Tower of Terror (3 page)

Dropping into a canyon of stone and glass highrise towers, the shuttle helicopter's rotor blast created a storm of litter and filth around the waiting limousine. Lyons didn't wait for the skids to touch asphalt, but jumped the last five feet, ran to the limo. The slightly heavier, more easy-going Blancanales followed a few steps behind. And Schwarz, distracted as always by his mental machinations, took up the rear, fast.

A young man in a chauffeur's uniform hurried from the front seat to open the door for them. Lyons jerked it open and got in.

"Where's the information?" Lyons demanded.

"On the seat, sir. That folder..." the young man pointed "...is WorldFiCor executives, worldwide holdings. The other folder is all Puerto Rican nationals and other persons known to sympathize with or participate in FALN operations in the United States..."

"Go to the helicopter," Lyons interrupted. "Help that man with the cases."

"Yes, sir!" The agent ran to the helicopter, helped Brognola unload two aluminum cases, then hurried back to the limo, a case in each hand. Hal Brognola, burly in his business suit, followed him to the car carrying his own briefcase.

"Get this car moving!" Lyons shouted through the rear of the helicopter lifting away.

"That's Mr. Smith," Brognola told them, nodding at the agent behind the wheel. The limo accelerated even as Brognola pulled the door shut. "You will not use your names around him or any of the other agents helping you."

"Pleasure working with you, Mr. Smith," Blancanales smiled.

Smith answered without turning his eyes from the avenue. "I'm not working with anyone. I'm on vacation in Hawaii."

"You will use the following names," Brognola continued, pointing first to Lyons, then to Blancanales, then to Gadgets. "Hardman One, Hardman Two, Hardman Three. Mr. Smith will be Hardman One's personal liaison to the back-up services."

"Great," said Lyons in the clipped manner of the tough big-city cop he would always be. "But we need another car, right now." He turned to Blancanales. "You got what you need? You ready to go to work?"

Blancanales looked up from the folder of photos and typed biographies. "Sure, soon as we get there," he said suavely, unruffled by the pace of his hardman life.

"We're here," Smith announced. He put a handset to his mouth. "Car number two please."

A yellow cab swung away from a line of unmarked cars, screeched to a stop only steps from the limo door. Agents in an assortment of uniforms, suits, and bums' rags opened the opposite door, took Gadgets' aluminum cases.

Gadgets flashed his usual nervous grin as he left. "Airborne!"

Blancanales gave Lyons a quick salute, then Lyons was alone in the back seat.

"How's that for service, sir?" Smith asked.

"A little slow. Take me to the President of WorldFiCor, now."

"Moving, sir." Smith power-drifted through a sweeping U-turn, using all four lanes of the avenue. "Would you like me to drive past the Tower? Take a look at it?"

"I don't have time to play tourist," said the blond mission leader.

Thirty-five floors above street level, a casually dressed Schwarz, carrying his shabby satchel of gadgetry, looked out at the black glass and steel of the neighboring World Financial Corporation Tower. He and Brognola stood in the commandeered office of an investment broker directly across from the Tower. Agents had already shoved aside the desks and cabinets. Boxes of electronic gear, plastic-wrapped consoles and coiled cables crowded the office.

"You have a view of the front entrances," Brognola told him, pointing down to the base of the Tower. "The entire face of the building, and something of the top."

"I need a map, a big map. And..."

"Right here." Brognola unrolled a hand-drawn chart of the area.

"And who is my liaison man?"

"
Mr. Jones
!" Brognola shouted. Instantly a young agent, in a janitor's gray coveralls, ran into the office.

"Yes, sir!"

"What's going on with the roof-top antennas?" Gadgets asked. "When will we be operational?"

"We're bringing the cables down right now."

"And the micro-waver interlock with the antennas on the other buildings?"

"Functioning."

Gadgets grinned. "Okay! Get those cables down here!" He ripped the plastic sheeting from a console, uncoiled the power cord, and sought out the wall plug.

