The front door was the only way in, but there was a hidden emergency exit behind a decorative bookcase, filled with leather-bound antique tomes so pristine they’d probably never even been opened, much less read. There would be no getting in through that door, but Nate figured it wouldn’t hurt to check it out anyway while they were waiting for his father to arrive. He put his shoulder to the bookcase, prepared for heavy labor, but found it was on rails and slid aside with relative ease to reveal the door behind it.
“What’s that?” Nadia asked.
“It’s an emergency exit,” Nate replied as he opened the door into a small, concrete-lined stairwell. This door was fitted with even more locks than the front entrance, and was reinforced with steel. Nate didn’t know if it had once been a fire exit, or if it had been created from scratch when the Empire State Building had been gutted and repurposed as Paxco Headquarters.
He stepped out onto the landing and peeked over the edge to see the endless flights of stairs leading down. He supposed the stairs were necessary for certain kinds of emergency situations—like, say, when there was a fire or a power outage that made the elevators unusable—but it made his body ache just thinking about going down them. The office was on the 102nd floor, and that was a whole lot of stairs to descend.
“If things go to hell,” Nate called over his shoulder, “we’ll use this exit to run for it.”
Nadia peeked in and gave him a doubtful nod. They both knew that if things went to hell, they weren’t getting out of here. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try.
Since the door wasn’t that hard to open, Nate went ahead and closed it and slid the bookcase back into place. There was no reason to broadcast their escape plan, even if it wouldn’t be anything like a surprise to his father. They both knew the exit existed, and it was the only logical way for Nate and Nadia to try to get out, if it came to that.
The phone inside the office rang, and both Nate and Nadia jumped at the sound. Their eyes met across the room. The phone rang a second time.
“I guess that’s for us,” Nate said, because there was no way a call for his father was coming in to the office at 6:00 A.M.
“Are you going to answer it?”
The phone rang a third time, and Nate couldn’t think of any reason not to pick up. It wasn’t like security could arrest him over the phone. He grabbed the receiver.
“Yeah?” he said, because hello just didn’t seem right for the occasion.
“I hear you want to talk to me,” his father said.
The calm, cool voice of the man who had raised him made Nate shiver. Nate was sweating with nerves, and his father sounded about as worked up as he would be if he took a sip of his coffee and found it had gone cold.
“That’s right,” Nate said. He sounded like a scared little boy to his own ears, not at all the bold rebel who planned to demand the Chairman step down in his favor.
“I’m on my way. But son, the smartest thing you can do is use the emergency exit and get out before I get there.”
Nate snorted. “Yeah, right. You think I’m going to make it that easy for you?”
“There are things going on you don’t know about.” Maybe Nate was imagining things, but he thought he heard an uncharacteristic edge of worry in his father’s voice. Not that Nate gave a damn.
“You mean things like you murdering Gerri Lake and trying to have Nadia killed?”
“That wasn’t me.”
Nate laughed. It was either that or scream. That his father would try to deny he was behind it all was positively maddening. How stupid did he think Nate was?
“You know what, Dad? Fuck you. We’ll talk when you get here.”
Nate hung up the phone with a resounding bang, his heart pumping hard enough he figured Nadia could hear it from her perch across the room. She was chewing her lip anxiously and looked pale and fragile, but even so, she looked more together than he felt. He’d come here certain he wasn’t capable of cold-bloodedly killing his own father, but judging by the intensity of his rage, he was no longer so sure.
“You’re going to have to do most of the talking,” Nate said. “A few sentences on the phone were enough to make me want to kill him with my bare hands.”
“You expect me to be more reasonable?” Nadia asked. “He had my sister killed, Nate. It’s going to take everything I have not to shoot him the moment he shows his face.”
She had a point. Negotiations of the kind they were about to attempt were best carried out with a cool head. Shouting expletives and broadcasting uncertainty weren’t the best ways of establishing themselves as negotiating from a position of power. Nate closed his eyes and wished it weren’t too early in the morning for a drink. He probably had too much adrenaline in his system for alcohol to even take the edge off unless he drank it in larger-than-advisable quantities, but the illusion that he was doing something to steady himself would have been nice. Something other than pacing a rut in the floor, that is.
The phone rang again within seconds of Nate having hung up, but he felt no inclination to answer. Voice mail picked up, but a different line started ringing almost instantly. Nate turned the ringer off, because the sound was getting on his nerves.
The good news was that his father had been telling the truth when he said he was on his way. The room was well soundproofed for privacy, but, even so, Nate and Nadia could hear the evidence of people gathering outside, if only because they themselves were so quiet. Of course the Chairman wouldn’t show up without a large entourage, including bodyguards. Even to meet with his own son.
There was a knock on the door, and then Nate heard his father’s voice, much muffled by the soundproofed door.
“I’m here, son,” he said. “Let me in.”
“Only you!” Nate shouted. “Your bodyguards and the rest of your entourage stay outside.”
“Understood.”
Just because the Chairman said “understood” didn’t mean he was planning to comply. Nate raised his gun and positioned himself so it would be the first thing his father saw.
“Do me a favor and open the door, would you?” he asked Nadia. “And stay behind it until he’s safely in.”
She nodded and unlocked the locks one by one as Nate listened to the sound of blood rushing in his ears and tried to ignore the sweat he felt beading on his brow.
The last lock snicked open, and Nadia looked at him for a signal. He nodded, and she opened the door just enough for someone to slip in.
Nate half-expected the security team to rush the door. After all, for all he knew, his father had stepped aside the moment he’d heard the locks opening. There was no peephole to show them what was just outside the door. There were surveillance cameras that his father could access from his desk, but Nate didn’t know his password so couldn’t get to the feed. His finger tightened on the trigger in preparation.
But when the door opened, only his father stood there. Nate had the vague impression of maybe ten or twenty more guys milling about, but the Chairman was blocking his view.
The Chairman had sounded like his usual calm, dispassionate self on the phone, but in person he didn’t seem to be quite so calm after all. His face was paler than usual, and his body screamed with tension. And not because Nate had a gun to his head. Nate doubted his father believed he would shoot, though he would be cautious on the off chance he was wrong.
“Come on in,” Nate said, backing up to give him space while keeping the gun firmly pointed at his head. “Move slowly. And if anyone else tries to come with you, I’ll shoot.”