I've worked with these people for years. I've She stopped, pressed her palms flat against her knees. It's one thing to suspect numbers on a spreadsheet. It's another thing to think someone. She stopped again.
Darius gave her the silence she needed. Then she looked up and her eyes were dry and her jaw was set and whatever had moved across her face was gone. Tucked back behind whatever it was that made Victoria Hayes the kind of woman who ran a company punny hundred and hundreds of millions of dollars. We need to get out of this elevator. She said yes ma'am.
He said we do. He went through the ceiling hatch first. The maintenance ladder was cold and the shaft was colder. Wind moving through it in currents from somewhere above, probably a maintenance access point at the roof level that the storm was exploiting. He tested each rung before he committed his weight to it.
Moving deliberately, a hand and a foot at a time. Below him, he heard the soft sound of Victoria Hayes removing her shoes. "Ready when you are," she called up. "Come up slow. Right hand, right foot, then left hand, left foot.
Don't rush it. He felt the ladder shift slightly with her weight. Looked down and saw her ascending in the beam of his work light. She had the clipped off high heels hanging from one hand by their straps. The other hand on the rung, and she was moving steadily, not fast, but not hesitating either.
He filed that away. She didn't hesitate. He reached the 14th floor door mechanism, the emergency manual release for the elevator doors, accessible from the shaft side and worked it with the small pry tool from his belt. The doors parted. A thin slot of emergency lit corridor opened up and he pressed through it, turned around and reached back through to offer his hand to Victoria.
She took it, not because she needed it. She was already almost through the gap, but she took it and he pulled and she stepped out onto the 14th floor of Hayes Global Logistics at approximately 1:15 in the morning in her stocking feet with her heels in one hand and her dead phone in the other, and she stood in the dim corridor and breathed. "Thank you," she said quietly, like she meant just the elevator, but also maybe something more. "Don't thank me yet," he said. We need to find a landline or a building radio.
Something they might have missed when they cut the communications. She looked at him. There's a hardwired phone in the security dispatch office on floor 16. Completely independent system. Old installation from when the building was built.
Kept it for redundancy. Almost nobody knows it's there. He looked at her. Almost nobody, he said. My facilities director showed it to me 3 years ago.