"Going down"
JOHN A. CLARK was a careful man.
The car that drove him to work at half past eight each morning was a custom made Lexus withe reinforced steel plates and bulletproof windows. His driver, a retired FBI agent, carried a Beretta subcompact automatic pistol and he knew how to use it. There were just five steps from the point where the car stopped to the entrance of Clarke Tower of New York's Fifth Avenue, but closed circuit television cameras followed him every inch of the way. Once the automatic doors had slid shut behind hik, a uniformed guard also armed watched as he crossed the foyer and entered iñyo his own elevator.
The elevator had white marble walls, a blue carpet, a silver handrail, and no buttons. Clarke pressed his hand against a small glass panel. A sensor read his fingerprints, verified them, and activated the elevator. The doors slid shut and the elevator rose to the sixtieth floor without stopping. Nobody else ever used it. Not did it ever stop at any of other floors in the building. At the same time it was travelling up the receptionist in the lobby was on the telephone, letting his staff know that Mr. Clark was on his way.
Everyone who worked in Clark's private office had been handpicked and thoroughly vetted. It was impossible to see him without an appointment. Getting an appointment could take there months.
When you're rich, you have to be careful. There are cranks, kidnappers, terrorist the desperate and the dispossessed. John A. Clark was the chairman of Clark enterprises and the eight richest man in the world and he was very careful indeed. Ever since his face had appeared on the front cover of Daily magazine ("The electronics king"), he knew that he had become a visible target. When in public he walked quickly, with his head bent. His glasses has been chosen to hide as much as possible if his round , handsome face. His suits were expensive but anonymous. If he went to the meeting or to dinner, he always arrived at the last minutes, preferring not to hang around. There were dozens of security aystems in his life and although they had once annoyed him he has always allowed them to become a routine.
But ask any spy or security agents. Clark is the one thing you can't get killed. It tells the enemy where you are going to and when you're going to be there. Routine was going to kill John A. Clark, and this was the day death had chosen to come calling.
Of course, Clark had no idea of this as he stepped out of the elevator that opened directly into his private offic, a huge room occupying the corner if the building with floor to ceiling windows giving views in two directions: fifth avenue to the east, central park just a few blocks boryh. The two remaining walls contained a door, slow bookshelf, and a single oil painting a vase d flowers by Daniel James.
The black glass surface of his desk was equally uncluttered: a computer, a leather notebook, a television, a telephone and a framed photo of a fourteen year old boy.As he took off his jacket and sat down, he found himself looking at the picture if the boy.Blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles. Alex Clark looked remarkably likely his father had thirty years ago. John Clark was now fifty five and beginning to show his age despite his year round tan."His son was almost as tall as he was. The picture had been taken the summer before on Long Island. They had spent the day sailing, then they'd had a barbecue on the beach. It had been one of the few happy days they'd spent together.
The door opened, and a secretary came in. Helen Busworth was English. She had left her home and her husband to come and work in New York and still loved every minute of it. She had been working in this office for eleven years, and in all that time, she had never forgotten a detail or made a mistake.
"Good morning, Mr. Clark," she said. "Good morning, Helen." She put a folder on his desk. "The latest figures from Singapore, costs on the R16 organizer. You have lunch with Senator James at half past one. I've booked the Ivy."
"Did you remember to call London?" Clark asked.
Ellen Bosworth blushed. "She never forgot anything, so why was she asked?" "I spoke to Alan Blunt's office yesterday afternoon," she said. "Afternoon in New York would have been evening in London. Mr. Blunt was not available, but I've arranged for him to call you this afternoon. We can have it patched through to your car."
"Thank you, Ellen. Shall I have your coffee sent in to you?"
"No, thank you, Ellen. I won't have coffee today."
