The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons (13 page)

Jake glanced at the guard’s name tag: Pulaski, Robert. The man’s lopsided mustache divided his sour face, and he reminded Jake of several firefighters he had tangled with over the years. “How are you?”

Pulaski nodded without smiling. “Fine.”

Prick
, Jake thought.

“That’s your office.” Graham pointed at the dark, glass-faced office behind them, and it dawned on Jake that he’d be on permanent desk duty. “We’re standing in the security bay. I’ll show you to your unit now. Let me take that.” He eased the suitcase from Jake’s hand and led him to the glass door to the right of the entrance. Pulaski pressed a button at the console and the door unlocked with a metal click. Jake followed Graham into a curved corridor with cones of subdued light descending from circular ceiling fixtures. The carpet muffled their footsteps as they passed closed doors on their left and a mirrored surface on their right.

“This is the residential corridor,” Graham said. “These first four units are guest rooms. Sometimes Mr. Tower’s physicians stay here and sometimes I do if I’m pulling a double shift.” They stopped at the fifth door. “This one is yours.” He gestured at the sixth and final door. “Ms. Thorn lives there.” The corridor ended twenty feet beyond Kira’s door. “There are no cameras here, so you can relax.” Graham aimed his ID badge at the door scanner. A red light turned green and the door unlocked. Graham opened it and stepped back, allowing Jake to enter first. “Welcome to your new home.”

Jake entered the bright unit. An office area with a computer and eight security monitors opened into a furnished living room with a large picture window overlooking the city. A black leather sofa faced an LCD TV screen and tan carpeting covered the floor.

“As soon as we get you a security card, I’ll have the scanner reprogrammed with your code,” Graham said.

Jake moved to the living room window. Sixty stories below, a police car raced up Broadway with its strobes flashing, its siren inaudible at this height. Wondering what crisis the uniforms in the Radio Motor Patrol faced, he entered the kitchen and opened numerous cupboard doors.

“You’re fully stocked,” Graham said, “and your grocery expenses are covered. We don’t allow deliveries on this floor, but the downstairs lobby is okay.”

Jake set his belongings down in the bedroom, which reminded him of his room at the Lexington. He inspected the spacious bathroom, complete with a Jacuzzi. Returning to the living room, he hoped his new digs would impress Sheryl.

“I’ll give you half an hour to unpack,” Graham said, “and then we’ll get on with the tour. I just need to give your contract to Ms. Thorn.”

“Oh, right.” Jake removed a folded copy of the contract from his inside coat pocket and handed it to Graham. He had hidden his own copy in the false bottom of his gun case. “Signed in blood,” he said with a smile.

After unpacking his clothes, Jake rejoined Graham in the security bay. Pulaski stared at the monitors, ignoring him. Graham removed a compact walkie-talkie from a charger beneath the console and handed it to Jake, who admired the high-end device.

“Never go anywhere in the building without one of these,” Graham said. “The charge is good for twenty-four hours, so just exchange it for another one first thing in the morning.”

Jake switched on the walkie-talkie and clipped it to his belt.

Graham stepped before the front door and rapped on the glass. “Bulletproof,” he said, palming the release button. He led Jake to the elevators and thumbed a call button.

“We maintain a rotating force of one hundred armed men, but only a quarter of them are cleared to work the top floor. That’s not counting our unarmed force. Only you and Ms. Thorn and I know that Old Nick is in the building.”

They boarded an elevator, and Graham pressed a button in the control panel marked B. The doors closed and the elevator plummeted. Then it slowed to a stop and its doors opened. Jake followed Graham through a windowless basement level with gray, cinder-block walls, and they stopped at a steel door with a wire-mesh window. Jake glanced at the camera peering down at them from above the door like an electronic gargoyle. Graham aimed his badge at a scanner, and they entered a wide room with a drop ceiling and paneled walls.

“This is Tower Security,” Graham said. “We call it the ‘Dungeon.’“

Behind a counter to their left stood a tall man with a crew cut, his badge identifying him as Thomas, Paul. He looked at Jake with alert eyes.

Graham said, “Paul, I’d like you to meet Jake Helman, the new DS.”

Paul shook Jake’s hand. “Sir.”

“Jake. Mr. Helman, if you must.”

“We thrive on formality here,” Graham said. “This way, Mr. Helman, sir.” Graham led Jake to another door. “We’re parallel to the parking garage, but we’re separated by ten feet of solid concrete. If the chromophobes hit us with a car bomb, we’re safe.”

