Vertical Run (34 page)

“At ease,” Ransome said conversationally. “If you’ve got a problem, Kingfisher, we’ll discuss it at the appropriate time.”

Kingfisher was screeching, “A fucking heavy! Oh man, you’ve got to be shitting me!”

Ransome sighed. “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Now, be at ease.”

“Oh shit, shit, shit …”

“You’re relieved of duty, Kingfisher. Report to Parrot on 43. Kestrel, take over the team.”

“You fuck, Robin! You gigantic fucking asshole …”

“Kestrel, kindly get that man off the air.”

There was a scuffling sound. The radio squawked. Someone, Kestrel, Dave presumed, growled, “Kingfisher’s on the casualty list, Robin.”

Ransome, his voice smooth as ice, and as cold, said, “The rest of you men, listen up. No determination, I repeat, no final determination was reached on this … this little issue that has so disturbed Kingfisher. However, I trust you will recognize that certain eventualities have been prepared for. Perhaps those of you who have underestimated the gravity of the situation now have a better perspective.”

General LeMay was the model for a character in that old movie. George C. Scott played him. What was the name of that film? Peter Sellers was in it too. Oh yeah.
Dr. Strangelove
.

“In any event, the alternative only would have been invoked had the subject not come back to this building.”

Dave braced his feet against the wall. Maybe, he thought, climbing back to the roof was not the best way to make his escape. Maybe triggering the alarm and dashing down the stairs while Ransome and company converged on Bernie’s office was not the best solution. Maybe there was a better way.

He heard a snap and the sound of inhalation. Ransome had lit another cigarette. “Gentlemen, the requirements of security have … well, several of you have asked why we are in pursuit of the elusive Mr. Elliot, and why we are obliged to implement uncommon procedures. Heretofore I have not disclosed all the facts. Now I am prepared to.”

Ransome took a drag and blew it out. The sound made Dave want a cigarette himself.

Go ahead, indulge yourself
.

Dave fumbled his pack of Virginia Slims out of his pocket. He tapped one into his mouth and reached for his matches. The cigarette pack slipped from his fingers. He snatched for it. It tumbled away, softly fluttering forty-five stories down to the street.

It’s just as well. Those things will kill you
.

“Now I shall tell you. And because it is without question that our subject, Mr. Elliot, is in possession of Snipe’s radio, I will tell him too. Listen up, people. Listen up, Mr. Elliot. Listen very closely.”

Dave filled his lungs with smoke. Ransome was making a mistake. He was talking when he should be taking action. He was distracting his men from their mission. Their attention would be focused on his words and not on the possibility that Dave …

“It seems that our Mr. Elliot has caught a bug. Not an ordinary bug. Far from it. On the contrary, it’s something rather special. The bug is what the lab boys call ‘tri-phased,’ a term meaning that it is highly mutagenic. It changes, it evolves through three quite separate and distinct phases. Much as the caterpillar evolves into the pupa, and the pupa into the butterfly, Mr. Elliot’s bug transforms from being one kind of entity into another, wholly different kind of entity, and then into a third and totally distinct creature.”

 … was in motion.

He flicked his cigarette away, and began pumping his body into a swing, arcing back toward Bernie’s window. He knew what he was going to do. He knew—he thought he knew—precisely how Ransome had deployed his men. If they were positioned as they should be, he could neutralize them.

With luck, he might not even have to kill anyone. Anyone, that is, except Ransome.

“Or the frog spawn to tadpole, and the tadpole to frog, three quite different creatures, each with unique behavioral attributes. So too the unfortunate Mr. Elliot’s bug.”

Dave unfastened his harness, and slipped back through the office window. He drew a pistol from beneath his belt and ejected the clip. Full. He pulled back the slide. A round leapt out. He retrieved it from the floor and put it back in the firing chamber. He replaced the magazine, released the safety, and set the selector for full automatic.

There would be at least two men in the conference room. Maybe more. Ransome’s roll call had gotten as far as Kingfisher—twenty-eight men. Four of them were in the lobby, and another seven were in reserve on the forty-third floor. Kingfisher himself out of action. That left sixteen men, plus Ransome. Dave tallied the calculus of a well-laid ambush. He knew how he would allocate his forces if he was in command. And if Ransome had done the same, then there would be …

“At first, this bug is a harmless little fellow. His only distinguishing attribute is that he holds primates in great esteem. Monkeys, chimps, apes, orangutans I suppose, and humans. Only primates, gentlemen. Our bug, Mr. Elliot’s bug, is a finicky bug—he will accept no other species as host.”

