"Stand by for a thrill," Green joked. "The exec car drops fast."

"Thank you for helping me, sir. It's very considerate of you."

"Your name's Jill?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know what's going on?" Green asked as they got in the elevator. "Xerox is fifth floor, right? All this weekend work is happening because some Hungarian Communist Party official — who happened to be a banker, you figure the ideology on that one — he decided to skip the People's Paradise. Problem is, with all the high-tech communications this corporation's got, it's all numbers. Numbers in, numbers out. Doesn't mean anything if someone's putting in make-believe numbers. Personally I think it's more than just this Hungarian..." he added cryptically.

The elevator dropped. For a second, they almost floated from their feet. Jill laughed.

"An executive toy," Green joked. The elevator slowed as it came to the fifth floor. "Are you a temporary from outside the company, or a temporary from the secretarial?.."

Green turned as the elevator doors slid open, saw the woman in the telephone company uniform. "The telephone company is already here."

He saw it as if in slow motion: the Latin woman in the uniform turning, the .45 rising as she took a combat crouch.

Green hit her with the box of papers. He shoved the box straight out from his chest, thirty panic-thrown pounds of paper striking the .45 even as the slug left the muzzle of the pistol.

Paper exploded. Sheets and shreds of printout flying, Jill screaming in the elevator, Green jumped on the woman in the phone company uniform. He jerked her head back with one hand, then he had her pistol in the other.

He pointed the .45 at the Latin woman's head. "What the hell! Who are you?"

His peripheral vision saved him. Even as he stood, he saw a second Latin in a phone company uniform. Green snapped a shot at the man, threw himself backwards into the elevator, screaming at Jill: "Hit the button! Hit it! Up! Get us out of here!"

Slugs punched into the elevator doors as they slid closed. The single bullet Green had fired missed the man, continued twenty feet down the corridor and struck a nylon bag. The slug smashed several electronic components in the bag.

Julio knew the next hour would be the most critical. They had hoped to avoid discovery until after the placement of the C-4 and thermite charges. But hopes do not win liberty. Nor do hopes guarantee the success of a military operation. Their leaders had anticipated all possible problems and police reactions. They had trained Julio and his squad to succeed despite accident and opposition.

When the garage guard alerted the police, Julio and Luisa kept the first police cars at bay with their automatic rifle fire. Julio then hurriedly placed claymore mines in the garage and basement entrances, and retreated to the lobby. Julio and Luisa took positions in the chrome and black-marble lobby. All pretense was past. Julio still wore his mover's coveralls, Luisa her phone company uniform. But they now wore .45 automatics, carried M-16 rifles.

Julio watched the elevators. There were six pairs of elevator doors on one of the Tower's twin cores. There were six pairs plus the wide doors of a freight elevator on the wall of the other core. Both sets faced each other across the marbled corridor between.

Luisa moved throughout the lobby, scanning the plaza surrounding the Tower for police units. "They made it so easy for us," she said to him as she passed. She motioned to the high walls of glass. Only the two elevator cores isolated in the center of the lobby blocked the view of the plaza.

Julio had no time to reply. He was watching the elevators' indicator lights. In one elevator, his comrades rode up, distributing loads of C-4, thermite, and detonators. But other lights also moved through the series of plastic numbers. One car left the thirty-first floor, stopped at the twenty-eighth floor. Then it moved again. A second car left the eighty-fifth floor, came down without a stop.

Julio checked his tape roller. His leaders had anticipated all situations and had included a tape roller in Julio's equipment; it was used by freight packagers to seal boxes quickly.

Silently arriving in the lobby, the first elevator's doors opened. Julio pointed his M-16 at the chest of a secretary. She was alone in the car.

"Don't move!" he said. "Come out of the elevator! Here!" She obeyed, too surprised even to speak. He slammed the tape roller down on her shoulder and walked around her, holding the roller in one hand, his M-16 in the other. Before she realized what he was doing, her arms were taped tightly to her body with nylon reinforced freighting tape. Then her hands to her body. He turned her, put a loose loop of tape around her legs. She could hobble, but not run, not even walk fast.

"Oh, please! No! I don't have anything. I don't..." Julio slapped a patch of tape over the secretary's mouth.

He saw other lights appear on the elevator indicator, one starting at the fifty-third floor, dropping fast. He kicked the secretary's feet out from under her, let her fall to the marble floor.

"You try to move, you die!"

He crossed to the door of one of the elevators that was coming down, but it stopped at the fifth floor. Then, suddenly, the doors of another car opened. Loud voices broke the lobby's silence.

Two executives, immaculate in their conservative gray suits, left the elevator arguing. Julio ran to them, shoved them.

"Watch where you're going, spic punk!" one of them swore. Then the executive saw the M-16, staggered backwards, dropping his briefcase.

Julio jammed the long gun barrel into the man's chest, jarring him backwards into the black marble wall. The man sank to the floor, his hands out in front as if to shield himself from the automatic rifle.

The other executive sprinted away, his overweight body lurching with every stride.

"Harvey! Don't run!" the executive on the floor screamed.

Intestines and excrement sprayed from the running man's body as Julio fired a six-round burst through his gut. A second burst from Luisa's rifle threw the carcass sideways across the polished floor. Bullets exiting from the victim ricocheted off the tall, tinted, shatterproof windows on two sides of the lobby.

"Noooooo!" The surviving executive half-screamed, half-sobbed. Julio went to him, kicked him hard in the solar plexus. He fell sideways, his body heaving as he tried to vomit and breathe at the same time. Julio wrapped him up with tape, shoving him from side to side.

Julio's hand-radio buzzed. The voice of their squad lieutenant whispered through the earphone. "This is Zuniga, on the fifth floor. One of them has escaped. He took Ana's pistol. You must kill him..."

But the light blinked from the number five, flashed into the higher numbers, into the upper ninety-five floors of the Tower.

Ana, on the fifth floor, shoved an extra thirty-round magazine into her phone company uniform. She jerked back the cocking lever on her M-16, and punched an elevator's "up" button. She waited.

"Back to your duty!" Zuniga ordered.

"I'll kill him! I'm going up to find the..."

"No! You had your chance to kill him, and he took your weapon. Now return to your duties. Nothing else is important."

Her face remained hard, livid with anger. Zuniga coaxed her. "We'll hit the alarms soon. That'll bring them all out."

"And if he hides up there?"

"Then he's blown to bits."

Ana smiled, flipped back the safety on her M-16. She returned to her task of distributing one-kilogram blocks of C-4 around the two columns of elevators.

The detonators were Zuniga's responsibility. He returned to the unit he had been assembling. It was then that he saw the torn nylon bag.

He ripped open the velcro flap. The radio-trigger fell to pieces in his hands.