wall above the buttons.

The elevator coming up went right past fifteen and stopped at twenty-two. Leonard watched, wondering if it would keep on going up, or start coming back down.

Now it was coming down.

“Elliot,” he said cautiously.

Elliot raised his head slowly, then looked up at the numbers. The second elevator was three... two... one floor way.

They did not hear the sound of something whooshing past. The elevator sounded as though it was coming to a stop.

And then the doors opened.

“Sweet Jesus, it’s a miracle,” said Elliot.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the car was nearly full. Jammed into the back were an elderly couple who were clearly at the end of their stay, each one clutching the handle of a wheeled carry-on bag. Also on board were a fortyish woman in a pink tracksuit and two teenage girls, also in matching tracksuits and running shoes. Elliot didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out these were the woman’s daughters.

At least there was still just enough room for him and Leonard to get on without having to scrunch shoulders.

No one said anything as they boarded, but there seemed a collective sense of despair in the car; the others had been waiting an eternity as well for this ride to street level.

Leonard went to press the L, for Lobby, but it was already lit.

The car began to descend.

And then stopped.

They had gone one entire floor.

One of the teenage girls said, “Of course.”

The doors parted to reveal a young couple and — Elliot wanted to scream — a stroller with a small child in it.

“Uh,” said Elliot, “I don’t think so. We’re pretty full here.”

“No, we can do it,” the father said, pushing in the stroller first, bumping the tiny rubber wheels over the metal edge.

Everyone else in the elevator had to back up. Once the father had the stroller in, he positioned it sideways so as to make space for the mother. She stepped in and waited for the doors to close.

“I always wanted to feel like a sardine,” Leonard whispered into his partner’s ear.

Someone had to say it, Elliot thought.

The elevator descended one more floor, and then stopped again.

A groan slipped through the lips of everyone in the elevator, with the exception of the couple who had just entered, and their child, of course, who was oblivious to everyone else’s aggravation.

“Seriously, this is too much,” said the elderly man to his wife.

“The way this is going we’ll miss our flight,” she said softly. “If there’s traffic, we’ll never get to LaGuardia in time.”

The doors parted.

Everyone thought, Jesus Christ no.

Before them stood a man in his early twenties, about five-ten and easily three hundred pounds. He was decked out in a pair of shorts, and a pair of oversized, unlaced sneakers, and an “I Love New York” sleeveless shirt where “Love” was a heart symbol. The thick laces trailed behind him like bright orange worms.

“I really think you’re gonna have to wait for the next one,” Elliot said.

“Fuck that,” he said. “I’ve been standing here ten minutes.”

He started to board, forcing his body into the mass of human flesh. The small boy in the stroller looked up, wide-eyed, at this towering mass of person hovering over him.

The large man continued to force everyone to squeeze back even farther. The older woman said, “I don’t think I can breathe,” although that might have had less to do with being compressed and more to do with the newest passenger’s sleeveless shirt.

He was, not to put too fine a point on it, aromatic.

Everyone was jammed in so tightly that the man did not even try to turn around. He faced the back wall of the elevator and said to one of the teenage girls who was closest to the panel of buttons, “Can you hit Lobby?”

“It already is,” she said.

Her sister said, “Hit the Close button.”

“The what?”

She pointed to the button with the two triangular symbols pointing at each other. Her sister hit the button.

The doors started to close, then bounced back. The newest passenger’s butt was in the way.

It was the girls’ mother’s turn to speak up. “Honestly, I think you’re going to have to take the next—”

But rather than get off, the man pushed in even farther, his belly hovering over the head of the child in the stroller. The girl pushed the button again.

The doors once again attempted to close, and this time they made it.

“Shit!” said one of the girls, looking down.

The door had closed on a trailing orange shoelace from one of the big man’s unlaced sneakers. As the car started to move downward, the slack went out of the lace. In less than a second, the shoe it was attached to was dragged suddenly to the door, which pitched the large man forward.

As his meaty leg was yanked upward, the top half of his body toppled. Like a great oak falling in the forest, he went straight to the floor, narrowly missing the child, but hitting the arms of the stroller, pitching the boy upward, like he was on a teeter totter and someone had dropped a boulder at the other end.

Everyone screamed. The teenage girls’ screams came out more like shrieks.

No sooner had the big man hit the floor than he started to lift up as his one leg headed toward the top of the door.

But then the shoe was ripped from his foot. He came crashing down again. The shoe sailed up to the center of the door until the lace snapped, and it dropped back down.

“Benjy!” the mother screamed, reaching over the man to see that her child was okay.

“Fuckin’ hell!” Elliot shouted.

Somehow, impossibly, everyone had pushed back to allow room for the fallen man. The girls were literally perched on Leonard’s feet. The child’s father’s arms were spread wide against the wall of the car.

The toddler was crying. The stroller was a write-off.

And then the doors opened.

They had reached the lobby.

Half a dozen people waiting to board recoiled in horror at the sight of the collapsed man. The girls managed to step around him, quickly followed by their mother. Once out, they stopped and turned to offer help.

The big man slowly got up off the floor. Elliot actually extended a hand to help him.

“You okay?” he asked.

The man nodded, then spotted his shoe, minus half a lace, on the floor of the car. Leonard grabbed it and handed it over.

“Please!” said the older woman, still at the back of the car. “Let us out! We have to catch a plane!”

She and her husband navigated their way around the others, but as soon as they exited the elevator they were faced with a throng of people who’d been waiting for it.

“Look what you did!” said the small child’s mother, who now had the toddler in her arms and was pointing to the mangled stroller.

“Uh, sorry,” he said.

“You should never have gotten on,” the father said. “And Christ, maybe this’ll teach you to tie up your shoes.”

“I said I was sorry. Anyway, it’s the hotel’s fault. The door grabbed my lace.”

The parents shook their heads as they hauled the busted stroller off the elevator.

“You sure you’re okay?” Leonard asked.

The big man nodded slowly. “I might have twisted my ankle,” he said, looking down at his socked foot. “But I guess I’m all right.”

“Okay,” he said, then looked at Elliot and gave him a shrug that said, I guess we’re done here.

As the two headed through the lobby, Elliot said, “I thought that guy was going to lose his leg or something.”

“I want my granola parfait from Le Pain Quotidien,” Leonard said, “and then we’re going to see if we can move to another hotel.”

Elliot smiled. “So now you’re the one who’s fed up.”

As they came out of the hotel, Leonard said, “That guy could have crushed us to death.”

“So, what, you’re looking for a hotel that bans fatties? That sounds very un-PC.”

They took a moment to get their bearings as they stood on the sidewalk. A yellow Prius cab was working its way down the street.

Leonard pointed east. “It’s that way.”

“No,” Elliot said, grabbing his arm. “I’m pretty sure Le Pain’s that way.”

The cab was sixty feet away.

“Wait,” Leonard said, looking one way and then the other. “I hate to admit this, but I think you’re right.”

The cab passed by the hotel doors.

“Okay, then let’s—”

And that was when the bomb in the Prius exploded.

Thirty-Six

Three minutes after the taxi explosion on East Forty-Ninth Street, eight people were huddled out in front of the three elevators in the lobby of the twenty-story Gormley Building on Seventh Avenue between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. A man and a woman who were closest to the closed doors were both gazing at their phones. The woman was reading the New York Times and the man was scanning information from an app that tracked the stock market. He shook his head slowly, not liking what he was seeing.

Of the six people behind them, most were on phones, others sipped expensive lattes from Starbucks cups. Every few seconds, someone would glance upward to see what floor the car was currently on.

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. These 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 kitchen 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.”

“Okay.”

“Take the stairs.”

Thirty-Nine

I don’t think you can wait any longer,” Valerie told the mayor. “You have to say something. A press conference.”

Richard Headley was circling his desk, pacing, running his hand slowly over his head. “Christ,” he muttered. “What the hell am I supposed to tell people? Don’t use the fucking elevators? In this city? Might as well them not to honk their horns.”

Valerie nodded sympathetically. “I know. If we put our heads together, maybe we can come up with something that—”

“And where the hell is Glover?” he asked, stopping and looking at the door, as if expecting his son to walk through it at any second.

“I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I’ll text him.”

Headley waved a dismissive hand. “Never mind. I don’t know what help he’d be anyway.”

Valerie, who had been standing in the middle of the room, took a step closer. “Mr. Mayor.” A pause. “Richard.”

He stopped pacing at the sound of his name, looked at her, and waited.

“It may not be my place to speak to this,” she said.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” the mayor said.

“I say this with the best of intentions.”

“Go ahead, Valerie. Just say it.”

“About Glover.”

“What about Glover?”

“I think... I’m worried about his self-esteem.”

The mayor cocked his head slightly to one side. His look bordered on amused. “Self-esteem?”

“I know we talked about this the other day, that his real talents lie in other areas, but you’re awfully hard on him. He’s trying so hard to please you, but he can’t seem to get anything right in your eyes. And I’m not just worried about him. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Why?”

“Things get out. People talk. People observe. Moving forward, we’re working very hard to craft an image of you that voters will like.” She cleared her throat. “Like more. They see the way you treat Glover, they form an opinion. That you’re, well, something of a bully where your own son is concerned. It doesn’t play well.”

Headley grunted.

Valerie stood a little straighter, steeling herself for the onslaught she thought was probably coming. “Look, you’re a complex individual. You can be tough, even cruel. But there is another side to you, and I’ve seen it. You can be compassionate. I know there are things you care about. The environment, for one. But it’s not enough to care about the planet. You have to care about the people on it.”

Headley looked bemused.

Valerie continued. “There are going to be more stories about you moving forward. Profiles. We’re looking for someone else to ghost-write your bio, now that Barbara Matheson has taken a pass.”

Headley snorted derisively. “One of Glover’s bright ideas.”

“Maybe it was a better one than we think. She could have done a good job if we’d agreed to give her a bit of leeway.”

He shook his head.

“As I was saying, there will be more profiles, many of which we’ll have no control over, and that means people who work for and with you will be approached. There’s a good chance a lot of them will speak off the record, especially if they feel they’ve been insulted or slighted by you. They’ll talk about what they’ve seen. How you’ve treated Glover might be one of the things that comes out. And it will reflect badly on you. The fact is, there’s already talk about it. There’s even a Twitter account that—”

Headley raised a hand, silencing her. He slowly wandered behind his desk and sat in his plush, oversized chair. He lowered his head briefly, placing his palms on his forehead before looking up again.

“Okay, so I’ll never win Father of the Year,” he said. “But the fact that I have him here, working in this administration, is to try to make up for the missteps I’ve made over the years. If he were anyone else... I’d have fired him by now, most likely.”

“He’s a bright kid, Richard. He’s the most tech-savvy guy I know. Policy, okay, that’s not his strong suit. He’s too young, doesn’t have the experience. Put him somewhere where he shines, twenty-four/seven. Like polling and data analysis. He just did a new hire down there. Liberate him from being part of the inner circle. Let him do his thing without having to make you happy every day.”

The mayor appeared to be considering Valerie’s words. He looked away and said, quietly, “He... humiliated me. It took me years to live that down.”

Valerie sighed. “You’re better than this.”

“You can bet, when and if I announce for anything, they’ll dig up that clip of him crying for the cameras.”

“He was a kid,” Valerie said. “He was a kid who watched his mother die while you were out—”

She stopped herself.

Headley gave her a cold stare. “—fucking her nurse?”

Valerie nodded slowly. “I might have put it another way. But yes.”

The mayor’s face softened. “My own father was a son of a bitch.”

“I know.”

“Treated me like shit.” He shook his head. “I hated him. I still hate him, and he’s been dead for sixteen years. The shit he made me do. But at the same time, I’m grateful, you know?”

“I... think so,” Valerie said.

“He gave me the strength to make hard decisions. I had to execute his orders or face his wrath. It made me tough.” He paused, struck by a memory. “One time, he made me evict this couple. The husband had lost his job and his wife had just had a baby. Had some sort of health complications. But they were four months behind in the rent. We were a business, not a charity. They had to go.”

Valerie looked as though she’d caught wind of a sewage leak. “Jesus, you tell that story like you’re proud of it. God help us if that finds its way into your bio.”

Headley blinked, as if not realizing how the tale made him look. “Yeah, okay, I take your point. But it was not the point I was trying to make. I learned to do what had to be done. I grew a spine working for my dad.”

“Except when it came to standing up to him. You could have said no when he told you to put that family onto the street.”

Headley gave his assistant a withering gaze. She just wasn’t getting it.

“All I’m trying to do with Glover is make him tough, too.”

“I see,” Valerie said.

“God, you’re looking at me just the way his mother used to,” the mayor said.

Now it was Valerie’s turn to gaze witheringly. “You don’t have to make the same mistakes with your own son that your father made with you.”

The look he gave her was a mix of contempt and admiration. “You got some balls talking to me this way.”

“If you don’t want to hear the truth, Richard, hire someone else.”

