If any tenants in floors twenty-nine or lower were to have felt slighted, David was prepared to cheerfully reply: Ah, you see, the delivery service could only do so much in one day. The rest were to be delivered on Monday. Hope you don’t mind waiting!
There were no more popcorn tins to be delivered, though. He’d ordered only enough for the eight floors at the top with some left over for special clients.
Was this a loose end? Would a nameless researcher for a congressional investigatory commission check the order later?
Like it really mattered.
Even though David was paralyzed, lying in a pool of his own blood in the conference room, he imagined himself smiling at the stack of popcorn tins on the small table against the wall. Six little popcorn tins. The one part of this morning that hadn’t completely gone to hell.
Whatever Molly had planned, David hoped for her sake she was going to finish it up quickly.
Maybe she’d come back and do the right thing. Finish him off.
Which would be perfect.
There was no ape on the thirtieth floor.
Nothing even remotely simian. And more important, no broken windows or missing panes of glass. Vincent enjoyed a few deep breaths of relief. The scuff on the security door had been nothing. Probably a late-night FedEx guy, banging his steel dolly into it.
Nothing to worry about.
He knew he was probably still freaked out by his little adventure at the Sheraton. Being choked into unconsciousness could do that to a guy. But he also knew it was partly his boy messing with his mind. His fifteen-year-old conspiracy theorist.
For weeks now, the boy had convinced himself that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were actually the work of the U.S. government—an elaborate stage show that cost thousands of lives, but won those in power a blank check to protect their business interests in the name of “the war on terror.” He told his boy to get the hell out of here, but the boy, as usual, had a way of chipping away at his old man, one piece of evidence at a time. He’d be sitting there at Vincent’s home PC, watching something intently, and of course, he would have to check it out, because what if it was porn? It was his paternal obligation. He would walk over to the monitor, though, and the boy would be pointing excitedly at the screen. “Watch this, Dad,” and before Vincent knew it, he was watching one of the two towers fall. He didn’t know which one—north or south.
The boy pointed at the side of the falling building. “Did you see that?”
“No—what? And hey, what are you watching this stuff for?”
“Look closer.” The boy rewound the video a few seconds, then clicked the little triangle. “See that?”
“See what.”
“The puff of smoke, shooting out of the sides as the building pancakes down.”
“I guess.”
“That’s a sign of a controlled demolition, Dad. The government brought those buildings down on purpose. They knew a plane hitting the top couldn’t do the job, so they put in a little insurance.”
“Get the hell out of here.”
Vincent heard himself speak those words, and realized that they were coming straight from his own father. Only his father would not be finding his boy Vincent poring over a conspiracy video on the Internet. He’d find him in the back shed with a copy of Swank, and his ironworker dad would curl it up, beat Vincent with it, and then say “Get the hell out of here,” before confiscating the magazine for personal use.
If only it were that easy.
So he had been hearing a lot of this crazy stuff recently—every weekend, when his boy came to stay. He got interested despite himself. Poked around a few articles the boy had printed out for him. It’s what made him grab that copy of Center Strike from the tiny book collection in the security lounge.
It also made him think way too much about the building he was paid to protect.
There were taller, more important buildings in Philadelphia than 1919 Market, that was for sure. Any terrorists thinking about attacking a building would most likely shoot for Liberty One and Two, Philly’s gleaming blue answer to the World Trade Center. Or City Hall, which at one time actually was the tallest building in America … for about seventeen minutes. Or the obvious symbols of American freedom: Independence Hall and, right across the street in a shiny new pavilion, the Liberty Bell.
In comparison, 1919 Market was neither architecturally nor historically significant. No government offices, unless you count that state supreme court justice’s pad.
So why had he been so freaked out?
Vincent decided he had to tell the boy to lay off the 9/11 stuff for a while.
What Vincent Marella didn’t know was that there were four explosive devices tucked away above the acoustic panels on the thirtieth floor. Two on the south side, one on the west, another on the north. One of the south-side devices was hanging ten feet from where he stood.
The scuff on the security door, though, was not the result of a last-minute break-in.
That really had been a FedEx guy.
In actuality, the explosive devices had been planted five years ago, shortly after David Murphy signed a ten-year lease on his portion of the thirty-sixth floor. David kept the trigger close at hand, at all times.
David liked to be prepared for all eventualities.
Even if the office were to be breached someday by a well-meaning law enforcement agency, they would find no such explosives on the thirty-sixth floor. Above, or below it.
No one would think to check six floors below.
Not until it was too late.
And when it came time to close up shop—like today—it was simply a matter of providing the right kind of accelerant. And spreading it on floors thirty-one through thirty-seven.
The kind of accelerant that could be melted into popcorn tins, and distributed to the companies on those floors.
MURPHY, KNOX & ASSOCIATES PROUD TO CALL THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE HOME … … 5 YEARS RUNNING!
The model David had in mind was One Meridian Plaza. He’d read about it before basing his company in Philadelphia. On February 23, 1991, a fire broke out on the twenty-second floor, engulfing and eventually gutting the eight floors above it. The building did not collapse, but remained a hulking shell of itself for more than a decade before city officials finally authorized its destruction.
A simple fire. Eight floors of destruction.
With the right kind of accelerant, it was more than enough to destroy the existence of Murphy, Knox.
Except in the minds of the fine people who enjoyed its free popcorn from time to time over the years.
Vincent Marella had no way of knowing any of this. This did not make him a bad security guard. In fact, the only piece of physical evidence that David had left behind, five years ago, was a tiny black tube of wire sheathing, cut from the wire when he patched the devices into the building’s power lines. David had missed it when he did a quick sweep of the rug to make sure he had left no traces.
Two days later, a vacuum cleaner from housekeeping had scooped it up.
It was now at the bottom of a floating landfill somewhere near South America.
Piece that together.
Vincent’s two-way beeped, snapping him out of his daydreams. If there were any terrorists hiding up here, that would have completely given away the game. Gotten his ass killed.
“What’s up?”
“You’d better come down to sixteen, Vincent.” It was Rickards, who’d been checking the lower half of the building.
“What’s going on?”
“Got a guy down here you should see.”
“Let me guess. He has cuts all over his hands from pushing through a window.”