Nothing Lasts Forever (22 page)

He was so frightened for Steffie that he wanted to cry. She had identified herself. She must have, trying to save her own children. He had only needed two more minutes, less than he would have had if the police had been willing to go along with him on the television scheme earlier. He was at the door to the thirty-second floor. "Come on, you wanted to talk. Let's hear what you have to say."

"Don't bully me, Mr. Leland. I have every intention of talking with you." The transmission was very clear, and it made Leland cautious. "Ah, silent now? I know you're nearby. Does it surprise you that I know that?"

Leland moved back from the door.

"Please, Mr. Leland, you're not going to admit that you're afraid of us at this time. I know you've been through an ordeal, but surely you don't believe you've proved your point. Hannah was more right about you than she realized. You're more than a trained dog. You live in a world of appearances and illusions designed to give your life the semblance of meaning. What do you think you've accomplished with all this?"

Leland stayed silent. He had his hand on the knob of the door.

"You're determined to make a fool of yourself," Little Tony said. "You
don't
know what you've done, do you? You've been guarding millions of dollars stolen from the destitute people of Chile, protecting the property of the biggest thieves the world has ever known, and trying to keep secret the most disgusting marriage of power and greed. Your daughter? Your daughter knows all about it. You are going to be hard-pressed to prove that you did not know it yourself."

Leland had the door open. The corridor was empty. To his left was Steffie's office; around to his right, the big room in which he had seen the gang herd the hostages. He had to try something.

"You haven't said anything real so far."

"A little more patience."

A strange thing to say, but at least Leland knew that Tony was not within the range of ordinary hearing — which meant, too, that he could be as close as the elevator banks.

Now, from upstairs, a sharp, loud report; the building shook slightly, and from around on the right, he heard people gasp and begin to cry. The gang had not given up; with only three left, they had finally managed to blow the safe. But at the same time, they had confirmed their deployment. Leland grinned and moved around to the right.

The crowd of people looked not nearly as fresh as last night. The men were in their shirt-sleeves, and the women had gotten out of their uncomfortable shoes. They were sitting or lying on the floor, most of them facing the far door. One of the women looked up at him and put her hand to her mouth. He pointed to his badge and then put his finger to his lips.

"Tap your friend on the shoulder," he mouthed, going through the motions. She did, and he beckoned them to stand. The message spread quickly through the room, but not before one woman screamed.

"Get down! Get down!"

Leland pushed his way through the people falling to his left and right. He heard something on the radio. A shadow moved on the wall outside, and Leland fired at it. The Kalashnikov had no more than six rounds left. Tony's shadow withdrew — it had to be Tony, with Stephanie. If he drove Tony back for a moment, the rest of the hostages could get to the stairs the other way.

"Go back!" he yelled. "Go back and go
down
the stairs! Go slowly, there's no one after you!"

Tony poked the muzzle of his machine pistol around the corner and fired a burst, hitting a woman in the stomach. Leland returned the fire, then moved forward. People were running now, screaming.

"Grandpa!"

"Get your brother out of here, Judy!" He couldn't turn around to look at her.

"What about Mommy? He said he was going to kill us all. That's when she stood up."

Tony had threatened everyone because of Leland. "You go ahead. I'll take care of your mother."

"We thought you were one of them at first."

He turned around: now that her face was changing, Judy was beginning to resemble her dead grandmother.

"Go on! Go on!"

Tony stuck the muzzle around again. Leland fired. Tony's burst tore into the ceiling panels. Leland pressed the "Talk" button. "The hostages are free and coming down the stairs. Now you can take the bottom of the building. Do you copy?"

"We copy. How many are left?"

"No more than one downstairs. See you later." Outside, people began cheering. The Kalashnikov had two rounds left. A man was trying to pull the wounded woman out of the line of fire.

"Help me, she's my wife."

"He has my daughter!"

"Look at yourself! You're covered with blood!"

Leland showed his teeth. "Damn little of it is mine."

The man turned away, saying something to himself. Leland looked behind him. Not everyone had got out. There was a man's body in the corner, and near the exit, a second woman was on the floor, holding her leg and writhing. The cheers outside were louder, almost loud enough to obscure the sound of the elevator. Leland spoke into the radio again. "We have wounded on the thirty-second floor."