 … three men. They all had their backs to the door. They were so engrossed by Ransome’s words that they did not hear it open, did not notice it close.

Dave gripped the pistol in both hands, combat style, and edged forward. The men were ordinary grunts, cannon fodder like Snipe, and very far from being in Ransome’s class. They didn’t even carry the same high-tech weaponry as Ransome. Two had Finnish Jati-Matics, lightweight 9 mm submachine guns with 40 round magazines and factory silencers. Dave frowned in disapproval. A 40 round magazine is amateurish. Its weight drags the muzzle down. A trained professional would know that. A professional would only use a 20 round clip.

The third man had an Ingram MAC with a WerBell Sionics suppressor, the state of the art in Dave’s day, but now merely an interesting antiquity. The poor idiot had laid the gun on the conference table. Dave stretched out his left hand and …

“As I said, a tri-phased bug. During the first phase nothing much happens except that the bug rides around in your bloodstream where it’s warm and cozy, and there’s plenty to eat. The bug likes it there, so he decides to settle in. And once he does that, he starts a family. A
large family. That’s what stage one is all about—breeding. Every forty-five minutes the bug splits itself down the middle. Where there was one bug, now there are two. Forty-five minutes later, where there were two, there are four. Forty-five minutes after that, eight. And so forth and so on for a period of roughly twenty-four hours. And when stage one ends, gentlemen, that one little bug has sired more than four billion offspring, gentlemen, more than four billion.”

 … flipped the machine pistol onto the floor. “Heads up, guys,” Dave whispered. “Likewise hands.”

One turned, bringing up his Jati-Matic. Dave swung his pistol. The man’s mouth sprayed shattered teeth and bloody saliva. Dave was speaking before the body hit the floor. “Don’t move and you won’t die. I don’t want …”

The man—a boy really—who had been carrying the MAC went pale. His eyes rolled in terror. Words and saliva bubbled out of his mouth. “He’s got something. AIDS, some disease, Jesus, keep away from me!” He stumbled toward the door.

Dave aimed his pistol on the boy’s thighs. He didn’t want to kill him. He didn’t want to kill anyone. If he stitched the boy’s legs, he would bring him down …

“After about twenty-four hours is when the second stage begins. The second stage lasts about seventy-two hours—three days. That’s the stage your bug is in now, Mr. Elliot. It has changed, evolved, mutated from its earlier, harmless, and quite passive stage into something else. The caterpillar has evolved into the pupa, and the pupa has an attitude.”

 … screaming. The screams would alert the rest of Ransome’s men. Dave couldn’t afford that. He lifted the muzzle, fired, and looked away, sickened. The third man’s gun clattered to the floor. His hands were in the air. He flattened his back against one of Bernie’s prized Pissarros, a dark painting of a cottage at the end of a distant lane. “Just don’t touch me, man,” he begged. “I’ll do whatever you want, but just don’t fuckin’ touch me!”

Dave nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the vial of pills he’d taken from Nick Lee’s medicine cabinet. “Okay, son, I want to see you swallow five of these. There’s a carafe of water behind you. Pick it up, pour a glass, and then wash them down.”

There was a worried look on the boy’s face. Dave tried to muster a friendly smile. He couldn’t quite manage it. “Just sleeping pills.”

The boy …

“Once mutated, the bug becomes mobile. It begins to migrate out of the bloodstream and into other organs. Now it’s infectious. After the twenty-four hour mark, the carrier—that’s you, Mr. Elliot—can pass it on to other people. But only via his bodily fluids—semen, saliva, urine, or blood. It’s been about thirty-six hours or so since our Mr. Elliot caught this bug, and so that is his current and highly contagious condition. You men will recollect that at 3:30 this afternoon, just before the twenty-fourth hour of his infection, I issued new orders regarding the handling of his remains. You now appreciate the rationale for those orders.”

 … shook his head and said, “I’m not eating anything you’ve touched.”

