It was not an accident.
Not when the elevator belongs to someone looking into his father’s murder and the murder involved a vehicle inexplicably careening across the White House lawn. And not when the dead man’s assistant is murdered by a pinpoint knife-thrust to the heart by a person or persons able to float through a home without making a noise.
It was not an accident.
Still, if it were only his febrile mind desperately seeking a means to connect these events in the wake of narrowly escaping his own death, he might be able to posit a modicum of doubt. He might be able to argue that he was mistaken, that strange as it may seem, elevators sometimes do malfunction, and like it or not, this was one of those times.
But that was not the case.
He had proof.
Astor hurried from the kitchen and stumbled upstairs, falling halfway to the top, then raising himself, urging himself onward, carrying himself like the secret drunk he used to be. Inside his bedroom, he made a beeline for the desk, his hands sorting through the annual reports, examining the covers, discarding them one by one until he found what he was looking for.
The Sonichi Corporation of Japan.
He sat down on the floor cross-legged and thumbed the pages. He saw the heading and stopped. It was on page 23. “Industrial Products Division.” It read, “Last year the company extended its market line in its elevator business, branching laterally from the commercial sector to the residential sector with the introduction of two models, the Express 2111 and the Express 2122.”
Astor chucked the report aside and ran back downstairs. He punched the elevator call button. Seconds later the door opened. A brightly lit elevator car beckoned. Boldly, he stepped inside. The name was proudly stamped above the call buttons. Sonichi Express 2122.
There was one last matter.
Leaving the elevator, he placed a call from his cell.
“Yessir, Mr. Astor. How may I help?”
“Hello, Don, just wanted to check if you called me about five minutes ago.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Something about my car. You asked me to come downstairs and take a look.”
“Your car is just fine, sir. Checked it myself when I came on shift.” Don the doorman laughed wryly. “You goofing on me, Mr. A?” Read as, “You back on the sauce again, Mr. A?”
Astor paused. “No, Don. I must have misunderstood. Don’t worry about it. Good night.”
Astor ended the call.
It was not an accident.
It was attempted murder.
Later, after he had reported the malfunction to the building superintendent and the inspector and repairmen had come and gone and pronounced the system in perfect working order, and they had scratched their heads because no one could find anything wrong anywhere, and they had all smiled politely, not quite hiding their opinion that the man on the sixth floor might not be operating with a full deck, Astor retreated to his bedroom. He did not bother with the reports strewn about the floor. Instead he walked to his night table and picked up the slip of pale blue stationery with the words Cherry Hill embossed across the top that had fallen from one of the reports.
Cassandra99
He did not know what the word meant, but for now, that didn’t matter. The stationery told him other things. The feminine script confirmed the tremor in Penelope Evans’s voice earlier that day and confirmed that she and his father had been working together on a secret project at the Astor estate in Oyster Bay.
Palantir.
Astor realized that he hadn’t thought of the word since meeting with Mike Grillo earlier that evening.
He looked at his phone and scrolled through to Alex’s number. The sight of her name was enough to scratch any idea he had of contacting her. With Alex it was all or nothing. If he called, he would have to tell her the whole story from A to Z. She would not be interested in hearing about the elevator until he explained why he had had the temerity (she would use a different word) to leave Penelope Evans’s home without calling the police. It would not suffice to blame Sullivan. There would also be the matter of the stolen agenda, and no doubt a dozen other failings on his part.
He could not call Alex.
It was then that Astor took a second, longer, and altogether darker look at his smartphone. It had been acting up since that morning, when he’d had trouble getting a clear line to the office while flying in. He thought about the timing of Penelope Evans’s death. Sullivan had stated that she had been killed less than an hour before they arrived. If he had not stopped to see Brad Zarek at Standard Financial to discuss the terms of the loan, he and Sullivan would have arrived in Greenwich at the same time as the killer. Did that mean that the killer knew about Evans only after he did? That somehow Astor’s interest in her had alerted him? If so, how?
Astor turned the phone over in his hand. Smooth, elegant, much too powerful. A necessary tool. But was it also a weapon?
And then there was the matter of Don the doorman’s call.
Astor accessed his voice mail and searched among the deleted messages. There were over a hundred, and he patiently scrolled through them all until he found what he was looking for. A message from three weeks earlier.
“Yeah, Mr. A. It’s Don. You might want to come down and take a look at your car. Don’t worry. There’s no problem, but it looks like the tires could use some air. That’s it.”
Astor listened again and again. He didn’t quite remember what Don had said earlier, but he was relatively certain the words were close to the same. They had simply been rearranged.
Calmly he walked downstairs and set the phone on the kitchen counter. He found the tool basket in the pantry. He chose a hammer-heavy, rubber-gripped, barely used-and returned to the kitchen. He stood before the counter, took careful aim, and brought it down squarely on the phone. And then he hit it again and again.
Not a weapon, thought Astor. A necessary tool.
For his enemies.
38
It was a dream.
Randall Shepherd said, “I’m going to shoot you and then I’m going to shoot your partner and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Alex stared back at the killer. She saw him pulling the pistol from his waistband and immediately started for her own weapon. She’d always been a fast draw, but this time something was wrong. Her arms refused her commands. She stood immobile, her hands stuck by her sides, her entire body as stiff as a slab of petrified wood. She could only watch and wait as Shepherd raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead.
“You won’t stop us,” he said.
I will, said Alex, but now her speech failed her too. She could utter no words as she watched his finger tighten on the trigger.
But then Shepherd turned the gun away and pointed it at Jimmy Malloy. And now Alex could scream, but she still could not move, and so she was condemned to stand still and watch helplessly as Shepherd shot Jimmy in the head. She was screaming, the gunshot loud in her ears, when her phone rang, waking her.
“Forza.”
“Alex, this is Jean Eyraud in Paris. It’s my turn to wake you.”
Alex threw off the sheets and sat up. “Did you get a match?”
“Quite an exceptional person you decided to kill. You should count yourself lucky to be alive. His name is Luc Lambert, thirty-five years of age, nine years in the Légion Étrangère, a sergeant. He fought in Africa and the Middle East. Decorations for valor and bravery. For fun, I ran his name through all our databases. We like to keep track of these guys. Someone like Lambert, with that kind of record, has to have a reason to leave the légion before putting in his twenty.”
“Shoot.”
“Ever hear of an outfit called Executive Outcomes, based in London?”