Bumper to bumper between a produce truck and another yellow cab, Blancanales and his agent waited for the light to change. On both sides of the street, neighborhood people — Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Central American Latins, Mexicans — filled the midday sidewalks. He saw Spanish signs, Latin grocery stores, full-figured women shopping with their plastic mesh bags. It could have been any street in Latin America. But they were less than five minutes by subway from the WorldFiCor Tower.

"So, what's your name?" Blancanales asked his driver.

"Mr. Taxi, sir."

Blancanales laughed. "Appropriate! You speak Spanish?"

"Si."

"Do you have a weapon?"

Mr. Taxi slapped his jacket. "Sidearm, sir. Uzis in the trunk. Five hundred rounds, each weapon. Tear gas, too. We're loaded for bear."

"How about some telephone change? I need to make some calls."

"No need, sir." The driver took a briefcase from the front seat, passed it back to Blancanales.

It was a mobile phone. "Convenient, but is it secure?"

"Scrambler interlock. NSA equipment. If it ain't safe, nothing is." Blancanales opened the folder and called his first contact.

A butler ushered Lyons into the walnut-paneled library of E. M. Davis, President of the World Financial Corporation. Davis, an elegant man with thinning, sandy hair, left his armchair and crossed the library.

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Stone," he said to Lyons, shaking his hand.

"It is unfortunate that I have to speak with you, sir."

"That is the world we live in." Davis sighed, then turned to the other two executives in the room. "Mr. Robbins, Vice-President, Western Hemisphere. Mr. Utek, Data Systems. I believe the three of us can answer all your questions concerning this problem. Please take a seat, Mr. Stone. What can we tell you?"

Lyons glanced around the room. There were high French windows overlooking the manicured rose garden and rolling lawns of the Long Island estate. One wall held floor-to-ceiling shelves of leather-bound law volumes. Mementos, photos and degrees covered another wall. One photo in a gold frame showed Davis standing with his arms over the shoulders of a past President and Secretary of State of the United States. All three men wore party hats and grinned into the camera. The ex-President held up two fingers behind Davis' head, like rabbit ears.

Tucked away in the lower left-hand corner of a mass of photographs was one wood-framed black-and-white that seemed conspicuous to the sharp-eyed Lyons by virtue of its very privateness. It showed a rather younger, much less bald Davis with a pretty young Latin woman and a young teenage boy; the boy had the dark skin of the woman but, remarkably, Davis' light, sandy hair. It was the only photo in the collection of this particular group. Lyons stored the image of it in his mind, along with the inevitable impression created by the picture of Davis with a former U.S. President.

"First," Lyons began, "why do you think these terrorists chose your company as a target?"

Robbins glanced at Davis; Davis nodded. Then Robbins answered: "We do have investments in Puerto Rico. Until today we believed we followed a socially progressive policy toward the Commonwealth and the people of Puerto Rico. We have never questioned the politics of our employees or associates. We have never attempted to influence the regional politics. We instructed any corporate officer, if questioned, publicly or privately, to state simply that the World Financial Corporation supports the right of the people of Puerto Rico to determine their future by the ballot box. We do business with — and within — most of the nations of the earth. We are sure we can continue in operation in Puerto Rico, whether it is the fifty-first state or an independent nation. We thought this was a fair position."

"Terrorists don't care what's fair," Lyons told him. "Perhaps that's exactly why they hit your company. Have Puerto Rican groups ever made any demands or threats against your company?"

Davis answered. "Nothing, Mr. Stone, that our internal security services did not neutralize."

"What do you mean?"

"We are in the business of international finance and management. We operate on a vast, worldwide scale. In some ventures, we are partners with nations. If WorldFiCor were to be granted nationhood, our company's income on operations and investments would exceed the tax revenues of most nations.

