Was he following him?
Or making his own escape?
Whatever, someone knew where he was or at least the direction he was taking to escape. That was not good.
Donohue’s anger suddenly flared. He tightened his fists, trying to control it, trying to control himself. His plan was a good one — he was safe, surely.
Unless Mussa was following him to order his death.
He stared at the door. He had no weapon but his hands.
He would kill Mussa if he had to. Mussa and whoever he sent. Kill them gladly with his bare hands.
Nearly trembling with his anger, Donohue punched the large square button next to the door to let himself out.
84
Tommy Karr saw colors and then brown, felt nothing and then fierce pain. His head snapped forward and he twisted, broken in half.
The moment pushed outward and then collapsed, time bending and twisting in three different directions at once.
He wasn’t falling anymore.
He was across a beam, and the world was on a slant.
He’d fallen onto the grid work. The fall had knocked the wind out of him and battered his body, but considering the alternative, he was in
Gradually, Karr recovered his breath. He’d fallen only a few feet, slipping down to one of the cross members, landing like a noodle across it. His head had jammed against a metal screen. His left leg hung free, but his right rested on one of the tower lights, twisted in thick cable that connected the light to the others nearby.
“OK,” he said aloud, “let’s get this show on the road.” But he couldn’t move.
He couldn’t find his hands. They seemed to be severed from his body. Finally he managed to turn his head and see his fingers gripping the meshwork near his face. Karr moved them slowly, then pushed his head back against the stabs and jolts at his neck.
“Go, let’s go,” he told himself. “Go, go, go. Come on, Tommy!”
He forced himself to start climbing.
The screen ran up the side of one of the girders near the elevator. While the rectangular holes were too narrow for footholds he found he could push his toes against the metal for traction.
The terrorists were clustered above, no longer paying attention to him. He pushed himself to move faster, but his head spun and he had to stop for a moment, rest.
The elevator began moving downward. Two of the terrorists swung down from above the girder where the others were working — they’d been on the top floor, which probably explained why the police hadn’t tried to get down from above.
Karr watched impotently as the two men began firing at the elevator. The machine continued downward as the bullets sprayed through it. He saw the face of a woman screaming and blood splattered against the glass doorway as the gondola disappeared below.
He started moving again.
The air around him exploded as the helicopters swooped in, one raking the side of the tower with its 7.62mm machine gun. Karr gripped the wire, the structure reverberating with the torrent of bullets the wash from the rotor.
A voice told Karr to leave, to get out of there now. It took a moment for him to realize it was the Art Room.
“There’s a helicopter firing on them!” he shouted.
“Get down!” yelled Rockman. “Get out of there. Go!”
The terrorists began firing back. Between the forest of iron grids and the buffeting winds, the helicopters had a hard time getting their bullets close to the terrorists. Finally one of the terrorists above slumped against the beam.
Two figures came down from farther up, down on the stairs. They were policemen.
“Tell the cops they’re almost directly above the terrorists,” said Karr.
“What cops?” said Rockman. “There are no policemen on the third level.”
“Are you talking to the French or what? There are two cops or gendarmes or whatever…”
One of the men had a case in his hand. White smoke flared from the stairs and there was a huge explosion — the man had fired an antiair missile point-blank into the fuselage of one of the helicopters. The craft pitched hard to the right, then disappeared.
85
Johnny Bib admired his boss — William Rubens was, he had to admit, one of the few people in the organization who truly appreciated the worth of a prime number. Still, Johnny had long ago concluded that Rubens was not a “people person.” Johnny was willing to dismiss his rude behavior as a result of the pressure of the present operation. Still, Rubens irked him so much that he lost his entire train of thought. So when Blondie ran into the room waving a computer DVD-R disk in her hand, Johnny Bib had no idea what she was talking about.
“The computer that accessed the library. It’s part of a network in a printing plant. They back up their drives several times a day on RAID-5 disk arrays,” she said.
“What do you mean?” asked Johnny.
“The computer system that was used to access the library: it had a backup system that wrote files to two disks at once. They uploaded the formulas, probably because they had to work them at times the library computers weren’t up. There were copies on the drive. They must have erased the originals, but I have some copies of deleted backups. They didn’t erase them all, Johnny. They did it on some sort of schedule, but they didn’t get parts of the temporary backups. There is a whole set of files they never erased.”
Blondie put the disk into a nearby computer. The drive began to whirl.
“This is the most interesting, this series. Look — it’s another set of formulas, an explosion simulation. It’s almost the whole thing! It’s like the Eiffel Tower, but one of much greater power. Look at all these formulas and the size of these numbers.”
“What’s being modeled?” he asked.
“A three-dimensional area affected by an explosion,” said Blondie. “These values are so high — I think it’s an earthquake of six-point-oh magnitude. Maybe it was to shake down the concept behind the formula, get the process right. They must have started here, figured out how to get the program to work, then revised it for the Eiffel Tower. Can we find somebody to try and re-create what’s missing?”
“Wait,” said Johnny Bib. “I’ve seen this before.”
Johnny Bib stared at his screen. The numbers of some of the equations would produce a Fibonacci series.
No, not precisely; no, he was wrong.
It was a progression, though. And one he’d seen recently.
It was a wave amplification.
He’d seen a similar model on the computer the French had compromised a few months before, the one the terrorists had stopped using.
