“And now,” Giddings said, “since I waved the change authorizations at you, you’ve found a reason, is that it?”
“Is that what you think?”
“And if it is?”
“Then screw you,” Nat said.
Giddings’s expression turned reflective. “Not very elegant language for an architect,” he said. His voice was mild.
The moment of conflict was past. But, Nat thought, it would return; it was inevitable. “I wasn’t always an architect.” Horse wrangler, paratrooper, fire jumper, student. In the meantime, “You just came up from the concourse?” Giddings took his time. “Why?”
“Wert you in the building before?”
“I said why.”
“Because somebody was.” All along it had puzzled him; now he brought it out in the open for examination. “I heard elevators,” Nat said. He paused. “Cops all over the plaza. Did they stop you?”
Giddings was frowning now. “They did.”
“They stopped me too.” Not strictly true, but there had been that conversation.
“And you’re asking who else is in the building,” Giddings said, “and why?”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe,” Giddings said slowly, “you made it up. Maybe there isn’t—”
Giddings stopped and turned, and both men looked at the red light that had come on over the elevator doors; both heard the sound of the elevator moving. They looked at each other.
“I don’t make things up,” Nat said.
“This time,” Giddings said, “I believe you.”
“Remember it next time too.”
All the way down to the empty concourse and out into the plaza. Nat found the same black cop with his big Irish mate. Giddings stood by watching, listening. “He and I,” Nat said, pointing at Giddings. “Anyone else go in while you’ve been here?”
Barnes, the black cop said, “Why do you ask, Mr. Wilson?”
Shannon, the Irishman, said, “Big building. Other doors.” He shrugged. “Maintenance men, other poor working stiffs.”
Nat said, “Did anyone go in?”
“One man,” Barnes said. “An electrician. He said there was a trouble call.”
“Who made it?” This was Giddings.
“I thought of that,” Barnes said. He hesitated. “Maybe a little too late.” He paused. “Is it important, Mr. Wilson?”
“I don’t know.” Simple truth. He was conscious again of the change-order copies in his pocket and he knew that it was the fact of their existence that was making him jumpy. But there could be no connection between them and whoever had gone into the building because the change orders applied only to work in progress, and work was finished, or near enough. “He’s riding the elevators,” he said.
Shannon’s face opened in a huge grin. “Now where’s the harm in that, will you tell me? A man gets the yearning to ride an elevator, does the sky fall like Chicken Little said?” The brogue was heavy.
Giddings said, “An electrician. What was he carrying? Anything?”
Barnes said, “A toolbox.”
Shannon said, “Oh, no, Frank, you forget. It was a bright shiny atomic bomb.” He spread his hands to show its size. “Green it was on the one side and purple on the other with sparks shooting out, lovely to see—”
“Easy, Mike,” Barnes said. He spoke to Nat. “Just a toolbox. And he was wearing his hard hat.”
“Has he come out?”
“If he has,” Barnes said, “it was by a different door.” He hesitated. “And they are locked. Right, Mr. Wilson?”
“If they aren’t,” Giddings said, “they damn well ought to be.” He looked at Nat. “We’d best check.
The doors around the great building were locked. Nat said, “No watchmen? No security people?’
“On any ordinary day,” Giddings said, “by now this place would be crawling with work crews. As you damn well know. And anybody who didn’t belong in the building—”
“I wonder,” Nat said. At least he was thinking again. “I never thought of it before, but in something as big as this, with as many people milling around—” He shook his head. “Fish in the sea, inconspicuous.” He was silent for a few moments, staring up at the arched vaulting of the concourse. “It never even occurred to me,” he said at last, looking again at Giddings. “Don’t you see it?” Giddings shook his head slowly. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Nat said slowly, “We design a building to be open, for people to come and go easily.”
“So?”
“So,” Nat said, “by its very nature it is—vulnerable.”
“To what?”
Nat lifted his hands and let them fall. “Anything. Anybody.”
3
For John Connors riding the silent elevators was an interesting, even pleasurable business; slick smooth-functioning machinery had always fascinated him. And if anybody was looking for him, as sooner or later they would be, riding the elevators and sending empty cars up and down the multiple shafts was probably the best way to confuse a search.
He was familiar with the building by day—ordinary workday, that was. What he had not realized was what the building would be like empty and echoing, just himself and the living, breathing structure.
It was like a cathedral when nobody else was there—only more so. He tried to think of an analogy. Imagine an empty Yankee Stadium, he told himself.
Hearing only his own footsteps echoing in a corridor, looking out of the rows of windows, the world beneath him, and seeing only the immensity of the sky, thinking that he had one chance and only one to do what had to be done, was like being on his knees in prayer, just himself in His presence, and echoing through his mind the hush and the expectation of something great about to happen.
Something he had heard once, perhaps at a rally, he didn’t really remember, but the statement had stuck in his mind “A few determined men changing the course of great events.” He liked that. It had a grand ring. Determined men. Heroes. Like hijacking a plane and getting clean away. Like terrorizing the entire Olympic Village. A few determined men. Or one man alone. They listen to you then. Trudging along corridors with his toolbox, riding the elevators—it was almost like being inside an immense funhouse.
Electricity, of course, was the key here. Electricity seemed to be the key to everything these days. Connors remembered that grid blackout a few years back, and how everything, but everything, had come to a full stop and some people had even thought the end of the world had come. Not everybody, of course, because nine months later almost to the day there had been that crush in the city’s maternity hospitals to testify that some had spent the darkened hours profitably. But at first there had been near-panic, and that was the thought to cling to.
He was no electrical engineer nor even an experienced electrician, despite what he had told that black cop, but he had worked in the building and he knew in a general way how the power distribution was handled. On each of those electrical-mechanical floors was what is called a splicing chamber, and whenever he could, Connors had spent a little time watching the subcontractor’s men at work, peeling back the steel-wire armor encasing the electrical cables and then peeling back the vinyl jacket under that, and finally getting to the heart of the matter, the big inside wires that actually carried the current.
He knew that through step-down transformers each mechanical-electrical floor furnished usable electrical power for a vertical section of the building, and that each also passed along in original strength to the next higher mechanical-electrical floor the electricity coming in from the substation outside the building. He didn’t know what the strength of that primary current was, but it had to be high, maybe as much as five hundred volts, because why, otherwise, would they bother to step it down?