There was a crash on Charles, and Kealey whipped his head around as a semitrailer scissored across the intersection. The large semi partially overturned in the middle of the road, where its driver apparently attempted to make a hard stop to avoid the fender bender in front of him. Just as on Conway, the men and women in the crosswalk were either frozen with shock or scrambling around in a panic, some running away from the blast, a few toward it, a few others stopping to help the driver of the semi.
A few seconds later, Kealey heard a rumbling noise from somewhere behind him, the unmistakable groan of twisting, tortured metal and a monstrous snap. It was followed by a crash that shook everything around him, sending tremors through the street.
“Ryan, look!” Allison screamed from behind him. “God help us. Look over there!”
He turned back, following her eyes. The hotel sky bridge had come down, and a gray ram of smoke and dust was pushing up the block, whipping through the trees on the traffic island, rushing over the taxicabs at the stand across the street to coat their yellow bodies with cinders. Dashing blindly for cover, people had thrown their hands over their noses and mouths as the choking ash swept over them.
“The hotel is burning!” she said.
Kealey had already caught sight of orange licks through the cloud. His temples throbbed. He heard sirens and clattering fire bells, the sounds blaring up from every direction. Going to the hotel was not an option. They’d choke before they got there. The convention center was a better bet. It appeared to have taken two hits, judging from the three blasts they heard and the twin columns rising from the site, but the boxy structure covered a much larger area, with discrete support sections. There would be more ways to get in.
And then, suddenly, there was another noise, so ordinary against the dissonant clamor of the alarms that it drew his attention: the electronic chirp of a cell phone alert. He turned to Allison, who was digging at her purse with trembling fingers. She fumbled out her phone and thumbed the HOME button.
“Colin?” Kealey asked.
“I think so,” she said, fighting tears. “I enabled Twitter pushes when we left the aquarium.” She nervously scrolled down the timeline queue to read her updates. She stopped, her eyes on the display, her cheeks draining of color.
“What is it?” Kealey demanded.
She just stood there, gaping mutely at the phone, a numb expression on her face. Kealey stepped closer, took the cell from her cold, loose fingers, and scanned the messages on its screen. The last one was a post from Colin. It consisted of only two words: Help us.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Do you know if he was near Julie’s event?” Kealey asked. “I’m guessing that was at least one of the targets.”
“The food vendors are usually set up nearby, so yes-”
“All right,” he said. “Maybe we can get to him and to Julie. Do you have her number?”
Allison nodded and scrolled to it. She pressed the name, the phone rang, but the call went to voice mail. Allison put the phone away. Her dusty cheeks were tear-streaked.
Kealey cupped her face reassuringly, then turned toward Pratt Street to the north. Beyond about halfway up the block the downtown skyline looked blurry and indistinct, as if it had been partially erased. Aside from the smeary glow of emergency lights-the fact that they had come on meant the main power was gone-and the scattered, ghostly forms of pedestrians, it was impossible to see anything clearly through the haze.
“We need to keep ourselves from breathing in the fumes and dust,” he said.
Allison reached into her purse and produced a floral silk scarf, yellow and violet chrysanthemums against a green background.
“I’ve got this,” she said, handing it to him.
Kealey took out his knife and cut the scarf up the center. He gave one half to Allison and wrapped his segment over his nose and mouth like a bandanna. He helped her do the same as people ran past them. He heard the sirens of emergency vehicles in the distance.
Her cell phone beeped again. She looked at it.
“Colin’s checking to see if I got his last post. Shit! I didn’t even think to answer him.”
“It’s all right,” Kealey said. “Ask him where he is, any landmarks we should look for. Tell him to keep it up. We need his exact location.”
She nodded, typed out her message, sent it. “Okay,” she said. “Done.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, kept it there, felt her relax a little. As a young lieutenant with the 3rd SFG in Bosnia, he’d learned to read his men’s pressure gauges before leading them into peril. A certain amount of tension could keep you sharp, but too much and you became distracted. Allison seemed as steady as could be expected.
Kealey looked north toward Charles, swiveled around, and looked west. The smoke was lighter on Conway Street and thickest over the rooftops several blocks to the northwest, where it was brewing up in a massive rooster tail, its dark fan-shaped crest spreading out almost directly overhead.
“What do you know about the layout of the center?” he asked.
“Not much,” she said, raising her voice to be heard through the scarf and the surrounding commotion. “It’s really two different buildings. The one right here on Charles is the original center.”
“Where is the job fair being held?”
“The newer one,” she said. “The main entrance is on Howard Street. It’s a busy part of town.”
“Busy in what way?”
“The warehouse on Eutaw borders on the Orioles’ ballpark,” she said. “There are shops on the main floor, offices, just a lot of things like that.”
Kealey continued looking east, lowering his gaze to the long, ruler-straight building that cut off Conroy about a quarter mile up.
“The sky bridge connected the Hilton Hotel to the convention center, right?”
She nodded. “Across Howard, where the entrance is.”
“We’ll never get in that way.”
“There’s another walkway between the old and new parts of the center on Sharp Street, a smaller version of the sky bridge. It crosses Conway a block or so up, right past Old Otterbein.”
“Past what?”
“Otterbein’s a landmark church,” she said. “When you turn up Sharp, there are entrances to both buildings on either side of the street. The walkway runs above them.”
Kealey tried to shut out the frenzied commotion around them. Charles was impassable, with vehicular traffic at a standstill all the way from Pratt Street and people moving between it. The first responders would already be establishing control of the remaining access points to the area. There was a time when his CIA credentials would have gotten him past whatever barriers they raised-but it had been years since he’d had any official connection to the Company, and the expired ID he’d never quite managed to clean out of his card holder wouldn’t bear scrutiny.
He gazed up Conroy. While traffic there was also at a crawl, it hadn’t gotten nearly as bad as on Charles, probably because it wasn’t a crosstown artery. Nor did he see any police cars or firefighting vehicles shooting along it yet-for the same reason, he suspected. They would have gone directly to the scene of the explosion on Howard, then cordoned off the roads and sidewalks there around the center’s newer extension. The back and side approaches were the last that would be restricted-and therefore were his best shot at gaining entry.
“We’ll take Conroy,” he said. “I’m going to need you to guide us as we get closer.” He gazed into her red, tearing eyes, then clutched her hand. “I’m glad you overruled me.”
She offered the thinnest of smiles beneath the mask as they moved into the maelstrom.