Early in our company's history, I realized what an attractive target we would be. Though we do not have tanks and jet fighters, we have a security service superior to those of most nations. However, that service operates in our foreign branches. We had hoped that, in New York, the United States Armed Forces would protect us from military assault. I can assure you, whatever the outcome of this crime, it shall not occur again."

"Terrorists can strike anywhere," commented Lyons.

"Our foreign offices have never had this problem. We have not allowed it."

"I understand. Now the guards, your company guards who were on duty at the time — they have told us the terrorists unloaded several large shipping crates. We have to assume these crates contain in excess of a thousand pounds of explosives. Though I don't think they can destroy the entire Tower, they could..."

"A thousand pounds of dynamite!" Utek, Vice-President of Data Systems, turned white. "No one told me!"

"C-4," Lyons corrected him. "It's a military explosive, more explosive in fact than dynamite. That much C-4 could do serious, possibly terminal damage to the Tower. It is certainly enough to kill every person in there. We'll need complete — and secret — cooperation from some of your company's personnel."

"I'll tell you what the threat is!" Utek stood, pointed at Lyons. "I'll tell you. It is complete and utter chaos! Those maniacs could ruin us! You cannot comprehend what this means..."

"I can comprehend what will happen to those people if that C-4 goes off. We wouldn't find enough of them to fill a sandwich bag."

"What do they want?" Utek demanded, glaring at Lyons. "How much? We'll pay. A million? Ten million? It's petty cash compared to what it'll cost the company to reconstruct the data for this fiscal year alone."

"They don't want money! That's the problem. We're dealing with
terrorists
. They won't negotiate, they won't talk, they..."

Davis quieted both Utek and Lyons with an upheld hand. "Gentlemen! Of course we're concerned about our personnel. But, Mr. Stone, I don't believe you truly do understand the nature of this threat to our operations.

Our Tower is not merely an office building. It is a data center. It operates twenty-four hours a day. It generates its own power. It is meant to be safe from earthquake, or natural disaster. It has to be. That Tower, and our system of satellite communication, serves two thousand worldwide offices. Any transaction anywhere on this globe is relayed, recorded and analyzed instantaneously.

If anything happens to the Tower, we are, quite simply, out of business. And that would create very serious repercussions in the economy, in employment, in the morale of the multinational business community. It would take years to recover. This is a very serious threat to the economic security of the United States and its allies."

Lyons looked at his watch. Thirty-nine hours, twenty-one minutes to go. "I need access to your personnel records, if that's possible. I need the blueprints of the Tower. If the architect and general contractor are available, that's great. The heads of building maintenance and security, too. And it all has to be secret. Total cooperation and no questions."

"Of course, Mr. Stone." Davis walked Lyons to the door, opened it for him. They entered the mansion's central hallway. Persian carpets covered the polished marble floors. The butler walked a few steps ahead of Davis and Lyons.

"Within this hour," Davis said, "we'll have the blueprints for you. The personnel records will be more difficult. We'll need to have that information transmitted from Kansas. Our long-term data storage banks are in the salt caverns there. And that information will be no more recent than twelve months ago, the end of the last fiscal year. The fiscal year runs July first to June thirtieth rather than January first to December..."

"I know."

"Of course. I simply don't want any confusion. We will also prepare a map of the floors and areas devoted solely to data services, and instructions for those officers forced to enter those areas, so that they will not inadvertently endanger the survival of the data systems. We will also have an emergency crew standing by in case of damage to the systems. You must understand what a disaster this could be to our corporation, and to the capitalist enterprise in this country. Is there anything I've forgotten?"

The butler opened the ten-foot-high hand-carved entry doors. Lyons squinted against the afternoon light.

"Yeah. How about the names of the people that the terrorists have trapped in the building? Can't forget about
their
survival, can we?"

This is how it happened, hours earlier.

On the fifty-third floor of the Tower, Charlie Green, Director of Eastern European Accounts for the World Financial Corporation, watched a video display screen.
Saturday morning
— 
what a time to be watching blocks of numbers and commodity codes rolling upwards on a screen and listening to a Russian clerk calling long-distance from Hungary
! The Russian spoke English with a heavy French accent.