His mouth slowly morphed into a crooked smile before his face once again turned grim. “Set it up. A presser, with the chief and that smug asshole from Homeland.”

“Maybe not Homeland,” Valerie advised. “We don’t want to scare everyone to death. You put Homeland on stage and we’re talking terrorism, no doubt about it.”

Headley gave that a thought. “Okay. And we better bring in what’s-his-name, our elevator guy, in case there are any technical questions.”

“On it,” she said. As she went for the door, it opened. Glover strode into the room.

“There’s been another one,” he said breathlessly. “Another elevator tragedy.”

Headley looked at his son pityingly, then at Valerie. “Breaking news.”

She gave her boss a sharp, disapproving look that said, You just can’t help yourself, can you?

Forty

Alexander Vesolov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was walking through Grand Central Terminal when he turned into Hudson News.

He perused the front pages of the various newspapers and settled on a copy of the Wall Street Journal. He picked it up, his eye immediately going to a story, above the fold, about the death of Dr. Fanya Petrov in an elevator mishap. Shouldered into the piece was a one-column sidebar story with the headline: “Is it Safe to Ride a City Elevator?”

He took a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the woman behind the counter. Once he’d pocketed his change, he folded the paper once and tucked it under his arm. He did not head back out into the terminal, instead deciding to peruse the periodicals. Hudson News had hundreds of magazines to choose from, as well as a selection of books.

Vesolov first wandered over to the newsmagazines. He glanced at the covers of Time and The Economist, leafed through the pages of The New Yorker and read the captions on the cartoons and didn’t laugh at a single one. He’d never understood them.

He put The New Yorker back and moved to the car section. Articles about cars needed no cultural translation. Vesolov reached for a copy of Automobile, lightly bumping shoulders with another man who was glancing through the pages of Motor Trend.

The other man was several inches taller than Vesolov, and in much better physical shape. Vesolov’s shoulders were permanently hunched; he was round in the middle and thick in the neck, his skin sickly pale. The other man was lean and trim, tanned, and his black business suit fit him perfectly.

“So,” Vesolov said quietly, his eyes focused on the magazine.

“Yes,” said the other man, his voice low.

“It’s done. There’s nothing else for you at this time.” Vesolov flipped the page, saw an article about an upcoming, all-electric Porsche. “If we need you, we’ll be in touch. A deposit has been made in the usual account.”

“You didn’t need to do that.”

“We had a deal. Petrov is no longer a threat.”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t protest. We had an arrangement. Things turned out a little differently than expected, but we have the result we wanted. Maybe the next one, you’ll give us a discount.”

“Seems fair,” the other man said.

“You have a bit of extra time. See the sights.”

The man chuckled. “Maybe not the Empire State Building.”

“No, it does not seem like a good week for those kinds of attractions.”

“You know where I would like to go? Iowa.”

“Iowa?” said Vesolov. “Nobody comes to America and goes to Iowa.”

“You see Field of Dreams? It is my favorite movie.”

Vesolov shrugged. “Fine. Go to Iowa. See corn.”

The ambassador put the car magazine back, turned, and walked away without saying another word. The second man waited the better part of a minute before heading back out into the terminal.

A third man, who’d had his back to the other two as he leafed through the pages of a Sports Illustrated, took out his cell phone.

He entered a number, placed the phone up to his ear. Someone answered before the first ring had finished.

“Get me Cartland,” he said.

Forty-One

Jerry Bourque had staked out a spot on Grove Street, leaning up against a tree growing out of the sidewalk between Bedford and Bleecker. Beautiful old brownstones, tall, leafy trees. Plenty of interesting shops and cafés and restaurants. Bourque had always loved Greenwich Village and wished he lived here. You could almost imagine that you were in a world separate from the rest of New York City. Maybe it was the trees that worked to muffle the horns and sirens and growling engines that were only a block away.

Some mornings, like this one, he’d come here before the start of his shift to see how she was doing.

Amanda.

She would have had her second birthday by now. She was only a year and a half old when her mother, Sasha Woodrow, was shot to death by Blair Evans.

Bourque had been here enough times to know the routine. The nanny — a young woman in her twenties — would arrive at half past seven, on the dot, every morning, Monday to Friday. Sasha’s husband, Leslie, would leave roughly fifteen minutes later. The front door would open, and Leslie, dressed nattily in suit and tie, would carefully bring out a bike and gingerly roll it down the steps to the sidewalk. He would then mount it and pedal off to his Wall Street job.

Bourque thought it was foolish of him not to wear a helmet. Amanda had already lost one parent. Why was he willing to take the risk that she might lose two? It was all he could do, every morning he was here and saw this, not to say something to him.

But he held his tongue, because if he were Leslie Woodrow, his comeback would be, “Well, maybe if you hadn’t dived out of the way, Amanda wouldn’t already be down one parent.”

Bourque surmised that Leslie got Amanda up and dressed, and that he also gave her breakfast, because most mornings that he was there, he witnessed the nanny emerging from the brownstone within twenty minutes of the father’s departure. Clearly, there was not enough time for the nanny to accomplish all those things. Bourque often imagined Leslie sitting at breakfast with his daughter, sharing a piece of toast with her, giving her some Cheerios to play with, hopeful that more of them would end up in her mouth than on the floor.

The nanny — Bourque wished he knew her name, and even though he had the skills to find out, he had resisted doing so — liked to take Amanda out for a stroll first thing every morning, unless it was raining.

Today was no exception.

The door to the brownstone opened and out came the nanny with Amanda in one arm, and a small, folded-up stroller in the other. Once she had locked the door and made her way down to the sidewalk, the nanny set Amanda down briefly and quickly unfolded the stroller before the child could wander off. Once Amanda settled into it, the nanny buckled her in.

Very smart, Bourque thought.

Bourque believed the nanny was from France. Here on a visa, perhaps, maybe a student taking courses at night while she worked for Leslie Woodrow through the day. Bourque often heard her speaking French to the child as they went past. How nice for Amanda, to acquire some proficiency in a second language at such an early age. Too bad about the way it had to happen, of course.

Bourque was discreet. He kept his distance. He turned away, or crossed the street, when the nanny approached with the stroller. He knew he shouldn’t be spying this way, but Bourque needed constant assurance. He needed to know Amanda was okay.

He needed to know she was happy. That she was not traumatized.

Like him.

If Amanda happened to be kicking her feet, or babbling cheerfully, or looking at the world with wonder and curiosity, Bourque felt hopeful. Those were all good signs, weren’t they? If you were consumed with the memory of your mother being shot, of her blood spilling directly onto you like warm, red rain, those things would not be possible, right? Bourque wanted to believe Amanda had a chance of being a normal, healthy, happy child. Sure, not having a mother put her behind the eight ball from the get-go, but Bourque had to believe that eventually she would get past that. And who knew? Perhaps, one day, Leslie would find someone else. A new wife, a mother for Amanda.

Hell, maybe he’d marry the nanny. It had happened before.

Bourque watched Leslie for signs every morning, too.

Those first couple of months, Leslie did not ride his bike. After the arrival of the nanny — and Bourque believed the woman had been hired only after the mother’s death — he would come down the steps to the street like a dead man walking. He shuffled more than walked. The man was visibly consumed with grief.

The next time Bourque staked out a spot in the morning, Leslie had the bike. To Bourque, the bicycle represented some level of recovery. A desire to face the day with more energy, to embrace it with speed.

In fact, as the weeks and months went on, he took off from his Grove Street residence with what struck Bourque as enthusiasm.

Good, Bourque had thought. That’s good.

Guilt-ridden as he was over the woman’s death, he was desperate for evidence that Leslie and Amanda were moving forward. Not that Sasha’s death wouldn’t haunt them forever. It certainly would Bourque. Maybe he was kidding himself. Seeing signs that were not there in a bid to ease his conscience. He wasn’t looking for forgiveness. He had no reason to expect that. But if Leslie and Amanda could build a future together, maybe Bourque could breathe a little easier.

Literally.

As the stroller approached, Bourque saw Amanda was playing with something. It was a small rubber airplane, and Amanda was zooming it around, holding it up against the sky, imagining it up there.

Her lips vibrated as she mimicked the sounds of the jet engine.

The lips that tasted her mother’s blood.

Bourque felt his windpipe tighten. He stood up straight, no longer using the tree to support himself. He reached into his pocket for his inhaler. Just one quick shot. That was all he needed. He uncapped it and brought it up to his mouth.

“Hey,” someone said.

Bourque brought the inhaler down and shoved it into his pocket as he turned to find the nanny looking at him.

“Yes?” he said.

“Who are you?” she asked. She enunciated perfectly, but her French accent was impossible to miss.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ve seen you before. Are you watching us?”

“No, I’m just waiting here to meet a friend. I—”

“I know I’ve seen you. Next time, I’ll call the police.”

Bourque, feeling his air passages constricting further, said, “I am the police.” He quickly flashed his ID. “I’m keeping an eye on someone farther down the street. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything.”

The nanny’s mouth went round in an Oh! gesture. “Sorry,” she whispered, and moved along, red-faced.

Bourque put the inhaler into his mouth and squeezed. He’d initially thought he only needed one shot, but now he took two. He fumbled as he tried to put it back into his pocket and dropped it instead. He bent over, snatched it up off the sidewalk, and dusted it off before tucking it away.

He could never do this again. If the nanny spotted him a second time, he’d have too much explaining to do.

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, not 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.”

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 systems.

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.

She said, “A lot of people think if you’re in an elevator that’s hurtling downward, and you jump off the floor just before it hits the bottom of the shaft, that somehow that’s going to save you. Well,” and at this point she chuckled, “there’s a whole lot wrong with that supposition. The first is, you’re not really going to be able to time it right. You can be looking at the numbers next to the door and figure, okay, we’re just about to hit the basement, jump now! But even if you could do that, which is pretty much impossible, it wouldn’t save you. Your body is still traveling downward at the same rate of speed as the elevator, so one way or another, you’re going to hit bottom and you’re going to hit it hard. The only real hope you have of surviving is to lie down on the floor of the elevator, on your back, spreading out your arms and legs like you’re a starfish. What this does is more evenly distribute your weight across the surface of the elevator floor.”

The host asked, “Okay, but what if you’re in an elevator with ten other people and can’t do that?”

The expert shrugged. “Well, in that case, you’re going to become elevator pizza.”

On MSNBC, the elevator crisis was a financial story.

“The New York Stock Exchange has closed three hours before the ringing of the bell,” one analyst said. “The business of the city has effectively ground to a halt. Millions of dollars are being lost every second that this goes on. Mayor Richard Headley has created a panic. He needs to get back out there in front of the cameras and come up with something better than ‘I don’t know’ and ‘We’re shutting down the elevators.’ This has to be the most astonishing example of incompetence I have ever seen.”

The only group alleged to have taken responsibility for anything that had happened in New York in the previous three days was the U.S.-based Flyovers, and even its connection to the taxi bombing had not been independently confirmed. But that did not stop many individuals, including more than a few politicians at very senior levels, from arguing that this was more evidence that America needed to curb immigration and tighten its borders.

“We cannot,” said one bombastic talk radio host, “allow these illegals into our country to wage war on us. But yet, that’s what we do! Just how stupid are we, ladies and gentlemen?”

Nearly every TV channel — with the possible exceptions of those devoted to weather updates, cartoons, and repeats of The Big Bang Theory — was featuring nonstop talking heads offering plenty of opinions based on almost no information whatsoever.

In that sense, it was pretty much like any other day.

Forty-Four

Barbara had not left the City Hall media room after the mayor’s statement. She’d taken a chair in a back corner, sat down, and written her piece with her two amazing thumbs. The room had pretty much cleared out, but reporters started filing back in when word got out that the mayor’s son was going to make a follow-up statement. So Barbara was already sitting there when Glover went to the podium to announce the mayor’s decision to shut down all city elevators.

“Holy shit,” Barbara said under her breath. The magnitude of this story was growing exponentially by the hour.

She wasn’t surprised Headley had sent the boy to deliver this latest bulletin. The mayor had done enough damage to himself in his earlier appearance when, in response to Barbara’s question, he could not say whether it was safe to ride a New York elevator. Glover’s statement had pretty much made it clear that the answer was no.

Glover declined to take questions after making the announcement, but as he tried to escape the room he was cornered by several news crews and reporters shouting out more questions. He kept raising his hand in front of his face, as much to keep the blinding lights out of his eyes as to keep the media hounds at bay.

Barbara saw nothing to be gained by joining the scrum. No reporter ever got an exclusive by following the pack. She glanced out the media room door and spotted Chris Vallins’s bald head. He was walking speedily, as though he wanted to distance himself from the chaos as quickly as possible.

Barbara chased after him. When she was within a couple of feet she reached out and grabbed his arm, spinning him around. His startled expression lasted only until he realized who it was that had a hold on him.

“Hey,” she said. “Tell me. Just how bad is this?”

