Vertical Run (15 page)

Ransome had come up with a particularly insidious lie, all the more insidious for being believable. It guaranteed that everyone—
everyone
—who knew Dave and who might help him would now be on Ransome’s side. Better still, it would cause Dave to doubt himself.

It could be true, you know
.

I know. God help me, I know.

He shivered in the stairwell’s half light, his arms wrapped around his knees, despairing in the knowledge that now he was utterly, utterly alone. There was no one to talk to, no one who would listen. Wife, child, friends—everyone who should believe in him believed lies. Every hand would be raised against him, and there was no one he could trust.

Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the sort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-de-ranged thoughts that cause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at night, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become certain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move. Maybe it’s the government, maybe it’s the Trilateral Commission,
maybe it’s the saucer people. You can’t trust anyone because anyone and everyone may be one of Them or one of Their Agents. And pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of
Scientific American
, or maybe you don’t because the editors are probably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining your room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at night you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the walls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to yourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else, and in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bag, better to be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during the daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are searching, and They want you in their crosshairs.…

The headshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you away.

Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world wants to kill them can be dangerous.

With any luck Marge—Marigold Fields Cohen, who probably had been conceived the very summer he had ridden into the high Sierra mountains and slept by a lake, perfect and green and never forgotten—Marge would still be unconscious. If so, she wouldn’t have heard his son. If so, she’d still use the tape recorder when the time came for Dave to make his escape.

Better have a fallback plan anyway
.

Right. Dave wanted nothing more than to avoid Ransome and his people. But if something went wrong before Marge played the tape, he would need geography through which he could pass swiftly, and through which his enemies could not. So far he’d managed to keep one short step ahead of them, and largely played a defensive game. The time had come to change that. Besides, he owed Ransome something for bringing his son into the picture. Indeed, he owed Ransome rather a lot.

1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47.

Prime numbers. A prime divided by any number other than 1 or itself will produce a fractional number as an answer. Primes are an infinite source of fascination to mathematicians, and easy to calculate—or, rather, easy
to calculate if you are only interested in the ones lower than 50.

Professor Rob speaking: “Gentlemen, can you imagine how downright embarrassing it is when a saboteur blunders into his own booby trap? Just think of it. Picture yourself, lying there in the smoldering rubble, a leg blown off perhaps, or possibly with your entrails unraveling before your eyes. Think how chagrined you would feel if you knew that the infernal device that had done the damage was one that you yourself had set. My goodness, but wouldn’t your face blush pink? One of life’s more nonplussing little experiences, I should say. In order that you may avoid such awkward and humbling moments, it is my mission today to teach you some arithmetic. What I will discuss, and what you will learn, are some few, simple mathematical progressions. Such formulae are quite useful in keeping track of the locales in which you might happen to have prepared a little prank for the edification of your opponents.”

There are sixteen prime numbers lower than 50. Dave laid traps in the fire stairs on sixteen floors. Sixteen in the east stairwell, sixteen in the west, and sixteen in the south.

His instructors at Camp P had emphasized the importance of simplicity. A good snare is a plain snare, designed to produce maximum effects with minimal materials. As in almost every field of endeavor, so too in the art of dirty tricks—K.I.S.S. is the greater wisdom.

Dave respected K.I.S.S. His traps—“jokes” the instructors would have called them—included strands of dark green telephone cable strung as tripwires near the top of flights of stairs; buckets of slippery liquid soap (the kind used in bathroom dispensers) set in corners where they might be retrieved easily by a running man; jars of sticky rubber cement ready to be tilted over; containers full of flammable industrial cleaning solvent placed conveniently ready to hand; much heavier gauges of wire, this time carefully coiled around a water
pipe and easily unraveled; a handful of cheap letter openers taped in spiky groups of three; power staplers left in various strategic positions; seemingly innocent wads of paper blanketing two platforms in the stairwells; a fire hose unwound from its spool and stretched up five flights of stairs; three canisters of photocopier toner ready to belch out blinding black powder; and other things as well.

His teachers would have been proud of him. K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Dave doubted that all of his traps would be effective. Many wouldn’t even be tripped. And as for those that were, at worst they’d cause broken limbs and punctured flesh. Most were merely inconveniences and none were guaranteed mankillers. They didn’t need to be. All they needed to do was slow Ransome and his people down.

On the other hand, pal, if you want to cause some real damage …

In a janitor’s closet he’d found five large cartons—two dozen bottles to the box—of ammonia cleanser.

Ammonia is common stuff. Everyone uses it to wash windows, sanitize toilets, and scrub porcelain. It is an ordinary household ingredient.

At Camp P they had taught him about ordinary household ingredients. They had taught him that, to the knowing, the average kitchen pantry is an arsenal of poisons, incendiaries, and explosives. When combined in the correct ratios, no small numbers of quote ordinary household ingredients unquote are lethal weapons.

Among them ammonia.

When mixed with iodine—the kind found in almost any office emergency medical kit—ammonia produces a precipitate of tiny nitrogen triiodide crystals. Once properly treated and dried, nitrogen triiodide becomes a substance of some commercial value. Indeed, DuPont sells it under a brand name well known in the mining industry—well known as being the perfect tool for blasting open new ore seams. The only problem with the stuff is
its instability. A mere sixty pounds of pressure placed on a batch of triiodide crystals and …

Dave’s guardian angel smirked.
Baby go boom!

Shortly after 6:00, David Elliot walked into an ambush.

