Have you ever had a complete communications blackout before? No, ma'am. Neither have I. She pulled her knees up, rested her arms across them. And I've been in this building for 11 years.
Darius reached into his tool bag and started pulling things out methodically. Not because he knew exactly what he needed yet, but because having his hands moving helped him think. He'd learned that a long time ago in a different kind of emergency, in a different kind of darkness. The transfer switch in suble 2 was manually overridden. He said she went still.
What does that mean? It means somebody went down there and physically changed the configuration on the panel by hand before the storm hit or right at the start of it. He set a cable tester on the floor beside him. It means the backup power cycling the lights going out. That wasn't an accident.
She stared at him across the beam of the work light. Someone did this on purpose, she said. It wasn't a question. That's what the panel looked like. And the communication's gone.
All of it. Cell signal. Emergency intercom. I don't know about the landlines on upper floors yet, but what I've seen so far doesn't look like storm damage. He paused.
Do you have any reason to think somebody in this building would want to create this kind of situation tonight? The silence that followed that question was not the silence of someone who didn't have an answer. It was the silence of someone deciding whether to give one. Victoria Hayes looked at the ceiling of the elevator for a long moment and then she looked back at him and what moved across her face in that half second was not the expression of a CEO running calculations. It was the expression of a person who was very tired and very afraid and had been carrying something heavy for a long time.
Yes, she said I might. She didn't say anything else immediately and he didn't push her. He had learned from years of emergency response work, from years of being a father to a child who processed things at her own pace that pushing someone before they were ready to talk only closed them down tighter. He focused on what he could control. He pulled the maintenance access panel on the sidewall of the elevator car, the small metal door that building techs could use to access the car's internal wiring and manual brake release.
He checked the brake mechanism. It was engaged correctly, which meant they were stable. The car wasn't going anywhere, it wasn't supposed to go. That was the good news. The bad news was that without power and without communications.
Getting out required either restoring one or the other or using the emergency hatch in the ceiling to climb out. He looked up at the ceiling hatch. "We're somewhere between floors 12 and 23," he said. Based on the time we were moving before the stop. 15.