Dave answered, “Read the label. It’s not my prescription. I haven’t touched those pills. Besides, if you don’t take them …” He gestured with the pistol. The boy understood, opened the vial, and gulped down a half dozen powerful soporifics. “Now what?” he asked.

“Now you turn around and face the wall.”

“Don’t hit me too hard, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” Dave …

“Mr. Elliot, I want you to pay attention to this. Listen closely. The bug can be spread—will be spread—to anyone who drinks out of the same glass as the carrier, anyone who kisses the carrier, anyone he gives a little love bite to, anyone he fucks, anyone who gives him a blow job.”

 … clipped him behind the ear with his pistol. The boy yelped and staggered, but did not fall. Dave hit him again, harder.

He looked back at the door leading to Bernie’s office, picturing how the bodies should lie. One of the three would be a real corpse. He hated that. He would have done almost anything to avoid it.

He slipped his hands beneath the arms of the dead man. There was too much blood. If Ransome or one of his people looked into the conference room, looked at the floor and the wall, they’d know what had happened.

Too late to worry about it now
.

He dragged the corpse the length of the conference room, dropping it face up near the door. He lay one of the Jati-Matics across its chest. Then he went back for the second man.

In less than a minute, he had arranged the bodies so that they looked …

“Of course the carrier won’t know that he’s contagious, that he’s spreading disease right and left. He thinks he’s still healthy because the bug isn’t producing any harmful effects. At least not yet. That doesn’t start to happen until well into the fourth day. By that time the bug has mutated again. What was a pupa is now a butterfly. It is ready to go airborne.”

 … like they had died charging out of the conference room. If the alarm over Bernie’s door sounded, they would have been the first into his office.

For final effect, he stepped to the center of the office and pumped a dozen silenced rounds into the walls and floor. Now the room looked like the scene of a firefight.

His time was running out. Ransome
(God, he loves the sound of his own voice!)
wouldn’t run off at the mouth forever. Dave had to set up the rest of his illusion quickly. Two doors opened into the conference room—one from Bernie’s office and one …

“Technically speaking, in stage three, the bug becomes what the medics call ‘pneumatic.’ That means that the carrier spreads the infection simply by breathing. Every time he exhales he spits out six million spores—I repeat, gentlemen—six million. He breathes in, he breathes out. If he does that fifty times, he will have released enough
bugs to infect every man, woman, and child in the United States. He does that a thousand times and he’s unleashed enough bugs for everyone, every living soul, on God’s green earth.”

 … from the hall connecting Bernie’s side of the building with the reception area. There were only three offices on that corridor—one belonged to Mark Whiting, Senterex’s chief financial officer, the second to Sylvester Lucas, the company’s vice chairman, and the third to Howie Fine, the chief counsel. Ransome would have stationed men in all those offices. They, like the three people in the conference room, would reach Bernie’s suite ahead of the others if the alarm was tripped.

Dave crouched, flung the door open, and rolled into the hallway. He drew a circle with his pistol, searching for a target.

No one was there. Just as it should be.

The interesting question was Ransome’s location. Dave wasn’t sure whether he would station himself close to Bernie’s suite—say, for example, in Whiting’s or Lucas’s office—or farther away. Either alternative would be militarily correct: close to lead the attack; far to redirect forces as battlefield conditions required. Which would Ransome choose?

Which would you choose?

A toss of the coin. Farther, I think.

He slipped up to Whiting’s door and placed his ear against it. He could hear nothing except for the whisper of Ransome’s frosty voice over the radio. He lifted his pistol …

“However, I overstate the case. You see, the bug in question is a delicate little fellow. Once he’s been expelled from the carrier’s body, he doesn’t live very long. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen at the high side. Unless he finds a new carrier before then, he dies.”

 … braced his legs, and shouldered the door open. A single black man, an older one, was sitting behind Whiting’s desk. His weapon, another Jati-Matic, was propped
butt up on Whiting’s credenza. The man looked at Dave, opened his eyes wide, and raised his hands. The expression on his face said that he was far too experienced to offer any resistance.

Dave nudged the door shut with his foot.

The man said, “Mister, I just want to say that I’m sorry. I accidentally seen what the man done there in Mr. Levy’s office, but I didn’t have nothing to do with it, and it just made me sick.” His eyes were sad and a little watery He wore a moustache that had begun to go grey. He was getting old, and becoming weary.