Diplomatic Immunity (36 page)

Appalled, I stare up at the screen, at the closed side-chamber door. Maybe Lemtov is just stalling, I think. Maybe he is trying to figure it out. Maybe in fifteen minutes he will emerge from the side chamber and head straight for the exit. But in fifteen minutes Rachel will be in the hands of NYPD Homicide. If Lemtov runs in fifteen minutes, it will already be too late.

Here in the Surveillance Room the phone rings. The senior guard answers it again, and this time he sits up straight. “Sir,” he says, then hands the phone to Mike. While Mike hangs his head and listens, the senior guard galvanizes his colleagues at the monitors. He wants to know which guards they have free in the Assembly building. He tells them that the order from Eckhardt is to get the girl over to the guardhouse at once.

My throat feels clotted. Mike hangs up the phone, then draws me out into the hallway. “Eckhardt,” he says, frowning. “So wild he’s just about busting a gut.”

“Just five more minutes, Mike.”

Mike jerks his thumb back toward the Surveillance Room. “Eckhardt’s given these guys a direct order. You can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. She’s gonna be handed over.”

“No.”

Mike lowers his head; he can’t bear to look at me. “Jesus,” he says.

Fear has dried my throat, I have to swallow before I speak. “Give me your two-way.”

Mike lifts his head. “What?”

Reaching, I yank the two-way off his belt. “Go get yourself another one,” I tell him with quiet urgency. I point to the Surveillance Room. “You stay here. Tell me what’s happening. Just keep me and Rachel away from the guards.”

“You and Rachel?” Mike screws up his face when it registers what I’m asking him to do. “Christ. You think they won’t catch you?”

“Look, tell Eckhardt about the FBI report. Try to hold him off. Lemtov’s just buying time. When he figures it out, he’ll run.”

“Says you.”

We look at each other. Urgent voices rise in the Surveillance Room, everyone calling in the spare guards around the building.

“Fucking mental,” says Mike, shaking his head. Then he points to the two-way in my hand. “Reset it to three one one,” he instructs me, backing away. “And you don’t speak to me on it. You just listen. Go on.” Turning in to his office to find himself another two-way, he shouts back over his shoulder, “Go!”

38

“D
ID IT WORK?
”
RACHEL ASKS THE MOMENT SHE
SEES
me.

She and Weyland have been sitting on the floor, their backs to the wall. They both scramble to their feet as I tell Rachel no, that it has not worked as we planned. She lets out a moan.

“But it still might,” I add quickly. “We just need some more time.” I point to Weyland. “Some guards are coming down to get Rachel in about two minutes. She can’t be here when they arrive.”

He doesn’t say a word, just thinks a moment, then nods. When I explain what I want him to do, he considers that a moment too. He can see it makes sense, the only way he can help us and not lose his job, and he nods again.

I beckon Rachel over to me by the door and take her hand; our palms are filmed with sweat. Then Weyland comes and touches Rachel’s arm and smiles his encouragement. He tells her she is going to be okay, but when she tries to smile back, her eyes are wide with fear. Weyland gestures to the door; he is ready.

“You set?” I ask Rachel.

She stares at the door blankly. When I squeeze her hand, she nods, so I step up and pull back the door.

Weyland takes three long strides, then launches himself out into the hall, arms spread out in a dramatic sprawl that looks just as it’s meant to look, as if I’ve caught him by surprise and delivered a mighty hit. But he has miscalculated the dive. He actually strikes the wall with his shoulder and cries out, an instinctive shout of real pain. Crumpling to the floor, he lies there, groaning.

As we emerge into the corridor, Rachel hesitates, then bends over Weyland. I have to drag her up the stairs.

Suddenly Mike’s panicked voice blurts out from the two-way, “If they keep going up those stairs, we’ve got them!”

I pull Rachel to a jarring halt beside me. And we listen. There is no sound from above, from below us only Weyland’s soft groaning. We stand like two cornered animals, frozen.

“Yeah.” Mike over the two-way. Watching us in the monitor as he talks to the Surveillance Room guards. “If they’d taken the elevator, they’d be clear.”

“The elevator,” I say, dragging Rachel back down the stairs.

Weyland, still stretched on the floor, holding his shoulder, looks up at us as we shoot past. He moans and rolls aside. Down the hall, we skid to a stop by the elevator. Rachel presses the button.

“Which floor?”

“Up,” I answer stupidly.

Rachel giggles, the giggle rising in pitch, and I take her firmly by both shoulders. “Keep it together, Rache.”

She looks back toward Weyland, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Keep it together,” I say again, shaking her. Bowing her head, she wipes a hand across her eyes.

The elevator arrives, the doors open. Mike speaks over the two-way. “They stop on one, they’re history.”

