Read Online Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe - Free Book Online

else connected with the bridge?
    Leland had been assuming that all of them were German, or European. What did a Chilean youngster look like? The military junta ruling Chile was the most repressive in the Americas, as committed to torture and murder as Duvalier of Haiti at his most lunatic.
    Now Leland heard an elevator again. He was so close to the roof and the elevator machinery up there that he could tell that it was not the elevator that had stopped on this floor, but another, probably coming up. Another question answered: they had not shut down the elevators — yet.
    The elevator came all the way up to the top. Leland pushed the door open a little more.
    "Wo sind sie?" It was the voice Leland knew.
    "Durch diese Turen, ganz da hinten."
    Leland's own German was good enough for that: Little Tony wanted to know where "they" were, and he was told to go "all the way to the back." Leland decided to take a chance. He stepped out into the hall and headed in what he thought was the other direction.
    The floor was a huge playground of executive privacy and privilege. Leland could see that it was going to be more difficult to find the stairwells on this floor than on those down below.
    Leland was on the south side of the building. The president's office, and the chairman's, would be on the north side, out of the direct sun. Given his importance, Rivers's office would be on that side, too. Leland was learning to get his bearings from the lights outside the windows, swimming out from underneath him toward the horizon.
    He may have come up a blind alley, Leland realized. He was in a private office, but narrow, small, and windowless, on the inside of the building. The other door was a massive, solid-looking affair. Leland had the Browning out again.
    The door was unlocked, the room on the other side unlit. The crack under the door on the far side was as bright as a strip of neon — bright enough to let him see that he was in some kind of reading room, with a table and chairs. The corporate law library. Given what he knew about major corporations, Leland could almost calculate the distance in inches to the president's office.
    He could hear something on the other side, at a distance, he thought. The doorknob on this side was fitted with a twist lock. He opened the door slowly, and sure enough, the first things he saw were the raised letters on the other side of the door identifying this room as the library.
    He was looking down a long corridor — it ran the length of the building, almost a block, all the way to Wilshire Boulevard. He had come all the way around the elevator bank. He was almost beginning to feel at home in the building.
    He had the door open fully when something made him stop and get back inside. At the end of the corridor, a light came on. Leland's heart was pounding again. He must have seen a shadow, he thought. He was going to have to learn to trust himself. Now two men, one of them Anton Gruber, stepped into view and started talking. They were wearing kit bags slung over their shoulders. Leland held his breath so he could hear them. Still, they were so far away that their voices sounded like they were coming over a telephone on a pillow halfway across a room.
    "Besteht eine Moglichkeit, dass er uns helfen wird?"
    "Ich glaube nicht. Der weiss doch, dass wir ihn umbringen werden, sobald er uns gibt, was wir wollen."
    They were talking about Rivers.
    "Ich mag das Toten nicht."
    "Je schneller wir ihn umlegen, umso leichter wird uns das Toten in der Zukunft fallen, wenn es notwendig wird. Dieser Mann verdient den Tod. Bring ihn jetzt her und wir erledigen das."
    Leland waited a moment, then looked out. The feeling was strange beyond all believing. Through the looking glass. Leland had been thinking it all evening, since — when? Gruber had a Walther. He wanted to kill somebody, like a kid — that much the briefings had right. He had Rivers in front of him, and Rivers was it. Gruber dusted imaginary lint off Rivers's