The Naked Edge (16 page)

“Faraday,” the parrot squawked. It didn't get a chance to add “Jerk” before it toppled to the floor of its cage, wings thrashing.

Jamie and Eddie ran into William's office. Cavanaugh followed and slammed the door.

“Poison gas!” His voice was barely audible amid the alarm as he recalled how much force the vapor had been under. “We can't stay here! It'll seep under the door!”

He pivoted toward a wall of shelves that had an array of imposing law books on them. After yanking down a book on the right of the middle shelf, he flipped a lever, then tugged at the entire section of shelves. The section was on rollers. It swung smoothly out, revealing a circular metal staircase that led down.

Jamie and Eddie looked surprised.

“William got so paranoid about his security, he insisted on another way to leave his office!” Cavanaugh flicked a switch that illuminated the stairs and motioned for Jamie and Eddie to hurry down.

About to follow, he balked and stared back at the closed office door. The gray haze was seeping under it.

Unable to subdue his protector's instincts, he lunged for the desk, grabbing the phone.

“What are you doing?” Eddie shouted from the staircase.

The building's security guards
, Cavanaugh thought.
The police.
The explosions put them on heightened alert. The alarm will bring them to this office. They'll burst in.

They'll breathe the gas and die.

William's phone system had an emergency button that directed a call to the lobby's security desk.

“What?” a voice asked quickly, sounding harried.

Pressing the phone hard against his ear, holding a hand over his other ear, Cavanaugh thought he heard sirens and urgent voices in the background. “There's an alarm on the thirtieth floor!”

“We know! A team's going up there!”

Cavanaugh stared again at the crack beneath the closed door. More of the gray haze seeped under it. “Don't go into the office! It's filled with poison gas!”

He slammed down the phone and charged through the opening in the wall. The metal staircase echoed as he pulled at the section of shelves. Closing the barrier, he heard a latch click shut. Then he ran down the circular stairs, turning repeatedly, the echo rumbling.

Jamie and Eddie waited at the bottom.

A dead end.

“How do we—”

“That latch on the right!”

Eddie yanked it and pulled.

A section of the wall moved toward him. The light in the stairwell revealed a janitor's closet.

They closed the wall, unlocked the closet door, and peered out, checking the corridor.

After the dim light in the stairwell, the overhead fluorescents seemed bright when they emerged from the closet.

“The police will search the building,” Jamie said.

“And emergency-response teams,” Cavanaugh agreed. “Assuming they're all genuine.”

He eased a stairwell door open. From below, footsteps and voices rumbled upward.

“We can't go that way.”

11

I always get the shit duty
, the fireman thought. His name was Ben Gutowski. Laboring up the stairs in complete firefighting gear, he felt sweat soaking his clothes. His legs ached.

Would you rather be in an elevator?
he asked himself.
Suppose this is another World Trade Center attack. Suppose more bombs go off or rockets or whatever caused the explosion. Suppose the building collapses. How'd you like to be in a friggin’ elevator then? And what's this alert about poison gas? You want to be trapped in an elevator with
that
? Maybe the captain did you a favor.

Breathing hard, Ben reached another stairwell door. Twenty-ninth floor. Below him, other firemen in full gear struggled upward, checking other floors. He pressed his hand against the door, feeling for heat. He did the same to the doorknob. Normal. He put his oxygen mask over his face, breathed, and opened the door. Assuming he didn't encounter a fire and his air-testing meter didn't detect any gas, he would then take off his oxygen mask and lumber along the corridor, making sure nobody was in danger.

Bang! Crash! Clatter!

Elvis Presley sang “Blue Hawaii.”

Surprise made Ben almost drop his ax. Ahead, a janitor took a wet mop from a pail and swabbed the corridor while a radio played music through the partially open door of a maintenance closet.

“What are
you
doing here?” Ben demanded.

12

While Elvis crooned, Cavanaugh peered up from mopping the floor. His gray janitor's coveralls covered the blood on his clothes and gave him the rumpled look of somebody who'd worked too many years on the night shift. The small radio was a bonus.

