He tapped the door once, then pulled the key ring out of his pocket to search for the Con Edison steam master key. He’d need the modern one. “Thanks for saving my keys.”
“Credit goes to Edison. He carried them into the ambulance and gave them to me.”
“Good boy!” Joe said automatically. He wished he’d thought to bring dog treats. Edison would probably earn his weight in dog treats before this was over.
The key turned, and he pushed the metal door open.
“You can just do that?” Vivian sounded surprised.
“Came with the house.” He didn’t have time to explain.
Edison walked next to him as they hurried down the steam tunnel. Vivian drew her gun and went first. The pipes here were freshly painted, the ground underneath so clean it looked as if it had been swept yesterday. It was the tidiest steam tunnel he’d ever seen.
One more door, and they were in the pitch-black basement of the Empire State Building. Someone had pulled the fire alarm, and it blared so loudly that Joe swore he could feel vibrations against his skin. His headache raised a notch with each beat.
He clicked on his flashlight and shone it ahead. Clean white walls, polished linoleum, fluorescent lights overhead that were off. A gray arrow was painted on the wall next to the word Lobby.
“You look pale,” Vivian said. “Maybe we should go back where it’s quieter and rest.”
He shook his head. They didn’t have time for his weakness. He needed to think. Vibrations against his skin? That couldn’t have come from the alarms.
Holding tight to his phone with one hand, he pressed it flat against the wall. The phone quivered under his hand with a steady heartbeat. The Oscillator was here, going full tilt. Vivian put her hand next to his and looked at him with worried eyes.
“Not much time,” he said. “You can go home.”
She gave him a look that left no doubt about her intentions. “Where to next?”
Following the arrow, he reached a surprisingly clean stairwell and took the stairs two at a time. The noise threatened to drive him to his knees, but he kept going. He could not let this building be brought down.
He’d take the stairs up one floor past the lobby, then he’d look like one of the evacuees, and could maybe sneak into an elevator. Up he went, until he reached the floor above the lobby. The staircase door opened onto lemon-yellow carpet and a set of closed double doors adorned with a logo that resembled a hammer. He didn’t even want to know what they did in here. He made for the elevators.
Vivian touched his arm. “Stairs are safer.”
“We can’t climb up one hundred and three stories,” he said. “We need to split up the distance. You go to forty-three, I’ll go to eighty-five. When you get there, put your phone against the wall.”
“Why?”
“Give me your phone.” He added her number to his list of monitored phones and handed it back. “I’ll know what vibrations it’s registering.”
Vivian pressed the up button. For a sickening moment, he feared that the elevator might be locked out by the police, or full of people fleeing, but the doors opened almost immediately onto an empty elevator. Apparently, people were following instructions and taking the stairs.
Edison went in ahead of him, Vivian after.
“I don’t like being separated,” she said.
“No time.” He pressed the buttons for floors forty-three (green, red) and eighty-five (purple, brown).
She tried to hand him her gun, but he refused to take it.
“You’ll be more use with it than I am. My vision is…impaired.” A delicate way to explain that he felt light-headed and dizzy and some objects were doubling themselves whenever he looked at them.
She put the gun into her holster. “What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to take readings on multiple floors to pinpoint the location of the device. I’ll go to the top. You start at the middle. We’ll go up or down, depending on how the readings from our phones differ.”
Vivian looked puzzled.
“I’m tracking the device via the sound waves it emits,” he said. “The waves should get bigger the closer we are to the device.”
The elevator stopped on the forty-third (green, red) floor. She held the door open with one hand. “What do I do?”
“Hold your phone against the floor by the elevator,” he said. “And wait.”
The doors closed on her skeptical face.
Edison nudged his hand. A question.
“I’m fine, boy,” he lied. Edison knew it was a lie, but he didn’t challenge him on it, just leaned against his leg, offering the support of his presence. Joe ruffled the fur on the back of the dog’s neck.
The elevator shot up at remarkable speed. He couldn’t hear it moving over the blaring of the fire alarm. Maybe the elevator was soundless, not like the creaky monstrosity that took him home.
He checked out the results from Vivian’s phone. The waves were stronger on the forty-third (green, red) floor than in the basement. The device was up high in the building.
The elevator settled and opened its doors to the eighty-fifth (purple, brown) floor. He pressed his phone against the floor just outside the elevator, ready to compare his readings to Vivian’s, but he knew already that it was stronger here. A lot stronger. The glass door vibrated visibly in front of him.
He checked the reading from her phone, then called her. “Vivian, it’s stronger up here. Get to the sixtieth floor, and we can take readings there.”
But his gut told him that he wouldn’t need to wait for those readings. The device was close to where he was standing now.
Chapter 47
Ash couldn’t help himself. After he got a notification of the evacuation of the Empire State Building from Sage, Ash had a public reason to go back, so he ordered his chauffeur to turn the limousine around and head back to the building. He wanted to watch.
The car couldn’t get close. Police had blocked off the street for two blocks in each direction.
“I could try to circle around,” said his driver. Ash couldn’t remember his name.
“I’ll get out here and text you with a meeting place.”
Ash climbed out and hurried down the street. Fire trucks, police cars, and people clogged the street and the sidewalk. Hard to believe so many people had been working in the building on a summer Sunday. Plus tourists.
A policeman stopped him. “You’ll have to turn around, sir.”
“But I have people in the Empire State Building.” Ash used his worried voice. “Will they be OK?”
“We’re evacuating it, and the surrounding buildings. I’m sure your friends will be fine.”
He hadn’t called them friends. “What’s happening? Why the evacuation?”
“We received a bomb threat — a call that someone had planted a sonic bomb in the building.”
Ash stopped breathing. A sonic bomb. Who could know that? “What’s a sonic bomb?”
“I have no idea, sir, but I’m going to have to ask you to move away.”
Ash backed away, keeping the building in sight. Who could have called in a sonic-bomb threat? Who else knew about the Oscillator? Geezer was dead. Quantum was dead. The only other person who might have an idea about the device was Joe Tesla.
Ash grimaced and moved against a nearby building to let evacuees file past. He pulled out his secure phone and called up the tracking app. The green dot that represented Edison was close. In fact, it was inside the Empire State Building.
Joe knew.
He couldn’t know everything, of course, but he knew that the Oscillator was in the building, pounding away. But without any idea of where, he’d never be able to find it in time. The Empire State Building was huge — one hundred and three stories high with over two million square feet of space.