Above him, Amanda yelled, "Over here! The surveillance room!"
Balenger surged up through the hatch. He ran to the surveillance room and opened its trapdoor. Smoke made him cough. As it cleared, the goggles showed him that the staircase had been blown apart three floors down. The twisted steel remnants vibrated, swaying. Far below, there were flames.
Balenger raised the walkie-talkie. "If you're talking about the metal box you strapped to Amanda, we did find it. I threw it down the surveillance room's staircase. A fire's trying to get started down there."
"Tomorrow, I planned to burn this place to the ground anyhow. The coins are worthless to me."
The abrupt change of topic made Balenger uneasy. "The coins?"
"A fortune, but I couldn't use them to pay the taxes on this place," the voice said bitterly. "I went to different coin dealers in different cities. Never more than a couple of coins at a time. Never the priceless ones. But you need to sell a lot of seven-hundred-dollar coins to try to pay fifty thousand dollars in property taxes. One day, in Philadelphia, a dealer I'd never met looked at what I offered and said, 'So you're the guy with all the double eagles. The other dealers are talking about you.' And that was the last coin I dared try to sell.''
Why is he talking so much? Balenger wondered. He's stalling for time. What's he up to?
Abruptly, Balenger recalled what he'd said to Ronnie seconds earlier: Ithrew it down the surveillance room's staircase. A fire's trying to get started down there. Jesus, I told him where I am.
Balenger charged from the open trapdoor, lunging toward the bedroom. Something exploded behind him, but there wasn't any shrapnel. What the blast sent was a flash of heat that filled the surveillance room. The detonator next to the trapdoor, Balenger realized. Ronnie triggered it by remote control. Smoke blossomed.
Amanda and Vinnie rushed ahead of him. But Vinnie's direction made it clear that he didn't understand what caused the small blast.
"Vinnie, get away from-"
In the bedroom, Vinnie stopped and turned.
"The trapdoor!" Balenger shouted. "Get away from-"
Stunned, Vinnie glanced down at where he'd stopped.
The trapdoor.
The detonator.
The blast was small but deafening. It sent a flash up Vinnie's legs. His jeans burst into flames. Screaming, he fell to the floor, swatting at his pants.
Balenger grabbed the bedspread and flailed at Vinnie's legs, desperately smothering the fire. Vinnie's screams continued.
In rapid succession, detonators exploded throughout the penthouse. Balenger saw their flashes, saw flames in the surveillance room and the medical room.
"A fire extinguisher!" Amanda yelled. "The kitchen!" She ran through the surveillance room, dodging the fire.
Balenger grabbed a decorative pitcher from a bureau and hurried into the bathroom. He twisted a knob on the sink, but no water came out. The electricity's off! The pump isn't working! he remembered. He scooped water from the toilet bowl, ran into the medical room, and dumped the pitcher onto the flames. A shotgun blast tore another hole in the floor, but by then Balenger was racing back to the bathroom. He yanked off the toilet-tank lid and scooped water. This time, he didn't enter the medical room but stopped at its entrance, hurling the water onto the flames. The fire hissed and shrank. The toilet tank again. He scooped out all the water he could get and ran to the medical room. Now, when he threw the water, the flames went out.
No more water. How am I going to-
He heard the spray of a fire extinguisher, Amanda attacking the blaze in another room. But she wasn't in the dining room where flames rose also. Water. Need to find more water. He stared at the open elevator in the exercise room. Ignoring the risk of a shotgun blast, he raced to the elevator and scooped up the five urine bottles that Ronnie had tauntingly returned to them.
Wrong move, you son of a bitch, Balenger thought, tossing urine onto the flames. The ammonia stench made him gag. He dumped more urine. The fire sizzled. A third bottle. A fourth. Drenched by piss, the fire retreated. The fifth bottle put it out.
Another shotgun blast tore through the floor. Running, Balenger felt a chunk of wood sting his face. He found Amanda in the library, where she frantically worked the extinguisher, putting out a blaze. She hurried to the surveillance room, spewed a white cloud onto the flames there, and put them out, also. But an instant later, the cloud stopped, the extinguisher empty.
The floor erupted from another blast, but by then, Balenger tugged Amanda into the bedroom. They crouched next to Vinnie against the outside wall. Theoretically, it was the safest spot-above Danata's living room, the door of which remained barricaded. Smoke drifted around them. Vinnie's charred jeans were stuck to him, the flesh blackened, leaking fluid. Third-degree burns. Balenger had seen plenty of them in Iraq.
"Hurts," Vinnie said.
Balenger knew that Vinnie was going to hurt a lot worse when his nerves recovered from the shock they'd received. Soon, he would be in agony.
"Hurts." Despite the green of Balenger's night-vision goggles, Vinnie's face was ashen.
"I know," Balenger said. "Can you walk?"
"Only one way to find out." Wincing, Vinnie motioned for Balenger to pull him up.
But Vinnie's legs were swollen. His knees refused to bend. Weight on them made him gasp. Balenger feared he'd pass out.
"Okay, not a good idea." Balenger eased him back to the floor. "Amanda." He was surprised to see that she still held the empty fire extinguisher. "Go quietly to the surveillance room and throw the extinguisher as far as possible. Into the library, if you can. But wait until I'm at the door to the medical room.".
"What are you going to-"
"Help with the pain."
Balenger went to the right, toward the medical room. Its candles glowed dimly, surrounded by smoke. He nodded to Amanda, who hurled the fire extinguisher in the opposite direction toward the library. As soon as he heard it crash onto the floor, distracting Ronnie, Balenger shifted into the medical room and reached through the broken glass door of the cabinet. He grabbed a syringe and the vial of morphine, then darted back into the bedroom an instant before pellets exploded from the floor.
He knelt beside Vinnie. "I'm giving you only enough to dull the pain, not put you out."
Vinnie nodded, biting his lip. "Just hurry and do it."
Balenger exposed Vinnie's left wrist and gave him the injection.
Vinnie's face remained rigid with pain. Slowly, it relaxed. "Yes."
55
The smoke hovered.
"It's thicker." Amanda coughed. "I thought all the flames were out."
"Not down there." Balenger pointed toward the open trapdoor in the surveillance room. He stepped warily toward it. Three levels below, the flames were stronger. The only thing he could think to do was shut the trapdoor and lock it.
Surprising him, Amanda rushed in with towels she'd soaked in the remaining water in the toilet tank. She pressed them over the edges of the trapdoor, sealing off the smoke.
With the electricity off and the heating system no longer engaged, the penthouse had rapidly cooled. Amanda hugged herself. Glancing down at her bare feet and the nightgown that gave little protection to her legs, Balenger said, "Maybe I can do something about that."
At the door to the medical room, he stared at Cora's body. I'm sorry, he thought. He gripped Cora's hands and pulled. There were so many holes in the floor, Ronnie would surely hear, he worried. But he needed to keep pulling. He eased Cora's body into the bedroom.
"Here," he said, taking off Cora's shoes and socks. Cora's feet had the terrible coldness of death. "You and she are about the same size. These ought to fit you."
Amanda gazed at what he offered. Madness became normalcy. She took the shoes and socks. "But not the pants." They were soaked with blood. "I won't put on the pants."