"Mr. Green, this is a State problem. It does not concern your company. If you will be patient..."

"One hundred and fifty thousand United States dollars this joker carries off in his briefcase, and it doesn't concern us? Please explain that, comrade!"

"I assure you, the security forces of the People's Socialist Republic of Hungary will not allow the money to leave the country."

"Where is the money? We're not talking about bankruptcy, but I want to know about the cash. He had the money in the briefcase, and police have him. Do they have the money?"

"The matter will be investigated completely, I assure you. The dollars United States will be returned to your company. It is very important for the State to clear this problem."

"If you want to do business with WorldFiCor again, your government
will
clear this problem. Do we understand each other?"

"You have my complete understanding."

Green hung up, left his desk. He wore gray sweatpants, a bright red sweatshirt. His running shoes felt clammy on his sockless feet. His suit hung in his office closet. More than twelve hours before, the Vice-President of European Operations had told him they had a problem with an account in Hungary. Would Mr. Green check on it before he left for the weekend?

"Sure, I'll check on it. I'll chase the jerk to Siberia, is what I'll do," he said to the air.

"Did you call me, Mr. Green?" Mrs. Forde, his senior office assistant, came into the office. Mrs. Forde, a forty-year-old mother of two, trim and athletic in her tailored gray skirt and jacket, held stacks of printouts. In the outer office, automatic typewriters printed information from Hungary as it simultaneously appeared on the video display.

"The commies are driving me blinkers," Green said.

"How can I help?"

"You can't," he told her, and tried to put his hands in his pockets. There were no pockets on his sweatpants. "Yes you can. Is there a delicatessen where I can get breakfast? How about you? Have you had a chance to eat this morning?"

"No, thank you, sir, I'm skipping."

"You? Why, are you dieting?" Green glanced at her. She had a figure like a twenty-year-old. Maybe better.

"Oh, no, sir," she smiled. "Last night, it was dinner, a concert, disco dancing, then a party with so much to eat. Would you like for me to send one of the temporary girls?"

"No. I'll be back in half an hour."

As he walked through the outer office, the temporary girls glanced at his mismatched sweatclothes, flashed him polite smiles. But they didn't pause in their work, stacking and collating sheets of information on the embezzlement and bankruptcy in Hungary. He stopped in midstride.

"Anyone want coffee? Food, anything. I'll treat."

One of the temporary girls, a dark-haired twenty-year-old in thick glasses, struggled with two heavy boxes of printouts. "I'll go for you, sir. Just give me a list. I'm going down to Xerox anyway."

Green took one box from her. It weighed at least thirty pounds, solid paper. "Negative. I'll fetch my own breakfast. I'll carry this down for you."

"Oh, thank you!"

"Oh, damn!" Mrs. Forde exclaimed. "What's wrong with the phones? Jill! When you're at Xeroxing, call for service on our phone lines."

"Yes, ma'am."

Green opened the office door for her. They went to the elevators, a straight bank of six on a single wall, one of the elevators for executives only. Green passed his magnetically encoded id through the Executive elevator's sensor.

"Stand by for a thrill," Green joked. "The exec car drops fast."

"Thank you for helping me, sir. It's very considerate of you."

"Your name's Jill?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know what's going on?" Green asked as they got in the elevator. "Xerox is fifth floor, right? All this weekend work is happening because some Hungarian Communist Party official — who happened to be a banker, you figure the ideology on that one — he decided to skip the People's Paradise. Problem is, with all the high-tech communications this corporation's got, it's all numbers. Numbers in, numbers out. Doesn't mean anything if someone's putting in make-believe numbers. Personally I think it's more than just this Hungarian..." he added cryptically.

The elevator dropped. For a second, they almost floated from their feet. Jill laughed.

"An executive toy," Green joked. The elevator slowed as it came to the fifth floor. "Are you a temporary from outside the company, or a temporary from the secretarial?.."