"How many?"

"Three, maybe more, maybe one dead."

"What's happening in there now? What was that explosion?"

"Tony can tell you as well as I can. Talk to him yourself."

"No, Mr. Leland, it's you to whom I will talk." You could hear the crackle of the elevator motor in his transmission. "What have you done here tonight but perpetrate the most bloody, unspeakable crimes?"

"You killed Rivers first. I saw you shoot him in cold blood."

"History will be the judge of that," Tony said.

Leland was moving as he listened, crossing the building to Steffie's office. "Mr. Leland, how many people have you killed tonight?"

"For a little while longer, Tony, that will stay classified."

"You're not ashamed of yourself, are you?"

"Nah." Steffie's office had been ransacked. It took him a while to recognize his jacket, but not because of the mess surrounding it. His pants were no longer the same color. He went into the bathroom.

"The world should know what a savage you are," Tony shouted. "You broke a boy's neck. You threw a man off the roof."

"Listen, you jive-ass son of a bitch!" Taco Bill roared. "Let go of that man's daughter!"

"Stay out of it, Bill," Leland said.

"The man's daughter, as you call her, is an adult largely responsible for seeing that one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world remains armed and in control of millions of helpless peasants. Are you listening, Mr. Leland? What are you doing, Mr. Leland?"

"Taking a couple of aspirins. I have a headache."

He had already done that. He had decided not to try to wash his face again, for he was liable to get something in his eyes. He was coated with grease, soot, and brown, dried blood from the top of his head down to the blackened, encrusted towels on his feet. He could scrape grease and dried blood out of his hair like cream cheese from a slice of bread. He opened the medicine cabinet again, trying to think ahead. Something was nagging him, something added. He took off the harness.

"Mr. Leland, for whom do you work?"

"I'm self-employed." He was hefting the Browning. The dirtier he was, the better. He had eleven shots. "Look, Tony, you've turned this around on me. Let's do a deal, you and I. A straight trade. You need a hostage. Take me instead of my daughter."

"Of course. You read my mind."

Leland practiced the move for the first time. Terrific — it was going to work. "Now, how do you want to do this?"

He heard gunfire below. That was right: one below, number two was Tony, three was defending the roof. Three left, including a woman. It took Leland a moment to remember how he knew that: the voice on the radio reading the words and numbers. He practiced the move again. Adhesive tape wasn't going to bother him.

"You know where I am," Tony said. "I want you to take the elevator here, unarmed. When you present yourself, your daughter can enter the elevator, free to do as she wishes."

"Sounds swell."

"Don't go for it, Joe."

"Bill, this has been what I've been working for all night."

"Joe, we're entering the bottom of the building," Al Powell said. "We want you to use your head."

"You tell me when you're inside. In the meantime, I've got to play ball with this guy. What choice do I have?"

"Joe," Bill said, "according to the TV, the cops aren't in the building yet. In fact, somebody's really pouring it on."

"Let me tell him," Al Powell said. "They have fortified positions on the third floor that give them fields of fire to the north and south, which is all they need."

Leland was quiet. Was Tony upstairs with Steffie
alone?
Leland didn't think whoever just blew the safe could get downstairs that quickly. Either way was all right. Tony and Leland were wise to each other. Tony wanted him thinking he was on the fortieth floor. What Leland did not like was the idea that Tony was trying to pull on Leland a stunt Leland had tried — unsuccessfully — on the gang. You get in an elevator, you don't know where it's going to stop next. It was too simple. He picked up the radio.

"Al, you've got seventy-five people coming down the stairs. You've got to occupy the bottom of the building now."

A helicopter swung in on the building, which rung with the sound of returning heavy automatic fire. There was still one upstairs. He wondered how long it was going to take the police to get wise to the situation down below, one guy running back and forth between two positions.

"I want it known that we still have the weapons to knock the helicopters out of the sky!" Tony screamed. "The people on the staircases will be permitted to descend to street level. We want no further bloodshed. Mr. Leland, are you ready?"

Leland was already climbing the stairs. "What do you want me to do?" One down, one up, and Tony — he couldn't have been able to fire at the helicopter and maintain a hold on Steffie at the same time.

"Get in the elevator."

"I'm starting from my daughter's office, and my feet are cut."

