The Big Fear (24 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

DOWNSTAIRS

Leonard was trailing as the old man skipped downstairs quickly, nearly giddy. His shoulder had started throbbing again; he could feel the ache in his back from sleeping on the floor of Roshni’s office—and for only a few hours at that. But below him, a man more than thirty years older was swinging along, negotiating the sharp turns of the bright descent while singing softly to himself. Leonard couldn’t make out the tune. He was nearly two full flights behind when Eliot looked up at him.

“Hop to it, my friend. She’s going to find out that we’re gone soon enough. She may even be smart enough to simply take the elevator and beat us down.”

Eliot had seemed creepily lethargic when he had been glued to his chair. Now, bounding across the steps, it was as though all the energy he had been saving while curled up behind his desk had been let go at once. Leonard lunged forward and skittered down the last few steps of a landing, holding to the iron rail and swinging himself round the corner. His right arm was practically useless, numb from where the bandage had dug in and cut off the blood. He gave it another go and sprang ahead. He was nearly even with Eliot, still singing and clattering to himself. Close enough, at least, that he could ask some questions, even as his breath was giving out on him.

“She told me it was you.”

“Well, of course she did. And of course you believed her. I’m a man who sits behind a desk wearing a suit all day. So obviously I am capable of anything. My name is on the door of a Wall Street firm. So you think I’m likely to murder tourists for a few thousand dollars.”

Leonard was jogging, huffing along behind Eliot, whose breath was crisp and controlled despite the fact that his feet were shuffling frantically down the stairs.

“I believed her, is all. It’s not that I would have suspected you.”

“If I had come to you and said I had found out that she was running this very same scheme, would you have believed me?” Eliot stopped on a landing to look back at Leonard, who stood silent. “I didn’t think so.”

“I think she was telling the truth when she said she had only learned about it. The cops thought they were trying to scare the city. And after all, the only thing she has to bribe them with is money. But the men working on this have been paid in fear.”

Eliot smiled, looking brighter and younger. “Well then we have one puzzle left, don’t we?” Having a problem to solve seemed to fill him with new energy.

“How long have you known?”

“I knew there was something wrong when your boss gave me the binder. But I didn’t know it was Veronica until a few days later. After Ms. Davenport had been killed. And even then, there is something of a distance between knowing and having proof.”

Even Eliot was beginning to slow. Leonard couldn’t count how many stories they had descended, and he couldn’t see how many were left below them. They had started at the eighteenth floor, and it seemed as though they had been going down forever.

“We have proof now.”

“We have a woman who has pointed a gun in our faces. We are a long way from proof.”

“She has the gun. That gun belonged to a cop who has been killed. We just need to get downstairs and call the police. They will storm the office.”

Eliot stopped for a moment on the stairs. “What good will it do, young man, to catch her? She tricked you. She tried to kill you. So I understand that you think she deserves punishment. And she most likely does. But the truth of the matter is that she is a parasite. My industry, unfortunately, breeds parasites. You squash one and another blooms in its place. We should be looking for the source. She used you to find out what Davenport knew. And what Davenport knew is more important than Veronica herself.”

Leonard thought on this for a moment. Eliot was right. They could call the police, they could sound the alarm, and when they arrived the only person they would catch would be a woman who had made a little money off of other people’s crimes. They would have lost the original wrongdoers. Not to mention that if the police storm the building and are suddenly called to an emergency at the Bank of Bremen, they wouldn’t even catch her at all. It would not take long for her to disappear while the city convulses over another skyscraper coming down.

“Okay. We go to the building. I think I know who we are going to find there too.”

“Do you?”

Leonard nodded. “At least one. Maybe more. And I know a detective who will listen.” And he thought of the call he had made that morning. He had only been able to leave a message. But if that message was heard, there would be more help still.

“How do we call him? Your detective. I don’t carry a cell phone. Do you?”

Leonard had left Roshni’s phone in the locker when he stole the suit. It had been that or the gun. “No.”

“And we are to walk up to a pay phone and dial this detective? You know his number by heart? Or we should call 911 and tell the operator we know that a police sergeant is about to blow up a bank, and see if she puts us straight through to the commissioner?”

“No. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

Eliot stopped for a moment and smiled at Leonard. As he stared at Leonard, the manicured face and the seamless hair appeared suddenly soft, a little bit undone. A very serious man who had shed his mask and let loose with the fact that he was secretly mischievous.

“Right you are.”

Just below them, Leonard could see a bright-red sign. EXIT. Finally. The sweat had flourished across the back of his neck now, but it would only be worse outside. He pressed on. Eliot was right. Their only chance was to get to the building before Sparks. They were two unarmed men planning to take on a uniformed police sergeant carrying a semiautomatic weapon and most likely a load of explosives. It was worth a shot.

“All right, Eliot. Let’s go.”

“Lovely. And do you have a plan, exactly?”