He glanced about nervously. “You’re the last person I should be seen talking to.”

Barbara turned her head to the closest door, a sign screwed to it that read Ladies. She hooked her arm deeper into his and dragged him toward it.

“You gotta be kidding,” he said. By the time he got his arm free, they were already inside, in an area with some cushioned chairs ahead of where the room opened up and the stalls could be found.

Barbara pushed Chris into a chair and dropped into one next to it.

“Spill,” she said.

“I’ve got nothing to say,” he told her as he turned his head to the door, clearly worried that another woman might walk in at any moment.

“How big is this? Who’s behind it?” she asked.

“They don’t have any idea,” he said.

“What about these Flyover nuts?”

Vallins shrugged. “They’re looking at them. But no one really knows anything.”

“What’s connecting the elevator events? Is there some commonality?”

Vallins pressed his lips tightly together, as though conducting an inner debate. “Okay, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but...”

“Come on,” she said anxiously.

“Cameras,” he said.

“Cameras?”

“Someone installed tiny cameras to monitor what was happening in the elevators that killed people.”

Barbara’s eyes went wide. “Jesus. Why would someone do that?”

Another shrug. “Maybe to see that someone was inside before making them go haywire. No sense dropping an elevator if there’s no one inside to fuck with.” He sighed. “You really made Headley look like a fool in there.”

“He doesn’t make it that hard. What else can you tell me?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t even have told you that much. But it’s going to come out. Landlords are being told what to look for. They see one of those cameras mounted on top of an elevator, they know it’s an elevator that might be targeted.”

“This is insane,” Barbara said. “Why would anyone do this?”

“You can be sure there’s a reason,” Vallins said. “And I’m betting that eventually it’ll come out.”

Barbara said, “You have my number?”

“Oh, I think everyone’s got your number.”

“Fuck off. My phone number.”

“I’ve got it. And your email.”

“How’d you get that?”

Vallins gave her a duh look. “It’s at the end of your column.”

“Oh, right.” She rolled her eyes at her stupidity. “If there’s anything else you can tell me, off the record, get in touch.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” His face softened as he asked, “How’s the elbow?”

“Aches like a motherfucker,” Barbara said with a hint of smile. “But it’s fine.”

The door started to swing open. A woman took one step in and stopped when she saw Chris. Before he could say anything, Barbara pointed to the hall and said, “Find another one.”

The woman disappeared.

Chris said, “You really are a piece of work.”

“You’re not so bad yourself. And I still say you were following me.”

Chris shook his head and sighed. “Lucky for you. Or you wouldn’t be here, now, being a pain in the ass.”

She eyed him slyly. “He’s got you checking up on me. Looking for some way to discredit me.”

“I’m not saying that’s true,” Chris said, “but even if it was, I think he’s got bigger things to worry about now.”

“So I better stop looking at my phone when I cross the street, then. My guardian angel is otherwise engaged.”

“Something like that,” he said.

“Too bad,” Barbara said.

The sound of a text came from inside his jacket. He dug out the phone, looked at the message, grimaced.

“What?”

“They need me,” he said, then rolled his eyes. “The mayhem has begun.”

Forty-Five

Amad Connor, fourteen years old, and his friend, Jeremy Blakelock, who had turned fifteen the week before, were pulling the same stunt they’d pulled several times before.

They had both left their Hell’s Kitchen apartment building after breakfast, supposedly on their way to a full day of school, where they were both in the ninth grade. Their parents — Amad lived with both of his, but Jeremy lived with his mother during the week and then went to live with his father, in Brooklyn, most weekends — always left for work later. Amad’s dad was employed in the massive shoe department at Macy’s, while his mother was a secretary for a condo development firm in the Upper West Side. Jeremy’s mother was the head, dayside chef for a restaurant just off Union Square.

Amad and Jeremy actually showed up for homeroom, when attendance would be taken, but they vanished on their way to first period. That way, it would take longer for school officials to figure out they were absent, at which point there was a chance they would call their parents and ask where they were.

But they also knew, from past experience, that often the school didn’t make that call. After all, they were teenagers. They weren’t some kindergarten toddlers who’d failed to show up. So what if they didn’t get to class? Odds were they hadn’t been kidnapped.

With an entire city at their disposal, one might have thought they’d explore it. Ride the subways, go to Midtown Comics and steal some graphic novels, then hit the multiplex and take in the latest adventure featuring the stars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But they did none of these things. They headed home.

They were going to surf.

From watching various YouTube videos, the two had learned that once you were inside an elevator, if you kept the doors open, looped a wire over a small bracket tucked in the upper corner where the doors retracted, and pulled down on it, the outer doors would remain open even after the elevator had moved on. So, they’d send the elevator one floor down, jump out, and once the elevator had stopped one floor below, step through the opening and stand atop the car.

To cover their tracks, they would make sure the door closed behind them. (Later, when the elevator stopped for long enough, they would pry open the doors one floor above the car and leap out.)

Up and down the shaft they’d go. They had no control over the elevator at this point. That would be determined by whoever got on it, and it was the unpredictability that made it so much fun. The elevator would be summoned to a floor, but which one? Someone would board, but where would they want to go? Whispering back and forth so as not to alert anyone they were there, they would take bets on where they might end up.

They’d recorded some of their earlier adventures on their phones and posted them anonymously to YouTube. The site was filled with this kind of stuff. They only wished they lived in an even taller building, so they could go on longer, wilder rides.

It sure beat school.

Except that afternoon, something odd happened.

It seemed that no one needed the elevator. They had been sitting on the roof of the car, at the top of the shaft, crouched below the ceiling and above the exit to the twenty-fifth floor without a door beside them to crack open. Ten minutes had gone by and they had not moved. And they could hear neither of the other elevators moving, either.

That had never happened before.

“What the fuck?” Jeremy said to Amad.

Amad said, “Maybe there was a fire drill and everyone’s outside.”

“There was no fire alarm, dipshit,” Jeremy said.

After twenty minutes, they started to get worried.

Jeremy suggested they open the escape hatch on the top of the car. If they could get into it, and hit the elevator buttons, they could probably get out. But the hatch did not lift off. It was bolted on, and they had not exactly brought along a tool kit.

They did not want to get caught on top of the car. They’d be in trouble not just with the building management, but their parents. All the other times they’d elevator-surfed, they’d gotten away with it.

But at the half-hour mark, they started shouting.

“Help!” they cried together. “Help us! We’re in here! Somebody get us out!”

No one heard them.

Connie Boyle’s phone buzzed.

It was screen side down on her desk at an investment firm in one of the uppermost floors of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, sixth tallest in the world. Although technically 104 stories tall, there were only ninety-four actual stories, and when Connie chose to look out the window, which was not often, she felt overwhelmed by the view.

And not in a good way.

It had taken Connie, forty-three, a long time to get used to the idea of working up here in the clouds. First of all, she was uncomfortable with heights. It wasn’t a totally crippling fear, but it was bad enough that she had insisted, when her firm moved here, on a work station well inside the building, away from the windows. She could go entire weeks without ever looking outside. Her friends would say to her, “Wow, how cool to work up there! Do you ever get tired of that view?”

“What view?” she often replied.

Connie’s anxiety about working here was not due solely to her uneasiness with heights. One World Trade Center had been erected on the site of the old World Trade Center. Connie could never get over the fear that the new building was a target. Whenever she heard a passing jet she felt a wave of anxiety. She felt relief at the end of every day, when she put her feet back down on Fulton Street.

Her phone buzzed, and she saw that it was her husband. When he asked her in a panicked tone — before she’d even had a chance to say hello — whether she was okay, her heart began to race and she almost instantly began to feel faint and dizzy.

“Why?” she asked.

“The elevators,” he said. “Have they shut down your elevators?”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but before she could ask him what he knew that she did not, a woman’s voice came over the building’s public address system.

“May I have your attention, please,” she said.

Connie’s dizziness intensified. Her heart was a jackhammer.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“It’s going to be okay,” her husband said. “I just wanted to be sure you were—”

Connie was half listening to her husband, half listening to the voice emanating from the speakers.

“They’re shutting down the elevators,” she whispered. “We... we can’t use the elevators. We’re... Oh God, we’re stuck up here. We’re sitting ducks.”

She dropped the phone onto her desk as she stood up out of her chair. She looked over the partitions to the north window.

“We’re trapped,” she said. Her voice grew louder, and shakier. “We have to get out of here! We have to get out!”

Several coworkers leapt from their chairs and gathered around Connie, attempting to console her. But the woman was in the throes of a full-scale panic attack.

“Connie, Connie, it’s okay,” said one woman. “It’s just a precaution. Yeah, we’ve got a long walk down the stairs to get home but—”

But Connie didn’t hear her. She had passed out and collapsed on the floor.

Retired librarian Zachary Carrick went to Zabar’s Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Zachary bought only as much as he could carry. Like many New Yorkers, he did not drive. Unlike most New Yorkers, he did not like to take taxis, and hated the subway. If Zachary was going to go someplace, it had to be within walking distance. Which meant that Zachary pretty much never left the Upper West Side. His world these days had become limited to roughly a nine-square block area. Zabar’s was only around the corner, at Broadway and Eightieth. He liked to walk, but he didn’t like to walk far.

So Zachary would buy what he needed for two days. On Fridays, he would buy a little extra, to get him through to Monday. It wasn’t just that Zachary Carrick only purchased what he could carry. He figured, at the age of eighty-seven, he didn’t want to buy too much food if there was a chance he might not get the opportunity to consume it. This worried him most on Fridays. Suppose, he often thought to himself, I pop my clog Friday night, and I’ve gone and bought enough provisions to get me through the entire weekend? What a waste of money that would be.

Zachary had been on his own since his wife, Glenda, passed away nearly twenty years ago, but he had never left their eighteenth-floor apartment on West Eighty-First. Why move? The place wasn’t huge to begin with. Why mess with a perfectly good routine?

Although he’d spent a career surrounded by newspapers and periodicals filled with current events, Zachary didn’t give a rat’s ass about what went on anymore. He didn’t get any papers and almost never turned on his TV, unless it was to watch what he called the Lobby Channel, where he could see who was coming in and out of the building. Out of the hundreds of channels available to him, this was, without question, the best reality show on TV.

Zachary was not prepared for what awaited him upon his return to the building today.

There were Out of Order signs taped to all three elevators.

A dozen other residents were milling about in the lobby, grousing about the inconvenience. Most of them were, as Zachary himself might say, getting on. A few of them were even as old as he was. One of them was Mrs. Attick, who was in a wheelchair. She looked the most distressed of any of them.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, setting down his two Zabar’s bags. Even though they weren’t that heavy, his arms felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets. The other residents quickly brought him up to speed.

“It was Headley gave the order!” one man said. “Shut ’em all down! All over the city!”

“That son of a bitch,” Zachary said. “How the hell am I supposed to get upstairs? I can’t walk up to eighteen. I’ll be dead before I get to ten.”

Mrs. Attick said, “What about Griffin?”

“Who?”

“My cat. The super said there’s no way to know how long this is going to go on. Could be hours or it could be days! Who’s going to feed Griffin?”

Zachary hated cats and didn’t much care what happened to Mrs. Attick’s. He just wanted to get back up to his apartment, where he could watch what was happening here on his TV while he made himself some coffee.

“My daughter came and took me to lunch,” Mrs. Attick said in her high-pitched voice. “But she dropped me off without knowing what had happened! She would have gone up and fed Griffin. She works out four days a week. She could have run up those stairs like it was nothing. Griffin’s going to be worried sick.”

Zachary was more worried about his yogurt. He needed to get it into the refrigerator.

He was about to go hunting for the super when the main doors flew open and in came two male paramedics — one short, one tall — with a wheeled gurney. They looked frustrated, but not shocked, when they saw the Out of Order signs.

“Did you reach the super?” the short one said into the small radio attached to a strap just below his chin. “We need a working elevator.”

His radio crackled. “On his way,” a voice said through static.

“Yes!” said Zachary under his breath. They’d have to get the elevators operational if there was a medical emergency somewhere in the upper reaches of the building.

Seconds later, the superintendent, a heavyset, olive-skinned man, came into the lobby from a nearby stairwell door.

“You got to get one of these going,” the paramedic said.

“Yeah, yeah,” the super said. “I just got the middle one back on. It’s Mr. Gilbert, in 15C.”

A stir of excitement from the residents. What a break, that Mr. Gilbert was having another one of his heart attacks.

The super hit the Up button and the center elevator doors opened. But Mrs. Attick had already positioned herself close to them, and when they parted, she wheeled herself in like someone trying out for the Paralympic Games.

“Lady!” the tall paramedic shouted. “Get out of the way!”

“My cat!” she cried.

She hadn’t yet turned around, so the shorter paramedic was able to grab the handles on the back of her chair. But as he attempted to pull the wheelchair back out, Mrs. Attick grabbed the railing on the elevator wall. That only slowed the paramedic for half a second, who yanked harder.

