Chapter 2 - The Red Phone
Richard Hall was sitting in his forty-fourth-floor office at Hall Urban Tower on 57th Street, staring at a set of blueprints for a new forty-story residential tower on the Hudson River.
It was 1:35 AM.
Richard rarely slept more than four hours a night. At sixty-two, his hair was entirely silver, brushed back with military precision, his frame lean and broad from forty years of walking steel girders and standing in muddy foundation pits.
His desk was made from a single slab of petrified wood, completely bare except for an architectural lamp, a glass of sparkling water, and a matte-black secure landline phone that only four people in the world had the number to.
The black phone rang.
Richard didn't flinch. He picked up the receiver on the first ring. "Hall."
"Mr. Hall, this is Dr. Marcus Vance, Chief of Emergency Trauma at St. Catherine Medical Center."
Richard stood up immediately, his hand tightening around the heavy receiver. "What happened to Grace?"
"She’s in our emergency surgical bay right now, sir," Dr. Vance said, his voice dropping into a careful, clinical tone. "She arrived by EMS ten minutes ago. She’s thirty-three weeks pregnant, in active labor, suffering from severe placental abruption brought on by acute blunt force trauma."
The air in the forty-fourth-floor office suddenly became very cold.
"Trauma," Richard repeated. It wasn't a question.
"She has severe bruising on her left shoulder, forearm, and upper abdomen, sir," Dr. Vance said quietly. "Her husband, Tyler Miller, was not with her. An elderly neighbor called 911. Grace gave us your name before we took her into emergency surgery for a C-section."
Richard looked out the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of his office. Below him, the grid of Manhattan stretched out in a million glowing lights—towers he had financed, bridges his concrete companies had poured, subways his subterranean crews had reinforced.
Thirty years of building a city.
And he hadn't been able to keep his only child safe in a four-room apartment in Brooklyn.
"Is the baby alive?" Richard asked. His voice didn't shake, but the glass in his hand cracked under the sudden, silent pressure of his grip.
"The fetal heart rate is critically low, Mr. Hall. We are operating right now to save both of them. I strongly suggest you come to the hospital immediately."
"I am already on my way," Richard said.
He hung up the phone.
He walked over to his suit jacket hanging behind the door, pulled it on, and tapped an intercom button on his desk.
Arthur Vance, a former NYPD Deputy Commissioner who had managed Richard’s personal security and intelligence operations for eighteen years, answered instantly from the anteroom.
"Sir?"
"Get the car," Richard said quietly. "And call Frank Castle at the District Attorney's office. Tell him I need a full-spectrum surveillance lock on Tyler Miller within twenty minutes."
Arthur hesitated for half a second. "Tyler, sir? Has something happened to Grace?"
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Richard walked past Arthur toward the private executive elevator, his face carved from cold, unyielding granite.
"Tyler Miller laid hands on my daughter," Richard said, the elevator doors sliding open with a soft chime. "Find out where he is. Block every exit he thinks he has. And make sure nobody—nobody—touches him until I give the word."
