False Impression (42 page)

‘Twelve six
fifty-two.’

‘Mother’s
maiden name?’

‘Madejski.’

‘Home
zip code?’

‘One zero zero
two one.’

‘Thank you, Mr
Fenston. We’ll get someone up to the thirty second floor as quickly as
possible. The engineers are currently responding to an incident on the
seventeenth floor, where we have someone stuck in an elevator, so it might be a
few minutes before they get to you.’

‘No hurry,’ said
Fenston casually, ‘there’s no one else working on this floor at the moment, and
the office won’t open again until seven tomorrow.’

‘It’s sure not
going to take us that long,’ the guard promised him, ‘but with your permission,
Mr Fenston, we’ll change your category from emergency to priority.’

‘OK by me,’
shouted Fenston above the deafening noise.

‘But there will
still be an out-of-hours call-out charge of five hundred dollars.’

‘That sounds a
bit steep,’ said Fenston.

‘It’s standard
in a case like this, sir,’ came back the duty officer’s reply. ‘However, if you
were able to report to the front desk in person, Mr Fenston, and sign our alarm
roster, the charge is automatically cut to two fifty.’

‘I’m on my way,’
said Fenston.

‘But I have to
point out, sir,’ continued the duty officer, ‘that should you do that, your
status will be lowered to routine, in which case we couldn’t come to your
assistance until we’ve dealt with all other priority and emergency calls.’

‘That won’t be a
problem,’ said Fenston.

‘But you can be
confident
that whatever other calls
we have
outstanding, we still guarantee that yours will be sorted out within four
hours.’

‘Thank you,’
said Fenston. ‘I’ll come straight down and report to the front desk.’

He replaced the receiver
and walked back into the corridor. As he passed his office, he could hear
Leapman pounding on the door like a trapped animal, but he could only just make
out his voice above the shrill scream of the alarm. Fenston continued on
towards the elevators. Even at a distance of some fifty feet he still found the
piercing drone intolerable.

Once he’d
stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, he went straight to the front
desk.

‘Ah, Mr
Fenston,’ said the security guard. ‘If you’ll sign here, it will save you
another two hundred and fifty bucks.’

Fenston slipped
him a ten-dollar note. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘No need to rush, I’m the last one
out,’ he assured them as he hurried out of the front door and back down the
steps.

As he stepped
into his waiting car, Fenston glanced up at his office. He could see a tiny
figure banging on the window. The driver closed the door behind him and
returned to the front seat, puzzled. His boss still wasn’t wearing a dinner
jacket.

J
ack Delaney
parked his car on Broad Street just after nine thirty. He switched on the radio
and listened to ‘Cousin Brucie’ on FM101.1, as he settled back to wait for
Leapman. The venue for their meeting had been Leapman’s choice, and he’d told
the FBI man to expect him some time between ten and eleven, when he would hand
over their camera containing enough damning evidence to ensure a conviction.

Jack was
suspended in that unreal world somewhere between half awake and half asleep
when he heard the siren. Like all law enforcement officers, he could identify
the different decibel pitch between police, ambulance and fire department in a
split second.

This was an
ambulance, probably coming from St Vincent’s.

He checked his
watch: 11.15 pm. Leapman was running late, but then he had warned Jack that there
could be over a hundred documents to photograph, so not to keep him to the
minute. The FBI technical boys had spent some considerable time showing Leapman
how to operate the latest high-tech camera, so he could be sure to deliver the
best results. But that was before the phone call. Leapman had rung Jack’s
office a few minutes after seven to say that Fenston had told him something
that would prove far more damning than any document. But he didn’t want to
reveal the information over the phone. The line went dead before Jack could
press him. He would have been more responsive if it hadn’t been his experience
that plea-bargainers always claim they have new information that will break the
case wide open, and therefore the FBI should reconsider the length of their
sentence. He knew his boss wouldn’t agree to that unless the new evidence
clearly showed an unbreakable link in the chain between Fenston and Krantz.

The sound of the
siren was getting louder.

Jack decided to
get out of the car and stretch his legs. His raincoat felt crumpled. He’d
bought it from Brooks Brothers in the days when he wanted everyone to know that
he was a G-man, but the higher up the ranks he
climbed,
the less he wished it to be that obvious. If he was promoted to run his own
field office, he might even consider buying a new coat, one that would make him
look more like a lawyer or a banker – that would please his father.

His mind
switched to Fenston, who by now would have delivered his speech on Moral
Responsibility for Modern Bankers, and then to Anna, who was halfway across the
Atlantic on her way to meet up with Nakamura. Anna had left a message on his
cellphone, saying she now knew why Tina had taken the job as Fenston’s PA, and
die evidence had been staring her in the face. The line had been busy when she
called, but Anna said she’d phone again in the morning. It must have been when
Leapman was on the line. Damn the man. Jack was standing on a New York sidewalk
in the middle of the night, tired and hungry, while he waited for a camera. His
father was right. He should have been a lawyer.

The siren was
now only a couple of blocks away.

Jack strolled
down to the end of the road and peered up at the building in which Leapman was
working, somewhere on the thirty second floor. There was a row of blazing
lights about halfway up the
skyscraper,
otherwise the
windows were mostly dark. Jack began to count the floors, but by the time he’d
reached eighteen he couldn’t be sure, and when he counted thirty-two, it just
might have been the floor that was blazing with lights. But that didn’t make
any sense, because on Leapman’s floor, there should only have been a single
light. The last thing he would have wanted was to draw attention to
himself
.

