was no telling up from down, until he came down chin first onto the edge of a stair.
The white light dissolved into swells of hot gray dust and blue-black smoke that stank of burned rubber, inflaming his lungs, and revealed that the walls of the stairwell were buckling, the ceiling was raining chunks of concrete, and Drummond was gone. Utterly vanished. Possibly he’d fallen into the sooty abyss where the bottom five or six stairs had been a second ago.
As Charlie peered into it, the remaining stairs, including those beneath his feet, cracked apart into nothing.
He flung a hand at the stout handrail. Because the lower mooring had fragmented, his weight caused the rail to pop free of the wall. The upper mooring held, enabling him to climb the rail while it swung.
He belly flopped onto the landing, then scurried on scorched-and possibly broken-hands and knees into the Perriman offices.
Other than the billows of white dust, tinted red by the illuminated exit signs, all was as before. Except, of course, the building might come down at any second.
If Drummond had made it out of the stairwell, Charlie figured, he would have headed down the hallway to the front vestibule, which opened onto West 112th Street.
There were no footprints in the fresh coating of dust there.
Charlie felt like slumping into one of the plastic workstations and crying. He hauled himself toward the vestibule. Halfway, he sensed motion behind him. He spun around, his hope reignited, all of his parts feeling like new again.
It was water, spraying from fire sprinklers.
His hearing had begun to return. He could make out the howl of a smoke alarm, though barely. To his ears, it was a drone.
Still he could hear Drummond. At least he thought he could. From the office next to the stairwell, the one whose door said D. CLARK, DEPUTY DISTRICT SALES MGR, N. ATLANTIC DIV. “Is there a fire?” Charlie thought he heard him say.
Charlie bounded down the hallway and threw open the door. Drummond swiveled sharply in his desk chair. A coating of white dust made him look like a baker. He seemed irked that there had been no knock. Taking in Charlie, his demeanor shifted to puzzled.
“Charles, what are you doing here?” His eyes settled on Charlie’s Perriman uniform. “Are you working here now?”
20
Charlie led Drummond out of the office, at the same time using Drummond’s shoulder to keep weight off a new knee injury relative to which his old gunshot wound felt like a paper cut. The glass-walled vestibule at the far end of the hallway showed West 112th to be as crowded now, in the middle of the night, as it ordinarily would be at midday during a street fair. Dogs yelped at the strange rumbling below-ground. Residents with coats thrown over pajamas gawked, through the haze of streetlamps, at towers of smoke rising from sidewalk grates. Charlie heard them speculating: “student prank,” “science experiment,” and, the overwhelming favorite, “terrorists.”
“My guess would be a cigarette,” Drummond said in earnest. “Eighteen percent of all nighttime fires begin when a person falls asleep while smoking.”
“My guess would be penthrite and trinitrotoluene,” said Fielding, climbing from the dark remains of the stairwell, assault rifle in hand. Dust gave him a ragged edge.
The shock of seeing him hit Charlie nearly as hard as the blast current. He probably would have fallen if he weren’t clutching Drummond.
Drummond studied Fielding as if trying to remember who he was. “Interesting theory,” he told him meanwhile.
Although the lights were off in the hallway, Fielding’s extensive wounds were apparent from blood that slicked much of his face and body. Yet he approached without evident impediment, his rifle blinking orange along with a changing traffic signal outside, his finger on the trigger.
Charlie looked to Drummond for guidance only to find Drummond looking to him the same way.
“Should we tell him about the security blanket?” Charlie asked, intending it for Fielding’s ears.
“That is a decent bargaining chip,” Fielding said. “An hour ago. In case it comes up in your next life, a man with an honest-to-goodness security blanket doesn’t resort to blowing himself up.” He flicked his rifle at a bare stretch of hallway. “Now, both of you, back up against the wall.”
Charlie raced to conceive a way he and Drummond could defend themselves. There was nothing in reach, save a light switch and the carpet sodden from the fire sprinklers. The people milling outside the front vestibule couldn’t see them through the doors and all the way down the dark hallway, and probably wouldn’t be able to hear a cry for help, or intervene in any case. The huge bank of fluorescent tubes directly above Fielding’s head held more promise: They might come on with enough flash or pop to distract him long enough that his rifle could be knocked away. Also the people on the street might be able to see in. And, at some point, Drummond might blink on too.
As he and Drummond backed toward the wall, Charlie tried to telegraph his intent to him. “Fifty-fifty proposition,” he said.
Drummond gave no sign of acknowledgment. But would he under the best of circumstances?
Trying to be discreet, Charlie flipped the light switch with his elbow.
The lights didn’t come on.
Glancing up at the dark bulbs, Fielding said, “Talk about your metaphors.”
“Actually, it’s a better metaphor than you know,” Charlie said.
“I’ll humor you: Why?”
“My father might be out, but now the whole world can see what you’ve been up to.” With an air of expectation, Charlie peered over Fielding’s shoulder, toward the street. He was primed to fly at Fielding if he bought the bluff or for whatever reason turned as little as an eyelash that way.
Fielding only smirked. “This can’t be the there’s-someone-behind-you trick.”
A series of gunshots, in such rapid succession that the sounds blended together, jolted the corridor. Glass shattered with near-matching clangor.
Fielding slumped against the wall opposite Charlie and Drummond.
Charlie snatched Fielding’s rifle out of the air. “That worked out a lot better than I hoped,” Charlie said, battling disbelief.
Looking toward the street, Fielding’s face dropped into an expression of shock. “You-!”
He fell the rest of the way to the floor. Blood spilled from his chest and darkened the water pooled on the carpet. He didn’t move, and wouldn’t again.
Any relief Charlie might have felt was superseded by surprise of his own, along with apprehension, as the shooter stepped through the newly created gap in the vestibule’s inner door.
“Why, if it isn’t Helen,” Drummond said warmly.
Her hair was red now and matted by what appeared to be dried blood.
“Actually, it isn’t Helen,” Charlie said, aiming Fielding’s rifle at her. He wished taking out Fielding signified that she was on their side. Given her track record, it was a good bet that she had a different agenda.
“I’m really Alice Rutherford, NSA,” she said. “I was watching from a bar across Broadway when you were brought in here, Charlie. It got to be a while. Then came that gigantic explosion. I was a little worried.”
“I don’t mean to be unappreciative,” Charlie said. “It’s just that, sooner or later, everybody in your line of work tries to kill us. And you…”
“I’m sorry I deceived you the other day.” She dropped her gun to her hip. “If I’d known then what I do now, I wouldn’t have let you set foot outside the senior center-at the least I would have called you a tank.”
“And now that you know what you know?”
“I don’t know what I can tell you to win your trust in the time we have-or the time we don’t have, I should say. The people outside probably have figured out by now where the gunshots they heard came from. And any
