Thornton improvised, reaching across the bookcase for the pair of ring binders whose spines extended from the edge of the top shelf. A gentle nudge sent them toppling from the bookcase, dimpling the tent wall before thumping against the floor, one after the other, motion and sounds that might be mistaken for a man dropping to his knees.
Logan responded with gunshots that sounded like thunder in the confined chamber. Hands held tight over his ears, Thornton watched nine holes appear in rapid succession in the tent wall by the ring binders’ landing spot. The laboratory wall became a haze of plaster dust. The two uppermost bullet holes in the tent combined to form a slit through which Thornton glimpsed Logan, a clean-cut, sinewy young man, kneeling in a practiced firing position. He wore a navy blue eight-point police cap with shiny black visor and a black nylon patrolman’s jacket. His blue turtleneck collar was embroidered with gold letters, NYPD. A distinctive black SSE5000 radio — custom-made for the New York Police Department by Motorola — clung to his belt. Like his navy blue whipcord trousers and black oxford shoes, every element in the uniform looked authentic. Except it was brand-new, all of it. Meaning Logan could be a member of New York’s Finest who’d recently been to the outfitters, or he was a killer in an NYPD costume procured in a haste that precluded a few washer and dryer cycles. Whoever he was, he exited the shot-up tent and, batting his way through a cloud of plaster dust, rounded the corner into the gap where Thornton stood.
Thornton backed up, flattening himself against the wall on the side of the bookcase facing away from Logan. He held his breath rather than risk inhaling and coughing the plaster dust. When he sensed that Logan was within reach, Thornton sprang, swinging the syringe sidearm. He drove the needle through the purported cop’s pants and into his thigh, then hammered the red plunger, hopefully sending the drug flowing into the femoral artery, the main supply line of blood to the lower leg.
Surprised, Logan leaped backward. Seeing the plastic tube stuck in his quadriceps, he smirked and said, “Nice try.”
O’Clair had said that the anesthetic acted instantly, but he was an electrophysiologist, not an anesthesiologist. And injecting the femoral artery had been Thornton’s idea. Maybe a shoulder or biceps would have been better. Regardless, Logan was still standing, leveling a stout Glock 17 still containing as many as six bullets.
“You’re dead,” he said to Thornton.
“In point of fact, you are, or will be shortly,” came Mallery’s voice from behind the tent. “Without the antidote.”
Keeping the gun locked on Thornton, Logan looked in her direction. “Antidote?”
“If you want it, you need to tell us who sent you,” she said.
As Logan looked in her direction, Thornton inched a hand toward the shelves, planning to capitalize on her diversion by flinging a book at Logan’s face, then rushing him to take him down.
Logan glanced back at him, his eyes narrowing. “Is this some kind of joke or—?” He fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes, out cold before his body landed.
“A stall tactic, actually,” Thornton said. To Mallery, he added, “And a good one.”
Peeking around the corner of the tent, she shook her head. “Beginner’s luck.”
Thornton stepped toward the fallen man with the intent of dislodging the Glock. But he heard two hurried sets of footsteps in the hallway, accompanied by now-familiar sets of squeaks and clanks. The backup unit. Thornton reversed course.
“We need to get out of here,” he whispered, rounding the corner to the back of the tent. Stepping past Mallery, he unfastened the latch securing the lower window sash.
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “This is the fourth floor.”
“There’s no other way out.” Balancing expediency and stealth, he raised the heavy window. The influx of cold air numbed him. “Out alive, that is.”
Something impacted the door to the lab with a crunch of splintered wood. A battering ram, Thornton guessed.
Climbing through the window, he looked over his shoulder to find Mallery directly behind him, her look of resignation hardening into one of resolve.
He stepped out onto a steel ledge extending from the base of the window by just four or five inches. Clinging to the building’s icy metal skin, he rotated his feet so that his toes pointed away from each other. Mallery lowered herself onto the ledge beside him, tentatively, until confident it would support both of them.
Thornton pressed the window shut, hoping to add a few seconds before the backup team considered that he and Mallery had resorted to such a foolish escape route. Through the glass he heard the door to the lab fly inward. The illuminated Exit sign in the hallway cast shadows of the men hurrying into the lab.
Ducking out of their sight, Thornton told Mallery, “Two of them.”
“Better than eight.”
The bitter air caused her to tremble but added a healthy pink to her face. Until she looked down. “Shit,” she said.
Thornton shared her assessment. “We can do this,” he said, clasping her forearm. He led her toward the next window, inches at a time. Then he reconsidered. “I’m not so sure what the point is, actually. Smash through the next window so we can be sitting ducks in that lab instead?”
Mallery nodded. “But what choice is there?”
Frosty wind sliced through the gaps between the buttons on Thornton’s shirtfront as he studied the two-lane 120th Street, the sidewalks populated by a dozen or so pedestrians, none appearing to notice the man and woman up on the ledge. A taxi sped down the mostly deserted street. Parked parallel to the sidewalk directly below was a brown UPS delivery truck. The boxy truck’s translucent white roof, meant to admit light to the cargo area, looked to be constructed of plastic malleable enough to provide some give. But even if they could jump onto it and keep themselves from bouncing to the street, the initial impact would seriously damage them — best-case.
As if reading Thornton’s mind, Mallery said, “Dropping forty feet means hitting the truck at thirty-four miles per hour.”
“Yeah, let’s not do that.” A rank gust of wind shifted his focus to an open boxcar-size dumpster on the sidewalk below, brimming with black plastic bags full of garbage. Pointing, he said, “Smells like the other day’s manicotti, which would be a lot better to land on than, say, bottles and cans.”
Mallery indicated a trio of young women descending the steps from Columbia Teacher’s College, directly across 120th Street. “How about we call to them, and they get the real police?”
The women turned toward Broadway. In seconds, they would be gone. Leaving no one else in sight.
Thornton said, “Sometime in the next month, if we’re lucky, homicide detectives would determine that the lobby guard was duped by men impersonating cops who had long since shot us and gotten away.”
From inside the lab came an assortment of crashes, the Faraday tent being torn down. The members of the backup team made their way closer to the window. Mallery stared at the trash bags below, her reluctance appearing to yield to a grim acceptance.
Thornton pressed his palms against the building and tensed his knees in preparation to spring off, all the while hoping some turn of events would prevent the need to do it.
“It’s important to try and land feet first, then roll so that you absorb the impact with your shoulder,” he said.
“How do you know this?”
“News story.” Best to keep the rest of the details to himself, he thought. The story’s subject, an MTA electrical worker, had jumped a similar distance from an unstable scaffold to a patch of grass at the edge of Union Square. He didn’t roll, consequently breaking both legs, his jaw, his nose, and an orbital socket. “I’ll go first.”
His reasoning, that he wanted to make sure the trash bags would give sufficiently, was curtailed by a hoarse male voice from within the lab: “They couldn’t have gone out the window, could they?”