the washed-out sky, pulsing as they grew and shrank, as new flames fed them or other flames were put out. A gray haze filtered the sun, bathing the city in pale orange light. News and police helicopters swarmed like moths.
The whole city could burn to the ground in hours, if no one was there to fight it.
Her phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Celia? It’s Mark. I don’t know who else to go to. You’re in the middle of this as much as I am. You seem to know more about it than I do.”
He sounded panicked, as if the Destructor was breaking down his door then and there. “Mark, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“This is all a distraction, isn’t it? Like the kidnapping plots, like all the crime sprees. Something else is at the heart of it. I think I’ve found it. There’s a place, a building, the Leyden Industrial Park.”
Celia’s nerves stretched, as if they all waited to snap at once. She stared out at the burning city.
Mark continued. “The place was supposedly mothballed fifty years ago, turned over to the city for urban development. It was slated to be demolished for the highway plan, but that got held up. Celia, the place is active. My father’s been channeling money out of his office. Embezzling.”
Embezzling. That spoke to her line of work, and the professional side of her interrupted him. “Mark, how do you know? What evidence—”
He kept talking, like he had to get it all out at once before he lost his nerve. “Phony payroll, phony contracts, grant money to nonprofits that don’t exist.” All rote stuff, downright mundane. Paulson deflected attention from such activity with smoke and mirrors—with an orchestrated crime wave. “There’s more. I found evidence of payoffs to all the robbery suspects, and the bus hijacker. The rest of the money is going to this Leyden Industrial Park.”
Pieces snapped into place, almost too neatly. If Mark had all this evidence, he could serve his father up on a platter.
If he could turn in his own father.
“Mark, we shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone.”
“I’m going there, to the Leyden building. I have to see for myself.”
“No, you should call the police.” But he
“Will you meet me there, Celia? I need to talk to you. I need your help.”
“Yes, of course,” she said without thinking.
“Meet me there in an hour.”
“Mark, hold on, you shouldn’t—”
He hung up. She growled at the phone. He was being an idiot. He only had half the pieces and couldn’t see the whole picture. He probably thought his father was running some sort of gambling or drug ring. He probably thought he could talk to Paulson, make him see reason, convince him to turn himself in. He wouldn’t be able to stand up to Paulson and arrest the guy.
If she got there first, maybe she could talk him out of it. Maybe his call to her was a suicide’s cry for help. She ran to the foyer, then hesitated, thinking of Analise in the Olympiad command room. No, her parents might need Analise where she was, able to survey the entire city and monitor police activity. They might need her more than Celia did.
Celia entered the elevator. Inside, she punched the button for the parking garage. Going down.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ON the elevator ride down, she thought about calling Arthur’s cell and leaving a message. Then realized he must already know what she was thinking, what she had planned, even across the city. The thought was both ominous and comforting. There was a time when all she wanted to was to be alone. But if she got in trouble, Arthur would know.
Michael was on-call, but not in the valet office when she reached the basement parking garage. She wasn’t about to ask him for a ride anyway.
The key card her father had given her worked on the West Corp valet office, where the keys to the fleet cars were kept. Not that she’d driven at all since Michael taught her how when she was sixteen. Assuming she found an inconspicuous car, and assuming she could drive it, and assuming she didn’t get pulled over by hyper police—
She found a dark blue sedan, automatic transmission, and matched the license plate to the keychain. Settling into the driver’s seat, she reacquainted herself with the controls and dials. She could do this, she could do this. Key in ignition, turn, shift gears, press gas pedal.
The engine revved, but the car didn’t move.
Then she remembered to release the parking brake.
So slowly the speedometer barely registered, she pulled out of the parking space and up the ramp leading to street level. Once on the street, she pressed the gas a little harder—if she drove five miles an hour the whole way, she’d take all day to get there. She sat leaning forward, her back rigid and away from the seat, clinging to the steering wheel and peering fervently through the windshield.
Fortunately, with the city blowing up around them, not too many other people were on the road. She had little traffic to contend with, and the cops were all in areas of the city where bombs had gone off.
Carefully, she drove northeast.
The warehouse district was an area of wide streets and cavernous buildings. This was a whole other city, the opposite of the one she looked down on from her parents’ living room. Here, she was an ant staring up at concrete walls that went on in all directions. She was trapped at the bottom of a canyon.
Slowing down, she looked for street signs, made out address placards bolted to the sides of buildings—some of them rusted and illegible. She found the right street and was afraid she’d spend the afternoon driving back and forth along its length, looking for the right building.
She shouldn’t have worried.
A shroud of smoke covered the city, along with a smell like a furnace, making the sky like dusk, dark enough that she could see her destination lit up like a storm cloud. Crackling electrical lights glowed through clerestory windows like faint bursts of lightning. Something was happening inside a building that was supposed to be abandoned and crumbling to ruin. That had to be the place.
It had taken her too long to get here. Mark would be here any minute. She couldn’t let him face down his father. No one should have to do that, no matter how great they were or how great their father was. She drove around the block and when she didn’t see his car, she parked, got out, and waited on the corner.
Twenty minutes later, twenty minutes of pacing the sidewalk and wondering about the crackling electric hisses that occasionally whispered from the warehouse, and wondering if maybe she shouldn’t be standing in plain sight, Celia began to think she’d been too late after all. Mark had been smart enough to not park right in front of the building and hid his car on one of the side streets.
Maybe he’d already gone inside.
Maybe she should try to talk to Paulson herself. And say what?
Actually, that had its appeal.
She could just sneak in and take a look. If she saw Mark in there, if he was in trouble, she’d call Arthur, the police, and Analise at Olympiad HQ and get help. If they weren’t too busy keeping the city from burning down.
Celia approached the front door. Glancing nervously at the windows high on the warehouse walls, she hoped no one was watching. They looked too frosted to see out of.
What she took to be the front doors, double steel slabs that swung open, had chains looped through the handles, secured with a padlock. Just what she’d expect to find on a shut-up building. She walked around. In the back she found a loading dock, and a sliding steel door that was not only unlocked, but open a crack. She climbed up on the ledge and squeezed through.
She entered a dark receiving area, a block of bare concrete, cold and musty, with an air of abandonment.