Everyone heard a snap.

Mrs. Attick screamed.

“My wrist! Oh God, my wrist!”

At which point, Zachary wondered if they would treat her first, right here in the lobby, which would allow him to use the elevator to get to his apartment and put his yogurt into the fridge.

It did not work out that way.

They got Mrs. Attick out of the elevator, tipped the gurney up on one end, hit “15” on the pad, and up they went.

They were too late.

Mr. Gilbert was dead, and had been for the better part of half an hour.

As was Zachary Carrick, who had decided, what the hell, he would make the climb. He was rounding the stairwell by the door to the fifth floor when his heart exploded.

The good news was, a sixth-floor tenant, Grant Rydell, twenty-three, an unemployed Broadway actor who was heading down to the lobby to check the mail — he was hoping his mother, back home in Saginaw, had sent him a check to cover that month’s rent — discovered Zachary in the stairwell and, before calling 911 on his cell phone, helped himself to his Zabar’s purchases.

Turned out that he and Zachary both loved strawberry yogurt.

“Terrorist!”

Ettan Khatri turned around when he heard someone shout the word. Not because he thought anyone was shouting at him, but because when anyone shouts “Terrorist!” you want to look around and see what’s happening.

Was somebody waving around a machine gun? Had some nut wandered into the lobby of this office tower on East Fifty-Seventh Street with dynamite strapped to his waist?

But when Ettan turned around, he saw a man pointing straight at him.

Of course, this kind of thing had happened before over the years. His parents were from India, and he was born and raised in the United States. Nevertheless, if your skin happened to be a little bit darker, and your hair was jet-black, there was always some asshole who thought you were an Islamic extremist. You could tell them you were Hindu, but they’d just look at you and say something like, “Same difference!”

Ettan, twenty-eight, was in the building for a job interview at a gallery that specialized in rare posters. Ettan had an art degree from Boston College, but he’d spent the last three years working behind the counter at the McDonald’s on Third just north of Fiftieth. When he saw the online posting for an assistant sales position at the gallery, he applied immediately.

So here he was, and given that the gallery was on the fifth floor, getting there by stairs was not going to be a hardship. He’d already checked in with security and was told he would find the stairwell door just beyond the bank of elevators.

It was as he was walking past the elevators, each decorated with a strip of yellow tape reminiscent of the kind used at crime scenes, that he heard the man yell.

He was a big man. Three hundred pounds, easy. Wearing khakis and a checked shirt and a ball cap with no logo on the front.

“Did you sabotage these?” the man asked, pointing a thumb at the elevators as he closed the distance between them.

“What?” Ettan said, at which he raised his palms in a defensive gesture, but not quite quickly enough.

The man drove a fist into Ettan’s mouth.

The world went black.

It started in the Spring Lounge when, sitting across from him at their table, Faith Berkley slipped off one shoe and ran her foot up the inside of Andre Banville’s leg.

Supposedly, this meeting had been to discuss purchasing one of Andre’s French landscapes. The bar was just around the corner from his gallery, but also just happened to be very close to Faith’s new, twentieth-floor luxury condo on Broome Street.

“Maybe,” Faith said, “if you saw our place, and our color palette, and how the light filters through the blinds, you’d have a better idea of our needs.” She put a little spin on the last word.

“Excellent idea,” Andre said. “Will Anthony be there to offer some suggestions?”

“As it turns out,” Faith said, “my husband won’t be home until later. We’ll have to manage.”

“Why don’t you finish that drink and we’ll do just that.”

They were on each other the second after the elevator door closed and Faith had tapped the button for her floor. Andre pushed her up against the back wall, put his mouth hungrily on hers, slipped his tongue between her teeth. He untucked her blouse and ran his hands over the lacy bra she’d bought the day before from Agent Provocateur, while she reached down to stroke him through his jeans.

“Jesus,” she gasped, “you could cut glass with this thing.”

A button popped off her blouse as Andre explored beneath it with his hands. “When we get to your room,” he whispered, “I’m going to pull down your panties and I’m—”

The elevator stopped. They were at the twelfth floor.

“Shit!” Faith whispered, pushing Andre away and frantically tucking in her blouse. “It’s not supposed to stop! It’s supposed to go directly to our floor.”

But the doors did not open. And the elevator did not move.

“What’s going on?” Faith asked.

She pushed the button for her floor again. Nothing. Then, a static crackle. A male voice emanated from a speaker next to the buttons.

“Is there someone in there?”

Faith said, “Elmont?”

Andre looked at her, eyebrows raised. She whispered, “Doorman.”

“Ms. Berkley? Yes, Elmont. We’re bringing all the elevators back down to the first floor and taking them out of service.”

“Why on earth are—”

“Some kind of emergency, ma’am. Happening all over the city. They say—”

“Faith?”

Another man’s voice.

Her husband.

“Anthony?” she said.

“I’m here with Elmont, honey. Raced home from the office soon as I heard what was going on. Wanted to be sure you were—”

“I’m fine!” she said, glancing at Andre. “It’s okay! Go back to—”

“Not a chance,” Anthony said. “I’ll be right here when the doors open.”

At the Empire State Building, hundreds of people who had bought their tickets and lined up to be taken to the 102nd-floor observation deck were told that they wouldn’t be heading to the top of the city’s most famous building after all. There was grumbling and confusion as tourists formed new lines to get their ticket money refunded.

It was a different story on the observation deck, where dozens of visitors were informed their trip back to street level was going to be somewhat more arduous than their ride to the top. Soon, the stairwells were filled with people, and not only those who’d been to the top, but also the thousands of people who worked in the building and were heading home.

A similar scene was playing out over at the Top of the Rock, the viewing area atop Rockefeller Center. Managers of almost all city tourist sites, even those that did not soar into the sky, decided to close their doors. Museums shut down. The guards on the various floors displaying art at the Guggenheim, which could have been accessed by walking up the gradually sloped floor that circled the atrium, announced that everyone was to leave the building. The consensus was that if the city’s elevators were a possible terrorist target, so might be notable landmarks.

The fear was that whoever was messing with New York was just getting started.

The millions who traveled countless stories upward every day were cutting out early. Anxiety around being trapped at work had prompted many to get out while they knew they could. But what awaited them when they got home, if they happened to live in a towering apartment building, was the same situation in reverse. Thousands decided to delay their return and went out to dinner, hoping that within a few hours the city would announce that the crisis was over and the elevators were once again safe to use.

Tourists arriving at JFK and LaGuardia, unaware of the mayor’s decree, were stunned when they got to their hotels and learned they could not get to their rooms if they weren’t prepared to take the stairs. Not good news if you’d brought half a dozen suitcases with you. Hotels reported scores of cancellations from those who had not yet left for New York but had seen the news.

In short, it was one big shitshow.

Forty-Six

The mayor, in his City Hall office, jumped from channel to channel, seeing reports from all corners of the city. In the room with him were Valerie, Vallins, and Glover.

“What a goddamn clusterfuck,” Headley said, shaking his head with despair.

“It is that,” Valerie said.

“You heard anything?” he asked her.

“I just got off the phone with Homeland, and the chief. There’s nothing new.”

“We have to get a fucking handle on this,” he said. “They’ve got to find whoever did this and they have to do it right fucking now! I’m being crucified out there. We need to come up with a new statement, something that offers some reassurance.”

Valerie said, “Inspections are being made. I’m hearing that a few elevators are already back in service. But I think we’re looking at a couple of days before things are back to normal.”

“Jesus Christ.”

The cell phone on the mayor’s desk started buzzing. Vallins was closest, and grabbed it.

“Mayor Headley’s office,” he said.

“Put the son of a bitch on,” a man said.

“Who’s calling?”

“Rodney Coughlin.”

Vallins said, “Hang on.” Headley looked at him. “You’re probably going to want to take this. It’s Coughlin.”

Headley took a moment to prepare himself, then took the phone. “Rodney,” he said.

“What the fuck are you thinking?” Coughlin said.

“Listen, I know—”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten what’s happening on Thursday. Does Thursday ring a bell, Dick? Huh?”

“I know. I know.”

“How do you think my guests will like walking up ninety-seven flights of stairs for the official opening of Top of the Park? Better have some pretty fucking amazing appetizers to make that kind of trek.”

“It’s a temporary measure,” Headley said.

“Who found a way around the rules to give half a mill to your campaign?” Coughlin asked. “It’s slipped my mind.”

“Rodney, I know. Look, have your people do a complete sweep of the elevators. I’m guessing they’ve already been told what to look for. I’m sure—”

“You know who’s going to be here, for the opening of the tallest residential building in the entire fucking country?”

“Rodney, I—”

“I’ll tell you who. Everybody.”

Vallins waved a hand, trying to get the mayor’s attention. Headley put his hand over the phone and whispered, “What?”

“Send me,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Tell him you’re dispatching one of your aides to personally make sure everything will be okay.”

Headley squinted. “What do you know about elevators?”

Vallins shook his head, signaling that wasn’t his point. He whispered, “I’ll get someone. I’ll oversee it.”

Headley nodded, then went back to the phone. “Rodney, listen to me.”

The mayor made his pitch. The second he ended the call, his face went red and his body shook.

“That fucking son of a bitch,” he said, and then pitched the phone in his hand directly at the TV screen, which had been showing a YouTube video of several people stumbling all over each other in a high-rise stairwell.

The screen shattered.

Valerie stifled a scream.

“Goddam fucking hell,” Headley said. “Who does Coughlin think he is, talking to me like that?”

Glover, who had said nothing through any of this, walked over to the mayor’s office window and gazed out at the city.

And smiled.

Forty-Seven

More than two dozen NYPD detectives crowded into the small, rectangular conference room. Some had taken chairs, others were leaning against the wall along the perimeter of the room. Nearly everyone had a takeout coffee in hand.

Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado stood off to one side, arms crossed. At one end of the room, with an oversized computer monitor on the wall behind, were Chief Washington, a woman from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Homeland’s Brian Cartland.

The detectives summoned to this meeting had originally been told they’d be focusing on the three elevator tragedies, but the scope of the investigation had been broadened.

They were now also looking at the taxi bombing on East Forty-Ninth Street. While there was not yet anything specific to indicate a connection between the elevator events and the bombing, the fact that the two incidents happened within minutes of each other could not be ignored. It was possible, the chief speculated, that the goal of the person or persons responsible had been to sow chaos by triggering simultaneous crises.

Attempts were being made to acquire whatever surveillance video existed from the three buildings where the elevators had been sabotaged. Two detectives across the room from Bourque and Delgado said these efforts were being undercut because none of the buildings had cameras set up in the elevator control rooms, where they believed the perpetrator would have had to make some initial connections between the main system and the portable controller. And as for saved video or images from other cameras, they had no idea when the elevators might have been tampered with. Should they start looking at video from last week, or six months ago?

But for sure, someone had to have gotten into those shafts at some point to mount cameras that would provide a view to what was happening inside the cars. Computer experts, the detectives said, had been brought in to determine whether it was possible to tell where the images being transmitted by the cameras had gone. They hoped to have more on that within twenty-four hours.

Street surveillance video was being gathered to help with the taxi explosion investigation. The car’s route that morning, up to the moment of the blast, was being traced, and once that was nailed down, cameras along that path would be found and video examined. A preliminary examination of the destroyed vehicle suggested the explosion had originated in its center, suggesting further that the bomb had been left on the floor of the backseat by a passenger.

“They seem like very different crimes,” observed a detective at the back of the room.

“True,” said Washington. “And they may very well have been executed by different individuals or groups with no connection to each other. But I want those following the taxi bombing and those on the elevator incidents comparing notes, in case there are links.”

“Yeah,” said Delgado. “A bomb left in a car is pretty low-tech compared to the elevator stuff. One requires a tremendous amount of planning, the other, not so much. Who we looking at?”

Washington went to a laptop set up at the front of the room. The screen on the wall lit up with photos of a bombed coffee shop.

Cartland said, “The list of groups that might want to set off a bomb in New York is long. We’ve had a few ISIS and ISIS-inspired events in recent years. But also on our radar are people identifying with the Flyovers movement. They’re believed to be behind this bombing in Portland, Oregon. These Flyover types are taking credit for similar events in coastal cities in recent weeks and have, indeed, claimed responsibility on Twitter for the taxi explosion, although we’ve not been able to confirm the claim’s legitimacy. Agent Darrell, from the FBI, can speak to this.”

A short black woman with closely cropped black hair moved forward. “Hi. Diane Darrell. This taxi bombing does have some of the earmarks of other acts that adherents of the Flyovers have said they perpetrated. What’s interesting is that the man who leads the activist group — who has, at least publicly, disavowed all acts of violence — is currently in New York, supposedly on a pleasure trip with his wife. Do we have that shot of Clement?”

A new picture came up on the screen of Eugene Clement and a woman crossing a New York street.

“This was just after he did a TV interview. We’ve been keeping an eye on him.”

