NEW YORK, NEW YORK, IT’S A WONDERFUL TOWN 6 страница

The guard’s finger suddenly stopped at an entry near the bottom of a page. “Wait a second. I got a note here that Mr. McMahon called. Says someone might be coming by to pick something up for him. That you?”

I almost laughed out loud. What a lucky coincidence! “Yes! That’s me,” I said.

“So he’s got you working on a Saturday, huh? Man, that guy never stops. Okay. Come on in.” The guard stepped back and let me past. At the security console, he handed me an electronic key card. “This’ll get you through the internal doors. Go on up. Executive offices are on fifty. Take the west bank of elevators.”

“Thank you.” I took the card and headed around to the elevators, which were around the corner from the reception area.

The elevator came immediately and I stepped in. It went express to the thirtieth floor, then began to ping as it passed each story. I watched the red LED display. 32… 33… 34… 35…

That’s about the first lucky break I’ve gotten on this case, I thought. I’d just have to be careful that I didn’t run into whomever Kyle had actually sent down here. I wondered idly what he wanted picked up.

The doors slid open on the fiftieth floor. I stepped out, keyed myself into the foyer, and took a minute to admire the place.

The floors were covered with some sort of woven reed matting that was springy under my feet. Huge windows faced west, giving a spectacular view of the Hudson River, but I could tell from the smoky tint of the glass that they were coated with some kind of polarized covering so that the light could come in without the heat. I could see, too, that the building was cantilevered so that each floor stuck out a little bit beyond the one below it, creating a natural system of awnings.

There were lush plants everywhere, so that the place felt a bit like a tropical rain forest. They would take a lot of care, I guessed. But they would help keep the air inside fresh and cool. Kyle had been right. It really was a green building.

I shook my head. Pretty Face did seem like a great company in so many ways. It was a shame that its biggest success was founded on a lie….

Now, to see if my hunch had been right.

I prowled down the halls of the fiftieth floor, peering into empty office after empty office. They were furnished already, with simple but elegant wooden desks and accessories. Everything was eerily silent.

I turned a corner. Now I was on the north side of the building. A corridor branched off from the center of that side, leading to a warren of internal offices. These didn’t have windows, and even though the morning was sunny, they were extremely dark inside.

I opened a door and stuck my head into what seemed to be a small conference room. No Anna.

I walked on down the line. Office, office, office.

Then I opened the door to another conference room — and stopped short, my heart suddenly pounding. In the shadows I could just make out a figure slumped at the long conference table.

“Hello?” I called out.

The figure raised its head. “Quién es?” it murmured.

“Anna!” I cried. Throwing the door wide open, I ran forward. As my vision adjusted to the dimness, I could see that Anna appeared basically unhurt. But she was swaying in her seat and her eyes looked unfocused. Could she have been drugged?

She peered at me for a second, then frowned. “Nancy?” she slurred. “’Zat you?”

“Yes, it’s me! I found you, Anna! I was so worried about you. Are you okay? What happened?” I blurted out.

Anna shook her head. “Satrap,” she muttered.

“Huh?” Tucking my hand under her arm, I helped her to stand up. She sagged against me. “No, never mind, tell me later. For now, let’s just get you out of here before the bad guys show up.”

“Satrap,” Anna said again. Raising her head with an effort, she said, “Too late.” Her eyes went to a point over my shoulder. “It’s… a… trap.”

SATRAP!

Suddenly the light from the doorway was blocked out. I whirled around. Anna was right. It was a trap.

In the doorway stood Kyle McMahon. Behind him loomed the bulk of Adam Bedrossian. I couldn’t see their faces until Kyle reached over and flicked the wall switch.

I stared at him and he stared at me. His face was white and strained.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

My pulse roared in my ears. Could I pull off a bluff? “I just wanted to see the offices,” I tried. “I found Anna in here — I think she needs a doctor.”

“Cut it out,” Kyle snapped. “I know you lied your way in here looking for her. Adam said you would. He said you’d figured too much out.”

I felt a jolt. So Adam and Kyle had set me up! “You called the guard and told him someone would be coming by and he should let them up,” I said, realizing it hadn’t been a coincidence after all.

“Adam did,” Kyle said. “He figured if you’d made it this far, it would be easier to deal with you up here.”

In a funny way, the knowledge that I couldn’t bluff them made me feel calmer. I had nothing more to lose. Beside me, Anna sat down with a soft groan.

“Oh, this is no good,” Kyle moaned. He began to pace up and down. “This is bad, bad. For goodness’ sake, Nancy, why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

“I’m sorry,” I retorted, “but the fact that Anna disappeared suddenly, without a trace, wasn’t something I could just ‘leave alone.’”

“Yes, yes, very heroic,” he snapped, waving a hand at me as he continued to pace. “Everyone else accepted the cover story, why couldn’t you?”

“I guess I just have a suspicious nature,” I said. “And there were all the little things that didn’t add up.

“So tell me if I missed anything,” I went on. I gestured at Adam. “I know you intercepted the fax that was supposed to come to me this morning.”

Adam nodded. His deadpan manner seriously creeped me out.

