‘No, no, wait a second. He was the chief engineer on this, right? So if there was a reason for someone to want to kill the man, I think we should know about it, don’t you?’
Gina is about to say something when she hears a siren in the distance. She freezes, afraid to look, but does it anyway. She turns to the window and peers down. Three police cars, blue lights flashing, speeding along the quays.
From up here they appear tiny.
She turns back.
Neither of the two men has moved.
Vaughan is old and frail, but Norton? He could easily have lunged at her, twisted her arm back and wrenched the gun from her. So why didn’t he? Maybe he was unwilling to take the risk. Or maybe he’s assuming, hoping, that the Emergency Response Unit guys, when they get here, will waste no time and simply take her out with a clean shot to the head.
‘Paddy,’ she says, looking behind him, ‘why don’t you tell him about the report?’
There is movement up ahead, behind the core section that houses the elevator shaft and stairwells – one person at least, possibly more.
But it won’t be the police, not yet.
She looks Norton in the eye, and sees a flicker of panic.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says.
‘Fine,’ Gina says, ‘whatever.’ She looks past his shoulder again, just for a second, and then turns to Vaughan. ‘Listen carefully because here it is, Mr Vaughan. A man named Dermot Flynn who worked with my brother at BCM wrote a report about this building we’re in. He showed the report to my brother, who showed it to him.’ She waves the gun in Norton’s direction. ‘Now I don’t know what’s in the report exactly – it was too technical, I couldn’t understand it – but for some reason Mr Norton didn’t want anyone else to see it. And now, as a consequence, my brother is dead and Dermot Flynn is dead.’
‘This is nonsense,’ Norton says. ‘I told you she was crazy. They both died in accidents. There is no report.’
The sirens have stopped.
Vaughan is staring at her. It’s clear that he doesn’t know what to think.
‘Would you like to see it?’ she says.
‘What?’
‘The report.’
‘Jesus, Jimmy -’
‘Shut up, Paddy.’
Gina reaches into her jacket pocket and takes out her mobile phone.
‘What’s your email address?’ she says.
There is a pause. Vaughan tells her. She keys it in.
‘Gina,’ Norton says, a hint of desperation entering his voice, ‘what are you doing?’
She hesitates. Her stomach is jumping. ‘I’m emailing him a copy of the report,’ she says. ‘Just like I emailed it this morning to Yves Baladur and Daniel Lazar.’
‘What?’
‘I retrieved it yesterday from Dermot Flynn’s laptop -’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘- and stored it in my email account.’
She waves the phone at him.
He glares back.
She looks at the display for a moment and then says to Vaughan, ‘Yep. There. It’s gone. Now you have it too.’
As Vaughan turns to Norton, he takes out his own mobile. ‘What the hell’s this all about, Paddy?’
Norton says nothing.
Vaughan looks at the phone, squints at it, presses something and waits.
Over his shoulder, Gina can see Ray Sullivan now – in the distance. He’s standing in full view, near the elevator. There is someone else behind him.
She turns to the window again and glances down to check out what’s happening at street level. Traffic has been halted and is backed up along the quays. People are gathering everywhere in little clusters. Some appear to be pointing up, others to be talking on their phones.
The jumping in her stomach is relentless.
She turns around again.
Norton is standing very still, staring at the floor.
‘Yep,’ Vaughan says. ‘I got it.’
He folds his phone shut and puts it away.
Gina holds hers down by her side.
‘I don’t know, Paddy,’ Vaughan says, shaking his head, ‘but it seems to me that she’s got you by the balls here.’ He pauses. ‘So you want to tell me what’s in this report?’ Sensing the activity behind him, he half looks over his shoulder. ‘And you might want to hurry.’
Gina watches as Ray Sullivan moves out of view and a uniformed guard takes his place. A second guard appears, and then a third.
She moves her own position, just slightly – closer to the stack of partition units.
‘Paddy,’ Vaughan snaps. ‘Are you going to make me read this damn thing? Or have me hear about it from someone else?’
Norton looks up. He is pale. He shakes his head.
‘It was purely theoretical,’ he says slowly, almost in a whisper. ‘He’d made these ridiculous calculations based on a set of theoretical conditions. Believe me, you’ll see.’
‘What do you mean, conditions?’ Vaughan says impatiently. ‘What conditions? Weather conditions?’
‘Yes.’
‘So we’re talking, what… wind?’
‘Yes. But quartering winds, tropical winds, stuff that doesn’t apply here, stuff that isn’t relevant.’
‘Shit,’ Vaughan says. ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’
Gina looks at him.
‘What?’
‘It’s the most significant calculation you have to make. How much wind stress a building can absorb. Testing is exhaustive. It’s done in controlled tunnels. Everything is computer simulated, checked a thousand times.’ He turns to Norton. ‘Jesus, what are you telling me, there’s a mistake somewhere?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Then what?’
Norton exhales, struggling. ‘Noel’s design for the wind-bracing system included a series of diagonal steel girders, and for some reason it came to Flynn’s notice, don’t ask me how, that the joints of these girders were bolted together, and not welded, as Noel had specified -’
‘Jesus -’
‘No, no, bolting them together was fine. Welded joints would have been stronger all right, but the contractor decided, and legitimately, that welding them was too expensive, too time-consuming and, in fact, unnecessary. For here. But Flynn went ahead anyway and did all these additional load-bearing calculations, extrapolating this, that and the other – what’d happen if we had a tropical cyclone or a hurricane. Wild stuff. It was pure speculation. So don’t be under any illusion, the building complies with all required codes and regulations -’
‘But?’
Norton swallows, looks around, exhales loudly.
Gina is crouched down now – phone in her hand resting on one thigh, gun on the other – looking up at the two men. With the stack of partition units in the way, she can no longer see what the guards are up to, but nor can they see her.
‘What he found was that the increase in stress to the building in the switch from welding to bolts was negligible for local weather conditions… but not when you took quartering winds into consideration.’
‘What are quartering winds?’ Gina says.
Vaughan looks down at her. ‘They’re winds that come in at a forty-five-degree angle and hit two sides of the building at once.’
She nods, barely understanding any of the words in isolation, let alone the complete sentence.
‘In that scenario,’ Norton goes on, ‘the difference is marked, and from then on… it’s exponential.’
Vaughan closes his eyes.
‘A simple increase of twelve or fifteen per cent could translate into an increase of… more than a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty percent.’
‘Jesus -’