Vertical Run (28 page)

“Uh …”

“Don’t screw with me, buddy. Remember what Ransome told you. I’m not an ordinary civilian. I’d do you for the price of a subway token. Now, tell me, your base is on thirty-one, isn’t it?”

“Yeth, thir.” Dave wrapped his fingers in the man’s hair, pulling his head back. “Again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The whole floor?”

“Park Avenue side.”

“How many men?”

“Uh …”

“How long have you been in the service, son?”

“Uh, four years, uh …”

“They don’t give your family full survivors’ benefits unless it’s six.”

Something in Dave’s voice did it. Snipe knew he was serious. He broke into a wail. “I don’t know! Maybe twenty or twenty-five!”

“ ‘Maybe’ isn’t good enough.”

Snipe was barely more than a boy, too young for Ransome’s kind of work, and a lot softer than he looked. He bawled, “Jesus! Don’t shoot! I really don’t know!”

The boy was shivering with terror. Dave twisted the gun again. “Okay, next question. Why are you bastards after me?”

“Aw Christ! They don’t tell people like me, mister! I’m just a grunt! Robin and Partridge—they know, but they haven’t said, won’t tell anyone.”

“What have they told you?”

Snipe was babbling now. “Nothing. On my mother, nothing! Just that you had to be … uh … dead. Fast. And that if we … ahh … like, you know … if we got you, we shouldn’t touch the body unless we’re wearing, ahh … you know … rubber gloves.”

Dave gritted his teeth. It was getting worse and worse.

“Where’s Ransome?”

“Forty-five! He’s in that dead guy’s office, the Levy guy!”

“What’s he doing up there?”

“Don’t know! Word of Christ, I don’t know! I haven’t been up there! I was just …”

“Guess.” Dave was feeling cold, lethally cold.

“Jesus, I don’t know! I really don’t! When we snatched that Jewish broad …”

Dave smashed Snipe’s face into the wall. He did it more than once. He didn’t keep count of the number of times.

“Speak to me, son. Tell me about the ‘Jewish broad.’ ”

A bloody froth bubbled out of the man’s lips. “Aw Christ! Aw, shit!”

Dave did it again. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“The Cohen broad. She was making a run for it. We got her—me and Bobby and Georgo—just as she was leaving her digs. She’s a fucking animal, man. She bit poor Bobby’s nose off. All the way off. The poor bastard will be wearing plastic for the rest of his life.”

“So?” Dave was ice.

“Nobody hurt her, man. Not bad. Just …” He was in an absolute funk.

Dave bounced Snipe’s face into the wall again.

“How bad?”

“Bruises. That’s all. I swear!”

“Where is she now?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you, man. We had her on thirty-one. Then Ransome took her up to forty five. I don’t know, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

Dave shuddered with rage. The message Ransome left on Marge’s answering machine was no lie. And if Dave had gone to the thirty-first floor first rather than AIW’s computer room …

“What else, you little prick? Tell me everything.”

“That’s all I know. Honest to God, that’s all I know.”

Dave spoke gently. “Say that again.”

“Uh … what? Say what?”

“God’s name. You want to die with it on your lips.”

“Huh? What? Oh shit, no, man, don’t …!”

Dave dropped him, took three quick steps back to avoid the backsplash, and leveled his pistol on the man’s head.

This is the way it’s going to be, huh?

This is the way.

So far it’s been self-defense. Except for those guys whose ankles you broke
.

Passive resistance hasn’t worked very well today.

And besides, you never exactly identified with Gandhi
.

Never. Didn’t like the movie either.

Snipe slumped to his hands and knees. He turned toward Dave weeping. “Please, oh God, please …”

Dave pulled the trigger. Plaster exploded from the wall. Snipe collapsed. His face was chalk white. He had fainted.