Delgado leaned in close to her partner and whispered, “Could that be our guy?” When Bourque gave her a puzzled look, she added, “Standing by the car. Talking to Otto? In the picture?”

Bourque gave a noncommittal shrug.

Darrell was still talking. “Is it just a coincidence that he’s here in New York when that taxi thing goes down, and the Flyovers say it was their doing? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never been a big believer in coincidences.”

Diane Darrell cracked open a bottled water and took a sip.

“A straightforward bombing is easy enough to understand. You’re a group with a message, and the easiest way to get it across is blow something up. Or get behind the wheel of a truck and mow some people down. All in the name of Allah. Or, perhaps in this case, to express contempt for left-wing ideology. It may not make sense in our minds to make a statement by murdering innocents, but we’ve come to understand the profile.”

She paused.

“The elevator thing is trickier. What’s the message? What’s the statement someone’s trying to make? So far, no one’s claimed responsibility. We’re looking for a motive here, and so far it’s elusive.” She looked at Cartland. “Unless you’d like to share your theory.”

Cartland made a tiny shake of the head.

“Okay, then,” Darrell said. She looked to the chief. “What about this homicide your people have been working?”

Washington nodded and scanned the room. “Where are Bourque and Delgado?”

Delgado raised a hand as Bourque said, “Here.”

Washington said, “Fill us in.”

Delgado told them about finding the body of Otto Petrenko on the High Line more than forty-eight hours earlier. “An elevator technician.”

A murmuring went through the room.

“Fingertips cut off, face beaten beyond recognition. To slow us down on an ID, in case he was in the system. Which he was, for a minor event a few years ago.”

“Where are you on this?” the chief asked.

Bourque weighed in this time. “Workin’ it. His boss says he didn’t service any of the buildings where elevators were sabotaged. But he might have been doing something on the side. But a couple of curious things. Petrenko had been in touch with relatives — those living outside the city — to warn them to be on guard. Told his sister, living in Vegas, that she should think about getting a gun.”

“Why the paranoia?” Cartland asked.

“Don’t know,” Bourque said. “Couple of other things. He’d expressed views that sounded sympathetic to the Flyovers, according to his wife. But I don’t have anything to suggest it went beyond that. We’ve done a check of his computer. No communications that stuck out.”

“But there was someone he’d met with a couple of times,” Delgado said. “Came to his place of employment. Nobody Petrenko works with has any idea who this guy was. We’re trying to get a lead on him.”

Cartland, who looked as though he’d been scowling ever since Delgado started talking, said, “Petrenko?”

The homicide detectives nodded.

“Is that a Russian name?” Cartland asked.

Bourque said, “His wife said he was born there, and his parents escaped to Finland shortly after he was born, then moved to America when he was four. Been in the U.S. ever since.”

“So far as we know,” Cartland said.

Bourque nodded. “Yeah.”

“So if he ever made any trips back to Russia in his later years, you don’t know that.”

Delgado said, “No, we don’t. We can look into that. Can you tell us why that might be relevant?”

Cartland hesitated. “Agent Darrell, a moment ago, alluded to a theory I have, which I was not particularly eager to share because it’s a bit out there.” A pause. “But I think we’re in a situation where every possibility needs to be explored, no matter how far-fetched it might seem.”

The room waited.

“The sole fatality in yesterday’s incident was Dr. Fanya Petrov, a renowned Russian scientist temporarily attached to Rockefeller University. Her area of expertise had something to do with nonge-netic hereditary characteristics, and not for a second do I understand any part of it. But Dr. Petrov also had considerable background in another area of study, one that made her very valuable, potentially, to the United States. That was pathogens. Bacterial pathogens. She knew a lot about the Russian government’s research into bioterrorism. She did not want to go back to Russia. She wanted to stay here.” He paused. “And we believe the Russians knew that.”

“Jesus,” said Bourque. “Are you saying—”

Cartland held up a hand. He wasn’t finished. “Not long after Dr. Petrov literally lost her head, the Russian ambassador was on the phone to the mayor very quickly. He wanted answers. What I’d like to know is how the ambassador found out about this accident so quickly. I think they knew she didn’t want to go back to Russia. They’d been watching her.”

At this point, Cartland scratched his forehead, then crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“I think the ambassador’s call of outrage to the mayor was a performance. He had to have been pleased by this turn of events. Things couldn’t have worked out better for him than if he’d planned it that way.” He paused. “Then again, maybe he did.”

He glanced down at the laptop, searched briefly for something, then clicked.

On the screen there appeared a photo of a man walking along a New York sidewalk. It was a side shot taken across the street without the subject’s knowledge. He was tall and trim with dark hair, dressed in a black suit.

“This,” Cartland said, “is Dmitri Litvin. A freelancer for SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.”

“Just what sort of freelance work does he do?” asked someone in the room.

“Pretty much what anyone needs. Want someone to disappear? Litvin can make it happen. But his skills go beyond assassination. He’s also believed to be a brilliant computer expert.”

“By ‘expert,’ do you mean ‘hacker’?” Delgado asked.

“Possibly,” Cartland said. “Litvin met this morning with the ambassador, in Grand Central. Dr. Petrov was described, essentially, as a neutralized threat. And Litvin made a joke about not going up the Empire State Building.”

“He’s not the only one,” quipped someone.

Cartland acknowledged the comment with a nod. “True. Their conversation was interesting but not conclusive. But we have to consider the possibility that the scientist’s death was a hit.”

Bourque said, “So you create a series of accidents, a kind of smokescreen. The only one you want to kill is the doctor, but if you only kill her, you raise too many red — no pun intended — flags. It looks like a Putin hit, plain and simple. But you let a few others perish in the process, we don’t know where to focus our attention.”

Cartland nodded. “Like I said, it’s kind of out there. But someone has gone to a lot of trouble to sabotage these elevators, and the Russians have people with the expertise to get it done. Now you tell me you’ve got a Russian-born elevator technician who was murdered two days ago. That lengths were taken to make it difficult to ID the body. That members of his extended family had the fear of God put into them.”

He uncrossed his arms. “My theory’s starting to sound slightly less fanciful.”

Forty-Eight

Following the mayor’s disastrous media event, Barbara could have wandered the city — and she would not have had to wander far — compiling stories about the chaos that had been launched by shutting down all the elevators in New York.

But that was the story every other media outlet in the city was chasing, and the truth was, they could do a much better job of it. Hundreds of people working their way down concrete stairwells, person-in-the-street interviews, frustrated tourists who’d come all the way from Flin Flon, Manitoba, wanting to go to the top of the Empire State Building and being turned away — these were tales made for TV. Lots of visuals. Angry people. Collapsing people. Network news crews were fanning out across the city.

Barbara figured, let ’em have it. Let them do what they’re good at. After her brief meeting with Chris Vallins, she hurried back to her apartment, hoping she could get there before her landlord shut down the elevators. If they were working, she was going to take one of them, figuring the odds it would take her to her death were slim. But she was too late. The elevators were plastered with two signs written in Sharpie that read: Closed by Order of Mayor Richard Shithead.

Barbara had always harbored a fondness for her landlord.

Once she’d reached her apartment and had taken a moment to catch her breath, Barbara put on a pot of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and fired up her laptop.

Barbara didn’t need to know how many elevators New York had. Barbara didn’t need to know how many millions of people were inconvenienced. Barbara didn’t need to know how many people would drop dead of heart attacks by the end of the day from taking the stairs up to their thirty-fifth-floor apartments, although that would be an interesting statistic. Barbara thought it was entirely possible more people would die not using elevators than would die in them.

No, what Barbara needed to know was why, and who.

Why would someone who wanted to kill people decide to do it by sabotaging elevators? Why not just pick up a gun and shoot them? Why not run them down with a car? Why not start a fire in an apartment hallway in the middle of the night? If you wanted to kill a few people, any of these methods would be easier.

Why not, well, blow up a taxi?

A bomb in a cab was very effective at taking out a few innocent people. It was pretty random, but if you were looking to make some kind of demented statement, it would do the trick.

Was the elevator saboteur trying to make a statement with the elevator deaths?

Were the victims random? Were the buildings random?

Barbara thought about that.

Even if you could take over an elevator’s controls, could tell who was in it at any given time by looking at them with a camera — thank you very much for that tip, Chris Vallins — it didn’t strike Barbara as a very efficient way to kill a specific person.

How long would you have to wait for your potential victim to board the elevator? What if the person took the stairs? What if the person went out of town? And if there were several elevators in this particular building, how long might you have to wait for the person to take the one you had rigged to fail?

Let’s say this person you wanted to kill finally got on the right elevator at the right time. Was there any guarantee that when the elevator went haywire, the person you wanted dead would actually die? Paula Chatsworth had survived, at least for a while. And from what Barbara knew of the second incident, that Russian scientist would still be around if she hadn’t decided to crawl out of that stalled elevator when it was stuck between floors. No one could have predicted she’d do that.

And the event this morning, where two people fell into the bottom of the shaft?

Barbara pictured people crowded around an elevator first thing in the morning, waiting for the elevator to arrive. The people who might be standing closest to the doors, waiting for them to open, would be totally left to chance. Completely random. And if someone had pushed them into the shaft, they would have been seen.

All of which led Barbara to conclude that the victims really were random.

But what about the locations? Why was the Lansing Tower on Third Avenue targeted on Monday? What was it about the Sycamores Residences, just south of Rockefeller University, that made it the saboteur’s choice for Tuesday? And today it had been the Gormley Building on Seventh.

Was there a common thread tying these locations together?

The coffee machine beeped. Her fresh pot was ready.

“What was I thinking?” Barbara said, getting up and walking right past the coffee machine to the refrigerator. She took out a bottle of chardonnay, unscrewed the top, and found a glass to fill.

She sat back down and began an internet search on the buildings, starting with the Lansing Tower, site of the first incident. There were, not surprisingly, hundreds of stories that mentioned the building. It housed a company devoted to movie and TV production — Cromwell Entertainment, the one Sherry D’Agostino had worked for — as well as top legal firms, even an office for the Department of Homeland Security.

That last tidbit of information was interesting, Barbara thought. She filed it away for possible future reference.

There was also a profile of New York real estate developer Morris Lansing, who had named the building after himself. Hey, if Trump could do it...

Lansing, sixty-nine, had been one of the city’s more illustrious characters for the better part of thirty years. And in those thirty years, he had probably made himself a few hundred friends and a few thousand enemies. You didn’t get that far up the city food chain without pissing off a lot of people. Had Lansing angered someone to the point that they’d fuck up his building?

Finally, there were real estate type ads. While the Lansing Tower was mostly commercial, there were some residences on the upper floors. Barbara had to fend off pop-up inquiries.

Next, she did a search on the Sycamores Residences. What came up first, of course, was the tragedy from the previous day. She ignored the recent news items, refining her search so it excluded this week.

Once she had done that, up came more real estate ads. There were several available units in the Sycamores. Some of them offered a view of the East River, and all touted the building’s amenities, including a playground for kids, a gym, and large party rooms that could be rented for special occasions. Did Barbara want to buy or rent? Boxes kept popping up on her screen, inviting her in to chat with an agent. She kept clicking on X’s to get rid of the boxes, which couldn’t have been more annoying if they were a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around her head.

Once she got through the real estate ads, she found a couple of other news stories. A kitchen fire on the sixth floor that was quickly extinguished, an entertainment feature about a visiting stage director who happened to be staying there.

Half an hour and two-thirds of a bottle of chardonnay later, nothing in particular had jumped out at Barbara. Maybe the answer to her question was there in what she had read, but if it was, she had failed to spot it.

Barbara sighed.

She rubbed her weary eyes and flopped herself onto the couch for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, trying to think of her next step. The only thing she could come up with was to finish off that bottle.

She got back up, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into her glass, and sat back down in front of her laptop. The screen had gone dark. She ran her finger over the mouse pad and brought the computer back to life.

One more building. The Gormley.

Here was another developer who believed you couldn’t go wrong naming a building after yourself. The structure had been started in 1967 and finished in 1969 under the able direction of Wilfred Gormley, who had passed away in 1984. Again, there were real estate listings advertising residences and office space.

Barbara scanned through the names of businesses that occupied the building. An insurance company, a talent agency, accounting services. On the first floor, a barber and a florist.

I am wasting my time.

Barbara put the glass to her lips, tipped it back and emptied it. She folded the screen down and slowly leaned forward until her forehead was touching it. She had to find another angle, another strategy, think of someone new to talk to, check in with her various contacts, make a call to—

I’m an idiot.

She raised her head and reopened the laptop.

If you wanted to find out what was common about the three buildings, she thought, you did a search on all of them at once.

So she typed in the names of the three buildings and hit Enter.

The results loaded in a millisecond. Barbara blinked when she saw what popped up first. She wasn’t quite sure whether to believe it.

It was an itinerary for mayoral candidate Richard Headley.

