Then it clicked. The shiver that ran down his spine intensified as Samuel realized who the woman was looking at. Not him, but someone else in a window nearby. A jumper. Everyone who worked on Wall Street was aware of the stories of the jumpers from the 1920s market crash. The tops of buildings were lined with brokers threatening to jump; the sidewalks below stained a dirty red color as a result. He shuddered. That couldn’t happen again. There had to be something he could do.
Wrestling with the window lock, his fingers suddenly sweaty, Samuel freed the latch and shoved open his office window, sticking his head out and immediately looking down. Mistake. Samuel was no good with heights and his vertigo quickly kicked in, causing him to feel dizzy and lightheaded, his vision blurring. Squeezing his eyes closed, Samuel brought his head back inside and took several deep breaths.
“Come on,” he whispered to himself, “not now. You can do this. You can do this.”
Samuel slowly forced himself to open his eyes again. The room seemed to sway slightly, but he fought through the sickening sensation and shuffled forward. Placing his hands on the window frame, he cautiously leant forward and looked down, his eyes finding the woman easily as she continued to scream and wail.
“Help him!” It sounds like she called out, clearly noticing Samuel and his position so near to the jumper he was yet to spot. The rest of her sentence was impossible to make out with the ambient surrounding noise, but the woman continued to shout upwards, pointing into the sky as she wailed.
With Samuel’s appearance, more people looked up, surprised to see someone else in the high-up windows of the Trident building. For a moment, Samuel wondered whether he had made a grave mistake revealing his location to the angry crowd below. Now that they knew people were definitely in the building, they would be even more determined for get some answers on the whereabouts of their money. It would take some convincing to let them know that he was in exactly the same boat.
But that was something to worry about at a later date. As the woman on the ground continued to scream, Samuel dragged his gaze away from her and scanned the building below him. Nothing. Other than the shimmering glass from the windows, there wasn’t anything to break up the scene below him. Swallowing, Samuel realized that meant the jumper was above him. Once he’d turned his head upwards, it didn’t take much to find the man. Balanced precariously on a ledge just a couple of floors above him, Samuel locked eyes on the man and exhaled deeply. This was it. He needed to do something. He needed to act.
Tugging off his suit jacket and tie, Samuel tossed them both onto his desk chair and charged across his office to the door. In his head he calculated where he had seen the man. Two floors up, just across to his right… which would be the left once he was upstairs. Darting out into the hallway, the noises from inside the Trident building suddenly came back to him as a stark reminder that he was not alone inside and he was not safe.
The sound intensified as he rushed toward the stairwell. It almost made him want to go back to his office and hide away, but the thought of the man on the ledge upstairs pushed him forward. If he had the chance to save a life, he had to try.
Pressing the door release, Samuel pushed it open as softly yet quickly as he could manage. He’d never even thought about how much sound the big metal doors made before, but now it was all he could think about. The few seconds it took him to slide through and close the door behind him felt like long minutes, dragging out that at any point could result in someone finding him and putting his life in danger.
Two floors up, two or three over to the left.
The words repeated in Samuel's head as he sprinted up the stairs, refusing to glance down to see if anyone else joined him on the stairwell. He was using the back stairs, but it made little difference. He could hear people struggling to break through doors not that far away, the crowd of people turning into an angry mob the longer they were left without an explanation.
By the time he reached the sixteenth floor, Samuel was sweating again. He had moved as quickly as he dared, hugging the wall to avoid being spotted by anyone looking up. Thankfully as he keyed in his code, the door light flashed green and allowed him entry. He’d never been up beyond the fourteenth before, uncertain what department even operated from this floor until he saw the frightening sign that welcomed him inside: Finance and Operations.
“Of course,” Samuel mumbled to himself, now he was really in the lion’s den. If he was going to find answers to what had happened to his money, this was the place to be. Immediately it made sense why the jumper was here: these were the people who would know everything, these were the people who had been directly involved.
A gust of wind coming from down the hall snapped Samuel back to reality and the reason he was there. Money could wait, someone’s life was on the line and that needed his attention. The breeze was a good enough indicator of where the jumper was and as Samuel hurried toward