No, Ransome, I am not one of you, although I might have been. It wouldn’t have been hard. In fact, it would have been easy. It was one of those things that you can just let happen. It’s no work at all. It’s the path of least resistance. All you have to do is shrug and smile at the corpses and say, “Sorry ’bout that.” And, the more you shrug at it, the easier it becomes. After a while, the sight of blood doesn’t bother you so much. Those things you used to think of as dead people undergo a sea change, and now they’re merely meat. You don’t call them human, you call them gooks, slopes, rice heads, Victor Charlie, chopstick Charlie. The men are dinks and the women are slants, and the only reason God made them was so that you could have fun with moving targets in a free-fire zone. Look at these animals. You call what they do “living”? It’s not living. You’re doing them a favor when you blow them away. They’re better off dead, better dead than red. It’s that easy, Ransome, really, really easy. You quit thinking of yourself as a soldier, which is an honorable profession. Instead you’re just a mechanic, which is not. That was me, Ransome, or pretty close to being me. Out in the boonies, things had started becoming very simple, very clear. It was all turning into physics—the arc of trajectory, the calculus of ballistics, the equations of force and mass applied at a distance against physical objects that happened to have legs. It wasn’t about war, it wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about our noble allies and stemming the rising tide of atheistic communism. It was about target practice. When I went over there, I thought that the war was Right with a capital “R.” Maybe I don’t anymore, but that’s not the point. The point, Ransome, is that you and all the people
like you didn’t give a damn one way or another. And you didn’t want the rest of us to either. You wanted us to become machines. That’s all, just machines. You almost did it to me. I would have gone over the line, Ransome, over to your side. I already had one foot there. But one day Jack Kreuter did something, and all of a sudden I saw where I was, and saw that I had to step back from the line. I saw that people are people, and you can kill them if you have to, but you can’t kill them if it’s fun. That’s when it has to stop, Ransome. Once you start enjoying your work, you have to stop. Otherwise, you turn into someone like you, and the world would be a better place if you’d been born dead. That’s why I’m not killing this poor kid you’ve named Snipe. Because I’m me, not you. You said I was one of yours, Ransome, one of your own. You’ve been saying that all day long. Dave Elliot is one of us. He’s ours. Beneath the skin we’re brothers. Well, Ransome, I’ve got a point of view on that. Here it is: Kiss my ass.

The temptation had been overpowering. A full frontal assault. Gunfire, blood, and the satisfaction that the sight of dead enemies brings. He could have done it. Ransome was off guard. His men were relaxed. No one knew their target was in the building. The element of surprise was on Dave’s side. He would be able to take out half of them before they knew what was happening.

It would be gratifying, you gotta admit
.

It also would be stupid. His enemies’ resources were endless. No matter how hard he hit them, someone would live long enough to use his radio and summon more troops. A lot more. Enough to man a floor by floor sweep.

He who turns and runs away lives to fight another day
.

He couldn’t run. He had to have the answers, and there was only one place he could find them—in Bernie’s credenza, in the file marked “Lockyear Laboratories.” But that meant going to the forty-fifth floor, straight into the trap Ransome was so boastfully preparing.

The files—Bernie’s goddamned files—there was no way to get them except through Ransome.

Or around him
.

Or around him. Right. There might be a way around him. It was crazy as hell, but it could be done.

The toughest part was Marge Cohen. Ransome had her up there, and whatever he had in mind for the woman would not be pleasant. She was part of Ransome’s game now. He’d already used Dave’s wife and son as psychological weapons. He’d use Marge the same way. Ransome would do anything he could to torment Dave, anything to distract him and anything to provoke him. “In the end, gentlemen, it is eminently more gratifying to destroy an enemy’s spirit than it is to destroy an enemy’s body.”

Besides, once you’ve blown your opponent’s mind, blowing off his head is hardly any work at all
.

He couldn’t try to rescue her. It was exactly what Ransom expected him to do. It would play to his strength. He’d have every route into and every route out of the forty-fifth floor covered. All of his resources would be focused on just that one point. It would be certain death to go after her. It was stupid even to think about it. Besides, he hadn’t spent more than two hours in her company. He hardly knew her. He owed her nothing. Why should he care what Ransome was cooking up for someone like that? It was stupid even to think about her. She was nothing to him, nothing at all, and she never would be. Ransome was very badly mistaken if he thought he could use a woman Dave had barely met to bait a trap. Dave was no fool, and only a fool would fall for bait like that.