Jack looked
across the road to watch an ambulance come to a screeching halt in front of the
building. The back door burst open and three paramedics, two men and a woman
dressed in their familiar dark blue uniforms, jumped out onto the sidewalk. One
pushed a
stretcher,
the second carried an oxygen
cylinder, while the third held a bulky medical bag. Jack watched them as they
charged up the steps and into the building.

He turned his
attention to the reception desk, where one guard – pointing to something on his
clipboard – was talking to an older man dressed in a smart suit, probably his
supervisor, while the second guard was occupied on the telephone. Several
people strolled in and out of the elevators, which wasn’t surprising, as they
were in the heart of the city where finance is a 24-hour occupation.

Most Americans
would be asleep while money was changing hands in Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong and
now London, but there always had to be a group of New Yorkers who lived their
lives on other people’s time.

Jack’s train of
thought was interrupted when an elevator door opened and the three paramedics
reappeared, two of them wheeling their patient on the stretcher, while the
third was still holding onto the oxygen cylinder. As they walked slowly but
purposefully towards the entrance, everyone in their path stood aside. Jack strolled
up the steps to take a closer look. Another siren blared in the distance, on
this occasion the droning pitch of the NYPD, but it could be going anywhere at
that time of night, and in any case Jack was now concentrating on the
stretcher. He stood by the door as the paramedics came out of the building and
carried their patient slowly down the steps. He stared at the pallid face of a
stricken man, whose eyes were glazed over as if they’d been caught in the blaze
of a headlight. It wasn’t until he’d passed him that Jack realized who it was.
He had to make an instant decision. Did he pursue the ambulance back to St
Vincent’s, or head straight for the thirty-second floor? The police siren now
sounded as if it could be heading in their direction. One look at that face and
Jack didn’t need to be told that Leapman wasn’t going to be speaking to anyone
for a very long time. He ran into the building with the sound of the police
siren no more than a block or two away. He knew he had only a few minutes
before the NYPD’s finest would be on the scene. He paused at the reception desk
for a moment to show them his FBI badge.

33O

Tou got here
quickly,’ said one of the guards, but Jack didn’t comment as he headed for the
bank of elevators. The guard wondered how he knew which floor to go to.

Jack squeezed
through the elevator doors just as they were about to close, and jabbed at the
button marked 32. When the doors opened again, he looked quickly up and down
the corridor to see where the lights were coming from. He turned and ran
towards some offices at the far end to find a security guard and two engineers
in red overalls, along with a cleaner, standing by an open door.

¦Who are you?’
demanded the security guard.

‘FBI,’ said
Jack, producing his badge but not revealing his name as he strode into the
room. The first thing he saw was a blown-up photograph of Fenston shaking hands
with George W. Bush, which dominated the wall behind the desk. His eyes moved
quickly around the room until they settled on the one tiling he was looking
for. It was in the centre of the desk, resting on a pile of spread-out papers
beside an open file.

What happened?’
demanded Jack authoritatively.

‘Some guy got
himself trapped in this office for over three hours and must have set the alarm
off.’

‘It wasn’t our
fault,’ jumped in one of the engineers, ‘we were told to downgrade the call,
and we’ve got that in writing, otherwise we would have been here a lot sooner.’

Jack didn’t need
to ask who had set off the alarm and then left Leapman to his fate. He walked
over to the desk, his eyes quickly scanning the papers. He glanced up to find
all four men staring at him. Jack looked directly at the security guard. ‘Go to
the elevator, wait for the cops, and the minute they turn up bring them
straight back to me.’ The guard disappeared into the corridor without question
and headed quickly towards the elevators. ‘And you three, out,’ was Jack’s next
command. ‘This may be a crime scene, and I don’t want you disturbing any
evidence.’ The men turned to leave, and in the split second their backs were
turned, Jack grabbed the camera and dropped it into one of the baggy pockets of
his trench coat.

He picked up the
phone on Fenston’s desk. There was no dialling tone, only a continuous buzzing
noise. Someone had disconnected the line.
The same person who
triggered the alarm, no doubt.
Jack didn’t touch anything else in the
room. He stepped back into the corridor and slipped into the adjoining office.
A screen was fixed to the corner of the desk and was still relaying images from
inside Fenston’s office. Fenston had clearly not only witnessed Leapman’s
actions, but had enough time to set in motion the most diabolical revenge.

Jack’s eyes
moved across to the switchboard. One lever was up, illuminating a flickering
orange light, indicating that the line was busy. He must have cut Leapman off
from any hope of contacting the outside world. Jack looked down at the desk
where Fenston would have been sitting when he planned the whole operation.

He’d even
written out a list to make sure he didn’t make a mistake.

All the clues
were there for the NYPD to gather and evaluate. If this had been a Columbo
investigation, the switch, the handwritten list left on the desk and the timing
of the alarm going off would have been quite enough for the great detective to
secure a conviction, with Fenston breaking down and confessing following the
last commercial break. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a made-for-TV movie, and one
thing was certain, Fenston wasn’t going to break down, and would never consider
confessing. Jack grimaced. The only thing he had in common with Columbo was the
crumpled raincoat.

Jack heard the
elevator doors open and the words, ‘Follow me.’

He knew it had
to be the cops. He turned his attention back to the screen on the desk as two
uniformed officers marched into Fenston’s office, and began to question the
four witnesses. The plainclothes men wouldn’t be far behind. Jack walked out of
the adjoining office and headed silently towards the elevator. He’d reached the
doors when one of the cops came out of Fenton’s office and shouted, ‘Hey, you.’
Jack jabbed at the down button and turned sideways, so the officer couldn’t see
his face. The moment the doors opened, he quickly slipped inside. He kept his
finger pressed on the button marked L and the doors immediately closed.