Evelyn Price found the other thing on New Year’s Eve morning, closing out the year’s administrative file the way she had done for 26 Decembers. A work order opened in September by N. Whitaker. Subject line about a mechanical release and a covered access port on 42 closed the same week in field. No action required. Beneath it, in a note history she was not supposed to be able to see because she held an administrator role nobody had ever audited, two earlier instances of the same request from two different springs, both closed the same way by the same person. She sat with her hand over her mouth for a while. Then she printed it, three pages, and put the pages in her own bag instead of the file and went home to her sisters for the holiday without telling anyone.
Nolan’s phone rang at 9:20 that night, Caleb’s name on the screen. He was on the living room floor with a pencil working out what the health coverage would cost per month if he paid it himself, and he looked at the phone until it stopped and set it face down. Whatever it was, it was a building he no longer worked in, and he could not afford to feel useful about it. He would think about that decision later more than almost anything else.
The storm came in on the 2nd of January, 9 inches by 6 in the evening and still falling, and the city put its plows on the main arteries and let everything else wait. Blackwell Tower had 41 people in it at noon that day and 6 by 7:00. And by 9, the only occupied floor was the 42nd, where Vivien Blackwell was alone with a conference table covered in the refinancing package. She had been there since 8 that morning. The board met at 9 the next day, and there were two schedules in the package she did not believe, and she intended to find out why before a room full of people asked her in front of the lenders. Her father had never sat alone with a document in his life. That was most of what had gone wrong in the year she took over.
At 9:51, a transfer relay in the electrical panel on 42 did what it had tried to do twice in December. The floor’s lighting and receptacles rode through on the alternate feed without a flicker. The door controller for the executive corridor did not. It lost its communication link and the latch configured during commissioning in a way nobody had revisited held its position. It had been set fail secure. The corridor door between the executive suite and the elevator lobby locked itself and stopped answering.
Vivien did not notice for 11 minutes. When she walked out with her coat over her arm and badged the panel by the door, the light stayed red. She badged again. She tried the handle hard enough to hurt her wrist. And then she stood for a moment in the dark corridor with the emergency lighting throwing long shadows across the walnut and understood that the building had locked her inside a suite of offices on a holiday week in a snowstorm. She was not frightened yet. She was irritated, which was her default, and she went back to the conference room for her phone and called the security desk. It rang in the lobby and went to the automated line because the desk officer was walking around on the sixth floor. She called Graham and got a voice box. She called the vendor’s emergency line and reached a dispatcher in Ohio who put her in a queue.
The pain started while she was in the queue. It was not what she had been told to expect. It sat high and to the left, dull like a hand pressing, and it came with a nausea she had last felt after a long flight, and she sat down on the edge of the conference table and told herself it was the day. Her father had died at 61; she was 46, ran 4 miles on a treadmill most mornings and had never once been to a cardiologist, and that was the whole argument she made to herself in the 20 seconds she had. Then her left arm went strange and she understood and she tried to stand and reached for the phone and went down instead.