“I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

This suited the dapper man just fine. “My thoughts exactly.” Eliot turned the corner toward the doorway. Leonard reached him just as he stood touching the matte-gray metal, its fire bar cocked in place.

“Now, the moment I push this open, Leonard, a fire alarm will sound throughout the whole building. They will have to evacuate it. Our friend will be asked to leave with everyone else, whether or not she has made her trades, and whether or not she has the gun with her. But chaos is going to be to our advantage, at least for a little while.”

Leonard put his hand on the door. It was cool. It was quiet. There would be no more cool and no more quiet for a while once they slipped out into the trash-covered streets.

“Come on,” said Eliot. “This is going to be fun.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

UNDERGROUND

James Sparks had always figured that he was going to have to do the hard work himself. Rowson and Del Rio had been just short of incompetent. He wasn’t surprised that either one of them was dead. It’s what you get for recruiting dirty cops. Not that the clean ones wouldn’t have been on their side: as far as Sergeant Sparks was concerned, every officer in the city should have backed the project. But a dirty cop is easier to control. Someone who owes you something. Someone who knows he is one slip away from explaining to his wife and kid that he’s been fired and is losing his pension and will have to live off of Social Security after all. Sparks’s ultimate boss had given him the chance to recruit them. Had cleaned the records of Rowson, Del Rio, and the rest of them. All Sparks had to do was instill enough fear in them. But someone who was sloppy enough to get caught once can only take you so far.

He had spent all night convincing himself that Mitchell would get taken care of by morning, then woke up to the cold truth that he was wrong. No word from Intake. Leonard Mitchell was on the loose. No telling what Del Rio had said to him before getting killed. He could have gone to the three-letter agencies by now. And someone just might have believed him. Sergeant Sparks didn’t fear getting caught, though, as much as he feared failing. After all he had done over the past year, he wasn’t going to fail now.

Which was why he had spent all morning in the basement of the new building. It had been easy enough to get in. No one asks questions when you’re in uniform, not even if you’re carrying a bulging backpack that was obviously not issued by the department. Without the schematic he had to guess where to put the clay to be most effective. Then again, even if he didn’t take the whole building down, even if all he managed to do was make the thing shudder and force the insurance company to spend an extra six months shoring it up, that would be enough. That would make people wonder who was protecting the city. Whether they would be safe.

He’d started in the corners, laying thin strands of the Semtex behind the boiler room, the elevator shaft. He had about a pound left and had bundled it near the center of the building. He hadn’t been able to cram as much as he’d hoped into the backpack, but the small load he had brought would be plenty.

After he laid out the explosives, he deftly tucked the wire and detonators into each molding. He had learned to do this part right, to always be careful. The whole thing was going to be set off with a cell phone, and while it had to be sensitive enough to get the signal even below ground, you had to be careful not to set the stuff on too much of a hair trigger. Sergeant Sparks was not interested in dying for his work.

He set in the last detonator and stepped back to admire his craftsmanship. He didn’t need the two cops, and he didn’t need to wait until nighttime to set up the building. He could sidle away now and watch the whole riot on television. He walked back up the stairs and past the guard. It was just two o’clock.

As he made his way through the lobby he saw a harried man talking to the security desk. The building wasn’t officially open for business yet, but plenty of people had stopped in now and again. Something about the man was out of place. Sparks couldn’t see his face, just the back of his suit, his slightly ragged hair, his posture crouched as though trying to shield his right shoulder from something. As Sergeant Sparks cocked his head to watch the man, who was gesturing frantically now at the poor schlub behind the desk, he walked face first into another man at the door of the building.

He sprung back, but the other guy had fallen to the floor. Around seventy by the look of him. Frail, in a double-breasted suit on one of the hottest days of the year. Probably had come into the building to take in the air conditioning. He was sprawled now across the great green marble tiles, clutching his right knee with both hands.

“Ahhh. Oh. You hit me, Officer.”

The man was curled into a ball, wailing. Sergeant Sparks stepped forward. The building was loaded with explosives and he had to get out of there. But he didn’t want to get caught, either, and running over an old man on his way out of the building would have been too suspicious. He reached out a hand.

“I’m sorry. I was just . . . I’m sorry, sir.”

When you’re a cop, you are supposed to grovel to everyone. Every drug-slinging mope is a sir and every ten-dollar whore is a ma’am. The kids can yell and wail at you, call you every sort of farm animal name that they like, and you’re expected to come back with calm and reserve. You curse them out like they deserve and it will end up on YouTube with you as the bad guy. It was one of the reasons Sparks had been doing what he’d been doing. What had seemed so appealing when his boss had brought him the idea. Maybe people would start to speak to the police with dignity again, if they knew what they were being protected from.