It covered one week during his election campaign a couple of years earlier. Barbara scrolled through the listing of events, looking for the highlighting of the words she had entered into the search engine.

The Sycamores reference came up first. Headley attended a fundraising party hosted by Margaret Cambridge, who lived in the York Avenue building’s penthouse. Margaret was one of the city’s major, and aging, philanthropists. She’d never be able to go through all her husband’s money, so she liked to give it away, and Headley was someone she wanted to give it to. Of course, there were rules governing large donations, but Margaret had strong-armed enough of her friends to come and give the max.

Barbara went back to the itinerary, looking for the word “Lansing.” The reference turned out not to be about the Lansing Tower, but about Morris Lansing, another major financial backer of Headley’s who’d hosted a campaign rally for Headley. Searching his name and the mayor’s together, Barbara learned that they were longtime friends.

On to “Gormley.”

The day after the Lansing rally, Headley had paid a visit to the Gormley Building because the person who lived in the penthouse was holding yet another fund-raiser for him. That person turned out to be Arnett Steel, president and CEO of Steelways, which was the firm the mayor had been pressing the city to hire for major, multimillion-dollar improvements to the city’s subway switching system.

“Fuck me,” said Barbara.

She looked to see what other stories came up that linked Lansing, the Sycamores, and Gormley.

Nothing else of consequence came up in her search results.

Okay, okay, she told herself. Take a breath.

Just because Richard Headley had something in common with these three buildings — or, at least, with people who had a connection to them — did not mean this was what linked the three elevator incidents.

But damn, it was pretty fucking hard to ignore. Barbara’s pulse was racing.

Suppose this is it, she thought. Suppose Headley is what connects these events.

That would suggest that if someone was sending a message through these horrific acts, the message was for him.

Barbara closed her laptop, stood, grabbed her jacket, and headed out of her apartment.

She wanted to talk to Richard Headley. She wanted to talk to Richard Headley, face-to-face, and she wanted to talk to him right now. She’d make some calls along the way to find out where he was. City Hall? Gracie Mansion? One Police Plaza? Wherever the son of a bitch was, she would find him.

Barbara went to the elevator, pressed the down button, and stood there. Glanced impatiently at her phone.

When the elevator did not immediately show up, she hit the button again.

And then it hit her.

“Jesus Christ, I’m losing my mind,” she said to herself, and headed for the stairs.

Forty-Nine

It was only Day Two at the new job for Arla Silbert, but wow, the shit that had happened.

Her first day — her first morning — she was off to a grisly disaster scene and ended up having dinner with the mayor’s son. On top of that, he disclosed to her something Arla just knew her mom would be dying to know. Which, if she hadn’t turned into such a bitch on the phone, Arla might have told her.

Anyway, it didn’t much matter that Arla didn’t pass on Glover’s tip that there was something fishy about those elevator accidents. The whole world knew that now. Just as well Arla hadn’t said anything. If she had, and Barbara had posted something on the Manhattan Today site twelve or more hours before Richard Headley held his disastrous news conference, the leak might have been traced back to her.

You don’t exactly want to be found out giving away your employer’s secrets your first day on the job. That’s definitely not going to help you get a good reference at your next place of employment.

So here she was, buried down in the data analysis department on her second day, and what with that Headley presser, and the shutdown of the city’s elevators, there hadn’t been a dull moment. Sure, she wasn’t ducking under police tape today, attending accident scenes with the mayor’s son. But there was plenty to do.

There was a hastily called meeting in one of the conference rooms midafternoon. Arla and her coworkers were tasked with monitoring media coverage of the crisis. Was the city’s messaging getting out there? Were property managers going to the city website to learn everything they could about how an elevator might be tampered with, how to recognize it, and how to stop it from happening?

At one point, Arla raised her hand.

“I saw something yesterday that really made an impression,” she said.

The others looked at her blankly, a kind of collective “Who are you again?”

Arla told them about being at the Sycamores Residences observing as the mayor comforted the boy who’d been in the elevator when the Russian scientist had been killed. Even with no cameras present, Headley took his time with the child, praised him, even invited him to Gracie Mansion for a hot dog.

“That was a side of him I hadn’t seen, that most New Yorkers haven’t seen,” Arla said. “A really human Richard Headley. For anyone who thinks that news conference today didn’t go well, maybe a way to offset that is to get him out on the street, and into those stairwells that everyone’s having to go up and down. Have him deliver some groceries to some elderly person on the fifteenth floor. Only, you know, have someone cover it.”

“Yes, well, thank you for that,” Arla’s new boss said, and then moved on to the next item.

In her head, Arla could hear the whine of a bullet-riddled fighter plane plunging earthward, the explosion as it hit the side of the mountain. There’d been no time for the pilot to eject to safety.

Humiliated, she went back to her computer after the meeting. Okay, maybe, for a newbie, she had overstepped. No one liked a smartass know-it-all, and maybe that was how she had come across. But that didn’t mean her idea wasn’t a good one. Maybe the problem was that she’d delivered it in the wrong venue. This department was not a campaign office. Yes, they gathered and analyzed data, but they were not strategists. These people, technically, worked for the city, not the mayor. It wasn’t their job to advise Headley on his image. He had political advisers for that. People like Valerie Langdon.

And Glover.

As the afternoon dragged on, Arla kept thinking about him. He was the one who needed to hear her idea. She should text him. Or... maybe not. He might react the way her supervisor had. Who did she think she was? Did she think those closest to the mayor had no clue how to present him during a crisis?

Or might Glover think she had an ulterior motive? Was she just looking for an excuse to talk to him again?

Yeah, well, maybe.

Just as she’d come to question her motives for taking this job in the first place — had she done it, at least in part, to piss off her mother? — she was now asking herself why, exactly, her thumb was poised over her phone, ready to send a text to Glover.

Wasn’t it possible she wanted to share her idea, and see him again?

She wrote: HEY, DONT WANT TO MAKE SUGGESTIONS ABOVE MY PAY GRADE BUT THINK RH COULD WIN NYERS OVER BY DOING A COUPLE OF THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

Arla reread the words several times. To send, or not to send?

She made her decision. She tapped the tiny, blue, upward-pointing arrow, heard the soft whoosh of the departing message. Arla left her phone, screen up, next to her keyboard and tried not to look at it any more often than every four seconds.

After a full minute had gone by, she believed she’d made a grave miscalculation. Glover had not responded. She’d made a fool of herself. She was some lowly new hire thinking she knew how to run the place. As the minutes ticked by, Arla realized the only thing worse than Glover not replying would be if he did reply. How would that play once the rest of her department found out? Arla Silbert, doing an end run around her boss on her second day.

Stupid stupid stupid—

The phone rang. Arla jumped. Not enough for anyone else in the room to notice, but she’d felt her entire body jolt.

It was not her cell phone that had rung. It was her desk phone.

She picked up. “Hello. Arla Silbert.”

“Hey,” said a voice that she recognized instantly. “So what’s this great idea of yours?”

Arla felt a hammering in her chest. “Listen, I’m sorry,” she said, keeping her voice low so none of her coworkers would hear her. “I never should have—”

“No, no,” said Glover. “Look, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We need to consider everything. Even,” and at this point Arla thought she heard a light chuckle, “from the new kid on the block.”

“If you really think—”

“I do. Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t think the others here appreciate my suggestions. Like you say, I’m the newbie.”

“Okay, look, your day’s just about over, right?”

“Yeah, the whistle blows in twenty minutes. But the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re asked to hang in.”

“If you aren’t, come by my office when you’re done.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

Arla hung up, looked around to assess whether anyone had been listening in. Everyone else appeared transfixed by whatever was on their screens.

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, Arla thought.

Some of the more experienced staff were, in fact, asked to stay late. A few who lived on the upper floors of tall residential towers volunteered to work overtime, hoping that if they hung in long enough, the elevators would be working again by the time they did go home.

Arla was not asked to stay, nor did she volunteer to.

She found a place in the hallway a couple of doors down from Glover’s office. Thank God for cell phones. In the olden days, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, if you were just hanging around, someone might approach and ask if they could help you, or demand to know what you were doing there, even if you did have a City Hall ID hanging around your neck.

But today, all you had to do was lean up against the wall and look at your phone. Your phone gave you cover in almost any circumstance, especially if it appeared you were dealing with an email or a text. That said you were working. You were dealing with something. You might not even have any business with anyone on this floor, let alone in this hallway. You were en route to someplace else, but had only stopped here because you’d received, or had to send, an urgent message.

So that was what Arla was doing. Leaning up against the wall, engrossed in her phone. For real. She was reading the latest updates about the elevator crisis when she sensed someone approaching. She looked up.

Glover smiled. “Hey,” he said. “You made it.”

“Hi,” she said, tucking the phone into her purse. “Okay, so you remember last night, I was telling you about when your dad — sorry — when the mayor was talking to that kid and—”

He put a hand on her arm. “We don’t have to do this in the hall.”

His hand felt warm through the sleeve of her blouse. “Yeah, sure, okay, that sounds great.”

“I need to get out of here for a few minutes, anyway,” he said. He tapped his chest by the handkerchief pocket of his jacket. “They can get me if they need me.”

Glover had been looking Arla in the eye, but something, or someone, farther down the hall had distracted him.

“Hang on,” he said.

Arla turned, following his gaze. A tall, broad-shouldered, and entirely bald man was walking toward them.

“Chris,” Glover said.

The man stopped, nodded. “Glover,” he said, his tone flat.

“You coming back from Top of the Park? Coughlin cooled down some?” There was an air of authority in Glover’s voice, but it sounded somehow hollow to Arla. Puffed up.

Chris looked at Glover through narrowed eyes. It reminded Arla of someone doing a Robert DeNiro impression, the way you’d stare someone down as you said, “You talkin’ to me?”

Finally, Chris said, “It’s handled.”

Glover nodded. “Great, just what I was hoping to hear.”

Arla sensed what was happening, and it made her sad for Glover. He was hoping to impress her, suggest that this Chris guy, whoever he was, reported to him. But it was clear this man felt no such obligation.

In a bid to break the tension, she extended a hand and said, “Hi. I’m Arla.”

Chris’s eyes widened and he smiled graciously as he took her hand. “Chris Vallins. Arla, you said?”

“Yes. Arla Silbert.”

Vallins’s eyes seemed to flicker. “Pleasure,” he said.

“Ms. Silbert has just joined us,” Glover said. “She’s a whiz at data analysis.”

Vallins smiled. “Well.”

“Listen, we’re just on our way,” Glover said.

“Of course,” Chris said. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Silbert.”

Glover lightly touched Arla’s arm to propel her down the hall. Once they were walking, she asked, “What’s he do?”

“Whatever my father asks,” Glover said.

“That all seemed, I don’t know, a little awkward.”

Glover shot her a look that seemed to confirm her assessment. “I feel like he doesn’t trust me, or respect me. It’s like he’s watching me half the time.”

Arla gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s not like you’ve got anything to hide,” she said. “I mean, you’re the mayor’s son.”

Chris Vallins watched as Glover Headley and Arla Silbert walked away. Once they’d turned the corner at the end of the hall, he got out his phone and pulled up the pictures he’d taken when Barbara Matheson visited the Morning Star Café.

Using two fingers, he zoomed in on the photos of the young woman who had joined her. He’d taken a few shots as she was leaving the restaurant.

Without question, this was the woman he had just met.

Hanging out with the mayor’s son.

His preliminary research had determined that while Barbara wrote under the name of Matheson, her legal last name was Silbert.

There was, Vallins believed, more than a passing resemblance between the two. He was willing to lay odds that the woman he had just met was Barbara’s daughter.

Vallins shook his head with no small measure of admiration. You had to hand it to Barbara, he thought. She’d installed a mole in City Hall. A mole who was cozying up to the mayor’s son.

The only thing to do now was figure out what to do about it.

Tell the mayor? Or warn Barbara that she was pushing her luck?

Vallins had to admit, he was warming to her.

But for now, telling the boss was the way he was going to play it.

Fifty

Bucky heard a knock at his second-floor hotel room door.

“Hello?” he said.

“Housekeeping?” a woman called out.

“Look at the sign!” he shouted. He’d left the Do Not Disturb card hanging off the door handle since checking in days earlier.

“I know, but—”

Bucky got up from the bed where he had spread out everything he needed, went to the door, and opened it a foot. Any further, and someone would be able to see what he had spread out all over the bedspread. A woman was standing in the hallway with a large cart stocked with sheets and cleaning supplies and tiny bottles of soap and shampoo.

“I haven’t serviced your room since you got here,” the woman said. “Are you sure you don’t need—”

“I don’t need anything,” Bucky said.

“Fresh sheets?”

“No.”

She held up a tiny bottle of shampoo. “This?”

“I’m good. The room is fine. I don’t need a thing.”

Bucky started to worry when the maid eyed him suspiciously. Maybe she thought he had a dead body in there. Or that he’d kidnapped a girl or something. Or was on some kind of porn-watching binge. He needed to give her a story.

