"Tower of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pendleton Don, Stivers Dick)5This 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. quot;Mr. Green, this is a State problem. It does not concern your company. If you will be patient...quot; quot;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!quot; quot;I assure you, the security forces of the People's Socialist Republic of Hungary will not allow the money to leave the country.quot; quot;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?quot; quot;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.quot; quot;If you want to do business with WorldFiCor again, your government quot;You have my complete understanding.quot; 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? quot;Sure, I'll check on it. I'll chase the jerk to Siberia, is what I'll do,quot; he said to the air. quot;Did you call me, Mr. Green?quot; 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. quot;The commies are driving me blinkers,quot; Green said. quot;How can I help?quot; quot;You can't,quot; he told her, and tried to put his hands in his pockets. There were no pockets on his sweatpants. quot;Yes you can. Is there a delicatessen where I can get breakfast? How about you? Have you had a chance to eat this morning?quot; quot;No, thank you, sir, I'm skipping.quot; quot;You? Why, are you dieting?quot; Green glanced at her. She had a figure like a twenty-year-old. Maybe better. quot;Oh, no, sir,quot; she smiled. quot;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?quot; quot;No. I'll be back in half an hour.quot; 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. quot;Anyone want coffee? Food, anything. I'll treat.quot; One of the temporary girls, a dark-haired twenty-year-old in thick glasses, struggled with two heavy boxes of printouts. quot;I'll go for you, sir. Just give me a list. I'm going down to Xerox anyway.quot; Green took one box from her. It weighed at least thirty pounds, solid paper. quot;Negative. I'll fetch my own breakfast. I'll carry this down for you.quot; quot;Oh, thank you!quot; quot;Oh, damn!quot; Mrs. Forde exclaimed. quot;What's wrong with the phones? Jill! When you're at Xeroxing, call for service on our phone lines.quot; quot;Yes, ma'am.quot; 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. quot;Stand by for a thrill,quot; Green joked. quot;The exec car drops fast.quot; quot;Thank you for helping me, sir. It's very considerate of you.quot; quot;Your name's Jill?quot; quot;Yes, sir.quot; quot;You know what's going on?quot; Green asked as they got in the elevator. quot;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...quot; he added cryptically. The elevator dropped. For a second, they almost floated from their feet. Jill laughed. quot;An executive toy,quot; Green joked. The elevator slowed as it came to the fifth floor. quot;Are you a temporary from outside the company, or a temporary from the secretarial?..quot; Green turned as the elevator doors slid open, saw the woman in the telephone company uniform. quot;The telephone company is already here.quot; 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. quot;What the hell! Who are you?quot; 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: quot;Hit the button! Hit it! Up! Get us out of here!quot; 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. quot;They made it so easy for us,quot; 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. quot;Don't move!quot; he said. quot;Come out of the elevator! Here!quot; 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. quot;Oh, please! No! I don't have anything. I don't...quot; 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. quot;You try to move, you die!quot; 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. quot;Watch where you're going, spic punk!quot; 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. quot; 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. quot;Noooooo!quot; 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. quot;This is Zuniga, on the fifth floor. One of them has escaped. He took Ana's pistol. You must kill him...quot; 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 quot;upquot; button. She waited. quot;Back to your duty!quot; Zuniga ordered. quot;I'll kill him! I'm going up to find the...quot; quot;No! You had your chance to kill him, and he took your weapon. Now return to your duties. Nothing else is important.quot; Her face remained hard, livid with anger. Zuniga coaxed her. quot;We'll hit the alarms soon. That'll bring them all out.quot; quot;And if he hides up there?quot; quot;Then he's blown to bits.quot; 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 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 quot;We have terrorists downstairs!quot; Quickly Green related to his overtime office staff what had happened on the fifth floor. quot;I saw two. There could be any number of them in the Tower — five, ten, twenty crazies. And they have automatic rifles.quot; quot;There's no money in the building!quot; 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. quot;There's nothing here they could want...what could they possibly want?quot; quot;We'll hear all about it on television tonight,quot; Green told her. quot;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.quot; quot;But they know we're here,quot; Jill said. quot;They know what floor we're on! From the elevator numbers!quot; quot;I hit all the numbers when we got out,quot; Green told her. quot;The elevator stopped on every floor above us.quot; quot;If we hide,quot; Sandy interrupted again, quot;the police will be here soon. They've got to be!quot; quot;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,quot; Green detailed his thinking, quot;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.quot; quot;Seventeen bullets,quot; Mrs. Forde corrected. She took a snub-nosed .38 revolver from her purse. quot;Five in the cylinder, and six extras. And I know how to use it.quot; quot;Mrs. Forde!quot; Green said in mock horror. quot;Pistols are illegal in New York City.quot; quot;Yeah. Murder and rape, too. And what about terrorism?quot; quot;We still don't have fire superiority,quot; Green continued. quot;But if they find us, or we have to break out, we could surprise one or two of them. Surprise them to death. So what's it going to be? It's time for a vote.quot; quot;No voting!quot; Mrs. Forde told him. quot;You're the Department Director. None of the girls has got your experience. We'll do what you say.quot; quot;This is not an accounting project. And it's their lives we're talking about, Mrs. Forde.quot; The woman turned to the others. quot;Mr. Green was a company commander in the Army. Two tours of duty in Vietnam. If you don't want to do what he says, take the elevator downstairs. Maybe you'll make it to the street, maybe you won't.quot; Diane, the third temporary worker, smiled, gave Green a quick salute. quot;You got my vote.quot; Sandy and Jill raised their hands. Green nodded. quot;Command accepted, with reluctance. And now, troops, get comfortable. Your fearless leader has to think of what to...quot; Screaming drowned out his voice. It was an electronic wail. In every office and corridor of the hundred floors, sirens sounded the alert to evacuate the Tower. quot;Fire! They've set fire to the...quot; Jill shrieked, running to the door. quot; Green knew that the building was considered fireproof. Something else must be up. One by one, in twos, sometimes in joking and laughing groups WorldFiCor employees and executives left the elevators. Every one of them assumed the evacuation of the Tower was a weekend drill. Within seconds of stepping into the lobby, each employee became a prisoner. The soldiers of Zuniga's squad seized and immobilized the employees with freighting tape. They did not resist. It happened too quickly. Zuniga waited for a proper subject for his upcoming demonstration. His improvised plan required horror. It was not enough that the prisoners saw the corpse of the fat executive sprawled on the lobby's polished marble floor. They might think the fat man provoked his captors. The prisoners might hope for mercy. Without blind, unthinking terror twisting their emotions, torturing their intelligence and logic, the prisoners might not take the desperate chances his plan demanded. A woman screamed. Zuniga watched his soldiers throw a young black woman against the wall. She was very young, perhaps still in her teens. They silenced her screaming with a rifle butt to the stomach, then a loop of tape around her head to cover her mouth. Loops of tape immobilized her hands. Cocking his .45 automatic, Zuniga started toward her. But to his side, elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman stepped out. She walked slowly, her back stooped from decades of bending over a desk. Under one arm, she carried an account folder, sheets of paper and adding machine tape hanging from the folder. Two of his soldiers, Carlos and Rico, grabbed her, wrenching her arms behind her. She cried out in pain, and Carlos released his grip. The old book-keeper fell to her hands and knees. Rico jerked her to her feet. Screaming, anger and horror on her face, she tried to twist away. Zuniga glanced at the prisoners. All of them watched Rico struggling with the old woman. Crossing to her in three strides, Zuniga jammed the barrel of the .45 automatic into the old woman's mouth and blew her head away. |
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