Airtight (25 page)

If they resisted, Brus would not instruct his men to forcefully remove them. Holland would go nuts, and would demand the use of tear gas or other irresistible force. There would be a public disagreement between the two men, and Brus would not back down.

The net result would be that it would cost Brus his job; Holland had the right to fire him, and would exercise that right. But it would firmly and permanently elevate him well above Holland in the minds of the townspeople, and would be the perfect kickoff for his candidacy for Mayor.

It may not have been a win-win for Brus, but at the very least it was a no lose–win.

So all Brus had to do was sit back and watch Holland dig his own political grave and Brus would move in once he stopped shoveling.

At first, Bryan didn’t recognize what was happening.

He sensed that he was breathing slightly faster than normal, but he couldn’t tell if that was because he was feeling intense anxiety. He was pretty sure that extreme nervousness caused quickened breathing, but it was hard to remember.

And it was really important that he remember.

But after a few minutes, there could be no denying it. The air he was breathing was less satisfying; he needed more of it. That’s why he was inhaling faster and faster, but it wasn’t getting the job done.

In full-fledged panic, he turned on the computer, to see if there was a message from Lucas, providing a reason to hold on. There was none, so he quickly typed one of his own. The pills were three feet away, sitting on the desk, next to a glass of water. Waiting.

Then the computer went black and stayed that way. It was obviously out of power; he wasn’t even sure if the e-mail he sent went out. The battery had run out, as had Bryan’s life.

He picked up the computer and threw it against the wall, smashing the now useless machine that had been his lifeline. The exertion made him breathe even harder.

It was the moment of truth; if he was to take the pills, now was the time. He had resolved to do so, and felt that he could do it when faced with the certain prospect of death by suffocation.

But in the moment he hesitated. It was death he was afraid of, death in any form, and until he took those pills there was the remote possibility it could be avoided.

So he debated it in his mind, in seconds that felt like hours.

And then he felt strangely peaceful; it’s counterintuitive, but a brain deprived of sustenance will create such a feeling.

And with the pills on the desk, he slumped to the floor.

“Negative,” Barone said. “It’s a goddamn garden apartment.”

He was telling me that the other of the two matches that the satellite lists had yielded was a dead end, that there was no underground shelter there.

He was telling me that Bryan was going to die.

There was literally nothing we could do. Either we had been wrong about the general location that he was in or we had missed something in our rush to go through the lists. The latter possibility seemed more likely, but it didn’t matter.

There was nothing left to be done.

Julie started to sob softly, and I felt like joining her. I had spent a goddamn week trying to find a killer, and in the process I had killed my own brother.

Emmit, not the crying type, smashed his hand into the car so hard that it made a serious dent. He had given it his all, had even taken a bullet that day by the missile shaft, but it hadn’t been enough. At that moment I wished I had taken the bullet and fallen down the shaft and never …

And then thinking about that time at the abandoned missile shaft reminded me of what Willis Granderson of the Morristown police had told us the day he sent us to check out that shaft. He had laughed and said that he knew people who built houses near an abandoned one, set it up as a shelter, and used it as a guesthouse. He laughed and said that he had guests he’d like to put underground like that.

The backup officers Barone had sent were just pulling up, six officers in three cars. I started screaming at them, and at Julie, Emmit, and Robbins, “LOOK FOR AN ABANDONED MISSILE SHAFT! SPREAD OUT AND LOOK FOR A MISSILE SHAFT!”

I saw Emmit’s face light up in recognition; he was there when Granderson made his comment, and he remembered it as well. “Come on!” he yelled, and quickly indicated where each of us should look, so as to spread us out to make the search as efficient as possible.

We all took off on the run, trying to cover as much territory as possible without missing anything. Having seen the other abandoned shaft, I knew this one was large enough that someone would realize it if they came upon it.

And Julie did.

“LUCAS! OVER HERE! I THINK I FOUND IT!”

