Satisfied, he slid from the ground car’s saddle and entered the building, leaving his vehicle for the cameras to watch. They scanned this street as they did every street, every room, in the State; and at the first sign of someone tampering with the car, a monitoring computer would alert the police.
Within the large, single room, narrow aisles separated booths selling fabric and garments. Even during daylight the inner tables were lighted by glow strips to bring out the colors of their merchandise. Eyes turned toward the chauffeur as he passed, some drawn by his iridescent livery but many by his carriage and frame. The body beneath his tight uniform would have done credit to a kouros of ancient Athens. He acknowledged the glances only by hooking the left corner of his mouth into a more pronounced sneer.
At the spidery framework of the elevator in the center of the room he halted. Four slim, chromed vertical rods rose from the floor here all the way to the roof of the building. The chauffeur touched the call plate with his ID bracelet; the radio-cesium key imbedded in its silver threw a switch invisibly and the cage began to whine down from the fifteenth level.
Shop owners in the Coeltrans Building were used to the activity, but there was a stir among their customers. Many of them had never seen a working elevator before. The cost of power to run elevators made them rich men’s toys—and rich men had air cars to get them between the top-floor suites of their fellows. Supported by the four thin columns, the cage sank through one-meter circles cut through each level. Little more itself than a floor with a waist-high rail plated to match the verticals, the cage appeared shockingly frail. A more substantial construct would have sometimes blocked the fields of the three scanning cameras covering each floor. No citizen, no matter how rich and powerful, could be granted that potential for secrecy.
The chauffeur stepped aboard and the cage began to rise. He lounged back against the guard rail, whistling as his fingers beat time against the chrome. On each identical level, banks of clerks looked up from their desks as the cage rose past them. The motor in the elevator’s floor raised it effortlessly past stairs which were theirs to climb every time they reported to work. The elevator was for Citizen Wilhoit alone—and for this youth.
Only on Level 15 was there a break in the vistas of desks crammed into 60-meter circular floor plans. Here the outside walls were pierced not by windows but rather by translucent panels cast in various pastels. The room was actually brighter than those below it, however, because of the sheets of sunlight-balanced glow strips in its ceiling. Underlings sat in ordinary desks around the level’s outer perimeter, but the central twenty meters were held by a jungle of potted plants and a single huge mahogany desk no less impressive for the litter of papers and instruments on its surface.
The cage stopped. The chauffeur continued to whistle, his back to the mahogany desk and the gray-faced man beginning to stand behind it. Then the current surged through the elevator’s handrail and snapped the chauffeur into a screaming arc.
Alternating current of over 600 volts tends to fling away those who touch it, saving lives that lower voltages might have taken. DC instead clamps and holds and kills; and to avoid inductance losses, Greater Greensboro and most other cities now ran on direct current. The charge ripping through the chauffeur’s body broke his ribs with unrelieved muscle contraction, and the screaming stopped only when there was no more air to be forced through the lifeless throat. Seconds later the flow cut off as suddenly as it had begun, and the charred body slumped to the floor of the cage.
The cameras on Level 15 recorded every visible nuance of the death.
* * *
Lacey gave the final command to the Crime Service computer. It would send a Red Team after the airport smuggler he had identified following a week of studying the operation from every angle. He swung the scanner helmet up against its counterweight and grinned his wolf’s grin of accomplishment. His hand was massaging the old scar on his neck and holding the glow inside him when Billings, the investigator at the desk to his right, got up. “You knocking off too?” Billings asked. He was a blond man with a round face and a quick smile.