Chapter 9 - The Fiftieth-Floor Ledge
On the sunlit terrace fifty stories above downtown Phoenix, Victor Reed's thumb hovered over the red ignition switch of an industrial structural-testing transmitter he had stolen from the forty-ninth-floor construction locker.
Heavy laminated blast shutters began sliding down across the glass doors of the sunroom to trap us inside the cantilevered glass atrium while Victor backed toward his waiting white Bell helicopter on the rooftop pad.
"Victor, you lunatic, those shaped thermite charges were placed by the demolition subcontractors on the old temporary scaffolding jacks beneath the atrium floor—if you fire them while the permanent steel bolts are still unseated, the entire glass sunroom drops fifty stories onto the street!" I shouted, bracing my shoulder against the descending steel shutter to keep a two-foot gap open.
"And who is going to testify that it wasn't a tragic architectural failure by Paige Mercer's own firm when you and the old man are buried under ten thousand tons of glass and steel," Victor snarled from the helipad, his eyes wild with desperation as the helicopter blades roared to full takeoff speed.
Behind me inside the sealing glass room, eighty-two-year-old Harrison Reed was gasping for air in his wheelchair as his oxygen tank hissed empty, while Detective Miller and the two officers fired three rounds that sparked harmlessly off the thick hurricane glass separating the room from the helipad.
In less than ten seconds, the automated steel blast shutter would crush the bottom gap shut, seal us inside the cantilevered glass box, and Victor would press that button as his helicopter lifted off the roof.
Nobody in that room knew the structural engineering of that fiftieth-floor terrace except me—because my own hands had drawn every single millimeter of the steel reinforcement blueprint eight months ago!
When we had installed the heated infinity-edge lap pool along the outer perimeter of the fiftieth-floor helipad apron, city building codes had required us to install an electromagnetic seismic dump valve designed to drain forty thousand gallons of water off the roof deck in three seconds during an earthquake.
And the manual emergency pull-box for that seismic flood gate was mounted on the concrete pillar four feet outside the sliding door gap!
Dropping flat onto my stomach on the marble floor, I slid headfirst underneath the descending steel shutter less than a second before the heavy iron edge slammed down onto the threshold right behind my heels.
"Shoot her!" Victor screamed at his pilot and remaining rooftop guard, raising his own compact pistol toward me while holding the red detonator transmitter in his left hand.
Before Victor could pull the trigger, I rolled behind the concrete structural column and yanked the yellow steel lever marked SEISMIC POOL PURGE—EMERGENCY DUMP downward with both hands.
With a deafening hydraulic boom, the four-foot glass retaining wall of the rooftop lap pool dropped flat onto the concrete helipad apron directly in front of Victor's boots.
Forty thousand gallons of rushing blue water—weighing more than one hundred and sixty tons—erupted across the rooftop helipad like a tidal wave!
The four-foot wall of rushing water slammed squarely into Victor Reed and his armed guard, sweeping their legs out from under them and sending the red detonator transmitter skittering across the flooded deck straight into my hand!
Even worse for Victor, the torrent of water washed his sliding body straight across the slick concrete pad toward the unguarded outer edge of the fiftieth-floor roof, while the violent surge slammed against the landing skids of the revving helicopter and forced the terrified pilot to lift off crookedly without him.
Victor screamed in sheer terror as the rushing water carried him over the concrete curb and his frantic hands caught the wet stainless-steel safety railing overhanging the five-hundred-foot vertical drop to Central Avenue below!
Crushing the detonator transmitter beneath the heel of my boot to short out the battery circuit, I unlocked the steel blast shutter from the outside and ran to the edge of the wet roof right beside Detective Miller.
Fifty stories above the tiny cars on the street below, Victor hung by his slipping wet fingers from the lower bar of the railing, sobbing in terror as his grip began to fail.
"Pull me up, Paige, please for the love of God do not let me fall!" Victor shrieked, his arrogant facade completely shattered as wind whipped his wet suit over the abyss.
I looked down into the terrified eyes of the man who had just tried to murder my grandfather and me—and then I reached down, grabbed his wet wrist with both hands alongside Detective Miller, and hauled him back over the railing into a pair of waiting steel handcuffs.
"You do not get to take the easy way out on the pavement, Victor," I told him coldly as the officers pinned him to the wet deck, "you are going to sit in a federal courtroom and tell the whole state what you did to my mother twenty-five years ago."
Looking up through tears of fury and defeat as the police dragged him toward the stairwell, Victor spat blood onto the concrete and laughed wildly in my face.
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"You think you just saved your family, little girl?" Victor rasped as the stairwell door opened.
"Go ask your beloved grandfather sitting in that wheelchair why your mother Victoria was really running away from this tower on the night she died—because I wasn't the one who ordered the hit on her ambulance twenty-five years ago!"