Suddenly guards come racing from the stairwell and into the passage behind us; they pause when they see Weyland sprawled on the floor. Pushing Rachel into the elevator, I hit the button for three. Out in the basement hall the guards shout and come running. I keep my thumb jammed on the button, cursing the doors. “Come on. Come on.”

At last, finally, they close. The shouts die as the elevator rises. Slumping against the wall beside me, Rachel tilts back her head and closes her eyes.

“You okay?” I ask.

She nods, but she looks pale and terribly drawn.

“At three,” I tell her, “we go straight out. We’ll try to get across to the Secretariat building. Not so many guards over there. And whatever you do, stay near. Stick with me.” Her eyes remain closed. “Rache?”

When she opens her eyes, I see that she is fighting back tears. I squeeze her arm, then the elevator stops, the doors slide open, and I take her hand and set off running across the polished cream linoleum straight down the passage toward the Secretariat building, south.

“You got no one in front of them,” Mike tells the guards as if he is wildly pissed off.

No one in front of us. We charge straight on, not looking left or right, the side corridors flashing by, our shoes slapping on the linoleum.

“Where are the guards?” says Rachel, breathless, as we push through the corridor doors. In front of us the long, wide passage to the Secretariat building is empty. Probably over at the General Assembly Hall, I think. Or the Council Chamber. I urge her desperately on. “Keep going,” I say. “Run.”

Seconds later we burst through the open doorway into the Secretariat building, I grab Rachel’s arm and stop her dead. People. Secretariat bureaucrats, guys with briefcases, women carrying folders, half a dozen or more strolling toward us, heading over to minister to the needs of the delegates in the Hall. Sliding a hand beneath Rachel’s arm, I walk her left toward the stairs. The Secretariat staffers pass by us without a second glance.

“You got anyone on the stairs?” Mike asks the surveillance guards. Then he swears. “Floor fucking ten maybe? What good’s that?”

Rachel and I exchange a look. Moving as one, we take to the stairs. Five floors up I am sucking air, blowing like a winded horse. Behind me Rachel has her hands on her hips, canting forward, still climbing. And then a long way above us, several flights up, we hear a door open. Two guards enter the stairwell, arguing over whether they’re meant to be heading up or down.

Edging along the wall, we get ourselves onto the next landing, then quickly and quietly step out of the stairwell.

“Okay,” says Mike, “they’re on eight.”

The eighth floor is just like most floors of the Secretariat, a long central corridor and countless ranks of veneered doors to either side. Plenty of places to be cornered but nowhere to hide. I touch the two-way on my belt. I want to ask Mike what’s happening with Lemtov, but I can’t do that without alerting the surveillance guards as to how Mike is helping us. I turn right, take a step, then swing to the left. With Rachel panting beside me, waiting for me to call our next move, it comes to me with a stark and numbing clarity. In a few minutes we will be caught. This is not going to work.

“Dad?” says Rachel, sensing my sudden loss of direction. Her face is pale, her eyes shine. Her shoulders rise and fall with each breath. I am her only hope of getting out of this; she is relying on me absolutely to tell her what to do next.

But all I can do is lift a hand helplessly. And then like the voice of an angel Mike barks over the two-way, “Twenty-nine through thirty-two? I don’t fucking believe it. You shut down three floors’ worth of security cams for maintenance, you tell me that only now?”

My heart beats hard into my ribs. Hope. Mike goes on chewing out the surveillance guards, making sure that I’ve got the message. And I have. Between twenty-nine and thirty-two the guards are blind. Grabbing Rachel’s hand, I run, a wild dash for the elevator, praying that our luck holds, that we can get all the way up to twenty-nine.

Hitting the elevator button with the heel of my hand, I step back and watch the numbers climb. Five. Six. Seven. Finally eight lights up; there is a ping as the doors begin to open, and I shove Rachel in ahead of me. And then I see the guard. A young guy, he stands in the elevator, his finger poised over the buttons. My gut clenches.

He glances from Rachel to me. And then he smiles pleasantly. “Floor?” he says.

Rachel shoots me a look. I glance down at the guard’s belt. He isn’t carrying a two-way, he has not heard.

“Twelve,” I say, stepping in.

He hits the button, the doors close, and we ascend in silence. The kid tries to make eye contact with Rachel, but she keeps her gaze firmly on the numbers over the door. Long seconds pass. When the doors finally open at twelve, Rachel hurries out. The kid looks faintly disappointed.

As the doors close behind us, Rachel hunches over and makes a strangled noise in her throat.

“Stairs,” I say, turning her in that direction, explaining the plan as we go. The elevators run in three banks, floors one through thirteen, thirteen through twenty-six, and twenty-six through thirty-nine. By getting off on the twelfth floor, we might misdirect the surveillance guards into thinking we’re not trying to get much higher. By taking another elevator at fifteen, they might not immediately assume that we’re heading straight for twenty-six, and they won’t necessarily place guards there ready for our arrival.

