The Face of Fear (16 page)

“Graham?”

With his feet he probed for a rung, found one after several seconds that seemed like hours. “I’m all right. My foot slipped. I’m okay now.”

“Don’t look down.”

“I didn’t. I won’t.”

He sought the next rung, stepped to it, continued the descent.

He felt feverish. The hair was damp at the back of his neck. Perspiration beaded his forehead, jeweled his eyebrows, stung the corners of his eyes, filmed his cheeks, brought a salty taste to his lips. In spite of the perspiration, he was cold. He shivered as he moved down the long ladder.

He was as much aware of the void at his back as he would have been of a knife pressed between his shoulder blades.

On the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger entered the maintenance supply room.

He saw the red door. Someone had put down the doorstop that was fixed to it, so that it was open an inch or two. He knew immediately that Harris and the woman had gone through there.

But why was the door ajar?

It was like a signpost. Beckoning him.

Alert for a trap, he advanced cautiously. He held the Walther PPK in his right hand. He kept his left hand out in front of him, arm extended all the way, to stop the door in case they tried to throw it open in his face. He held his breath for those few steps, listening for the slightest sound other than the soft squeak of his own shoes.

Nothing. Silence.

He used the toe of his shoe to push up the doorstop
_;
then he pulled open the door and walked onto the small platform. He had just enough time to realize where he was, when the door closed behind him and all the lights in the shaft went out.

At first he thought Harris had come into the maintenance room after him. But when he tried the door, it was not locked. And when he opened it, all the lights came on. The emergency lighting didn’t burn twenty-four hours a day
_;
it came on only when one of the service entrances was open
_;
and that was why Harris had left the door ajar.

Bollinger was impressed by the system of lights and platforms and ladders. Not every building erected in the 1920s would have been designed with an eye toward emergencies. In fact, damned few skyscrapers built since the war could boast any safety provisions. These days, they expected you to wait in a stalled elevator until it was repaired, no matter if that took ten hours or ten days
_;
and if the lift couldn’t be repaired, you could risk a manually cranked descent, or you could rot in it.

The more time he spent in the building, the deeper he penetrated it, the more fascinating he found it to be. It was not on the scale of those truly gargantuan stadiums and museums and highrises that Hitler had designed for the “super race” just prior to and during the first days of World War Two. But then Hitler’s magnificent edifices had never been realized in stone and mortar, whereas this place had risen. He began to feel that the men who had designed and constructed it were Olympians. He found his appreciation strange, for he knew that had he been restricted to the halls and offices during the day, when the building was full of people and buzzing with commerce, he would not have noticed the great size and high style of the structure. One took for granted that which was commonplace
_;
and to New Yorkers, there was nothing unusual about a forty-two-story office building. Now, however, abandoned for the night, the tower seemed incredibly huge and complex
_;
in solitude and silence one had time to contemplate it and see how magnificent and extraordinary it was. He was like a microbe wandering through the veins and bowels of a living creature, a behemoth almost beyond measurement.

He felt in league with the minds that could conceive of a monument-like this. He was one of them, a mover and shaker, a superior man. The Olympian nature of the building-and of the architects responsible for it-struck a responsive chord in him, made him reverberate with the knowledge of his own special godlike stature. Brimming with a sense of glory, he was more determined than ever to kill Harris and the woman. They were animals. Lice. Parasites. Because of Harris’s freakish psychic gift, they posed a threat to Bollinger. They were trying to deny him his rightful place in this new and forceful current of history: the at first gradual but ever-quickening rise of the new men.

He pushed the doorstop against the floor to keep the door open and the lights burning. Then he went to the edge of the platform and peered down the ladder.

They were three floors under him. The woman on top, nearest by a few rungs. Harris below her, going first. Neither of them looked up. They certainly were aware of the momentary loss of light and understood the significance of it. They were hurrying toward the next platform, where they could get out of the shaft.

Bollinger knelt, tested the railing. It was strong. He leaned against it, using it like a safety harness to keep him from tumbling to his death.

He didn’t want to kill them here. The place and method of murder were extremely important tonight. Here, they would drop to the bottom of the well, and that would ruin the scheme that he and Billy had come up with this afternoon. He wasn’t here just to kill them any way he could
_;
he had to dispose of them in a certain manner. If he brought it off just right, the police would be confused, misled
_;
and the people of New York would begin to experience a spiraling reign of terror unlike anything in their worst nightmares. He and Billy had worked out a damned clever gambit, and he wouldn’t abandon it so long as there was a chance of bringing it off as planned.

It was a quarter of ten. In fifteen minutes Billy would be in the alleyway outside, and he would wait only until ten-thirty. Bollinger saw that he probably wouldn’t have time for the woman, but he was pretty sure he’d be able to carry out the plan in forty-five minutes.

Besides, he didn’t know what Harris looked like, and he felt there was something cowardly about killing a man whose face he’d never seen. It was akin to shooting someone in the back. That sort of killing—even of an animal, even of a louse like Harris—didn’t fit Bollinger’s image of a superman. He liked to meet his prey head-on, to get close, so that there was at least a hint of danger.

The trick was to force them out of the shaft without killing them
_;
to herd them to other ground where the plan could be carried out. He pointed the pistol down, aimed wide of the woman’s head and squeezed the trigger.

The shot exploded
_;
ear-splitting noise assaulted Connie from every side. Over the diminishing echoes, she could hear the bullet ricocheting from one wall to the other, farther down the shaft.

The situation was so unreal that she had to wonder if it was transpiring in her mind. She supposed it was possible that she was in a hospital and that all of this was the product of a fevered imagination, the delusions of madness.

