Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'He's probably got the phone turned off. When he's got his head into a problem he often does that. I guess he'll call when he's got something for us.'

'Maybe you ought to go and help him,' Mitch suggested.

Beech drew a sharp intake of breath and shook his head. 'It may be my computer but it's Aidan Kenny's building management system,' he said.

'If he needs my help I reckon he'll ask for it.'

'Where's Richardson?' Mitch shook his head wearily. 'He was supposed to go and find Kay '

Mitch clicked the mouse to look inside the swimming pool The picture on the CCTV continued to show a swimming pool with no sign of Kay and the same unidentified object near the foot of the screen.

Marty Birnbaum came alongside Mitch and leaned towards the screen. 'If I were you,' he said quietly, 'I wouldn't look too hard for either one of those two. If Ray did find Kay then he might prefer to be left alone for a while.'

'You mean…'

Birnbaum raised his almost invisibly fair eyebrows and ran a hand through a head of yellow curls so small and neat that there were many at the office, Mitch included, who had wondered if it might be permed. And the tan? That looked fake too. As fake as the smile, anyway.

'Even with a plane to catch?'

'We're none of us going anywhere at the moment. Besides, Ray

Richardson being the kind of guy he is, I can't imagine he would take very long about it, can you?'

'No, I guess not, Marty. Thanks.'

'Don't mention it. And I mean don't mention it, Mitch. You know what he's like.'

'Oh, I know what he's like all right,' he said grimly. Mitch stood up, took off his jacket, undid his tie and, rolling up his shirtsleeves, went over to the window. The building was warming up.

Outside the Gridiron the sky was turning a delicate shade of purple. Most of the lights in the other office buildings nearby had already gone out as people left early for the weekend. Though he could not see the ground Mitch knew that there would be little traffic moving in the downtown area now. About this time the bums and the winos started to take over. But Mitch would happily have organized a midnight walking tour of Pershing Square just to have been out of the building. He didn't mind the heat so much as the smell, for the stink of excrement was now unmistakable. First rotting meat. Then fish. And now the smell of shit. It was almost as if the bad smell was having a psychosomatic effect on him, although he knew that was not the only reason he was so worried. What had really started to bother him was the thought that somehow Grabel had sabotaged the Gridiron's building management systems as a way of getting back at Richardson. When better to do it than two or three days before the inspection? Grabel knew his way around computers, too. He was no Aidan Kenny, but he knew what he was doing.

Mitch turned to face the room. Everyone was just sitting around the long, polished ebony table, or lounging on the big leather sofa underneath the floor-to-ceiling window, waiting for something to happen. Looking at their watches. Yawning. Anxious to get out and go home and take a bath. Mitch decided to say nothing. There seemed to be no point in alarming them without good cause.

'Seven o'clock,' said Tony Levine. 'What the hell's keeping Aidan?' He stood up and went over to the phone.

'He's not answering,' Mitch said dully.

'I'm not calling him,' explained Levine. 'I'm calling my wife. We were supposed to be going out to Spago's tonight.'

Curtis and Coleman appeared at the door of the boardroom. The older man looked questioningly at Mitch, who shrugged back at him and shook his head.

'Couldn't we at least open a window?' said Curtis. 'This place smells worse than a dog kennel.' He began to take out his police radio.

'These windows were not designed to be opened. And they're not just bullet-proof.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means,' said Beech, 'that you won't be able to use that radio in here. The glass is an integral part of the Faraday Cage that surrounds the whole building.'

'The what?'

'The Faraday Cage. Named after Michael Faraday, who discovered the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction. Both the glass and the steel framework are designed to act as an earthed screen, to shield us from external electrical fields. Otherwise the signals emitted by the VDUs could be captured with the aid of some simple electronic surveillance equipment. And used to reconstruct the information appearing on those computer screens. A corporation like this one has to be extremely careful of electronic eavesdroppers. Any one of our competitors would pay a lot of money to get their hands on our data.'

Curtis pressed the send/receive button on his radio a couple of times as if seeking to verify what Bob Beech had told him. Hearing nothing but white noise he put the unit down on the table and nodded.

'Well, you learn something every day, I guess. Can I use your phone?'

Tony Levine cleared his throat. 'I'm afraid you won't be able to do that either,' he said perplexedly. 'The phone isn't working. At least, the outside lines aren't. I just tried to call home. It's out.'

'Out? What do you mean, out?'

'Out. As in not working.'

Curtis crossed the room angrily, snatched up the phone and stabbed out the number of New Parker Center as if he was killing ants. Then he tried 911. After a minute or so he shook his head and sighed.

'I'll check the phone in the kitchen,' volunteered Nathan Coleman. But he was soon back again, his face wearing an expression that indicated no improvement on the situation.

'How could this happen, Willis?' said Mitch.

Willis Ellery leaned back in his chair. 'All I can think is that there's been some kind of spurious tripping of the magnetic circuit-breaker that controls the telecommunications power distribution unit. That might have been caused by powering up equipment. Or it could be that Aid had to shut something down and then start it up again.'