“What does it look like I'm doing?” Cavanaugh answered, annoyed. The fireman appeared genuine, but after the night's threats, it was foolish to make assumptions. “And what are
you
doing here?” He almost let go of his mop in apparent sudden realization. “Wait a minute, is there a fire?”

“Didn't you hear the explosion?”

“Explosion?”

“On the fortieth floor.”

“
What?
”

“And poison gas,” the exhausted fireman said.

“Poison . . . Jesus, don't tell me it's terrorists!”

“We don't know
what
it is. You need to get out of here.”

“Buddy, I don't need convincing.”

“Anybody else on this floor?”

“Nobody.”

“You're positive.”

“I've been up and down this corridor for the past hour. The place is deserted.”

A bell sounded. Down the corridor, an elevator opened. A policeman charged out.

“This floor's clear!” the fireman shouted to be heard above the music. “I'm getting this janitor out of here.”

“On the double! We don't know what else might happen!” The policeman ducked back into the elevator. Its doors closed.

“You heard him,” the fireman said. “Go!”

“I'm outta here,” Cavanaugh said.

He and the fireman hurried toward the stairwell door.

“Hold it, I forgot my coat,” Cavanaugh said.

“Hurry!” The fireman turned and yelled down the stairs toward where footsteps and voices struggled upward, “Evacuee coming down!”

“I'm right behind you!” Cavanaugh yelled. “Check the other floors. Poison gas? God help anybody who's in the building.”

Breathing hard, the fireman climbed to the next level. Simultaneously, Cavanaugh opened the maintenance room's door all the way. There, amid boxes of cleaning supplies, Jamie and Eddie waited. Only one other set of coveralls had been in the room. They'd been too big for Jamie, so Eddie wore them.

Jamie grabbed a box, holding it as if it contained something important.

Clutching his mop as if he was too startled to realize it was in his hand, Cavanaugh led the way through the stairwell door. Lights glared. Above, the door to the thirtieth floor banged shut as the fireman went in. Below, other firemen climbed and opened doors.

Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurried down.

“One of your men ordered us out of here,” he told the next fireman, four floors down. “I don't understand what's happening.”

“Just do what he told you.” The fireman breathed hard from the climb and the weight of his equipment. “Get out of the building. Evacuees coming down!” he yelled to his team farther below.

As Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurriedly descended, the clatter of their footsteps added to those of the emergency team.

“Evacuees!” a fireman yelled to other men below him. “Are you hurt?” he asked Cavanaugh.

“No. Just scared.”

“I hear you,” the fireman said. Putting his oxygen mask on, he braced himself and opened a door.

They hurried lower. Passing emergency workers, breathing hoarsely, they reached the fifth floor, the fourth . . .

A few seconds after they passed the lobby door, it banged open. A fireman charged up the stairs, shouting into his two-way radio, “Affirmative! Poison gas! The thirtieth floor! Make sure the building's empty!”

With his attention focused on the upper floors, the fireman failed to see them below.

13

GARAGE LEVEL TWO, the sign said. Cavanaugh cracked the door open and listened. Hearing only stillness, he opened the door farther and studied the few cars. In an emergency that required a building to be evacuated, it was standard procedure for the teams to start at the bottom, moving upward. Subsequently, they assumed areas they'd checked didn't need to be revisited.

As he stepped into the parking garage, the overhead lights made everything a sickly yellow.

“Over there.” Eddie pointed past three drab-colored Tauruses that Global Protective Services used.

Eddie's car was equally anonymous.

“Let's see if it explodes.”

They crouched behind the farthest car and put their hands over their ears—except for Eddie who could protect only one ear while he pressed an ignition button on his car's remote control. When the car started, Eddie relaxed. “Well, at least we don't need to worry about
that
.”

“But there might still be a bomb,” Jamie said.

Eddie agreed. “The attack team would have seen me drive in here. They'd have had plenty of time to hide one somewhere other than attaching it to the engine.”

Cautious, they approached the car. Its nostril-stinging exhaust made Eddie press another button on the remote, shutting off the engine.

In the smothering silence, Cavanaugh reached under his sport coat, felt behind the pouch that contained his spare ammunition magazine, and unsheathed a small flashlight, another item from his bug-out bag. For its size—as long and wide as his index finger—it produced surprisingly intense light.