I was the closest to her, so I got there first. She was leaning over, trying futilely to pull on the enormous metal covering. A hundred of her, a hundred Emmits, would not have been able to do it.

But one Emmit proved to be enough. On the other side of the cover from where Julie was standing, he found a small door cut out of it. It was made of metal as well, and as I ran towards him I saw him take out his gun and shoot at the padlock that was on the handle.

He shot four times, and by the time I got there with the other officers he was pulling the door open. He lifted the door and I looked in; there was a long, fairly steep staircase down at least twenty feet.

I headed down; it was so steep that I did it backwards, treating it more like a ladder than a staircase. I was looking down as I did so, but I could hear the others above me, coming down.

The first thing I noticed, even before I got down there, was the sound of the television. When I got to the bottom I could see that it was a small apartment. I was about to call out Bryan’s name, and was already panicked that he hadn’t called out mine, when I saw him lying next to the table.

Emmit and two officers had made it down, and approached as I leaned over Bryan. One of the officers, who seemed to know what he was doing, felt for a pulse, but didn’t say whether or not he detected one. All he said was, “We need to get him to fresh air.”

When I stood up, I noticed the two pills sitting next to a glass of water on a table. He hadn’t taken them.

I was already feeling light-headed from the lack of air in the room, though some was certainly coming in from the stairwell. Whatever was affecting me didn’t seem to bother Emmit, though. This man who had nearly died from a bullet wound, and gotten out of a hospital bed to help, picked Bryan up, and put him over his shoulder.

One of the officers yelled into the shaft, “We’re coming up!” and then stepped out of the way for Emmit, who carried Bryan up the stairs with apparent ease. I was feeling so weak that I almost hoped Emmit would come back and carry me, but I followed along.

When I got to the top I saw Bryan lying facedown on his back, with one of the officers over him, doing CPR.

Before I had a chance to ask what his status was, Julie came over to me.

“He’s alive,” she said, and started to cry.

We sat in the hospital waiting room for three hours.

Dr. Arthur Lansing came out once to talk to us, somewhere around the one-hour mark. Lansing looked to be no more than thirty-five and was tall, at least six foot six. He would have been taller if he had a single hair on his head, but it was shaven clean. I had absolutely no idea what to make of that.

He spoke with authority and confidence, conveying a feeling that he was in control of the situation. “Mr. Somers is in a coma, but his condition has stabilized.”

“So that means he’ll … he’ll survive?” Julie asked.

Lansing nodded. “Absent any unforeseen circumstances.”

Julie closed her eyes in a silent thanks, and Emmit exhaled about four tanks’ worth of carbon dioxide.

I was focused on getting more information. “Why is he in a coma?” I asked.

“His brain was deprived of oxygen for an unspecified period of time. It shut down, partially as a defense mechanism. When it kicks back into full operation, he’ll hopefully come out of the coma, and we’ll know more about potential damage.”

“What’s your guess?” I asked.

He smiled patiently. “I’m afraid I don’t do guesses very often. If I knew how long he was without sufficient oxygen, I could give you an informed opinion. But I don’t, so I won’t. Sorry.”

“Can we see him?” Julie asked.

“Yes, but give it a little time. He’s going to be moved to a private room in Intensive Care; the nurse will come out to get you in a bit.”

So we waited. Captain Barone came in to see how things were going. He hugged all three of us, even Emmit. Barone was far more emotionally involved in this than I had realized.

After we had told him what little we knew about Bryan’s condition, he said, “So when the hell are you coming back to work?”

“I’m thinking vacation,” I said.

“Think again. We’ve got a murder case to solve.”

“Which one?”

“Judge Brennan,” he said. “When word gets out that Steven Gallagher didn’t do it, the Feds will be all over it. I want to beat them to it.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said, but the comment stung me. I hadn’t thought in a while about Steven Gallagher in that apartment, and the three bullets I pumped into him.

When Barone left, Emmit asked, “If Gallagher didn’t do it, who did?”