“I’ve got the flu,” he said, and placed a palm over his stomach. “I come to New York to see my girlfriend and soon as I get here I come down with something. Musta caught it on the plane. Right after I check in I start throwing up and then I got the runs.” Then he made a waving motion in front of his nose, clearing the air.

“Oh my,” the maid said, taking a step back from the door.

“I’m taking it easy till it blows over,” he said.

“What about food? I don’t see any tray from room service outside your door.”

“Been too sick to eat,” Bucky said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Okay, okay, you get better,” the woman said, pushing her cart on to the next room.

Bucky closed the door and sighed with relief. He wouldn’t have wanted to be asked to explain the items strewn across the bed and desk. Certainly not the empty pizza boxes, which would have put a lie to the story he’d just told. But especially not the various containers of chemicals. The wires. The timers. The two open laptops. The two burner phones and other electronic devices.

The gun.

Bucky had driven all the way across the country to New York. It wasn’t like he could get on a plane with all this stuff, especially the silencer-equipped Glock 17.

He’d brought everything up to the room in two trips, which wasn’t all that difficult given that he had booked himself into a two-story motor court. No high-rise hotel for him. Wouldn’t want to be trekking up all those flights of stairs these days. Once he had everything in the room, he set it all up the way he liked. It was here that he’d put the finishing touches to the bomb he’d left in the Prius. It was here that he was preparing two more. And it was from the laptops he did any necessary research, and watched reports about what he’d accomplished.

Bucky was going to have another talk with Mr. Clement tomorrow. He had some ideas about what to do next, maybe up their game, but he wanted to clear them with the boss. It was a conversation they would have in person. Mr. Clement didn’t like communicating through landlines or cell phones. The old man avoided texting. He didn’t like when things were written down. The guy wouldn’t even take an Uber. Only cabs he could pay for in cash. So they’d set up meetings at the zoo, or on the street, or in the hotel men’s room.

They’d have another meeting there in the morning. He’d just have to be careful not to be seen by Mrs. Clement. She’d spotted him, Mr. Clement said. She was getting a little suspicious.

Bucky didn’t like that. He knew Mr. Clement kept her in the dark about the worst of his activities. But women often had ways of figuring things out. They were sneaky. They couldn’t be trusted.

Bucky wondered what Mrs. Clement would do if she knew the things her husband had set in motion.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe something.

Anyway, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had work to do.

Fifty-One

Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado had already put in a twelve-hour day and were both starting to get a bit punchy. Delgado had phoned her mother-in-law to babysit, again, because her husband had pulled a late shift at the firehouse. She’d talked to him a couple of times, the two of them wondering what the night might bring in a city without elevators.

On Delgado’s computer screen was the picture Jerry had emailed to himself from Otto Petrenko’s coworker’s phone. It showed, in the distance, Otto talking to the tall man leaning up against the dark sedan.

Delgado had placed on the same screen, off to the side, a photo of Eugene Clement. She and Bourque did not necessarily have a reason to believe it was Clement who’d come to see Otto at his place of work, but it was a starting point.

“I just don’t know,” said Bourque, who had wheeled his office chair around to the other side so he could sit shoulder to shoulder with his partner and stare at the screen. “It could be him, but then again, it could be just about anybody.”

“Clement and this guy are about six feet, but so are half the men in the world, so that’s no help. And they both have gray hair. But...”

“What do you see?”

“I’m just looking at our mystery man’s hair. It seems... off.”

Bourque leaned in closer. “Off, as in...?”

“Kilter. It doesn’t look natural. I think it’s a rug.”

Bourque nodded. “Maybe. So... it’s part of a disguise? He doesn’t want people to recognize him?”

“Or he’s just vain,” Delgado said. “Let’s go back to the tag.” She zoomed in on the back of the sedan. That part of the car was in shadow, and the color of the license plate was difficult to determine. Plus, it was nearly 50 percent obscured by the used Mustang, in the foreground of the picture, that the elevator technician had been thinking about buying. Immediately to the right of the plate was a scratch in the paint where the bumper had been dented.

All they could make out were the last two numbers of the plate: 13. Even those numbers were somewhat blurry. The plate could be a New York State one. Below the numbers were what appeared to be the letters TATE. Most New York plates had the words “Empire State” across the bottom. But then again, most New Jersey plates said “Garden State” in the same place. And Connecticut plates featured the words “Constitution State” along the bottom edge. Rhode Island had “Ocean State.”

Most New York plates were an orangey yellow, but some were white with blue numbers, and others were blue with orange numbers. New Jersey plates came in yellow, or blue, or white.

What proved more helpful were the words across the top of the plate. Jerry pointed to the screen. “Looks like an R and K there.” The last two letters in New York.

“Yeah. So it’s a New York plate. That narrows it down to only a few million,” Delgado said.

Bourque pointed. “What is that?”

“What is what?”

He put his finger directly on the screen.

“Do you mind?” Delgado said, brushing his hand away. “You’re gonna leave a smudge. You’re as bad as my kid.”

“Just look,” he said, pulling his finger back half an inch.

Delgado leaned in, her nose only four inches from the screen. Bourque was pointing to a small sticker of some kind on the bumper, just below the plate.

“I can’t tell what it is,” she said.

It was not the size of a traditional, rectangular bumper sticker people put on their cars to advertise where they’d gone on vacation, or who they were supporting politically. This sticker was round, and about the size of a paper coaster, if not slightly smaller.

“It looks like it’s got letters on it,” he said.

“Yeah. Maybe three. Reminds me a little of a New York Yankees logo. You know? With the N and the Y on top of each other, except here they look separated.”

“So it’s an N, and a Y, and what’s the third letter?” Bourque asked.

“Maybe a C?” She shook her head. “It’s just going to get fuzzier if I blow it up any more.”

“Hang on,” Bourque said slowly. “I think I’ve seen this before but I’m not sure where. I just have to think...”

He got up out of his chair and rounded the desks until he was back in front of his own computer.

“Want your chair?” Delgado asked, watching as her partner leaned over to tap away on the keys.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. He squinted at his screen and muttered to himself, “Okay, yes, yes, okay.”

“What is it?” Delgado asked.

“Give me a sec. I’m printing it out.”

“Printing what out?”

A few steps away, a printer started to hum, and seconds later a piece of paper dropped into the tray. Bourque walked over, retrieved it, then sat back down in the chair next to Delgado.

He held the sheet of paper in front of her. “What do you think?”

He had printed out a picture of a logo with the letters NYG grouped artistically together.

“Pretty,” she said. “What is it?”

“Remember how Headley’s been going on about making this a more livable city?”

“Yeah, well, that’s really going well,” she said. “So long as you like stairs.”

“It was all part of his campaign. Reducing greenhouse gases, that kind of shit. He’s been doing a big push about making all city cars environmentally friendly. Either making them all electric, or at least hybrid. Part gas engine, part electric.”

“Okay,” Delgado said.

“He kicked it off with his so-called New York Green initiative. They made up these stickers.”

“So... this is a city car,” Delgado said slowly.

Bourque nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, then maybe this is a dead end,” she said. “I mean, it makes sense that someone from the city, like the building department, the one that looks after elevators, might come by and see the folks at the good ol’ elevator repair shop.”

“Yeah, but then why wouldn’t they talk to the boss? To what’s-his-name, Gunther Willem. And supposedly Otto never mentioned this guy he went out to talk to. According to Willem, Otto didn’t say a word about what his visitor wanted. Why wouldn’t he want to reveal a conversation he had with someone from the City?”

Delgado took her face away from the screen and leaned back into her chair.

“That’s a good question,” she said.

“So all we have to do,” Bourque said, “is find an environmentally friendly sedan that belongs to the City, with a plate ending in 13, and a scratch in the bumper right there, and find out who signed it out on this day.”

“Well,” Delgado said, “how hard could that be?”

Fifty-Two

Once she’d managed to hail a cab and was safely ensconced in the backseat, Barbara started making calls on her cell. Her first was to the mayor’s office, but she couldn’t get through. When the line wasn’t busy, it rang endlessly.

Not surprising. Given the kind of day it had been, Headley and his team might well have adopted a bunker mentality. Hole up, wait for things to blow over. So far, the fallout from the mass elevator shutdown was not good. At least eight dead. Six of those were possible heart attacks, two were stairway falls.

There were probably a hundred media inquiries per minute coming in to City Hall. The city’s ability to deal with incoming requests for information and interviews had probably already collapsed.

But heading south in a cab, Barbara was struck by how calm — almost convivial — things were. Manhattan sidewalks were always thronged with people moving hurriedly from place to place, and, not surprisingly, given that going upstairs was suddenly a pain in the ass, they were more packed than usual. But people were hardly running about, panicked. Not many of them were even putting one foot ahead of the other. They were standing around, leaning up against buildings and lampposts, chatting with each other, laughing. Every café, bar, and restaurant with outdoor seating was overflowing with people making the best of an emergency.

Can’t get up to your apartment? Might as well have a drink till they give the all clear.

Fuckin’ New Yorkers, Barbara thought. It doesn’t matter what you throw at us. We just carry on.

She threw a twenty at the driver and leapt out of the cab two blocks from City Hall. She ran the rest of the way.

She had always loved this part of Manhattan. The park and fountain south of the city’s seat of government. People playing chess, kids on school tours, the nearby stands selling New York souvenirs and trinkets and hot dogs and pretzels. Tourists heading off to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on foot.

But Barbara didn’t really see any of this now. She had her mind on one thing and one thing only: telling Richard Headley that he, and his supporters, were what linked the elevator incidents.

As she reached the gate to get onto the City Hall grounds, her way was blocked by a uniformed officer. She’d been through this security checkpoint so many times that often she was waved through without flashing her media credentials.

This time, the cop on duty wouldn’t let her through. He said, “Hold it right there.”

“I need to talk to the mayor,” Barbara said.

The cop smirked. “Oh, well, sure. Head right up. I’m sure he’s free.” But he did not let her pass.

“No, seriously,” she said. She dug into her purse and handed him her credentials. “I go in there all the time. Come on, you know me. Right? You haven’t seen me go through here a hundred times?”

“I still have to check your ID and confirm that you’re legit. Threat level’s been raised, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Barbara sighed, turned around in a gesture of frustration.

Something caught her eye.

Two people heading down the sidewalk. A man and a woman. The woman, at least from where Barbara stood, looked a lot like Arla, and the man had more than a passing resemblance to the mayor’s son.

“Shit,” she said.

“Huh?” the cop said.

Barbara spun back around. “Nothing.”

He handed back her credentials. “Go on in.”

Barbara ran into the building, cleared further checkpoints, and headed to the mayor’s office, where she encountered even more security.

“Please,” she said to the female guard. “I need to see him.”

“You’re gonna have to deal with the media liaison department if you—”

The door to the mayor’s office opened. Valerie Langdon emerged.

“Valerie!” Barbara shouted. She quickly followed that with, “Ms. Langdon!” She and the mayor’s assistant had never been on a first-name basis.

Valerie turned, saw who it was, and hesitated.

“It’s important,” Barbara said.

Valerie approached. “What do you want?”

“I need to talk to him.”

“You and every other reporter between here and California,” she said.

Barbara took two seconds to compose herself. “I think I know why,” she said.

Valerie’s head tilted to one side. “Why what?”

“Why it’s happening.”

“Tell me.”

“I think it’s about him,” she said.

“Say again?”

“I think the elevator incidents are about the mayor.”

“That’s insane.”

“Maybe,” Barbara said. “But I want to bounce something off him.” Valerie took ten seconds to make up her mind. “Come with me,” she said.

Valerie made Barbara wait outside the door to the mayor’s office. She reappeared less than a minute later.

“He’ll see you,” she said, a hint of surprise in her voice.

Valerie did not follow Barbara into the office. The mayor was leaning up against his desk, watching the TV on mute.

“Close the door,” he said.

Barbara closed the door.

“Have a seat,” he said.

Barbara took a spot on the couch and Headley sat in a chair opposite her. He slapped his palms on top of his thighs and leaned forward. “So, what’s this important thing you want to tell me?”

“There’s a common thread to the elevator events,” Barbara said.

“I know,” the mayor said, shrugging. “Similarities in... technique.”

“I’m not talking about the cameras.”

Headley’s eyebrows went up. “So you know about that.”

She nodded. “I’m not talking about how it was done. I think I know why it might have been done.”

Headley leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, as if daring her to impress him. “Shoot.”

“I think it’s about you.”

A long pause. Then, “Go on.”

“All three buildings are either owned, or occupied, by major supporters of your campaign. Especially the one this morning. The Gormley Building.”

“I don’t know anyone named Gormley.”

“Maybe not, but you do know Arnett Steel. He lives in the penthouse.”

Headley said nothing.

“And the Sycamores, that was where—”

“I know,” he said. “Margaret Cambridge.”

