Nothing Lasts Forever (13 page)

He knew exactly what was happening to him as soon as he felt the glass under his right foot, but his weight was pitched forward and he had generated too much momentum. His feet were gashed, the left worse than the right. The gang had been ready for him. He was motionless, holding on tightly to the banister, trying to keep from crying out.

The left foot had a big cut, a bad one. He had no one to blame but himself. They had taken the fluorescent tubes stacked in the stairway above the fortieth floor and broken them all over the stairwells. He should have known what they had in mind for him. Coming down from the roof, he had failed to notice that tubes had been moved. When he lifted his left foot back up to the step above his right, he could feel the blood pour off the ends of his toes. His instinct was to be careful, but he knew he had to hurry, even if they would be able to follow the trail he left to anyplace in the building. He had to get upstairs, but he had no idea of how he was going to tend to himself. The only first-aid equipment he knew of was in Stephanie's office. Bits of glass were embedded in his right foot; he could feel them grinding when he lifted his foot and set it down again.

He tried to go fast, but the cut in his left foot seemed to gush blood with every step. He hopped and skipped, trying to keep his weight off it, while the glass ground into the right foot. He went on up to the thirty-fourth floor, where at least he had the protection of his fortress.

Gunfire, just beyond the door. He stopped in the stairwell, his left foot raised above the rough concrete. It was running blood, the pain intensifying. Tomorrow he wouldn't be able to stand on either foot. He could feel the anger filling up in him
again.
He put both feet on the concrete, took his breaths, and pulled open the door.

The lights were on. The sound of the door opening made the girl in the middle of the room turn around, but she was too slow and startled by Leland's appearance, and a single short burst lifted her over the desk behind her.

Another automatic weapon went off, and the ceiling panels to Leland's left jumped and shattered. Leland had safety in the stairwell only if someone did not come upon him from above or below. He scrambled on his hands and knees across the floor to a position behind a desk. More fire, scattering items inches above his head. Leland knew where it was coming from, near his own fortress in the northeast corner. He moved to the next desk westward, poked his head up, and fired the Thompson as the other guy leaped over Leland's traffic jam of desks.

He was the only other one? Leland's feet were planted in puddles of blood. The lumps of plastic and detonators he had molded around the emergency lights were off to his right, not even in view. He moved over again, fired another burst at his fortress, and got down again. While the guy returned the fire, Leland got the last packet of plastic out of the kit bag and molded it around a detonator into a ball. In another moment, the guy was going to wake up, give his position on the radio, and call for help.

Leland worked his way around a little more. He'd killed four of them now, which wasn't bad, given the odds. This plastic was potent stuff, more than they needed for the safe, probably wrong for it, too. Now the guy was on the radio. Leland poked his head up and fired again, trying to penetrate his own defenses. He moved three or four desks closer to the northwest corner, until he could see the emergency lights to which he had molded the other packets. The other guy shot again, stitching the glass behind Leland. The cops downstairs were loving every minute of this. Cops everywhere liked to be in charge of the gunplay, and when guns were going off and they weren't in on it, it made them more than a little bit crazy.

"Hey, creep! Do you speak English?"

"Yes I do, you human filth!"

"Take a good look at those emergency lights by the elevators!"

He laughed. "I saw that movie,
Sergeant York!
Gary Cooper made a birdcall!"

Leland hadn't had that in mind; but then he remembered that the old man downstairs had made him think of
Sergeant York
— now what filled his thoughts was what these people had probably done to that old man.

"Look again, dummy!"

Leland saw his head coming up. "Wait!" he shouted "Don't shoot at it!"

Leland had the Thompson trained on him. The first rounds hit the guy in the neck and high in the chest, driving him back and passing through him to shatter the window beyond. Leland stood up and emptied the clip into him, keeping him upright and driving him back against the glass and then through it, three hundred and forty feet above the ground. Leland glanced again at the plastic on the emergency lights. He'd thought he knew what it was. It had certainly scared hell out of Skeezix's new friend. Later — first, Leland had to tend to his feet. No, first he had to figure out how.

