Melody Burning (17 page)

“Hey there, Frank.”

“Hi, Joe, where’d you come from?”

In answer, Joe glanced toward the men’s room down the hall. Then he returned to the security office. Frank went on. He didn’t think that Joe had the slightest chance of survival so he couldn’t even look at him. He reached the end of the hall and climbed down the spiral stairs that led to the main equipment floor, where the steam generators were housed, along with the backup electrical generators.

He didn’t see the figure that appeared in the hallway behind him, slipping out of a storage closet. Luther Szatson watched him carefully as he disappeared down the spiral stairs.

Luther had been hard at work on this for a long time, and Frank Turner was going to take the entire hit for the catastrophe.

Clear and simple, Frank had been set up. Even while he was still in prison, the frame was built around him. He’d been chosen carefully. First, he’d done good work in the past. Second, he could be blackmailed because he’d been released illegally.

Szatson went past the security office with its big window. He stuck his head in the door. “Joey, where’s Frank?”

Joe glanced at his monitors. “Don’t see him. Want me to give him a call?”

“Yeah, do that.”

Joe picked up his walkie-talkie. “Hey, Frank, Mr. Szatson’s here.” He waited. “Come in, Frank.” He waited longer, then repeated the message.

As Luther knew perfectly well, the walkie-talkie’s signal wasn’t going to penetrate into the fuel storage area, blocked as it was by the big iron of the generators above.

“I saw him heading toward mechanicals, but he’s not in there now.”

“I’ll go take a look,” Luther said. “If he turns up, please ask him to wait for me in his office.”

“Is anything the matter, Mr. Szatson?”

“Nothing that can’t be handled.”

Luther then went down to the end of the hall and opened the fire door into the machine room. It was almost silent, with only one steam generator running, emitting nothing more than a soft whine.

Moving carefully so that his heels wouldn’t clatter on the grating of the floor and alert Frank, he went to the steel hatch that led down into the fuel storage area. Below, the lights were on. Frank was up on a ladder, bending over the middle of the three huge fuel tanks.

Very quietly, Luther lifted the hatch and put it down over the opening. He then slid the locking bar in place with his foot. He would later say that he had done it because there had appeared to be nobody in the fuel storage area and it was a code violation for it to be open.

He went back to the security office. “Not there,” he told Joe.

“That’s funny, because I didn’t see him come back. You looked down below?”

“It’s closed.”

Joe thought for a moment. “You can’t close it from inside, so he must’ve gone out while I was . . . I don’t know—I had my back turned.”

“You’re not required to be monitoring this hall, so it’s no skin.”

“I just like to notice. I like to be aware.” Joe stood up. His break time had arrived. “I’m taking my break, Mr. Szatson.”

“Sure thing.”

So Joe went upstairs, without the slightest idea that, by doing so, he was saving his own life.

In the fuel storage room, Frank was working up a sweat as he methodically unscrewed the big bolts that kept one of the inspection ports sealed. You could see through the ports, but the tanks were not intended to be opened unless absolutely necessary.

Grunting, pushing against the long handle of the wrench, he finally got the last bolt to move. As he opened the inspection port, fumes from the warm furnace heating oil filled his nose, choking him and making his eyes water. The oil had to be kept at a constant hundred degrees, or it would be too thick to flow through the system. This was no home heating system on a larger scale. It was completely different and far more complicated.

Now was the moment. He had laid the box atop the fuel tank. He picked it up and opened it. Just eleven minutes left. But that was good—it was enough time to get well out of the basement area before the explosion. He did not think anyone down here was going to survive for even a second.

The fire would travel up the building’s various chases and shafts, then blossom when it reached the top of the building. The top three floors would start burning immediately. Lower down, the process would be slower. To an unknown extent, the building’s sprinkler system would retard the flames. But in an explosion like this, standpipes would be wrecked up and down the line, and there was no way to tell how many of the sprinklers would work, or for how long. If Szatson had done his construction right, they wouldn’t work for very long at all.

He closed the small firebomb, then immersed the detonator in the oil. Circulators inside the tank kept the oil in motion, and the box soon disappeared into the thick blackness.

It was done. And he did not feel anything—except, of course, urgency. He had to get out now. He could not waste time, but even as quick as he was, by the time he was going up the spiral stairs again, he had only nine minutes left.

The hatch was closed.

He looked at it. How could this be?

Then his heart
really
started hammering. “Hey, Joe! Joey! You locked me in, dammit! JOEY!”

The moron had found the hatch open and closed it. What did they give him, a monkey brain? Obviously, if it was open, somebody was in here. With shaking hands, he pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt. The damn thing had better work because eight minutes might not be enough time to get this open from the inside.

“Joey, you locked me in the oil hole!”

Static.

“Joey!”

Static.

Too much steel. It had never worked in here, and it never would. But hell, Joe would have at least called down. Nobody in his right mind would close this hatch without checking the space. The lights were still on. Joe wouldn’t close the hatch and leave them on. He would definitely have turned them off, which would have alerted Frank immediately.

The truth hit him.
This was not an accident.

Of course not—how stupid had he been! Szatson would never, ever let a man with knowledge like he had live.

Szatson had done it.

Frantic now, he leaped down the stairs, grabbed the ladder, and threw it against the oil tank. He pulled off the hatch cover and peered in, but saw only slowly roiling blackness. Even if the box came to the surface, he would never find the incendiary sunken in all that oil.

