In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close. Damn, damn close.
And now she was texting him!
Gary stared at the screen again, still not completely convinced it wasn’t a mirage. There was probably some advice about what to do next, play hard to get or something, but he didn’t give a shit. She was hot and she liked him. Told him he was talented and funny, and it was like his Brooklyn dream was finally coming true and—
That’s when Gary heard it. It was a weird sound. It seemed to be coming from above him, on the ceiling of the stairwell. It was a little whirring sound followed by a couple of metallic clicks.
He looked up as he heard it again. It seemed like it was coming from inside the rectangular AC duct above him. Then there were more of the sounds. A lot more. “What the hell?” Gary said, standing. It sounded like someone had dumped a box of Chiclets into the aluminum duct, only weirder.
“Freddie?” Gary said, keying his radio.
“What now?” said his perpetually surly bastard of a boss, who was outside hosing the sidewalk.
“I don’t know. There’s something weird up here. I’m on the sixth floor in stairwell C.”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know, but you should come up.”
“This better be good,” Freddie replied.
Chapter 57
The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as they were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.
“Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.
The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.
“Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.
“It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.
Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.
“Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”
“No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.
“What are you talking about?”
“I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”
“Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”
“No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.
“I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”
“Well, hurry up already, would you please?” Mr. Beckett said, going to the aluminum blinds on the ambulance window that faced the target.
Chapter 58
I immediately spotted the commissioner and the acting mayor, Priscilla Atkinson, in attendance when I entered the huge, crowded conference room. As I glanced up to the nosebleed section of the amphitheater seating, I was happy to see Brooklyn Kale and Arturo and Doyle and climbed up and sat down next to them.
Down on the floor in the center of the room, I could see my new fair-haired leader, Lieutenant Bryce Miller, going over his notes. I was almost glad I’d been taken off as case lead. It was high time to allow another Christian to be fed to the lions.
Someone dimmed the lighting, and a satellite image of the Queens warehouse from yesterday’s raid appeared. Bryce had just stepped to the podium and was still adjusting the microphone when the conference room doors burst open and two uniformed cops rushed in.
One of them made a beeline for the commissioner and whispered in his ear. I sat up straight when the puzzled, annoyed look on the commissioner’s face became one of intense concern.
“Ms. Mayor, everyone, excuse me,” the commissioner said, standing as the lights came back on.
Brooklyn and Arturo and Doyle and I all looked at each other with the same wide-eyed expression.
“Good grief. What the hell now?” Brooklyn said.
“Something has come up,” the commissioner said. “I’ll explain in a minute, but right now I’m going to need everyone to please stand and calmly head for the stairwells and proceed outside.”
He cleared his throat as everyone started freaking out.
“Quiet, now, everybody, okay? Head for the exit immediately. We have a problem. A red terrorist alert has been issued. We need to evacuate the building.”
Chapter 59
“I told you, you stupid bastard,” Mr. Beckett said from the window, where he looked at the building through binoculars. “They’re coming out now! They’re evacuating! Blow it now!”
“One more minute,” said Mr. Joyce.
“No! Now!” Mr. Beckett cried. He watched as a truck pulled up in front of the building and a guy leaped out with a black Lab in tow.
“It’s the bomb squad! Do it now!”
“One second,” said Mr. Joyce, clicking away at the keyboard like a jazz piano soloist. “Just a couple more adjustments.”
Mr. Beckett tore a schematic in half and kicked the cooler.
“You’ve adjusted it enough! It’s now or never!”
Mr. Joyce ignored him, eyes on the screen, clicking buttons like mad.
Mr. Beckett looked through the binocs again, then started banging his head against the ambulance’s metal wall.
“Blow it,” he whimpered. “Blow it.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Mr. Joyce said. “It’s all about the placement, otherwise it’ll do cosmetic damage at best.”
“I don’t give a shit! Blow the damn thing now!”
“Fine,” said Mr. Joyce. “You win. Just so you know, it’s not ready.”
“Blow it!”
“First say that it’s your call,” said Mr. Joyce. “I don’t want you blaming this on me later.”
“It’s my call! It’s my call!” Mr. Beckett cried.
Mr. Joyce set off the detonators on the eighty pounds of plastic explosives with a soft press of his thumb.
Chapter 60
We were in the stairwell, nervous, feeling as powerless as schoolchildren in a teacher-led fire drill. It wasn’t the weird sound we suddenly heard that was that concerning. It was the hard shudder that a moment later came up through the ground and wrenched through the stairs and walls into the marrow of our bones.