Jamie took out hers, also.

They knelt and aimed the beams behind the wheels and at every area of the car's undercarriage. Then Cavanaugh went to one side of the car while Jamie went to the other. He aimed his light through a window toward the rear of the interior while Jamie did the same from the opposite side. The idea was to concentrate on small areas, progressing from one tiny space to another in an ordered way. Cavanaugh had difficulty keeping his flashlight steady when he knew that at any moment the door to the parking area might bang open and what came through might not be an emergency team.

Through the windows, they looked for anything that seemed out of place. But the chances were, a bomb wouldn't be that easy to notice. Sometimes, the only indication was a slight shadow.

The dashboard. The steering column. The brake. The accelerator.

What they mostly searched for was a wire. When a door was opened, the wire would tug a concealed igniter, and the car would explode. The extremely thin wire might have a non-reflective coating that made it difficult to detect.

Cavanaugh's mouth felt dry. “See anything?”

“No,” Jamie answered.

“Time for the game.” Cavanaugh referred to “rock, paper, and scissors.” He and Eddie made a fist and shook it three times. When they stopped, they had three options: to leave the fist closed (rock), to open the hand flat (paper), or to hold out the first two fingers (scissors).

Cavanaugh's scissors cut Eddie's paper. “Okay,” he told Jamie and Eddie, “Get back behind the far vehicle while I open the doors.”

“You didn't play the game with
me
,” Jamie noted.

Cavanaugh studied her.

“Fine,” he said.

They held up their fists and shook them three times.

Jamie's paper covered Cavanaugh's rock.

“I don't want you to do this,” Cavanaugh said.

“I don't want to, either. But I'm part of the team, and I'm going to risk my life the same as everybody else.”

“Yeah, you're tough,” Eddie said.

Cavanaugh had never understood the expression “heart in my throat” until now.

“Do it slowly,” he said. “Keep looking for wires.”

The speed of his pulse made him sick as he and Eddie crouched behind the farthest car. He opened his mouth and pressed his hands over his ears to minimize the impact of an explosion. But even with his ears muffled, he was sure he heard Jamie open the doors.

A few instants lasted forever.

Then Jamie was standing in front of him, looking terrified but proud.

“Okay,” he said, exhaling. “My turn. I'll check inside.”

As Jamie and Eddie crouched behind the far vehicle, Cavanaugh aimed his small flashlight and cautiously leaned into the car, peering up under the dashboard. He checked under the seats.

Nothing looked suspicious.

As Jamie and Eddie rejoined him, he reached into his jacket pocket and came out with something else from the bug-out bag: a zip tie.

Without needing to be told what came next, Eddie unlocked the Taurus's trunk but kept his hands on the lid so that it opened only a crack. While Jamie aimed her flashlight, Cavanaugh inserted the zip tie into the crack between the lid and the car's chassis and drew it from one side to the other.

What he felt for was a taut wire. All an enemy needed to do was pick the trunk's lock, put a bomb inside, attach a wire to the bomb's detonator, close the lid until only the enemy's hand fitted inside, hook the wire to the inside of the lid, and then close the lid.

The twist tie was pliant enough that if it encountered a wire, it would bend without putting pressure on the wire. Sweat trickled down Cavanaugh's face. His hand wanted to shake, but he kept it steady. Five minutes later, he nodded to Eddie, who raised the lid slightly higher, while Cavanaugh and Jamie aimed their flashlights inside.

Finally, the trunk was all the way open. They searched among weapons and an armored vest, and to their relief found nothing that looked like a bomb.

Security specialists were paranoid about being held prisoner in the trunks of their cars. One of the first things an operator did when acquiring a vehicle was to inspect the trunk's interior and rig its latch so that it could easily be tripped from the inside. As a further precaution, a weapon and escape tools were hidden behind the trunk's lining, and air holes were drilled, tubes leading from them to the vehicle's interior. Finally, the best agents had a secret stash of something else. Smiling, Eddie now displayed it, peeling off the lining on the right side of the trunk.