Maybe he could drain the tank, then close the valve so that nothing would explode but fumes and residual oil.

Dropping down, he looked for some sort of emergency release valve, but there wasn’t one. He could see where the piping went out to the fuel oil fill station behind the building, but there was nothing anywhere that would release oil into the room itself. Maybe it was possible to drain it into the sewer. Surely the tanks had to be cleaned.

No, they didn’t. This was modern equipment that didn’t build up residue. It never needed cleaning.

Four minutes. Almost dizzy with fear, he took a wrench up to the hatch and began hammering on it with all his strength.

“Damn you, Joey, WAKE UP!”
WHAM, WHAM, WHAM.

Fire. It would hurt, it would be agony, and it was death, the real thing,
death
—and why had he done it? He hadn’t wanted to. He had tried to talk Szatson out of it.

“God! God, it’s wrong, I know it’s wrong!”
WHAM, WHAM, WHAM.

Two minutes.

Hissing. What was it? No, it was early,
it was early
.

Fire was gushing out of the inspection port. The hissing became a roar.

His whole body, all at once, felt as if his skin was being ripped off.

Fire
.

C
HAPTER 17

B
eresford’s muscles were screaming, his head was pounding, his lungs sucking agonized breaths. He had been running for hours, always moving in the direction of the tall buildings he glimpsed occasionally. He’d tried to stop cars, but nobody would let him in. When he’d seen police cars, he’d gone the other way or hidden.

He took big, ragged strides down the shoulder of a highway with cars speeding past just inches from him. To his left was the wall that enclosed the highway; above it appeared the sheer facade of the Beresford. A sunken highway ran along the west side of the building. You could see it when you looked down.

Ahead was an exit ramp, but it was narrow and had no shoulder. Nonetheless, he had to get up there, so he took it, squeezing himself as tightly as he could against the concrete wall. The cars passed him so close that some of them actually bumped against his right thigh. There was honking, the squeal of brakes, shouting.

Then he was high enough to reach the top of the wall, and with his great arm strength, he hoisted himself up.

Before him stood the side wall of the Beresford, its cladding gleaming black in the soft midmorning light. Ahead was the front of the building, with its doorman and concierge and other lobby personnel. He must not go near them; he must not let them see him.

Quickly, he trotted across the street and went down the alley behind the building. There was no concealed way to enter except that one door. In the front there would be more building personnel, and he feared that he wouldn’t have time to explain the situation before they called the police.

He had to get into the fuel storage area and get that bomb out of there. Again and again, he’d tried to think who would put it there. Terrorists was the only answer he could think of, but how had they gotten into the depths of the building like that?

He came out the far end of the alley. Now he was on the east side of the building, and the entrance to the parking garage was just ahead. It was not attended, so the only chance he had of being seen was if somebody happened to be driving out and became suspicious.

As he hurried toward the parking level elevator lobby, he thought of only two things: the bomb in the basement and Melody on the top floor. In the back of his mind, though, were less formed thoughts of all the other people in the building, and all the animals, and the fact that the explosion would be so dangerous.

A few more steps and he would be standing in front of the elevators. But he did not take those steps, because he also knew that he would then be on camera.

To one side of the four elevators was an alarmed entrance to the emergency stairs, and if he opened that door, not only would an alarm sound, another one would go off in the security office. He wouldn’t get two flights before he was caught.

But he had a better way. One of the chases came all the way down to this level. From this side, its opening was buried behind the spray-on ceiling material. But Beresford knew that it was like all the other chases—open-shaft construction.

To reach it, he stood on the hood of a car and pushed at the ceiling material until he found an area that had give. Then he pushed a fist through and tore at the ceiling until he had made a hole large enough to enter.

The car he was standing on was now a mess, but that didn’t matter. From here, it would take him just a couple of minutes to reach the crawl space between the two basements. He would remove a few ceiling tiles and drop right down into the machine room, then make his way to the fuel storage area.

This was the same shaft he used to reach Melody, and being in it again made him think of her fifty stories above him. Right now, he could only hope that she was safely away from the building. But why would she be on the morning after her big concert? She’d be resting.

He looked up into the darkness. There was a faint light that he knew came from the elevator shaft—again, an open shaft that should have been closed.

How he longed to just climb to Melody and get her out of here—and Mom, too, even Mom. Because he knew that Melody loved her, despite all their fights. So he loved Mom. Not like his own mother, of course, but he would fight for her life if he had to, no question there.

The second he got the bomb out of the building, he would tell Melody and Mom everything, and he was going to make them stay out of the building until the police had searched every inch of it.

He was just raising himself into the chase when there came a distant sound, a pop like bacon frying, but louder. The chase was lit yellow, and he dropped down onto the car and rolled away as a big ball of fire burst out of the hole.

For a second, he was too shocked to move. The chase was now filled with flickering light. He raised his head into fume-choked heat. If that fireball had hit him, he would be dead.

He looked up. The higher reaches of the chase were still untouched.

He had to climb, and he had to do all fifty stories or Melody was going to die. He pulled himself up into the chase. Off at the end of the crawl space there was roiling fire, but it was boiling up the elevator shaft and the chase that ended in the equipment room, not this one. This one would be clear for a while.

Without another thought, he started up, climbing hand over hand, pulling himself on pipes, doing it the way he had always known. Except, this time there was a difference. This time he was already terribly tired, and as he grabbed pipe and drew himself up, he felt unaccustomed pain in his muscles.