No doubt about it. He was going to have to go get her.

Dave glanced at the wall clock: 3:03
A.M
. Everything was in place.

The nitrogen triiodide he’d precipitated earlier in the day had dried nicely. He’d passed the liquid through filter paper—the kind American Interdyne Worldwide used in its coffee brewers—and left the crystals to dry in the American Interdyne telephone room. He had fewer than twenty ounces of the explosive. It wasn’t much, but it would do the job. In an enclosed area, it most certainly would do the job.

The triiodide was not the only joke he had in mind. He had spent the past half hour in the west and south stairwells—floors forty-five to fifty—setting new booby traps to replace the ones Ransome’s men had disarmed. Of necessity, the new traps were cruder than the ones he’d laboriously set earlier in the day. Pretty slapdash stuff, he thought.

Now, he was back in the American Interdyne computer room. He was waiting for Ransome to come on the radio again. Once Ransome had finished laying his trap—whatever it was—he’d order his men into place. They’d be distracted then, as they tried to settle into position. That was when Dave would make his move.

But first, he had something to do. There was no avoiding it, painful though it might be. He winced at the thought of it, but it had to be done. If there was anyone in the world who might be able to tell Dave about Lockyear or about a.k.a. John Ransome, it would be Mamba Jack Kreuter.

He reached out for the telephone. He noticed his hand was shaking. He stopped, tapped a cigarette out of his pack, and lit it. His hands still shook. Talking to Jack was not going to be easy. The man would neither have forgiven nor forgotten. Jack Kreuter wasn’t the forgiving kind. He had to hate Dave more than he hated anyone in the world.

Dave took another drag. The nicotine wasn’t helping.

Making this call was going to be the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life.

Lieutenant David Elliot loved Colonel Jack Kreuter. Lieutenant David Elliot betrayed Colonel Jack Kreuter.

Servicemen do that—fall in love with one another. It has nothing to do with sex. Sexual attraction is a feeble imitation of the love a man-at-arms feels for his comrades. The emotions go deeper than those between father and son, between brother and brother, between husband and wife. The bond that forms, soldier-to-soldier, is old, old, old—primitive stuff, the instincts of earliest evolution, slope-browed protohumans banded together, all for one, one for all. It is in the blood, and cannot be resisted.

One can lie, cheat, steal, and murder, and do so with an untroubled conscience. David Elliot did not doubt that a.k.a. John Ransome, to take but one example, slept well at night, and was not troubled in his dreams. Anyone can break the commandments, each and every one of them, and not feel the worse for it. There is no depravity or sin so vicious for which a man, given time and the proper attitude, cannot pardon himself—and for which others, in the end, will not absolve him … but for one exception, the sole offense that is never forgiven, never forgotten. No soldier will forgive a comrade-in-arms who has betrayed him.

No betrayer will forgive himself.

David Elliot forced himself to pick up the phone. It wasn’t easy.

He tapped “9” for an outside line and dialed “001” for an AT&T International line. The telephone clicked and gave him a triple-beep. “Enter ID code now.”

What?

He hung up and tried again. The same thing happened. American Interdyne appeared to have installed one of the modern world’s more obnoxious technologies, a phone system that required an individual identification code for every long distance call. Big Brother is alive and well and living in the phone company.

Dave slammed down the phone, and swore.

He took a last drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. The call had to be made, and it had to be made soon. He needed to find another phone.

Dave slammed down the phone and swore.

He was as furious with the technology as he was with himself. All the risks he had taken, and it was another goddamned restricted phone system the same as American Interdyne’s.

He’d been careless—worse, thoughtless. Desperate to find a usable telephone, he’d left the American Interdyne computer room, run down one flight of stairs, shimmed the fire door lock, and started looking for an open office.

You clown. Are you totally brain dead?

He’d forgotten what he had seen from the street—that the eleventh floor was the most brightly lit in the building. The mergers and acquisitions department of Lee, Bach & Wachutt never slept. There were people all around. He had been stopped and questioned three times. Every time, he’d been forced deeper into the investment banker’s offices, and further away from the fire stairs and elevators.