“I know about the Venezuelan frog toxin. Anna did some research on the frog and became concerned that the company hadn’t run tests on the long-term effects of the toxin on people’s nervous systems. That’s what she wanted to talk to me about, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Kyle acknowledged. “She’d been badgering me about it for months, ever since she happened across some article in an old scientific journal. I thought I’d finally gotten her to drop it. But then when those crazy protesters showed up, Anna started up again. She said that what we were doing was the same thing, morally speaking, as testing our products on animals. I ask you! I mean, this stuff is perfect — it’s a true miracle substance. And it’s one hundred percent natural. We are doing women of the world a huge favor by giving them Perfect Face!”

“You mean you’re doing your company a huge favor,” I pointed out. “Perfect Face makes millions of dollars a year for you. If you had to pull it off the market for testing, Pretty Face cosmetics would probably go under.”

“It’s possible to make products that are good for business and good for the consumer. And the environment as well,” Kyle insisted. “That’s Pretty Face’s core philosophy. And Perfect Face is good for the consumer and the environment. We don’t even harm the frogs to get the toxin. All we do is harvest their shed skins.” He turned to Anna. “How could you think I was trying to hurt anyone?” he asked her. “That hurts me!”

He sounded genuinely upset.

Anna peered up at him, her eyelids heavy. “Need… to test it,” she said stubbornly. “You don’t know… what could happen over time.”

“But the native tribes in that part of Venezuela have been using it medicinally for centuries!”

“Not the same,” Anna replied. Her voice sounded stronger, to my relief. Whatever she was doped up with, maybe it was starting to wear off. “There are many differences, the main one being they don’t use it every single day. They use it as a painkiller or an anesthetic when they need it. Anyway, who knows what the long-term effects on the natives are? No one has ever studied it.”

Kyle scowled. “You’re being needlessly academic. We have enough evidence without doing a formal ten-year study. It’s just not necessary — common sense will tell you that!”

“If you’re so convinced your product is safe,” I spoke up, “then why don’t you let your own daughter use it? Why do you keep giving Kelly the old formulation of Perfect Face?”

Kyle winced and was silent.

“I thought so,” I said, folding my arms.

All this time Adam Bedrossian had been standing impassively by the doorway. Now he spoke for the first time.

“Kyle,” he rumbled, “we’re wasting time with all this chitchat. Let’s get on with what we have to do.”

Kyle’s face looked haggard. “We can’t,” he said with a touch of desperation. “For heaven’s sake, Adam, we can’t go that far — we’re businessmen!”

My lungs suddenly felt as if all the air had been pressed out of them. Was Adam planning to get rid of me and Anna?

“We don’t have a choice,” Adam said. For the first time since I’d met him, I heard a hint of emotion in his voice — impatience. “Think about it. We crossed the line when we first brought Anna here against her will. Once we’d done that, surely you could see that there was only one way it could end. We couldn’t let her go after that.”

“That isn’t true!” I said quickly. Maybe I could appeal to Kyle’s better nature. “Kyle, if you harm us, you will get caught. It’s just a matter of time. My friends know everything that I know” — mentally I crossed my fingers — “and if I disappear, they’ll know who to blame. But this can still have a happy ending. All you have to do is announce a voluntary recall of Perfect Face. If you do that, you’ll look like heroes for pulling the product off the shelves before there are any complaints about it. And Anna and I will promise to keep quiet.”

Adam chuckled. “Nice try, Miss Drew.”

I ignored him and stared at Kyle, willing him to agree. But to my dismay, his expression hardened and he shook his head.

“We can’t pull Perfect Face off the market,” he insisted. “It’s out of the question.”

“Like I said, there’s only one way this can end,” Adam drawled. Stepping toward me, his hand suddenly shot out with startling speed and grabbed my arm. I tried my best to pull free, but his grip was like iron — there was no way I could break it. He hauled me out of the conference room and toward a fire exit.

“Come on, Kyle,” he called over his shoulder. “You should be able to handle Anna on your own. The chopper’s waiting on the roof.”

Chopper! Where were they taking us?

As Adam pulled me up the stairs to the roof, I struggled as hard as I could. But it was like trying to fight with an iron statue. He didn’t even break his stride.

Throwing open the door to the roof, he stepped out, pulling me behind him. Wind whipped my hair into my eyes and the sudden sunlight dazzled me.

A small helicopter sat on a landing pad at the far end of the roof, its rotors turning slowly. Adam lifted me bodily into the cabin, strapped me into a seat, then calmly pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed my hands in front of me. He reached under the seat and pulled out a coil of rope, which he used to tie my legs to the seat supports.

I sat there, helpless, shards of icy fear stabbing at my heart.

Anna was bundled into a seat beside me and tied up the same way I was. Then Kyle climbed into the copilot seat and Adam took the controls. “Keep an eye on them,” he shouted to Kyle over the roar of the rotors. “Especially Miss Drew.”

A moment later the chopper rose into the air. It banked and began to fly north, up the Hudson River. I sat there, staring down blankly at the silvery ribbon of water. No one had any idea where I had gone. My cell phone was dead, so even if I had been able to reach it, there was no possibility of using it to call for help. I had no idea where we were going.

For some reason, at that moment, the Miss Pretty Face pageant popped into my mind. It was tonight — only about eight hours from now.

Looks like I’m going to miss it, I reflected bleakly. I guess Piper was going to get her shot at the crown after all.

I’d been in tight spots plenty of times before, but this was the worst yet. And, unfortunately for Anna and me, I was fresh out of tricks.

How, how, how was I going to get us out of this one?

TO BE CONTINUED…

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