Chapter 8 - The Penthouse Siege
My eyes snapped up to the hospital television screen above the fourth-floor nurse's station, where a live helicopter news broadcast showed downtown Phoenix's tallest glass skyscraper, the fifty-story Reed Tower, cordoned off by security barriers.
According to the scrolling red banner at the bottom of the screen, an "emergency medical lockdown" had just been declared inside the executive penthouse residence of eighty-two-year-old billionaire Chairman Harrison Reed by his nephew and Acting Chief Executive, Victor Reed.
"Victor Reed is not your mother's brother—he is your grandfather's nephew whom Harrison adopted when he thought his whole bloodline died twenty-five years ago," Julian Vance said beside me, his fingers flying across his tablet as he pulled up the Reed Corporation's board structure.
"Harrison Reed suffered a stroke last month and announced he was signing his final irrevocable estate transfer at six o'clock tonight—making Victor the sole heir to ten billion dollars in commercial real estate and defense trusts," Julian explained breathlessly.
"When Evan called Victor an hour ago and sent him a photo of your birth certificate and the lion signet ring, Victor realized that if you reach your grandfather before six o'clock tonight, his entire ten-billion-dollar inheritance evaporates automatically under the bloodline clause!"
Down on the floor in handcuffs, Evan Cole smirked up at me with pure malice.
"Victor already wired five million dollars into my offshore Cayman account for tipping him off, Paige, and he has twenty armed private security contractors sealing every elevator in the Reed Tower until the old man signs the final transfer or stops breathing at six o'clock," Evan taunted.
From inside Room Four-Twelve, my father Samuel called out weakly as the nurses stabilized his monitors, motioning me over to the side of his bed with a trembling hand.
"Paige, forgive me for being a coward for nine long years," Samuel whispered as tears rolled down his hollow cheeks.
"Gwendolyn found out I had accidentally overdrawn a client escrow account nine years ago, and she threatened to send me to prison and leave you an orphan if I ever questioned how Clara died or why she moved into our house," he sobbed.
"Listen to me—if you need to reach Harrison Reed's fiftieth-floor penthouse without taking the main tower elevators, you already hold the key in your own architectural files!" Samuel said urgently, gripping my hand.
I froze as my memory flashed back to the luxury penthouse swimming-pool cantilever renovation my firm had been hired to engineer on the forty-ninth floor of the Reed Tower eight months ago.
Because Harrison Reed was paranoid about corporate kidnapping after his daughter Victoria's mysterious death twenty-five years ago, the old billionaire had built a secret private freight-and-evacuation hoist concealed inside the hollow structural steel core column on the building's west face!
And as the lead structural architect who had certified the load bearings on that core column eight months ago, I still had the master maintenance override badge sitting in the glove compartment of my car!
"Detective Miller, lock Evan and Gwendolyn in the interrogation hold and bring a tactical unit to the west underground loading dock of the Reed Tower in twelve minutes," I said, sprinting for the hospital elevators with Julian right behind me.
Ten minutes later, I pulled my car into the subterranean contractor service bay beneath the Reed Tower, grabbed the yellow hardwired engineer's keycard from my glove box, and slipped past the main lobby barricades with Detective Miller and two armed plainclothes detectives.
Pressing my architectural contractor badge against the disguised concrete wall panel behind the basement chiller units, I unlocked the hidden core-column elevator and punched the override button for Floor Fifty.
The high-speed counterbalanced cab shot silently upward through the steel spine of the skyscraper in forty seconds and slid open behind a paneled mahogany bookcase inside the dimly lit private library of the fiftieth-floor penthouse.
Through the cracked double doors leading into the grand glass-walled sunroom overlooking the entire Phoenix valley, I saw eighty-two-year-old Harrison Reed sitting frail and pale in a motorized wheelchair, with an oxygen cannula in his nose.
Standing directly over the old billionaire's wheelchair was a tall, silver-haired man in a three-thousand-dollar suit—Victor Reed—flanked by four armed private bodyguards and a nervous private physician holding a clipboard.
"Sign the final irrevocable trust transfer right now, Uncle Harrison, or the doctor here is going to turn off your oxygen concentrator and tell the board you passed away peacefully in your sleep," Victor said coldly, forcing a gold fountain pen between the old man's trembling fingers.
"My daughter Victoria's baby is alive, Victor—I saw the message from the hospital before you took my phone, and I will die before I give my daughter's killer a single penny," old Harrison rasped defiantly as one of the guards reached down and switched off his oxygen valve!
Before Harrison could gasp for breath, I kicked open the mahogany library doors and stepped straight into the sunlit penthouse with Detective Miller's tactical badge and pistol raised right beside my shoulder, holding my birth mother's gold lion signet ring high in the air.
"Take your hands off my grandfather's chair right now, Victor, or the Phoenix Police Major Crimes unit puts you on the floor," I commanded, my voice ringing clearly across the marble sunroom.
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Harrison Reed turned his head weakly toward the doorway, saw me standing in the golden afternoon light—wearing the exact face and emerald eyes of his dead daughter Victoria at age twenty-five—and tears spilled instantly down the old billionaire's weathered cheeks as he whispered, "Victoria's little girl?"
Cornered beside the glass balcony wall as Detective Miller and the two officers disarmed his stunned bodyguards at gunpoint, Victor Reed suddenly lunged backward through the sliding glass doors onto the fiftieth-floor outdoor helipad, grabbed the remote steel fire-shutter switch, and yelled into his tactical radio, "If I don't get the ten billion, nobody does—detonate the thermal charges on the cantilever support beams right now!"