In the next room, a half-dozen uniformed men and women with perfect posture sat behind a long console. Wearing headsets, they faced scores of monitors recessed in the wall, each feeding a digital recorder. Some of the screens displayed as many as nine images at once; others cut from location to location. Jake felt as if he had wandered into a massive electronics store or an air traffic control center. A woman observing the central lobby moved her trackball, and a camera zoomed in on a man in a suit as he passed the security counter without signing in.

“Unauthorized person in Sector Alpha,” she said into her microphone.

On another monitor, two guards stopped the man, who raised his hands as if to say,
What did I do?

“There are almost two hundred cameras in the building, plus infrareds and motion detectors,” Graham said before guiding Jake toward yet another door.

They entered a pale yellow cinder-block corridor and Jake peered through an open doorway on his left: shower steam obscured his view of scores of blue metal lockers. Graham unlocked a black metal door and they entered a dark chamber that reminded Jake of a bowling alley. Six booths faced fifty-foot lanes with paper targets at their ends.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jake said, his voice deadened by soundproofing.

“Every guard on this force is required to log in an hour of target practice each week. Anyone who misses a session is barred from working the following week.”

“Who enforces that rule?”

“You do.”

Jake entered a booth and gazed ahead. The snarling faces on the illustrated targets stared back at him.

Blood erupted from Dread’s torso as he flew back against the liquor store counter
…

Jake swallowed.

Baldy’s chest opened up in three spots and he fired his shotgun at the ceiling…

He needed a cigarette.

“Mr. Tower prefers old-school paper targets to digital projections,” Graham said. “He also prefers live ammo to laser simulators. Says you need to feel the real thing kicking in your hand.”

Jake stepped out of the booth. “You’ve spoken to him?”

Graham shook his head. “Never met the man. All of my info comes from Ms. Thorn.”

On the walk back to the elevator, Jake said, “Who held this job before me?”

“Dick Drewniak, a retired fed. Drew was okay, but I’m working double shifts because he resigned without giving proper notice.” They boarded the elevator. “The building’s on Yellow Alert right now because of the demonstrations outside. We work on the standard color-coded system: Yellow, Orange, and Red.”

“What happens on Red?”

“All hell breaks loose.”

“That’s reassuring. At what stage do we call nine-one-one?”

A puzzled expression passed over Graham’s face. “The guidelines for emergency responses are on your desk, but we try to minimize police involvement here. You might say that’s our goal.”

Sunlight streamed through the central lobby’s thirty-foot-high glass facade, which overlooked the police officers and demonstrators outside. A rotating sculpture of a DNA molecule reached the ceiling. People in business attire entered through revolving doors and stopped at a long counter manned by guards acting as concierges. Twenty elevators and an escalator transported professionals to their destinations. Jake took it all in with wondrous eyes.

He had arrived.

The elevator doors parted on the fiftieth floor, the words
TOWER INTERNATIONAL
emblazoned on the opposite wall in letters six feet high. Graham unlocked double doors with his badge and they entered a maze of intersecting corridors honeycombing the floor. High ceilings, stark white walls, and metallic carpet created an industrial effect while overhead florescent lights hummed and massive windows offered awesome views of lower midtown Manhattan. They passed recessed glass offices, conference rooms, kitchen areas, and a sea of cubicles occupied by intense-looking junior executives. Some ate at their desks while juggling multiple phone calls. Jake actually felt sorry for the poor bastards.

“All of the big shots and their peons work here,” Graham whispered. “As far as they’re concerned, this is the top of the food chain. Mr. Tower tells Ms. Thorn what he wants done and she relays his orders to Daryl Klemmer, the CEO.”

Jake’s ankles throbbed and he knew that he would be unable to find his way back to the elevators on his own. Impressed by the size of the circular floor, he realized that he had only seen a fraction of the equivalent space on Sixty. They approached a giant glass cube in the center of the floor.

“This is the Corporate Security Office,” Graham said. They entered the cube, and Jake took in the desk, chairs, computer, and security monitors. “We run background checks from here and meet with department heads who aren’t allowed upstairs. That means everyone but Klemmer.”

Jake gazed through the glass at the harried workers. The pervasive sense of fear felt palpable.

Graham took a digital camera out of a metal cabinet and raised it to one eye. “Smile for posterity …”

Jake forced a smile and the camera flashed.

“I’ll download this upstairs.” Graham removed a memory card from the camera. On their way back to the elevator he said, “Life Support is on Fifty-Nine. That’s Mr. Tower’s personal ER. His food is prepared on the same floor. There’s a separate kitchen for each meal of the day, and they’re sterilized after every use.”