Bolden turned long enough to meet Schiff’s eyes and read the anger painted in them. Ahead, a wood-paneled wall partitioned the floor. The directors’ gymnasium sat behind it. He followed the wall to the glass doors that led to the gym. Inside, two young women seated at the reception desk looked at him in surprise.
“Sir, may I help you? Please, sir… you can’t…”
Bolden skirted the desk and found himself in the main exercise area. For all the talk about “cross-pollination,” there were strict rules about mixing with the proles. A row of Lifecycles occupied one half of the room, parked next to the floor-to-ceiling window. In case the view toward Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty wasn’t inspiring enough, each bike had a television. Every TV was on and tuned to CNBC or Bloomberg Television.
Running machines occupied the left-hand side of the room. Treadmill after treadmill after treadmill at ten grand a pop, and not a soul to be found. He ran to the end of the floor. A second room housed a fully equipped weight room. It, too, was empty. He slowed to check for an exit, then moved down the corridor. He negotiated the locker room, steam room, checked inside two massage rooms. A clock on the wall read 9:05.
“Sir, please…”
He turned to face one of the attendants. “Is there a stairwell?” he asked, hands on his knees, fighting for breath. “I need to get downstairs.”
“Yes, of course.” She pointed to an unmarked white door a few feet away. “But where are you going?”
Bolden opened the door and ran down the stairs. A dim light burned overhead. The staircase descended one flight before coming to a dead end. Bolden emerged into the executive kitchen.
Like any self-respecting bank, HW maintained its own kitchen. Or two kitchens, to be exact. There was a cafeteria on thirty-eight, and the dining room on forty that served lunch for directors and above, and catered formal gatherings. Smaller, more intimate rooms existed on forty-three, for those occasions when secrecy was of the utmost importance.
A few chefs were unpacking the morning’s deliveries. Otherwise, the place was empty. Settling to a brisk walk, Bolden made his way through the stainless-steel counters, searching for a service entrance. He’d never seen a chef outside the kitchen, so he knew that they must have their own entry. He checked the pantry, then the meat locker. He came to a sliding door built into the wall. He pushed it open to reveal a dumbwaiter. The space was tight, but he might fit inside. He leaned his weight on it and the tray dipped perilously. He stepped back and looked to either side of him. A stainless-steel door opened to the garbage chute. He looked inside. It was a long way down and pitch black.
And then he saw it. Across the room was a fire alarm, a red metal box with a white T-pull.
Since 9/11, the firm had practiced evacuating the building twice a year. Every floor had its assigned fire marshal. When the alarm was activated (silently), everyone knew to gather in lines at the stairwells and calmly leave the building. Once downstairs, each floor would make their way to a preordained meeting point one block from the building. Roll was called, and when all floors were accounted for, the firm trooped back into the building. No one joked. No one complained. Fire alarms were serious business.
“Danny, search the area. Hey, chef, you seen anyone come through here? You did? Where’d he go? Thank you.”
Bolden heard the voices echoing inside the kitchen. His eyes darted from the alarm to the entry. Dashing across the room, he pulled the alarm. Immediately, water sprayed from the overhead nozzles. A siren buzzed and the wall-mounted strobes began to flash. Bolden rushed back to his spot. Grabbing a stack of plates, he threw them into the dumbwaiter, then pressed the lift button. He stepped to the left, pulled open the garbage chute, and climbed inside. The door slammed shut behind him. The chute was four feet by three, stamped from reinforced aluminum. Like a climber negotiating a couloir, he wedged his feet against opposite walls. Every few seconds, he slipped. An inch. Two inches. The darkness was total. The chute might drop to the basement.
“Security says the alarm was pulled in the kitchen.” It was Schiff again, and closer. “Fan out, gentlemen.”
Footsteps echoed above Bolden’s head. His hands were slippery with sweat and exertion. He tensed his muscles, but pushing too hard was as bad as not pushing hard enough. He slipped again.
“Mr. Schiff, the dumbwaiter’s going up.”
“Say again?”
“Bolden’s in the dumbwaiter. Goes to forty-three, that’s it.”
Schiff shouted for his men to go to forty-three.
Bolden held his breath. He waited a minute, then inched his way up. His right shoe caught and came loose. He struggled to hold it, but a moment later, it tumbled into the darkness. Reflexively, he jammed his foot against the wall, but the sock was nearly worn through.
Bolden felt himself going. Inch by inch. Falling. In desperation, he reached for the sill of the entry. His fingers grasped only air. He dropped in stages, four inches, six, twelve, gathering speed. He pressed his palms to the wall, but his palms bounced off. Suddenly, he was in free fall, his stomach pressed high in his chest. A moment later, his feet hit something soft. He landed in a pile of rancid garbage. Yesterday’s meals. He kicked at all four walls. A door opened and he stepped into the custodian’s chambers.
Thirty-nine was not officially a floor. No elevator stopped there. It was a floor between floors, a technical work space crammed with over three thousand miles of cable and wire from the trading floor, servers, mainframes, Liebert air conditioners to keep the firm’s IT infrastructure operating at a perfect sixty-four degrees, and most important, an uninterruptible power supply.
He looked around the cramped foyer, walls on two sides. A service elevator faced him.
Bolden waited two minutes before pressing the call button.
Over a thousand people crammed the lobby and the promenade that surrounded the building. Bolden exited the freight elevator and walked into the milling masses. He let the crowd dictate his pace, never hurrying, never pushing, content to keep his head lowered and let the flow carry him. Nearby, there was a commotion. One of the downstairs security guards pushed past him, then abruptly stopped and took a step back.
“You Thomas Bolden?”
“No,” said Bolden. “Jack Bradley.”
The guard stared at him a second longer. Bolden was just another white face. “All right, Mr. Bradley,” he said. “You go ahead, sir.”
A minute later, Bolden passed through the massive glass doors.
The temperature had dropped further. The air crackled with cold. The day was gray and frigid.
19
His name was Ellington Fiske, and he stood beneath a driving rain in front of the Ronald Reagan Building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Rain funneled off the hood of his poncho and onto his shoes; it sluiced from his shoulders and dripped from the ends of his sleeves. Though the word “Police” was stenciled in block letters upon his back, he was, in fact, a member of the United States Secret Service. The assistant director for National Special Security Events, he was in charge of all security measures surrounding the inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States.
Fiske strode into the center of the street. He was a small man, standing five feet seven inches in his brogues, and wiry; 141 pounds according to his wife’s digital scale. He looked both ways, careful to avoid being run over by a piece of heavy machinery. Though Pennsylvania Avenue had been closed for nine hours, the four-lane boulevard was a hive of activity. Forklifts rumbled across the sidewalk, removing the more than three hundred concrete casements that lined the street in front of any federal building. Teams of laborers threw up scaffolding to erect bleachers that would line the parade route. The air rang with hammers knocking home bolts and pinions. A few feet from Fiske, a large crane ground to a halt. Chains were attached to a traffic signal positioned in the center island. The crane’s arm lurched skyward. The traffic signal was uprooted and deposited onto the flatbed of a waiting truck. The process was to be repeated twenty times up and down Pennsylvania Avenue by four o’clock that afternoon.