Ellen Bosworth left the room, seriously alarmed. No coffee? What next? Mr. Clark had begun his day with a double espresso for as long as she had known him. Could he be ill? He certainly hadn't been himself recently, not since Alex had returned home from that school in the south of France. And this call, this phone call to Alan Blunt in London. Nobody had ever told her who he was, but she had seen his name once in a file. He had something to do with military intelligence, MI6. What was Mr. Clark doing talking to him? Ellen Bosworth returned to her office and suited her nurse not with coffee, she couldn't withstand the stuff, but with a refreshing cup of English breakfast tea. Something very strange was going on, and she didn't like it. She didn't like it at all.
Meanwhile, sixty floors below, a man had walked into the lobby area wearing grey overalls with an ID badge attached to his chest. The badge identified him as Sam Green, maintenance engineer with X press Elevators Inc. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and a large silver toolbox in the other. He set them both down in front of the reception desk. Sam Green was not his real name; his hair, black and a little greasy, was fake, as were his glasses, mustache, and uneven teeth. He looked fifty years old but was actually closer to twenty-nine. Nobody knew the man's real name, but in the business that he was in, a name was the last thing he could afford. He was known as "The Very gentlemawant to he was one of the highest paid and most successful contract killers in the world. He had been given his nickname because he always sent flowers to the families of his victims.
The lobby guard glanced at him. "I'm here for the elevator," he said. He spoke with a Brooklyn accent, even though he had never spent more than a week there in his life.
"What about it?" the guard asked.
"You people were here last week," yeah, sure. We found a defective cable on elevator thirteen and it had to be replaced, but we didn't have all the parts, so I was sent back.
The gentleman fished in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. "You wanna call the head office? I've got my orders here."
If the guard had called X press Elevators Inc., he would have discovered that they did indeed employ a Sam Green, although he hadn't shown up for work in two days. This was because the real Sam Green was at the bottom of the Hudson River with a knife in his back and a twenty-pound block of concrete attached to his foot. But the guard didn't make the call. The gentleman had guessed he wouldn't bother, after all, the elevators were always breaking down. There were engineers in and out all the time, what difference would one more make? The guard checked a clipboard, "Go ahead," he said. The gentleman put away the letter, picked up his cases, and went over to the elevators."
"There were a dozen servicing the skyscraper, plus a fourteenth for John A. Clark. Elevator number thirteen was at the end. As he went in, a delivery boy with a parcel tried to follow. "Sorry," the gentleman said, "closed for maintenance." The door slid shut. He was on his own. He pressed the button for the sixty-second floor.
He had been given this job only a month before. He had to work fast: killing the real maintenance engineer, taking his identity, learning the layout of Clark Tower, and getting his hands on the sophisticated piece of equipment he had known he would need. His employers wanted the multi-millionaire eliminated as quickly as possible. More importantly, it had to look like an accident. For this, the gentleman had demanded and been paid one hundred thousand dollars. The money was to be paid into a bank account in Switzerland - half now, half on completion."
"The elevator door opened again on the sixty-second floor. Sorry, the sixty-second floor was used primarily for maintenance. This was where the water tanks were housed, as well as the computers that controlled the heat, air conditioning, security cameras, and elevators throughout the building.
The gentleman turned off the elevator using the manual override key that had once belonged to Sam Green. They went over to the computers. He knew exactly where they were. In fact, if he could have found them wearing a blindfold... In fact, he could have found them wearing a blindfold.
He opened his briefcase. There were two sections to the case. The lower part was a laptop computer. The upper ledge was fitted with a number of drills and other tools, each of them strapped into place. It took him fifteen minutes to cut his way into the Clark Tower mainframe and connect his own laptop to the circuitry inside. Hacking his way past the Clark security system took a little longer, but at last it was completed. He tapped a command into his keyboard.
On the floor below, John A. Clark's private elevator did something it had never done before. It stopped one extra floor, at level sixty-two. The door, however, remained closed. The gentleman did not need to get in."