"I understand."

"It's a bad deal, Joe," Bill said.

"I want him to talk. Let him have his say."

"What we were going to do, Mr. Leland, if you had not interfered and caused all this bloodshed, was demonstrate to the world that your daughter and her partners, Rivers and Ellis, were doing what your own government now expressly forbids, that is, selling arms to Chile. One of the mistakes made by the capitalist press is the perpetuation of the idea that we are stupid people. We are not stupid people."

Leland was on the thirty-fourth floor. He thought he could go one more before he had to call an elevator. He didn't give a shit about Rivers or Ellis or their guns. Smart guys. Assholes. Stephanie hadn't even been sure of her bonus. They'd kept her tied in knots. How smart were they now, on their way to the autopsy room? He thought of what he had done to Rivers's body — more bad luck. If you could not wear a dead man's shoes, you could not mutilate his body, either. He thought of his daughter again and had to wonder what kind of a human being she had become. He wondered if all this would even make a difference to her, a difference in the way she thought of life.

Tony was on the air again, talking to the world.

"We have been aware for a long time of the secret elements of the contract just concluded between Klaxon Oil and the murderous regime in Chile. Under the terms of the contract made public, for one hundred fifty million dollars, almost all of it borrowed from the United States and its puppet international lending agencies, Klaxon Oil is to build a bridge in Chile. One hundred and fifty million for a single, unimportant bridge in a country where millions live in unimaginable squalor. That itself would be bad enough, but there's more. For the next seven years, Klaxon has promised to supply the Chilean fascist, military regime with millions upon millions in arms. Arms with which to hold their illegal power, power that they seized through well-documented American intervention."

Leland was on the thirty-fifth floor, hailing an elevator. Tony was not so in love with the sound of his own voice that he would not recognize the starts and stops of the elevator for what they were — evidence that Leland was coming after him. What Leland had in his favor was the fact that Tony was on the air. If he tried to punish Stephanie for what Leland was doing, Tony would lose whatever audience sympathy he was trying to develop. He knew it. Leland had no doubt that everything Tony was saying was true. Tony's tragedy was that he didn't see that he was as much a factor — a result — of the problem as the woman he was threatening with a gun.

The elevator arrived; Leland banged the "40" button and shuffled toward the stairs. He would be able to hear what happened. More gunfire from below. Good. Anything to make Tony think the situation was changing. Leland was at the stairs when the elevator stopped again and the shooting began almost at once — and stopped. Leland got on the radio.

"Tony, you're feeling the strain. I tried that trick an hour ago, and it didn't work for me. I'm disappointed with you."

Tony sighed. "Mr. Leland, how do you know that your daughter is not already dead?"

Taco Bill boomed. "You touch that woman, I'll kill you myself, you son of a bitch!"

"That's how I know," Leland said. "Let her go if you want to fight me." He kept climbing: the length of time the elevator had been in motion made him think Tony was on the thirty-eighth floor. It was an open floor plan up there, with the outside windows in view on all sides.
You'd better figure out what you're going to do, kiddo.

"Mr. Leland, your problem is that you don't know what battle you're fighting, or even what century you're in. Your chivalric notions have no relevance here. You are not Robin Hood and that fool with his radio is not Little John. Your daughter is one of the principals in this illegal transfer of weapons. You seem to know something of the real strength and status of multinational corporations. There are arms stockpiles here in the United States and in warehouses all over the world, where the most lethal weapons are traded on commodities exchanges, as if they were pork bellies or grain futures. We can document the transfers of funds, the money laundering, the attempts to conceal, obscure, and confuse the record. Even as I speak, on your precious, stupid holiday, ships are in international waters, bound for Chile, supposedly carrying farm equipment and machine tools, but in fact laden with automatic weapons, rockets, and other assorted arms. They set sail yesterday morning because the first payment was delivered to this building promptly at nine o'clock, and the signal was given. Six million dollars — six million of the people's money. It has been in the safe here all this time, Mr. Leland. It is our intention to return it to the people. This six million is evidence of Klaxon's disregard for life and human rights in its pursuit of wealth and power. In our redistribution we are going to demonstrate the power of the grip corporations like Klaxon have on all of you. We are going to show how you all dance to their tune."