Rachel says “Ah-ha,” but she hasn’t listened to a word.

We race up the stairs past thirteen waiting for some warning from Mike over the two-way. No warning comes. Then, emerging onto the fifteenth floor, we pause. The silence from the two-way now is eerie. Rachel crosses to the elevator and hits the button.

“Wherever we go, they’ll find us, Dad.”

“We’re buying time. That’s all we can do.”

She makes a face. Despair.

The elevator arrives, the door opens, and two middle-aged men in suits are standing there. Faces I vaguely recognize, deadwood from Protocol.

“If they don’t get in the goddamn elevator—” Mike says, and my hand snatches at the volume control, turning it down. The guys in the elevator look at the two-way, then up at me curiously.

I think, What? If we don’t get in the goddamn elevator, what? We’re caught? We’re not caught? What?

“Going up?” says one of the Protocol guys.

Steeling myself, I bow my head and usher Rachel into the elevator in front of me. We watch the doors slowly close. Then a cry comes from somewhere on the floor.

“Hold it! Hold the elevator!” The urgency is unmistakable; it has to be a guard.

But when one of the Protocol guys reaches for the buttons, I brush his hand aside and hold my thumb firmly down on Close Door. Twenty-six is already lit; these guys are going to the same place.

“Charlie,” I say, tossing my head toward the cries out on the floor. “Thirty pounds overweight. He can take the stairs.”

The doors close, we start to rise, and the two men exchange a glance. Neither one is smiling.

Rachel has her back to the wall, her arms folded, and her chin sunk on her chest. Perspiration beads on her forehead and trickles down her cheeks to her neck. She is breathing hard, like me. When the guy nearest Rachel bends to look at her more closely, she raises a hand to her face. His glance slides across to me, and I lift my eyes to the numbers over the door: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. At last he turns back to Rachel.

“Something wrong?” he asks her.

She turns her head, eyes fixed on the floor. She could not look more frightened, more in need of help, if she tried.

Twenty-four, twenty-five.

The two guys exchange another glance, clearly thinking about that shout down on fifteen.

“You in a hurry somewhere?” the same guy asks Rachel.

“A meeting,” I interject. “Last-minute rush.”

They consider me doubtfully.

Twenty-six. The bell pings.

“Who with?” the guy says.

As the doors slide open, I cast around for a name. “Jim,” I say finally.

“Yeah?” He cocks his head. “Which one?”

Rachel steps out past me. I nod stiffly to the two men, then get out and steer Rachel away quickly. Leaning toward her, I whisper, “Soon as we’re through this door, run. Straight up to twenty-nine. Don’t look back.”

Behind us now we can hear the two Protocol guys debating what to do as they step out of the elevator. We’re almost at the stairs when they call out that we’re heading the wrong way for the offices. We keep right on walking.

“Miss!” one of them calls after Rachel.

I shoulder open the stairwell door and tell her, “Run.”

I take the stairs two at a time; at first Rachel tries to keep up, but she simply cannot do it. After two flights she stops, slumping against the banister. On the flight above I stop and urge her on. Then she lifts her head, I see her face, and my heart leaps into my throat. She has gone white. Her eyes seem sunken and the skin is stretched tight over her cheekbones. Physical exertion and fear have sapped her strength totally. She drops her head and sobs.

Leaping down the steps, I wrap an arm around her waist. She rises and puts her arm over my shoulder, then leans in to me. She keeps saying sorry.

“A couple of more floors, Rache. We’ll get there.”

She nods, then looks up. Easing her away from the banister, bearing much of the weight of her slight frame now, I start to climb. She lifts her legs, struggling, climbing beside me. Another flight, then the door back down on twenty-six opens. A few ineffectual cries of “Hey!” and “What are you doing?” drift up the stairwell. The Protocol deadwood; thank God they make no effort to follow. They yell something about reporting me to the guards and then they withdraw.

Rachel and I are both perspiring freely now, both breathless. My heart palpitates strangely as we stagger onto the twenty-ninth-floor landing. Rachel disengages herself, leans back against the wall, hands on hips, and tries to catch her breath. Clinging to the banister for support, I follow her gaze up to the security camera fixed high on the wall above us. Then I turn up the volume on the two-way.

“Dad—”

“Shh.”

A few seconds more, then Mike speaks. “They’re up there. We’ve lost them.”

When I look at Rachel she presses her lips together, her mouth trembles.

“Okay,” I say, finally pushing away from the banister, hauling myself upright, moving toward the door.

Be strong, I think. She needs you to be strong.

And I almost manage to keep my voice steady as I tell her, “Now let’s get you hidden.”