Descending the ladder, she repeatedly caught herself murmuring softly: sometimes it was jumbled phrases that made little sense, sometimes strings of utterly meaningless sounds. Her stomach rolled over like a fish on a wet boat dock. Her bowels quivered. She felt as if a bullet had already ripped into her, already had torn apart her vital organs.

Bollinger fired again.

The shot seemed less sharp than the one before it. Her ears were desensitized, still ringing from the first explosion.

For a woman who had experienced little emotional—and no physical—terror in her life, she was handling herself surprisingly well.

When she looked down, she saw Graham let go of the ladder with one hand. He grabbed the railing that ringed the platform. He took one foot off the ladder
_;
hesitated, leaning at a precarious angle; started to bring his foot back
_;
suddenly found the courage to put it on the edge of the platform. For a moment, fighting his own terror, he stayed that way, crucified between the two points of safety. She was about to call to him, urge him on, when he finally freed himself of the ladder altogether, wobbled on the brink of the platform as if he would fall, then got his balance and climbed over the railing.

She descended the last dozen rungs much too fast and reached the platform as Bollinger fired a third shot. She hurried through the red door that Graham held open for her, into the maintenance supply room on the twenty-seventh level.

The first thing she saw was the blood on his trousers. A bright spot of it. As big as a silver dollar. Glistening on the gray fabric. “What happened?”

“Had these in my pocket,” he said, holding up the scissors. “A couple of floors back, when I almost fell, the blades tore through the lining and gouged my thigh.”

“Is it bad?”

“No.”

“Hurt?”

“Not much.”

“Better get rid of them.”

“Not just yet.”

Bollinger watched until they left the shaft. They had gotten out two platforms down. Because there was only a service entrance at every second floor, that put them on the twenty-seventh level.

He got up, hurried toward the elevator.

 
“Come on,” Graham said. “Let’s make a run for the stairs.”

“No. We’ve got to go back up the shaft.” Incredulity showed on his face, anguish in his eyes. “That’s crazy!”

“He won’t be looking for us in the shaft. At least not for a couple of minutes. We can go up two floors, then use the stairs when he comes back to check the shaft.” She opened the red door through which they’d come only seconds ago.

“I don’t know if I can do it again,” he said.

“Of course you can.”

“You said up the shaft?”

“That’s right.”

“We have to go down to escape.”

She shook her head
_;
her hair formed a brief dark halo. “You remember what I said about the night guards?”

“They might be dead.”

“If Bollinger killed them so he could have a free hand with us, wouldn’t he also have sealed off the building? What if we get to the lobby, with Bollinger hot on our heels, and we find the doors are locked? Before we could break the glass and get out, he’d have killed us.”

“But the guards might not be dead. He might have gotten past them somehow.”

“Can we take that chance?”

He frowned. “I guess not.”

“I don’t want to get to the lobby until we’re certain of having a long lead on Bollinger.”

“So we go up. How’s that better?” “We can’t play cat and mouse with him for twenty-seven floors. The next time he catches us in the shaft or on the stairs, he won’t make any mistakes. But if he doesn’t realize we’re going up, we might be able to alternate between the shaft and the stairs for thirteen floors, long enough to get to your office.”

“Why there?”

“Because he won’t expect us to backtrack.”

Graham’s blue eyes were not as wide with fear as they had been
_;
they had narrowed with calculation. In spite of himself, the will to survive was flowering in him
_;
the first signs of the old Graham Harris were becoming visible, pushing through his shell of fear.

He said, “Eventually, he’ll realize what we’ve done. It’ll buy us only fifteen minutes or so.”

“Time to think of another way out,” she said. “Come on, Graham. We’re wasting too much time. He’ll be on this floor any second now.”

Less reluctantly than the first time, but still without enthusiasm, he followed her into the elevator shaft.

On the platform he said, “You go first. I’ll bring up the rear, so I won’t knock you off the ladder if I fall.”

For the same reason, he had insisted on going first when they descended.

She put her arms around him, kissed him, then turned and started to climb.

 
As soon as he got off the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor, Bollinger investigated the stairs at the north end of the building. They were deserted.

He ran the length of the corridor and opened the door to the south stairs. He stood on the landing for almost a minute, listening intently for movement. He heard none.

In the corridor again, he searched for an unlocked office door until he realized they might have gone back into the elevator shaft. He located the maintenance supply room
_;
the red door was ajar.

He approached it cautiously, as before. He was opening the door all the way when the shaft beyond was filled with the sound of another door closing on it.

On the platform, he bent over the railing. He stared down into the vertiginous depths, wondering which one of the doors they had used.

How many floors had they gained on him?

Dammit!

Cursing aloud, overcoat flapping around his legs, Bollinger went back to the south stairs to listen for them.

 
By the time they had climbed two flights on the north stairs, Graham was wincing with each step. From sole to hip, pain coruscated through his bad leg. In anticipation of each jolt, he tensed his stomach. Now his entire abdomen ached. If he had continued to work out and climb after his fall on Mount Everest, as the doctors had urged him to do, he would have been in shape for this. He had given his leg more punishment tonight than it ordinarily received in a year. Now he was paying in pain for five years of inactivity.

“Don’t slow down,” Connie said.

“Trying not to.”

“Use the rail as much as you can. Pull yourself along. ”

“How far are we going?”

“One more floor.”

“Eternity.”

“After that we’ll switch back to the elevator shaft.”

He liked the ladder in the shaft better than he did the stairs. On the ladder he could use his good leg and pull with both hands to keep nearly all of his weight off the other leg. But on the stairs, if he didn’t use the lame leg at all, he would have to hop from one step to the other
_;
and that was too slow.