“Hey, mate,” Keene said. “She’s back.”
McCoy had ducked out to take a leak or throw up or just stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. You never knew with McCoy. Once, Keene had caught him rubbing an issue of
“And I know you’ll want to see this.”
Keene heard the toilet flush.
Ah, taking a piss.
“McCoy! Your girl is back online!”
A meaty head popped out of the door.
“What?”
Molly placed the glasses on her face and then made her way to the north fire tower. Had to be that one. It was the closest to the active side of the office. No reason for Ethan to select the other. He’d be going out of his way to visit a bathroom.
Now it was time to outrun a sarin bomb, perched over a doorway.
Molly had faked a marriage to an actuary for three years. She figured she could pretty much handle anything.
It was all about the speed. Blast through the door, make it down the first concrete staircase, then vault to the left, hands on the landing, and flip down the next staircase. And so on. Hope she made it clear of the dispersal cloud fast enough. Even a little bit in her lungs could slow her down. Take root there. Potentially ruin the operation.
The door latch. That was the problem. She couldn’t hold it down and flip through the door at top speed at the same time.
She ran through the gear in her wrist bracelets. Wire. Blade. Hooks. Heroin. USB key. Poison.
Wait.
Wire. Hooks.
She fished out the gear, tied off the hook, looped the wire around the flat door latch, pulled it to the right, freeing the bolt from the strike plate, then sank the hook into the drywall to the right of the door. She let go. The wire held. All she needed was for it to hold for five seconds.
Five seconds was a generous amount of time.
Molly leaned up against the opposite wall, then launched herself through the doorway. Steel banged against the cinder block. As she sailed through the air, hands outstretched in front of her, she heard a
The device had been placed above the doorway, some kind of delivery nozzle pointed down—just as she thought it might be. She imagined the nerve agent coating the backs of her bare legs, her heels … but no, that wasn’t possible, she’d moved too fast. She was fine. She was
This was just a vault and floor routine, she told herself. Just like 1988.
Only, no rubber foam or plywood or springs. No music. No padding on the perimeters. No choreography.
Simply cold, unforgiving concrete.
She could do this.
And her glasses were going to stay on her face the whole routine.
Because she wanted them to see
McCoy, who was finally out of the bathroom, squinted at one of the laptop monitors. He settled into his chair.
“She’s stunning, isn’t she?” McCoy said, pulling the zipper up on his jeans and trying to find the buckle to his black leather belt.
“I’m dizzy,” Keene said.
“How is she taping this?”
The image on the monitor was a Steadicam nightmare: a shaky, floor-over-ceiling-over-floor blur of motion, with a cinder block wall doing a violent 180 every so often.
“Cameras in her spectacles. I saw her put them on. She showed us three fingers before proceeding.”
“Three fingers,” McCoy repeated.
“But what is she doing? She came blasting through that door like someone was after her with a gun. Now she’s trying to qualify for the Olympics by flipping down a bloody fire tower. Strange way to make a getaway. She’s not even finished her operation.”
McCoy wasn’t paying attention, though. He kept his eyes on the monitor and searched the table for the thick file Girlfriend had sent him. “Number three, number three,” he said. “Yeah, that’s Goins.”
“Odd thing was, she took time to set up the door handle before going berserk.”
“Huh?” McCoy said.
“I said, she took—”
“Oh,” McCoy said, then paused. “Oh, that’s right. You were out buying your little bottle of nursemaid—”
“Night Nurse.”
“Whatever. You missed the part of the meeting where JFK there told his employees that he’d rigged the two fire towers with sarin.”
“Murphy’s a paranoid guy, isn’t he? Why not just lock the damned things?”
“No better lock than a weaponized nerve agent. So my little Girlfriend there is trying to outrun death. That cloud of sarin is only going to make its way down the fire tower. She can beat it, but she can’t stop it.”
Keene stared at the monitor.
“Fine, sure. But what’s she running towards?”
“Why,” McCoy said, “number three.”
Ethan Goins was having a weird sex dream about Amy Felton. He had them often. They’d become so familiar, part of his brain probably believed he
But office romance was suicide in a line of work like theirs. It would be discovered in a flash. Picked apart. Exploited. Most likely by David himself. It was only when Ethan carpet-bombed his liver after work—take, for example, his recent adventures with the French martini—that he started to think that work didn’t matter so much.
And Amy did. Very much.
The most they’d ever done, physically, was hold hands beneath a small Formica table in a crowded bar on Sansom Street. They’d gone out with a gang of four from the office: Ethan, Amy, Stuart, and some intern Stuart was trying to nail. Stuart was too busy trying to make out with the intern’s right ear to notice Amy slide her hand over Ethan’s, her fingers seeking purchase in the space between his. Ethan gave her a look like,
This sex dream he was having was a little bit different.
Amy was wearing an oversized hotel bath towel, which quickly slipped off.
Only problem: She was working for an imaginary boss, some Alpha Chi thickneck with just the right amount of facial hair at all times. He was wearing a bath towel, too. His was not so oversized. It kind of slipped off.
Ethan, for some inexplicable reason, was standing in the hotel room with the both of them.
(Even now, Ethan knew he was dreaming—in fact, he knew he was passed out on the gray concrete landing in the fire tower with a pen sticking out of his throat. But the idea of Amy Felton in a hotel bath towel was too much