Green turned as the elevator doors slid open, saw the woman in the telephone company uniform. "The telephone company is already here."

He saw it as if in slow motion: the Latin woman in the uniform turning, the .45 rising as she took a combat crouch.

Green hit her with the box of papers. He shoved the box straight out from his chest, thirty panic-thrown pounds of paper striking the .45 even as the slug left the muzzle of the pistol.

Paper exploded. Sheets and shreds of printout flying, Jill screaming in the elevator, Green jumped on the woman in the phone company uniform. He jerked her head back with one hand, then he had her pistol in the other.

He pointed the .45 at the Latin woman's head. "What the hell! Who are you?"

His peripheral vision saved him. Even as he stood, he saw a second Latin in a phone company uniform. Green snapped a shot at the man, threw himself backwards into the elevator, screaming at Jill: "Hit the button! Hit it! Up! Get us out of here!"

Slugs punched into the elevator doors as they slid closed. The single bullet Green had fired missed the man, continued twenty feet down the corridor and struck a nylon bag. The slug smashed several electronic components in the bag.

Julio knew the next hour would be the most critical. They had hoped to avoid discovery until after the placement of the C-4 and thermite charges. But hopes do not win liberty. Nor do hopes guarantee the success of a military operation. Their leaders had anticipated all possible problems and police reactions. They had trained Julio and his squad to succeed despite accident and opposition.

When the garage guard alerted the police, Julio and Luisa kept the first police cars at bay with their automatic rifle fire. Julio then hurriedly placed claymore mines in the garage and basement entrances, and retreated to the lobby. Julio and Luisa took positions in the chrome and black-marble lobby. All pretense was past. Julio still wore his mover's coveralls, Luisa her phone company uniform. But they now wore .45 automatics, carried M-16 rifles.

Julio watched the elevators. There were six pairs of elevator doors on one of the Tower's twin cores. There were six pairs plus the wide doors of a freight elevator on the wall of the other core. Both sets faced each other across the marbled corridor between.

Luisa moved throughout the lobby, scanning the plaza surrounding the Tower for police units. "They made it so easy for us," she said to him as she passed. She motioned to the high walls of glass. Only the two elevator cores isolated in the center of the lobby blocked the view of the plaza.

Julio had no time to reply. He was watching the elevators' indicator lights. In one elevator, his comrades rode up, distributing loads of C-4, thermite, and detonators. But other lights also moved through the series of plastic numbers. One car left the thirty-first floor, stopped at the twenty-eighth floor. Then it moved again. A second car left the eighty-fifth floor, came down without a stop.

Julio checked his tape roller. His leaders had anticipated all situations and had included a tape roller in Julio's equipment; it was used by freight packagers to seal boxes quickly.

Silently arriving in the lobby, the first elevator's doors opened. Julio pointed his M-16 at the chest of a secretary. She was alone in the car.

"Don't move!" he said. "Come out of the elevator! Here!" She obeyed, too surprised even to speak. He slammed the tape roller down on her shoulder and walked around her, holding the roller in one hand, his M-16 in the other. Before she realized what he was doing, her arms were taped tightly to her body with nylon reinforced freighting tape. Then her hands to her body. He turned her, put a loose loop of tape around her legs. She could hobble, but not run, not even walk fast.

"Oh, please! No! I don't have anything. I don't..." Julio slapped a patch of tape over the secretary's mouth.

He saw other lights appear on the elevator indicator, one starting at the fifty-third floor, dropping fast. He kicked the secretary's feet out from under her, let her fall to the marble floor.

"You try to move, you die!"

He crossed to the door of one of the elevators that was coming down, but it stopped at the fifth floor. Then, suddenly, the doors of another car opened. Loud voices broke the lobby's silence.

Two executives, immaculate in their conservative gray suits, left the elevator arguing. Julio ran to them, shoved them.