On his way out, he discarded the Thompson and picked up the girl's machine gun — a Kalashnikov at last — and three full clips of ammunition.

He went down to the thirty-third floor, looking for an office similar to his daughter's, hoping to find something besides paper, towels, and toilet tissue. He could walk, but walking made him bleed. He was on the south side of the building, on the assumption that the gang would have its attention turned to Wilshire Boulevard, where the black-and-white had been spotted.

He picked the last of the glass out of his right foot, then studied the left. The gash was in the pad behind the smallest two toes, a good three-eights of an inch deep, jagged, almost an inch and a half long. It had been a long time since he had seen his own meat like this. If it could be treated properly, the cut would give him no problems. But he didn't know if he would even find something to tie around it temporarily. Finally he remembered that the best offices had the corner views.

He found a Turkish hand towel, and he folded it once lengthwise and then tried to tie it, but it wasn't long enough. His temper started to flare again. He wanted to kill them all? Now it crossed his mind that he was glad he still had most of them left.

He caught himself. First he had to bind his foot. He sat up — where the hell was he, anyway? This was a business office. He hopped across the room to the desk and got a handful of rubber bands. Good. In fact, it was pretty slick. The thickness of the towel cushioned the pressure of the rubber bands.

He wanted to see what was playing on the radio. Twenty-six was quiet. He dialed to nine.

"Come in," a voice whispered. It was a young, black voice, deep, with no trace of ghetto. "If the person who radioed for help can hear me, acknowledge this transmission if you can."

Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "You got him. Listen: you've got seven foreign nationals armed with automatic weapons and high explosive, perhaps a lot more, holding approximately seventy-five civilians hostage on the thirty-second floor. They've killed one. He's on the fortieth floor. In addition to the two birds who took the short way down. I've killed three others, including two women..."

There was a pause. "You want to identify yourself, fella?"

"Not possible. If I get the chance, I'll throw my wallet out to you."

"What else can you tell us?"

"The leader of the gang is a German named Anton Gruber, a.k.a. Antonino Rojas, Little Tony the Red, with a call on him in the German Federal Republic. He has enough explosive in here to flatten the place, which may be what he has in mind if he doesn't get what he wants, whatever that is. On the other hand, I've got the detonators, or at least some of them..."

"Throw them out."

"Can't right now, and I don't think it's a good move. As long as he thinks he can get me and make me tell him where the detonators are, he won't play his last card, the hostages."

"You talk like a man who knows something, if you understand me. I want you to throw the detonators out. The first objective is to reduce the chance of disaster."

"I already have, until they catch me. Let me talk. From what I can tell, they have the elevators locked up on the thirty-second floor. You try to shoot your way in, from above or below, and they're going to start killing women and children. Call your boss and ask him if he wants children shot on Christmas in his town."

"I want you to listen to me..."

"No, you listen: I'm wounded and I left a trail of blood to where I am now. They're still after me. I won't be leaving a trail anymore; let me protect myself and I'll get back to you."

Leland turned the radio off. He had been in one place long enough. He had to get himself together and understand how the situation had changed. He wanted to talk some more with the police.

He was limping, but he could move. It was like walking on loaves of bread. His left foot felt as though it had been sliced in half. He would know if he started bleeding badly again. He went upstairs, taking the southeast staircase, hurrying the first flight to get past the thirty-fourth floor, then slowing and feeling the pain the next two. Good enough. He was tired anyway. He wanted to rest.

Of all the aircraft he'd owned after the war, the best had been his Cessna 310. During the war he had flown all sorts of things, of course, from training planes up through the Thunderbolt, a heavy-handling, evil-looking brute, to the Mustang, the best single-engine piston aircraft ever built, bar none. He had been happiest thinking about airplanes and flying. On the day he'd checked out in the 310, he'd dropped the salesman off at the office and taxied back out to the runway again. The kid in the tower had told him to keep the wings on — he'd know how good Leland was feeling that day...

