Episode 6: The Floors Above Sixty

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: The ledger man let something heavy go over the side of the barge rather than be caught holding it, and Ines went into the river after it while the barge pulled out from under the bridge. Leland and the rest reached the pier too late to do anything but watch the current close over where she went in.

The water under the bridge was colder than a Midtown lobby with a doorman had any right to produce four floors down. Ines went in feet first with Dov’s rope cinched around her waist, and the current took her sideways before it let her find bottom at all.

What the ledger man had thrown was not money. It was a document case, the hard kind with a rubber gasket, wedged between two pilings where the current couldn’t finish carrying it downriver. Ines got both hands around it and gave the rope two hard tugs, the signal for pull, and let Dov do the rest of the work.

“You went in for a briefcase,” Hatch said.

“I went in for whatever a man throws away instead of getting caught with it,” Ines said. She set the case on the iron stairs to drain before anyone else touched it.

The gasket had held. Inside, rolled tight and dry, were blueprints with the Hargrove Building’s own seal stamped in the corner, three sheets deep. The top sheet ran the tower up past sixty in pencil additions nobody had ever filed with the city: sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, each one drawn in the same hand as the seal but none of them stamped.

Dov unrolled the third sheet and went quiet in a way that made Hatch ask him twice if he was all right. In the margin, next to the sixty-second floor, someone had written a note in blue ink that had survived the river better than the pencil had, three words and a date circled twice. Ines recognized the hand before she read a single word of it, because she had spent four years of her life learning to forge it.

She rolled the sheet back up before anyone else could get a look at the note, and slid the whole set into her jacket instead of laying it out on the dock for a vote. Hatch was already asking whose hand it was, and Ines was already deciding how much of the answer the team was going to get.

The Vote

Does Ines tell the team what she recognized?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 7 gets written from whatever wins.

Tell them everything: She lays the blueprints out on the dock and names whose hand it is.

Tell Hatch alone: She pulls Hatch aside this time, not Dov.

Claim it’s nothing: She tells them the note doesn’t mean anything and hopes nobody asks twice.

Burn it: She feeds the blueprints to the barge’s motor instead of answering anyone.