He did not know what to do. His thoughts were all jumbled. People were injured and he was OK. Maybe he should try to help people. Maybe he’d find Donald. They must have evacuated the building. They would have got everyone out before it came down, for sure. Donald was back there somewhere, maybe wandering around looking for him. If they could find each other, they could go to a café or a hotel and still have their meeting…
A fire truck blasted past him, almost running him down, then was gone in a blaze of red flashing lights and sirens and honking.
‘Bastards!’ he shouted. ‘You fuckers, you almost killed-’
A group of black women caked grey, one carrying a satchel, one rubbing the back of her dreadlocked head, glided towards him.
‘Excuse me?’ Ronnie said, stepping into their path.
‘Just keep going,’ one of them replied.
‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘Don’t go that way!’
More emergency vehicles blasted past. The ground crunched. Paper snow beneath his feet, Ronnie realized. The paperless society, he thought cynically. So much for the bloody paperless society. The whole road was covered in grey paper. The sky was thick with falling sheets, zigzagging down, plain, typed, shredded, every shape and size you could imagine. Like a billion filing cabinets and waste bins had tipped their contents from a cloud.
He stopped for a moment, trying to think clearly. But the only thought that came into his head was, Why today? Why fucking today?
Why did this shit have to happen today?
New York was under some kind of terrorist attack, that much was blindingly obvious. A dim voice inside his head told him he should be scared, but he wasn’t, he was just fucking angry.
He marched forward, crunching on paper, past one bewildered person after another coming from different directions. Then, as he approached the mayhem of the plaza, he was stopped by two NYPD cops. The first was short with cropped fair hair; his right hand was resting on the butt of his Glock, while his left was holding a radio to his ear. He was shouting a report into it one moment and then listening the next. The other, much taller cop had shoulders like a padded-up footballer player, a pockmarked face and an expression that was part apologetic, part don’t fuck with me, we’re all fucked enough.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the tall cop said. ‘You can’t go past here – we need the space right now.’
‘I have a business meeting,’ Ronnie said. ‘I – I – ’ he pointed – ‘I have to see-’
‘I think you’d better reschedule. I don’t think anyone’s meeting anyone right now.’
‘The thing is, I have a flight to the UK tonight. I really need-’
‘Sir – I think you’re gonna find your meeting and your flight have been cancelled.’
Then the ground began rumbling. There was a terrible cracking sound. The two cops turned in unison and looked up, straight up the silver-grey wall of the North Tower. It was moving.
27
The lift was moving. Abby felt the floor pressing against her feet. It was rising, jerkily, as if someone was hauling it up by hand. Then it stopped sharply. She heard a thud, following by the sloshing of liquid.
Shit.
Her boot had fallen over. Her latrine boot.
The lifted swayed suddenly, as if it had been given a massive push, and boomed into the side of the shaft, throwing her off her feet, against a wall, then slamming her on to the wet floor. Jesus.
There was a massive bang on the roof. Something struck it with the force of a sledgehammer. The sound echoed, hurting her ears. There was another bang. Then another. As she tried to scramble to her feet, the lift lurched violently sideways, striking the shaft with such force she could feel the shockwave running through the steel walls. Then it tilted, throwing her across the small space, thumping her into the opposite wall.
Then another bang on the roof.
Christ, no.
Was he up there? Ricky? Trying to smash his way into the lift to get her?
It rose again a few inches, then swung wildly again. She whimpered in terror. Pulled out her phone, pressed the cursor. The light came on and she could see a small indent in the roof.
Then another bang and the indent grew larger. Dust motes swarmed crazily.
Then another bang. Another. Another. More dust.
Then silence. A long silence. A different sound now. A dull thudding. It was her heart. Pounding. Boomf… boomf… boomf.
The roaring sound in her ears of her blood coursing. Like a wild ocean racing inside her.
The light on her phone went off. She pressed the cursor and it came back on again. She was thinking. Desperately thinking. What could she use as a weapon when he broke through? She had a canister of pepper spray in her bag, but that would only stall him for a few moments – maybe a couple of minutes if she could get it in his eyes. She needed something to knock him down.
Her boot was the only thing. She picked it up, aware of the wet, soft leather, and touched the Cuban heel. It felt reassuringly hard. She could conceal it behind her, wait until his face appeared, then swing it up. Surprise him.
Her brain was all over the place with questions. Did he know she was in here for sure? Had he been waiting for her on the staircase, then somehow stopped the lift when he realized she had taken it?
The silence continued. Just that fast thud of her heartbeat. Like a boxing glove pounding against a punchball.
Then through her fear she felt a flash of anger.
So close, so damned close!
So tantalizingly close to my dreams!
I have to get out of this. Somehow I have to get out of this!
Suddenly the lift began to rise slowly again, before stopping with another sharp jerk.
The grinding sound of metal against metal.
Then the angular tip of a crowbar screeched in through the crack between the doors.
28
The grinding whine of the winch. The rattle of the idling diesel of the R &K 24-Hour Rescue tow truck.
Lisa batted away a whole bloody cloud of flies. ‘Piss off!’ she shouted at them. ‘Just go away, will you!’
The rattle turned into a roar as the steel hawser tightened and the guy in the cab accelerated, giving more power to the winch.
She was intrigued to know what would happen next. To find out what the car was doing there in the first place. No one drove three klicks down a dirt track and then into a river by accident, MJ said. Then he’d added, ‘Not even a woman driver,’ for which he had received a kick on the shin from her.
One of the local Geelong cops who had turned up, the shorter, calmer of the two, told them the car had probably been used in a crime and then dumped. Whoever had put it here hadn’t reckoned on the drought causing the water level to drop so much.
A fly landed on her cheek. She slapped her face, but it was too fast for her. Time was different for flies, MJ had told her that once. One second to a human was like ten seconds to a fly. It meant that the fly saw everything as if in slow motion. It had all the time in the world to get away from your hand.
MJ knew all about flies. Not surprising, she thought, if you lived in Melbourne and liked to go out in the bush. You’d become an expert faster than you could ever have believed possible. They bred in dung, he had told her last time they went camping, which meant she would no longer eat anything once a fly had landed on it.
Lisa stared at the white cop car with its blue and white chequered band, and the white police van in the same livery, both with their racks of blue and red roof lights. There were two police divers in wet suits and flippers, masks on their heads, standing down below her in the shrubbery at the edge of the water, watching the taut steel hawser steadily rising out of the water.