The man’s grip was firm for someone so old. He tugged down on Sparks and the cop nearly toppled onto him. With a heave, the sergeant pulled the man into a standing position. Suddenly, the old man’s arms were all over him. The man had seemed small, but was pressing all around him now; it was everything Sparks could do to keep himself steady. The man’s hands were around his waist, and he was groaning.

“My hip. I think you broke my hip, Sergeant.”

Sparks was ready to leave him and flee the building, but he couldn’t shrug the guy off. The man yanked closer, unsteadying Sparks, until he was nose to nose with him. Sparks stared at the man’s sleek chin and his square eyes, wondering how he could have been fooled into thinking that the man was timid and frail. The lips parted gently and the man whispered into his ear, “Surprise.”

The man shoved off and Sparks stumbled back. As he did, he banged into another man. Sparks hadn’t noticed someone standing behind him while he was in the dance with the old man. Untangled, he reached for his gun. He would just shoot his way out and set off the building. Anyone who could say that they’d seen him do it would be killed in the blast anyway. Except his gun wasn’t there. The man he had banged into had lifted it while he had been struggling. He turned and his eyes came in to focus. He saw a skinny young man in a nice suit that didn’t quite fit, taunting him with his weapon.

“Good to meet you in person, Sergeant.” Sparks recognized the man from the picture in the paper. Leonard Mitchell. The one who had killed Officer Del Rio.

“Stealing an NYPD firearm is a serious crime.”

“I’m well aware. I’m familiar with a number of serious crimes. Sabotage. Blackmail. Burglary. Murder. You think maybe we should start counting them up? See who’s got the better tally?”

The sergeant stepped toward Leonard slowly. Men who aren’t used to carrying guns don’t hold them right. The weapon was in Leonard’s hand but his grip was loose; he wasn’t aiming it. Sergeant Sparks wasn’t threatened at all. If the moment was right he would spring for it.

“You can count up whatever you want. I was doing what I was doing for the good of the city.”

“Except you and I know that isn’t true. You were doing it because someone was telling you.”

“No one ever made me do a thing I didn’t want to.”

“Of course not. But you got transferred to Harbor too. Didn’t you? How many complaints did I see? Eleven? Thirteen? Sexual harassment? Inappropriate comments?”

“Nothing happened with any of those women.”

“Not for lack of trying. And if you had gone to the trial room on that, you would have hit rock bottom. You only had one way left to get any power.”

Sparks stewed. He had been promised that those had been scrubbed from the file. Not just redacted like the screwups by Del Rio or Rowson or the others. But physically swiped from the paper files in the bottom of some cabinet in 1PP. If he hadn’t gotten that promise, he wouldn’t have been here.

“I have plenty of power as it is.”

“No you don’t. You can’t scrub people’s histories. You can’t orchestrate a sanitation strike with a handful of cops working for you. You can’t send sanitation trucks out to dump trash and make the strike look even worse than it actually is.”

“I can do a lot.”

Sparks kept his eyes on the man as he spoke. He didn’t like to be accused of anything. Least of all if it was true. “You’ve been working this game for Victor Ells, Sergeant. Just trying to make the mayor look bad so he can swoop in and take over. You weren’t just paid off. You were promised something.”

“I told you I don’t care about the money.” Leonard remembered seeing Sparks’s name in Roshni’s file. He might not care about it. But he was getting plenty of it. And he was likely getting something else too.

“What did he offer you? Chief of Detectives? The Academy? Commissioner? You’ve been murdering people just to get Victor Ells in charge of the city.”

“Maybe Ells deserves to be in charge.”

“If that were true, he wouldn’t need you to blow things up. He wouldn’t have asked you to murder Christine Davenport once he learned she was on to him.”

“That woman,” Sparks said, “brought all of this on herself. She could have kept quiet and ended up with an awful lot of power.”

Leonard nodded, started to look down. Sparks sensed his chance was coming. They always go soft when they start thinking about people they could have saved. The kid whose buddy tried to leap from one building to the next and blames himself. The guy who thought his girlfriend could handle an eight-ball. They feel guilty and that’s when you move in and get them to confess.

Or simply take them out. The moment Sparks noticed Leonard’s glassy contemplation, he lunged at the gun. Leonard snapped out of his dream and yanked back, but was nowhere near quick enough. As Sparks sent the gun spinning across the field of green marble, he made a quick calculation: Getting out was more important than getting the gun back. He still had his cell phone, wired to the Semtex below, and as soon as he could get far enough away that he wouldn’t come down in the blast himself, he could use it. He bolted for the door.

Behind him, he could hear the chaos of the two men, shouting to the doormen and the passersby to get out of the building. They were more intent on wrangling civilians to safety than on catching Sparks. Just as he had figured, they had made a mistake. Because if he could get clear enough of the building himself, it really wouldn’t matter if they were inside it or not. They would be caught in the collapse all the same.

He turned left on Albany Street at a full sprint. It would only take him a minute.