save him from the ill effects of secondhand smoke. Halloran thought that was pretty funny, since they might be standing a few yards from a building that was full of nerve gas.
Suddenly, Roadrunner jumped the steps out of the RV, with Harley, Magozzi, and the women right behind him.
'You'll figure it out?!' Harley was bellowing. 'You've got a fifty percent chance that you're going to blow yourself to the moon, you goddamn stupid Lycra stick!'
Roadrunner stopped right in front of Knudsen, who put down the phone and said, 'Bomb squad, one hour out.'
Roadrunner shrugged as if it was meaningless information. 'You're some kind of a bomb expert, right? That's how you recognized those weather stats on the screen.'
Knudsen didn't answer.
'So if that building over there blew, how far away do you have to be to be safe ?'
'If all those trucks are full of sarin, it could be as far as seven miles. . ..' He stammered to a halt, understanding exactly what Roadrunner was going to do and what he was asking. 'If you know a way to disarm that plastique, tell me what to do and I'll go in there.'
Roadrunner smiled like a boy. 'No offense, Agent, but that would take way too long.'
Knudsen just looked at him for a second. 'Five, ten minutes on these roads.'
Roadrunner looked around worriedly. 'Do a lot of people live around here?'
'Four Corners was about it. This is mostly state forest.'
Roadrunner nodded, still troubled but resigned. It was the best he could hope for. 'You've got to make everyone else leave. I'll wait ten minutes from right now,' was the last thing he said before he turned around and walked toward the building.
They stood there with stricken expressions, watching Roadrunner walk away. Magozzi turned to Grace and Annie and Harley a second too late. They were already gone, following quietly in Roadrunner's wake without saying a thing. Charlie was right by Grace's side.
Roadrunner turned on them when he heard Harley's leathers swishing against the grass. 'Get the hell out of here, Harley. Take Annie and Grace and get the hell out of here.'
'Fuck you, you fucking fuck.' Harley stomped past him, seething. 'What if you hit the first line and it calls up a chain? That screen shows thirty lines at a time, and you're going to need more eyes to find the right one before it shuts you down.'
Roadrunner had to trot to pass him. 'That's bullshit, Harley. I'm better than any of you, and you know it.'
'The hell you arc. You've only got a fourth of a brain, you dumb-shit. The other three fourths are right behind you. Keep walking. We're running out of time.'
Sharon had automatically started to follow Annie and Grace. Part of it was some twisted sense of duty, part of it was guilt, and part of it was just knee-jerk. The three women had been following one another for what seemed like forever. Separating now didn't seem possible. She'd gone two paces before Halloran grabbed her by the upper arm and turned her to face him. 'Not. This. Time. You get that, Sharon'' His words blew across her face. 'This time, I'm not letting you go.'
Sharon felt something ripping inside, pulling her in two different directions, felt Halloran's fingers tight against her arm, and figured she'd have to shoot him to get him to let her go. She decided not to.
Magozzi, Gino, and Agent Knudsen stared after the Monkee-wrench people, thinking things that none of them would ever say out loud. Finally, Knudsen spoke.
'Between the three of us, we could probably take down all of them and drag them back to the RV. Except maybe the big guy.'
Magozzi smiled a little, watching Grace. Funny. It should have looked like she was getting smaller, walking away like that, but instead she seemed to look bigger. 'Don't follow me, Gino.'
Gino didn't look at him. 'You go, I go.'
'Don't be an ass. Everything I've got is walking into that building right now. Everything you've got is back in Minneapolis.'
Gino watched him walking away.Not everything, buddy.
MAGOZZI WALKED ACROSS what seemed like an endless expanse of concrete floor toward the desk, the computer, the bomb, and the entire Monkeewrench crew. All he saw was Grace-and Charlie, of course. Goddamnit, she was going to get the dog killed, too.
She felt him coming. 'Get out of here, Magozzi,' she said without looking at him when he moved up beside her. 'Go with the others. You've only got eight minutes left to get out of range before Road-runner starts hitting those keys.'
It was the first thing she'd said to him directly, and for reasons that defied logic, they made him ridiculously happy. He waited until she got tired of his infuriating disobedience and turned on him, glowering. Then, the second he had her eyes, he smiled and said, 'Hello, Grace.'
She jerked her head back coward the computer screen almost immediately, but the corner of her mouth twitched just a little. 'Seven minutes.'
'Okay. You want to make out?'
OUTSIDE, Gino, Bonar, Halloran, and Sharon had piled into Knudsen's bare-bones sedan. Knudsen hadn't started the car yet. Dying in the line of duty was one thing. You accepted that the minute you put on any kind of badge. Dying senselessly was another thing. No agency pretended there was glory in pointless self-sacrifice, not even the FBI. And this would be pointless. Living to fight another day was the ticket, and this was his case. Getting blown up and gassed right at the beginning wasn't going to do anybody any good, which was why he was driving out of here. So if the unthinkable happened, he'd be around to sort through the aftermath, find the bad guys, if there were any left, and uncover the things they'd know to look for the next time, so it never happened again.
Except he wasn't driving out of here. He was just sitting like a slug behind the wheel while the seconds ticked away, thinking of the civilians and the cop inside that building who happened to think that this particular self- sacrifice wasn't that pointless after all. He waited for one of the other four people in the car to start banging on the seats and screaming for him to get the hell out of there, but none of them said a thing.
'HOW MUCH LONGER?' Annie asked. Harley looked at his watch. 'Five more minutes.' The waiting was killing Magozzi. Grace hadn't exactly jumped on
the making-out idea, and the others were preoccupied with the programming language on the laptop screen, which left him with nothing to do but stand there and contemplate his own death. He could have been working on what he would do with the rest of his life if Roadrunner picked the right command line instead of the wrong one, but it seemed safer to go with the worst-case scenario. Grace had taught him that.
Suddenly Roadrunner slapped his forehead, said 'Duh,' of all things, then moved the mouse and clicked.
Magozzi sucked in a breath and watched numbers flying by on the screen, waiting to blow up and die and see the light at the end of the tunnel or whatever else was supposed to happen.
After a few seconds, the monitor blinked black, then a new screen came up. The rest of them released a collective exhale that sounded like the wind. Magozzi looked down at his body. He wasn't dead, and he hadn't blown up. Not even a little.
'What just happened?' His voice sounded squeaky, and his face colored.
'Harley said the guy was sloppy on this. I just didn't read far enough, the command sequence was so long.' Roadrunner pulled the screen back up and pointed. 'It's right at the end; see those four letters? B-O-O-M at the end of this sequence'-he paged down a little-'and M-O-O-B, that's boom backwards, at the end of this one. Christ. That's absolutely puerile.'
Harley looked a little tense. 'So which one did you punch in?'
'Moob, of course. Boom sets the bomb, boom backwards unsets it. I mean, how obvious can you get?'
Harley smacked him across the back of the head. 'You dumbshit. What if the guy had set it the other way around so itwouldn't be obvious?'
Roadrunner rubbed his head. 'Shit. I never thought of that.'