While laying his traps, he’d concluded that Ransome’s goons were keeping out of the stairwells. Guarding the ground-floor exits was enough to ensure that their prey did not escape. Besides, occasional smokers—exiled from their offices, lepers of the late twentieth century—snuck out to the stairwells to enjoy secret, shameful cigarettes. While the presence of a telephone repairman carrying spools of wire up and down the stairs was unremarkable to the nicotine addicts, the presence of patrolling thugs would have raised their suspicions.

Had Dave been in Ransome’s shoes, he would have ordered his men to steer clear of the stairs until long after the business day had ended. Unfortunately, now the day
had
ended, and some of Ransome’s people were getting playful. Dave wondered whether their boss knew what they were up to. Probably not. A man like Ransome would never approve of such an ineptly prepared trap. It was inconsistent with Ransome’s professional standards. Dave himself found it sufficiently amateurish as to be offensive.

You just can’t get good help anymore
.

Two of Ransome’s men had positioned themselves in the west stairwell. They were crouched in a corner on the thirty-third floor near the fire door. One of them, doubtless thinking himself cunning, had disconnected the fluorescent lights above the door. The concrete platform, the cold grey walls, and the door itself were masked in shadow.

The shadows were the giveaway. If they’d left the lights on, Dave might not have noticed until it was too late.

The old turn-off-the-lights trick. These guys read too many Robert Ludlum novels
.

They couldn’t have been in place long. As he’d put the finishing touches on his booby traps, Dave had climbed past the thirty-third floor twice during the last fifteen minutes.

If they have any training at all, there’ll be another pair of them on the thirty-second floor, waiting on the other side of the fire door. Standard ambush tactics, straight out of the manual
.

The idea would be to trap him between the thirty-second and thirty-third floors. Two men shooting from above, two from below. “Flanking crossfire” was the technical term. It turned your target into shredded beef.

Which means the excitement won’t start until you’re halfway up the next flight of stairs
.

Dave climbed the last few stairs to the thirty-second floor. His shoe heels echoed on the concrete steps. The two men in the shadows knew he was coming. They would have heard him, would have been following his progress, and would have been whispering eagerly into their radios.

How long have they been there? How long have they been listening? Have they had time to summon more men?

The space between the stairs, the empty well that plummeted from the roof of the building to the ground, was wide enough that he could see his waiting enemies. Both were flattened against the wall. Both held stubby, ugly assault rifles to their shoulders.

AR-15s? No, something else. Something with bigger magazines and more rounds
.

Dave stopped and puffed hard, as if catching his breath. He untucked his shirttail and swiped it across his face. He blew heavily. “I hate these goddamned stairs,” he muttered in a voice just loud enough to be heard. One of the men above him jiggled a radio closer to his mouth.

Idiot. You can’t yammer into a radio and point a rifle at the same time. Don’t they teach you people anything?

Dave rolled his shoulders and resumed climbing. The two men on the next floor would not shoot. Not now. They wanted to be sure they got him, and the only way to do that was to take him in a crossfire. They wouldn’t fire until he had reached the platform halfway between the thirty-second and thirty-third floors. He was certain of it.

The certainty did not help. His heart hammered, and now, all at once, he
did
feel short of breath. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A small muscle beneath his left eye twitched uncontrollably. His knees felt wobbly. He wanted a cigarette.

There are times when you knowingly walk into a trap. Sometimes you do it because it’s the only way to flush out the enemy. Sometimes you do it because the only way to achieve your objective is to spring the trap. But mostly you do it to bait a trap of your own.

Which doesn’t make it any easier.

The muscle beneath his left eye was out of control. His wrists, just where the veins are closest to the surface, tingled. It took conscious effort to keep his hands away from his guns.

Dave climbed. One step. Two steps. Three steps. Four …

He was, just for this moment, invisible. The men on the thirty-third floor could no longer see him. They would be shifting their aim to the platform eight steps ahead of him, waiting for him to blunder into their sights. The men stationed behind the door would be coiling their muscles, readying themselves to spring out. Both teams thought they knew where their target would be. They were ready for it, looking forward to it, and perhaps even thinking about how, once it was over, they would pat one another on the back, crack rough jokes, light cigarettes, and assure one another that, when all was said and done, the David Elliot affair hadn’t been an especially difficult assignment.

Dave put his hand on the stair rail—cold, hollow, tubular.

One deep breath.

He pulled, kicked, pushed, and vaulted.

Thirty-two stories to the ground floor. If he missed, he missed, and that was that.

He cleared the stairwell, cleared the rail opposite, and landed on the balls of his feet. It had been a short, easy jump—only a moment of danger to take him from one flight above the thirty-second floor stairwell to one flight below it.

“Shit!” A voice from above. Silenced bullets pocked the concrete where he had landed. Dave was already gone.

He snatched at the banister, seized it, and hurled himself downward. He took two and three stairs at a time. He had to get past the next platform. If he was still on the stairs leading down from the thirty-second floor …

The fire door slammed open. Shoes slapped on concrete.

 … then the men behind him would have a lovely view of his back.

He swung over the rail and leapt. A hail of bullets cut the air above, behind, and beside him.

A scream of frustration: “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch!”

David Elliot ran.

“This is Egret! He’s on thirty-one, on thirty, headed down! Where are you? What? In the west stairwell, you jackass! Get here, fast!”

Someone, maybe more than one person, emptied a magazine, maybe more than one magazine, down the stairwell. The bullets punched into walls, blasting out rock hard splinters of concrete shrapnel. Dave felt a bee-sting of pain in his shoulder.

They were thundering down the stairs, firing as they ran. Flattened bullets ricocheted all around.