He desperately needed to call Andrea, tell her what was going on, and somehow convince her that she didn’t need to worry.
But his office phone, like the one in the conference room, was dead. Jamie looked out his office window, which faced east. If he craned his neck, he could almost see the corner of his block, off in the distance beyond Spring Garden Street. Just two houses down from the corner were Andrea and his baby boy.
Whatever had happened this morning, Jamie knew it would be many, many hours before he would see his wife and son again. The police interrogations alone would probably keep him here—or down at the Roundhouse—until late tonight.
He just wished the police could be called, so they could arrive, so that they could get it all over with already.
Look at me, he thought. The new daddy. Gone for barely an hour, and already nervous as hell.
Nervous daddy.
Wait a minute.
Jamie saw his soft leather briefcase on the desk. Was it still in there?
It would make all the difference.
The remaining employees split up. If they had any chance of calling an ambulance—for Stuart or David or both, even though Stuart’s chances of making it through this without brain damage were next to nil—they were going to have to find their way to another floor. That much was clear.
Nichole announced that they’d be checking the elevators, and it took Roxanne a second to realize that they meant her, too. Jamie had already slipped out of the conference room to find a phone or sit behind his desk and cry or something. Ethan was still AWOL. Molly left a second later, most likely to the bathroom to puke. Amy couldn’t blame her. She had only watched her boss take a bullet to the head, and she felt queasy.
Of course, that left Amy to lock the doors to the conference room, leaving the guns where they were. Let the police sort it out.
It also left her to check the fire escape doors. You know, the ones allegedly rigged with a chemical nerve agent.
Sometimes, Amy felt like the only adult in this company.
There were only two fire escapes in the building; both were accessible only from outside the office. The thirty-sixth floor was a square carved up into two separate offices; their company dominated the floor in a U shape. The remaining sliver was occupied by a local magazine called Philadelphia Living—shopping, restaurants, parties, and all of that good stuff. Amy was a subscriber, even though she didn’t know anybody who could afford the getaways, clothes, and jewelry highlighted in the magazine every month. It was lifestyle porn: You’ll never have it as good as this. Masturbate to the pages, if it makes you feel better.
She walked halfway down the hall that connected the conference room with David’s office, then turned left. A security door opened up directly onto a short corridor. Make a left again, and you’d be staring at the north fire escape door.
Which Amy was doing now.
Staring at it.
Should she chance it?
David had told them some wild things this morning. There was not much she could prove right now, except for one thing: that the orange juice and champagne contained some kind of poison, which had killed poor Stuart. Why would David lie about something like putting sarin in the fire towers?
Because it was silly, that’s why. Poison’s one thing; rigging a chemical bomb is another. This building has security up the wa-zoo. Like somebody wouldn’t notice a bomb rigged to a fire escape door? Somebody leaves a brown-bag lunch on a step in the fire tower and hazmat-suited Homeland Security folks would probably be descending on the scene within twenty minutes.
So if the very idea was ridiculous, why was she nervous about opening the door?
Go ahead, Amy.
Go ahead and do it.
She put her hand on the cool steel, as if she could sense by touch. Oh yeah, clearly there’s a sarin bomb behind this door.
The problem was, Ethan recognized the sensation.
His throat had closed up once before, halfway around the world.
Before coming to work for David’s company, he’d been in the military. Special Forces. Most recently Afghanistan, November 2001, as part of Operation We Think Bin Laden’s Here So We’re Going to Bomb You Back to the Stone Age, and he and his crew had been duking it out with some obscure Afghan warlord in the desert south of Kandahar. A warlord who just so happened to have a few canisters of ricin lying around. A skirmish went wrong; Ethan and his fellow gunmen found themselves tumbling into a medieval-era sandpit, and the warlord—some screw-head named Muhammad Gur—danced around the edge of the pit, throwing in his precious canisters of ricin, cackling.
Ricin, Ethan later read, was manufactured from the waste of castor beans. In weaponized mist form, ricin asks your body to stop making certain important proteins.
Okay, it’s not really asking. Ricin pretty much demands it. As a result, cells die. If not treated, the victim follows suit.
All Ethan knew was that his throat was closing up.
He’d been hit the worst out of anybody. He could have sworn that Muhammad Gur jerk had been aiming for him personally. Luckily, Ethan’s colleagues blasted their way out of the pit and dragged Ethan across the desert, looking for help. But when somebody looked down and saw Ethan frantically pointing at his throat, it quickly became clear that he might not make it to the medical supply tent.
A tracheotomy is a quick but complex procedure. In an emergency situation, you find the Adam’s apple, slide down a bit until you feel the next bump—the cricoid cartilage—then find the little valley between the two. Congrats, you’ve found the cricothyroid membrane. That is where you cut: half inch horizontally, half inch deep. Pinch the sides so that the incision opens like a fish mouth, then insert the tube. Don’t have a tube? Use a straw. Or the plastic tube of a ballpoint pen (with the ink stem removed, of course).
Out in the desert south of Kanadhar, Ethan’s savior had a Swiss Army pocketknife and a plastic straw. Saved his life.
But here, inside the fire tower at 1919 Market Street … Ethan was pretty much screwed.
Suffering from a serious Muhammad Gur flashback, Ethan stumbled backwards and imagined, if only for a few seconds, that he was trying to cling to the side of that medieval sand pit. Actually, it was a set of concrete stairs, leading down to the half landing between the thirty-sixth and the thirty-fifth floor.
Ethan tumbled down them. Backwards.
Every step hurt.
But not as bad as the agony in his throat.
This felt worse than ricin.
Castor beans his ass.
This was something else.
Amy stepped back from the door. She thought she heard something on the other side. The pounding of feet? People? Maybe security guards? Cops? A black bag crew? Someone dispatched to clean up their presumed-dead bodies?
Never mind. It could be help.
“Hello?”
She caught herself before pounding on the door. Just on the off off chance that the door was indeed rigged; she didn’t want to set off any kind of bomb accidentally.
“Hello! Can you hear me?!”
Ethan recognized Amy’s voice immediately. Her sweet voice. He wished he could answer her.
Still, he was strangely pleased that she’d come looking for him. So much so, Ethan was even willing to forgive her the French martini thing.
Hello! Can you hear me?!
Yes, honey, I can.
I wish I could tell you to come on in. But for one, my throat is sealed up tight, and for another, I’m thinking you’d receive a face-blast of the same chemical agent if you walked through that door.
Instead, Ethan found himself scrambling through his bag, searching for a pen.