I was irritated that with all I had learned, I couldn’t come close to answering that question with any certainty. “If you’re asking who held the knife, my best guess would be Kagan. He possessed the necessary skills. I would have thought Carlton hired him.”

“Why?”

“Because he got half the money from Hanson, and Brennan could have been seen as a threat to that.”

“But somebody did Carlton, and Rhodes,” Emmit said, accurately. “And Rodriguez said Carlton was alive when Gallagher left the house that night.”

“Maybe it was William,” I said. “The butler did it.”

It was a bad joke, and Emmit correctly disregarded it. “Why would he kill his boss? Carlton already had the money; why would William have wanted him dead? Unless it’s Carlton’s wife; she was dumping him anyway.”

I didn’t believe that was likely, and said so. She was going to get a fortune in the divorce; it seemed unlikely that she would have engineered something like this, especially the Brennan killing. But anything was possible, and I would certainly investigate it.

We dropped the conversation and resumed staring at the door through which the nurse would allegedly come, inviting us in to see Bryan. I knew she hadn’t forgotten us, since I had gone to the desk at least a dozen times to remind them.

There were other things about the Brennan case, especially the situation in Brayton, that still bothered me. There were the items that Gallagher found in Rhodes’s hotel room, that he left with me. But even more troubling were the items he didn’t find. There were far more explosives missing than had been used, and the timers were not there as well. They could have been set by Rhodes before he died.

There was the Michael Oliver killing. I still couldn’t understand why he had been singled out to die; he was no longer a player once he submitted his report, and even before that had labored in anonymity.

But above all, it still made no sense that the violence was coming from different directions. Carlton and his partners had the motive for Brennan to be eliminated, yet all the rest of the violence was directed against Carlton’s side.

But sometimes things that don’t make sense suddenly do, all at once.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “That has to be it.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked up, and there was the nurse. Julie and Emmit were already standing, but I had been so lost in thought that I was oblivious.

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You can see Mr. Somers now,” she said.

“You guys go ahead,” said Emmit. “I’ll wait here.”

Julie and I followed the nurse through the double doors, and down a corridor to the intensive-care area. She led us to a room, and opened the door for us. “Just for a few minutes,” she said, and we went in.

Bryan was lying in bed, tubes leading into his arm, looking better than I would have guessed. He had his eyes open, but didn’t seem to acknowledge us in any way. I reached him first, and gently bent down to give him a slight hug.

“Hey, Brother, it is damn good to see you,” I said.

I pulled back slightly, and thought I detected a slight smile, though I couldn’t be sure. I looked at him, and then Julie, and felt a tightening in my throat. Humans I have spoken to who are in touch with their emotions have told me that’s a precursor to crying, but I can’t speak from personal experience. I certainly wasn’t going to hang around there and find out.

Fortunately, I had something else to do. “I gotta go to work,” I said, and turned and left.

“We have fought the good fight,” Edward Holland said as media cameras rolled,

“and we are still fighting. We are not going to let the water our children drink, the very air that they breathe, become instruments of harm. Not on my watch.”

They cheered him, all eight thousand of them. It was by far the largest crowd ever assembled in Brayton, and Holland had them eating out of his hand. But he knew that was about to change and the cameras would capture that as well.

“But we are going to do it the right way, the Brayton way. Yes, we have lost the battle in the courts, but there are many more to be waged, and we will win more than our share. That I promise you.”

The cheers became louder, raining down on him. Alex Hutchinson stood behind him on the podium, smiling and nodding in agreement, though she had no idea what was going to happen next. Holland had debated whether to tell her in advance, but decided she might choose to sabotage it.

“There has been far too much violence, and our side is being blamed for much of it. I know they are false accusations, and you know it as well. But perception is reality, and we must not do anything that feeds that perception.

“I am also concerned for your safety. No, change that. I am
responsible
for your safety. It’s a responsibility I will not shirk and I will not delegate. I will do what is necessary, what is consistent with the oath I swore when I took this office, to protect you, the citizens of Brayton.”