"Watch where you're going, spic punk!" one of them swore. Then the executive saw the M-16, staggered backwards, dropping his briefcase.

Julio jammed the long gun barrel into the man's chest, jarring him backwards into the black marble wall. The man sank to the floor, his hands out in front as if to shield himself from the automatic rifle.

The other executive sprinted away, his overweight body lurching with every stride.

"
Harvey! Don't run
!" the executive on the floor screamed.

Intestines and excrement sprayed from the running man's body as Julio fired a six-round burst through his gut. A second burst from Luisa's rifle threw the carcass sideways across the polished floor. Bullets exiting from the victim ricocheted off the tall, tinted, shatterproof windows on two sides of the lobby.

"Noooooo!" The surviving executive half-screamed, half-sobbed. Julio went to him, kicked him hard in the solar plexus. He fell sideways, his body heaving as he tried to vomit and breathe at the same time. Julio wrapped him up with tape, shoving him from side to side.

Julio's hand-radio buzzed. The voice of their squad lieutenant whispered through the earphone. "This is Zuniga, on the fifth floor. One of them has escaped. He took Ana's pistol. You must kill him..."

But the light blinked from the number five, flashed into the higher numbers, into the upper ninety-five floors of the Tower.

Ana, on the fifth floor, shoved an extra thirty-round magazine into her phone company uniform. She jerked back the cocking lever on her M-16, and punched an elevator's "up" button. She waited.

"Back to your duty!" Zuniga ordered.

"I'll kill him! I'm going up to find the..."

"No! You had your chance to kill him, and he took your weapon. Now return to your duties. Nothing else is important."

Her face remained hard, livid with anger. Zuniga coaxed her. "We'll hit the alarms soon. That'll bring them all out."

"And if he hides up there?"

"Then he's blown to bits."

Ana smiled, flipped back the safety on her M-16. She returned to her task of distributing one-kilogram blocks of C-4 around the two columns of elevators.

The detonators were Zuniga's responsibility. He returned to the unit he had been assembling. It was then that he saw the torn nylon bag.

He ripped open the velcro flap. The radio-trigger fell to pieces in his hands.

The loss of this one single component threatened their entire mission. Zuniga forced himself to remain calm. It would be impossible for their leader to smuggle another detonator past the police lines which surely surrounded the Tower already. He thought of executing Ana, or forcing her to remain behind and trigger the blast. But no, she had not been careless. The man had surprised her while she worked.

He considered alternatives to radio detonation. He had been well-trained. He knew of a hundred ways to trigger the C-4. But it must be a technique or device which would both insure the success of the mission
and
his own survival.

Zuniga's laughter rang in the silent corridor. He threw down the shattered component. He intended to execute all the hostages anyway. He would use their
fear
as the detonator.

"We have terrorists downstairs!" Quickly Green related to his overtime office staff what had happened on the fifth floor. "I saw two. There could be any number of them in the Tower — five, ten, twenty crazies. And they have automatic rifles."

"There's no money in the building!" Sandy interrupted. She was a tall, slender blonde, one of the temporary workers who rotated through the various offices of the Tower. There was panic in her voice.

"There's nothing here they could want...what could they possibly want?"

"We'll hear all about it on television tonight," Green told her. "WorldFiCor is an international corporation. What they want could have nothing to do with us. All that we have to do right now is live through it."

"But they know we're here," Jill said. "They know what floor we're on! From the elevator numbers!"

"I hit all the numbers when we got out," Green told her. "The elevator stopped on every floor above us."

"If we hide," Sandy interrupted again, "the police will be here soon. They've got to be!"

"Sandy, let me finish. We don't have to be brave, but we have to keep cool. We have to think out what we'll do. We can stay up here, or we can try to get out. If we stay up here," Green detailed his thinking, "we might be here for days. They might have time to search all the offices. But if we try to get out, we're betting our lives that the crazies won't be waiting for us. We'd have to shoot our way past them, and I've only got six rounds in this pistol."