The thirty-sixth floor was like the thirty-third, a gridiron of tiny cubicles surrounded by equally tiny, but color-coordinated offices — in a big corporation, you always knew where you stood in relation to the top.

It had no status now, with bulletholes, splintered panels, and broken glass everywhere. He was on the north side again, sitting on the floor behind a desk, looking down into Wilshire Boulevard. Three blocks away, he could see the flash of a boiling light against a building. A helicopter appeared over the hills, then swung around abruptly and headed north, toward the San Fernando valley.

Leland was eating his Milky Way. He'd finished the Oh Henry!, and he was saving the Mars bar for last. He felt like a kid in the movies, or a young cop eating for energy in a prowl car...

He'd taken the 310 straight out to sea at a height of a thousand feet, across the New Jersey suburban blight where every tacky, upright swimming pool stood revealed, every van, every bolt-together aluminum tool shed — at a thousand feet, at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, the suburbs looked like an enormous junkyard.

But then he'd gone on, out over the ocean. Two miles out, he was at five hundred feet; ten miles, fifty feet. By then he was making better than two hundred knots, faster than he'd flown in almost twenty years. It was a brilliant, blue-sky day, with only a few cirrus clouds far above. The sun was over his shoulder and the water looked very dark, so close the wave's seemed to be nipping at the plane. He passed a sport fishing boat and waggled his wings. The 310 was his second twin, with wingtip fuel tanks, as pretty as any general aviation aircraft ever, loaded, equipped for IFR, one of the first small radars — he had world-wide capability At thirty miles out, he came upon two freighters, five miles apart, making for the Ambrose Light Using their superstructures as pylons, he flew figure eights; and when the crews came out on deck, he waggled his wings, climbed straight up, rolled, stalled, let it fall, and finished with a full loop between the ships where both crews could see. When he headed back to the land, he could see arms waving from the decks.

He pressed the "Talk" button. "You guys still there?"

"Ah, how you doing? What happened to you?"

"I had to get the show on the road. For the last ten, I've been cooping."

"Right. A couple of us heard your earlier transmission, and we agree that you're the real thing. We're going to take a chance on you. Now how do you make the situation?"

"The roof is easier to defend than to take. They're very heavily armed..."

"How about you?"

Leland thought of the Browning, and that Little Tony might be listening. "I'm in business," he said.

"How do we recognize you?"

Leland smiled. "I'm black. I wasn't when I started, but I am now."

"I hear you. We'll talk about that later. What about the radio? How did you come into that?"

No wonder: they hadn't figured out that he had one of the gang's radios.

"I came into this the same way I came into this sweet little Kalashnikov machine gun. It's logical to assume they're tuned in, too. Do you know who Little Tony is?"

"Hey, I usually work out of Hollenbeck. I was on my way home to West L.A."

"Okay," Leland said. "He's third generation Red Army Faction, West Germany. After Andreas Baader died, his people went deep underground Nobody knew where they would turn up, but the stories were always that they would do something big. Here we are." Leland had a sudden thought: what if the marshal on the plane from St. Louis had been responding to some wild, incoherent information? If Leland had been paying attention and identified himself, he might have learned something that could have prevented this.

"How do you know all this stuff?"

"Just say it's a long time since I worked Hollenbeck. Look, I told you: These guys need me, and it's not a good idea to stay on the air too long."

"Well, we're going to give them a taste now."

Leland froze. The police still did not understand the situation. He had become convinced that Little Tony was listening. Leland moved closer to the window — and now, faintly, he heard one of the elevators running. He couldn't be sure that they weren't coming for him. No, such a short trip would have been completed already.

They had been listening! They were headed down to meet the police!