"Instead, he picked up the briefcase and the silver toolbox and carried them back into the same elevator he had taken from the lobby. He turned the override key and pressed the button for the sixtieth floor. Once again, he deactivated the elevator. Then he reached up and pushed the top of the elevator. It was a trapdoor that opened outward. He pushed the briefcase and the silver box ahead of him, then pulled himself up and climbed onto the roof of the elevator.
He was now standing inside the main shaft of Clark Tower. He was surrounded on four sides by girders and pipes, blanketed with oil and grime. Thick steel cables hung down, some of them humming as they carried their loads. Looking down, he could see a seemingly endless vertical shaft illuminated only by the chinks of light from the doors that slid open and shut again as the other elevators arrived at various floors."
"Somehow, the breeze had made its way in the form of street-spinning dust that stung his eyes. Next to him was a set of elevator doors that, had he opened them, would have led him straight to Clark's office above. Over his head and a few yards ago, right was the underbelly of Clark's private elevator. The toolbox was next to him on the roof of the elevator. Carefully, he opened it. The size of the case, the sides of the case were lined with thick sponge. Inside, in the specially moderated space, was what looked like a complicated film projector, silver and concave with a thick glass lens. He took it out and then glanced at his watch. It was nine AM. It would take him an hour to connect the device to the bottom of Clark's elevator and a little more to ensure that it was working. He had plenty of time. Smiling to himself, the gentleman took out a power screwdriver and began to work.
At one o'clock, Helen Busworth called on the telephone. "Your car is here, Mister Clark." "Thank you, Helen." Clark hadn't done much that morning. He had been aware that only half his mind was on work. Once again, he glanced at the photograph on his desk. "Alex, how could things have gone so wrong between a father and a son? And what could have happened in the last few months to make them so much worse?" He stood up, put his jacket on, and walked across his office on his way to lunch with Senator James. He often had lunch with politicians; they wanted either his money, his ideas, or him. Anyone as rich as Clark made for a powerful friend, and politicians need all the friends they can get.
He pressed the elevator button, and the door slid open. He took one step forward. The last thing John A. Clark saw in his life was inside his elevator, with its white marble walls, blue carpet, and civil handrail. His right foot, wearing a black leather shoe handmade for him by a small shop in Ethiopia, traveled down to the carpet and kept going right through it. The rest of his body followed, tilting into the elevator and then through. Then he was falling sixty floors to his death. He was surprised by what had happened, so totally unable to understand what had happened that he didn't even cry out. He simply fell into the blackness of the elevator shaft, bounded twice off the walls, and then crashed into the solid concrete of the basement five hundred yards below."
"The elevator remained where it was. It looked solid, but in fact, it wasn't there at all. What Clark had stepped into was a hologram, an image being projected into the empty space of the elevator shaft where the real elevator should have been. The gentleman had programmed the door to open when Clark pressed the call button and had quietly watched him step into oblivion.
If the multimillionaire had managed to look up for a moment, he would have seen the silver hologram projector beaming the image a few yards above him. But a man getting into an elevator on his way to lunch does not look up. The gentleman had known this, and he was never wrong.
At 1:50, the chauffeur called up to say that Mister Clark hadn't arrived at the car. Ten minutes later, Helen Bosworth alerted security, who began to search around the foyer of the building. At 2:00, they called the restaurant; the senator was there waiting for his lunch guest, but Clark hadn't shown up.
In fact, his body wasn't discovered until the next day, by which time the multimillionaire's disappearance had become the lead story on the news - a bizarre accident. That's what it looked like. Nobody could work out what had happened because, by that time, of course, the gentleman had reprogrammed the computer, removed the projector, and left everything as it should have been before, quietly leaving the building.
Two days later, a man who looked nothing like a maintenance engineer walked into JFK International Airport, was about to board a flight for Switzerland, but first, he visited a flower shop and ordered a dozen black tulips to be sent to a certain address. The man paid with cash; he didn't leave a name."