“I think someone is sending a message to you, and those who’ve enabled you,” Barbara said. “I think this... I think this is about revenge.”

Headley slowly shook his head. “Your theory seems... thin.”

“Do you have a better one?” Barbara asked.

“Several leads are being followed. An alt-right domestic terror group could be behind this. That theory is already out there. It strikes me as the most credible one. My guess is you’d just love for these events to have something to do with me. It’d fit the narrative you’ve set forth.”

“That’s not true,” Barbara said. “I’m not here as a reporter. I’m — okay, that’s bullshit. I am here as a reporter. But I want to see whoever’s doing this caught just as much as you do. I want this to end.” She paused. “I watched Paula Chatsworth die. This isn’t just another story for me.”

“It’s personal,” the mayor said.

Barbara nodded.

“Personal in more ways than one,” Headley said with a sly smile.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.” He smiled. “Were you surprised when I so readily agreed to see you?”

“Um, maybe a little.”

“I had Valerie show you in because I wanted to congratulate you.”

“For?”

“Your audacity. The genius of it. Planting someone right here at City Hall. Getting someone on the inside. I have to hand it to you.” He suddenly got up, went back to his desk, shuffled some papers, trying to find something. “It’s here somewhere,” he said. “I asked for the file. On new hires.”

Arla.

“Doesn’t matter,” Headley said, abandoning the search and heading for the door, getting ready to show her out. “I’ll find it later. But I’ve been informed that you have a member of your family working for us. Am I right about that?”

Barbara nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes. But it’s not what you think. She did it entirely on her own. If you want to know the truth—”

“That’d be a twist.”

“If you want to know the truth, I think she took the job, in part, just to get under my skin. She knew that working for your administration would not go over well with me. Our relationship is... complicated. But she got the job because she’s good at what she does. She deserves it.”

“So you say,” Headley said. “Forgive me for being skeptical. Anyway, whatever game you and your daughter may or may not be playing here, it’s over. As is her employment with the City of New York.”

He opened the door, inviting her to leave. But instead of walking out, Barbara went to his desk and grabbed the sheaf of papers he’d been going through.

“Hey!” the mayor said. “Don’t touch my—”

She quickly found what she was looking for. She waved one sheet in the air and scattered the rest onto his desk. “You were hunting for this. My daughter’s job application.”

“I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. But I know what I need to know.”

“Do you? Do you know her name?”

The mayor shrugged. A no.

“Arla,” Barbara said, heading for the door. She slapped the sheet of paper against Headley’s chest as she passed him. “Arla Silbert.”

She met Headley’s eyes for a fraction of a second as she walked out.

Fifty-Three

Barbara had her head down as she walked briskly away from the mayor’s office, but not, as was most often the case, because she was looking at her phone. Her head was down because she did not want anyone to see her cry.

If it had not been for the tears blurring her vision, she might have seen Chris Vallins instead of running right into him.

“Sorry,” she blurted, and looked up. “Oh, shit.”

“Jesus,” he said, seeing the tears. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, trying to steer around him. But this time, it was his turn to hold her by the arm and steer her toward the closest door.

It wasn’t a ladies’ room this time, or a men’s. He ushered her into a conference room that was outfitted with one rectangular table and about a dozen wheeled office chairs.

“Talk to me,” he said, putting her into one of them. He took another one and wheeled it around so he was facing her, knees touching.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Barbara said. “I’m fine.”

She dug into her purse for a tissue and dabbed her eyes.

“You were in talking to Headley?”

She nodded.

“About?”

Barbara swallowed, sniffed. “He’s the link. Wherever an elevator’s gone down, it’s been a building with a major political donor. To his campaign. I think that’s what this is about.”

Vallins said, “Whoa.”

Another sniff. She went into her bag for another tissue and blew her noise.

“What did the mayor say?”

“He dismissed it,” she said.

Vallins leaned in close, his head nearly touching hers. He saw a tear running down her cheek and caught it with his finger.

“That’s why you’re crying?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s... I think everything’s about to unravel.”

“What do you mean?”

Barbara raised her chin, looked into Vallins’s eyes. “I don’t know what to make of you. You work for that asshole, but there are times when you seem like maybe you’ve got an actual conscience.”

He smiled. “I don’t know about that.” He paused. “I... sometimes I have to play both sides.”

“That sounds like the shortest definition ever of ‘politics,’” Barbara said.

“Maybe.”

“My daughter got a job with the city. She did it totally on her own. Headley found out, somehow. He thinks I engineered it. That I got her in here as a spy, for fuck’s sake.” She shook her head. “It’s not true.”

Vallins inched back slightly. “I can see why he might have thought that, though.”

“He’s going to have her fired, Chris,” Barbara said. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Barbara shrugged. “It’s not like it’s your fault.”

Vallins said nothing.

“I have to go,” Barbara said. “I have to find her. I have to talk to her.”

As she started to rise from her chair Vallins gently gripped her shoulders and held her in place. “Wait,” he said. “Just...”

“What?”

Vallins swallowed, took a breath. “I like you. I mean, I’ve always liked what you’ve stood her. I’ve been reading you for a long time. And, well, yeah, I like you.”

Barbara sniffed again. “Okay. I’m guessing the mayor doesn’t know you’re a fan.”

He managed a smile as he struggled with what to say next. “Maybe sometime I’ll be able to explain. But for now, I’m sorry.”

And then he did something she was not expecting. He leaned forward, kissed her lightly on the forehead, then released his grip on her shoulders and wheeled back in his chair.

Barbara stood and studied him for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said, and left the room.

Fifty-Four

I’m an idiot,” Arla said. “It should have occurred to me that you’d already thought of this.”

She and Glover had settled into a booth at Maxwell’s on Reade Street. He smiled and took a sip from the copper mug that held his Moscow Mule. Tito’s vodka, ginger beer, and lime. Arla had gone for a glass of Sancerre. Glover had offered a taste of what he was drinking, and the face she’d made when she got a little of it on her tongue had made him laugh.

Arla had told Glover she thought the mayor had to get out there, be seen by and with all those New Yorkers struggling through the elevator crisis. Climb a few flights to take dinner to a shut-in, she’d said. Deliver a prescription from Duane Reade to an apartment dweller too ill to make the trip down and back up again.

“Yeah, those are good ideas,” he said to her, sitting across the table from her.

“You’re already doing this, aren’t you?” she said.

“I’m setting up something,” he said. “But great minds do think alike.”

“I brought this up at our department meeting,” Arla said, “and everyone looked at me like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ Sorry if I’ve wasted your time.”

“Not at all,” Glover said, leaning forward so he wouldn’t have to speak loudly. “The truth is, I was happy to get out of the building. It’s pretty tense in there.”

Arla had her fingers over the base of her glass, holding it securely between sips. Inches away, Glover lay his hands flat on the table, his fingers splayed as if reaching out to Arla, waiting to make a move.

“I’ll just bet it is,” Arla said.

“Yeah. Dad’s kinda freaking out. The news conference didn’t go well. All the TV pundits are ripping him to shreds.”

“When can people start using the elevators again?”

“Once landlords and property managers have done inspections, they should be able to start up the elevators in their buildings. So, maybe tomorrow? And you can be sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop the Top of the Park grand opening tomorrow night.”

“That skyscraper at the north end of Central Park?”

“Right. Rodney Coughlin’s massive steel and glass erection.”

Arla smirked.

“After the Freedom Tower, it’s the tallest building in the city. He’s one of my dad’s biggest backers. We’re going to the opening tomorrow night.”

“Yikes. I’m not sure I’d want to be in on one of those elevators.”

“No kidding,” he said. “But I’m sure everything will be safe. Who knows. They might even catch whoever’s doing it by then.”

“I wonder who it is,” she said.

“Whoever it is, you gotta admit, he’s pretty brilliant. I mean, yeah, you have to condemn the act, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity of it all. Being able to take over control of a building’s elevators. It’s amazing.”

Arla shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see much to admire.” She turned over her phone, which had been resting facedown on the table, to check the time. “Look, if you have to go, I’ll understand.”

“I’m in no rush,” Glover said.

He inched his fingers forward until the tips of several were touching Arla’s. She did not pull back.

“I wondered how you’d feel about, you know, getting together outside of work.”

“You mean, like right there?” Arla asked.

Glover laughed nervously. “This sort of started out as a drink about work. But maybe sometime we could—”

“Sure,” Arla said. “I’d like that.”

He smiled. “Great. Do you have a favorite resta—”

“Hey,” said a voice.

They both turned to see Barbara standing at the end of the table. While Arla struggled to hold her jaw in place, Glover appeared unfazed to see her there.

“Barbara,” he said, taking his hand away from Arla’s. “Nice to see you.”

Barbara attempted to offer Glover a smile, but her face was glass on the verge of shattering as she focused on Arla.

“Uh,” Glover said, still not sure why Barbara was standing there, since she had not yet said why, “let me introduce you. Arla, this is Barbara Matheson, who you may know from her Manhattan Today column.” He managed a smirk. “Maybe not my father’s favorite writer, but believe me, he always reads her. And Barbara, this is Arla Silbert. She’s—”

“We’ve met,” Arla said.

“Oh,” Glover said, surprised. “Where do you know each other from?”

To her daughter, Barbara said, “I need to talk to you.”

“How did you find me?” Arla asked.

“I saw you coming out of City Hall. This is about the hundredth place I’ve gone into, looking.”

Arla said, “I have a phone.”

Barbara shook her head. “I had to talk to you face-to-face.”

Glover, watching this conversation, had the look of a bewildered puppy. “I feel a bit out of the loop here,” he said.

Barbara said to him, “I went to see your father.” She paused. “It’s all about him.”

Glover shrugged. “It’s always all about him.”

“That’s not what I mean. All this shit with the elevators. It’s a message, meant specifically to get his attention.”

Glover was instantly alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“Ask him. I’m done. I gave it my best shot. Anyway, you’re not why I’m here. I’m here to talk to my daughter.”

It was Glover’s turn to keep his jaw from dropping. Speechless, he looked at Arla, who had briefly closed her eyes, as if trying to make her mother disappear.

“Arla,” Barbara said.

She opened her eyes. “Please go.”

Barbara’s face began to crumble. “I’m so sorry. Somehow... he figured out who you were... are... to me.” A long pause, then, “Maybe even to him.”

Glover found his voice. “That’s your mother? And you just happened to land a job helping the mayor? Are you some sort of spy?”

“No,” Arla said. “She didn’t even know I was applying for the job.” She looked at Barbara. “I’m fired, right? Did Headley tell you that?”

Barbara nodded. “Pretty much.”

“Terrific,” Arla said, tearing up herself now. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

Glover was still struggling to put it all together. “I don’t — I had no idea. You don’t... have the same name.” He reached back across the table for Arla’s hand before she could pull it away. “I’ll talk to my father. He can’t fire you like that. I oversee your department. I’ll handle this.”

Barbara couldn’t stop looking at Glover’s hand on Arla’s.

“Don’t,” Barbara said quietly. Glover, startled, slowly withdrew his hand as Arla’s cheeks flushed.

Glover took a moment to compose himself and said, “I should go.” He tossed some bills onto the table to cover their drinks and slid out of the booth. Before walking away, he looked at Arla and said, “I’m going to sort this out.”

But Arla couldn’t look at him. Her head was bowed, she had one hand over her eyes. Barbara sat where Glover had been.

Without looking at her mother, Arla said, “I hate you.”

Barbara said, “I don’t blame you. And I think maybe you’re about to hate me even more.”

Arla took her hand away from her eyes and looked at her mother through tears. “That seems unlikely. You’ve lost me my job.” She tilted her head toward the door, in the direction Glover Headley had gone, and said, “Maybe more than that.”

“It wouldn’t have worked out with Glover,” Barbara said.

“Oh, and why’s that?” Arla asked. “Because you hate his father? If you’d been there for me more, you’d know I’ve got a mind of my own and don’t care whether you approve of people I see, or who their parents might happen to be.”

“It’s not... like that,” Barbara said.

“What, then?” Arla said. “Tell me. I’d really like to know.”

“It could never have worked out with Glover,” Barbara said slowly, “because he’s your brother.”

Fifty-Five

When she comes through the doorway, she is panting, desperate for air. “I think I need a drink of water,” she gasps. And then she begins to stagger.

The boy is sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching an episode of Star Trek. He jumps to his feet.

“Mom?” he says.

She puts a hand to her chest. “It hurts so—”

And then she goes down. First to her knees, then the rest of her pitches forward. She doesn’t even manage to get an arm in front of her to help break her fall. Her face has turned slightly, so she lands on her right check.

“Mom!” the boy screams, running to her.

She moves her lips, whispers something to her son. “I need... call your father.” Her eyelids close.

“Mom? Mom? Say something. Mom. Please don’t die. Mom? Mom. Open your eyes. Look at me. Mom. Mom! I love you, Mom. I love you. Oh, Mom. No no no no no.”