He stood up to consider the matter further and then added, 'You know, it could be there's a general problem with all the fibre-distributed data interface. There's a local equipment room on this floor with a horizontal local area network that's connected to the computer room via a high-speed backbone LAN. I can go and check that out.'

Curtis watched him leave the room and grinned. 'High-speed backbone,' he said. 'I love that. There are times when I could use a little of that myself. You know, with all these technical experts around, Nat, it beats me that we're stuck inside an office building at seven o'clock at night.'

'Me too, Frank.'

'But doesn't it give you a good feeling? To know that we're in such capable hands? I mean, thank God we've got these guys with us, y'know?

I'd hate to think what might have happened if we'd been here on our own.'

Mitch smiled and tried to shrug off the detective's sarcasm. But there was something he had said that he couldn't shift from his mind. The time. Seven o'clock. Why did that of all things seem to nag at him?

And then he remembered.

He returned to the work-station and clicked the mouse to get the CCTV camera view of the computer room and Kenny still typing away, trying to solve the glitch. Everything looked normal. Everything except the hands of the clock on the wall. They read six-fifteen and had done so for the last forty-five minutes. And now that he looked more closely at the television picture, he began to see small repetitions in Kenny's behaviour: the same little jerk of the head, the same frown, the same finger movements across the keyboards. Mitch felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He had been viewing nothing more than a tape recording of what had happened in the computer room. Someone had wanted them to think that Aidan Kenny was working at trying to debug the building management systems. But why? For the moment, Mitch kept the discovery to himself, hoping to avoid alarming everyone. He turned around in his chair and looked at David Arnon.

'Dave? Have you got that walkie-talkie?'

'Sure, Mitch.' Arnon handed over the set he always carried on site to speak to the construction people.

'They've got one of those in the security office, right?'

Arnon nodded.

'I'm going to get the security guy, Dukes, to see what's keeping Richardson.' He caught the tiny pupil in Birnbaum's pale blue eye and added, 'I don't give a fuck what he's doing.'

Birnbaum shrugged. 'It's your funeral, Mitch.'

'Maybe.'

Curtis was still wearing his sarcastic face. Mitch looked at him and nodded towards the door.

'Could I have a word with you please, Sergeant? Outside?'

'I'm not doing anything right now. Why not?'

Mitch said nothing until they were further up the corridor. 'I didn't want to say anything in front of everyone in there,' he said at last. 'I guess I didn't want to scare them the way I'm scared now.'

'Jesus, what's up?'

Mitch explained about the time on the clock in the computer room and his suspicion that for the last three-quarters of an hour they had been viewing a tape recording, a recorded loop of what was happening.

'Which means that something may have happened in the computer room just after six-fifteen. Something that someone is trying to hide from us.'

'You think Aidan Kenny is all right?'

Mitch let out a sigh and shrugged. 'I really don't know.'

'This someone,' Curtis said after a moment, 'do you think it could be your friend from the garage? The one who knocked you out?'

'The thought had crossed my mind, Sergeant.'

'How far do you think he would go?'

'I really don't figure Grabel for a murderer. But if Sam Gleig disturbed Grabel sabotaging the computer, then it's just possible he could have been killed for it. Maybe that part was an accident. Anyway, I think Grabel may have come back here to warn me. It could be that he had second thoughts about the whole thing.'

'Either way, we're in trouble.'

'Yes, I'm afraid so,' said Mitch.

'Well, hadn't we better go down to the computer room and find out if Mr Kenny is OK?'

'Sure. But if I'm right it means that we don't dare use the elevators.'

Curtis looked blank.

'Abraham controls the elevators,' explained Mitch. 'The whole building management system could be screwed.'

'Then we'd better take the stairs,' suggested Curtis.

'I'm not walking. We'll get Dukes to check on Kenny on his way up here. You see, if we are going to be trapped in the building for a while, it would make more sense for them to come up stairs where there's food and water, rather than remain down there where there's none.'

Curtis nodded. 'Sounds sensible.'

'At least until we can get help.'

Mitch pressed the call-button on the walkie-talkie and lifted the set to his ear. But as they came alongside the open space of the atrium it was the ground-level security alarm that he heard.

After he had recovered from the toxic effects of his futile attempt to revive Kay Killen, Ray Richardson had gone to a phone and tried, without success, to call the boardroom. A call to Aidan Kenny proved equally fruitless. So Richardson returned to the atrium to find Joan. She was sitting on the one of the big black leather sofas where he had left her, beside the still-playing piano, a handkerchief pressed to her nose and mouth against the foul smell that filled the building. Richardson sat down heavily beside her.

'Ray?' she protested, recoiling from his wet body. 'You're soaked. What happened?'

'I don't know,' he said quietly. 'But I don't see how anyone could say that it was my fault.' He shook his head nervously. 'I tried to help her. I jumped in and tried…'