“Fuck!” she hissed—she just managed to keep it from being a scream.
She threw herself forward, away from the stairs and out across the blind void of the fifth floor, following the sound of rolling metal on metal.
The cylinder.
Rolling away from her, fast as hell.
Toward the edge.
The drumming was the sound of helicopter rotors. And the high, rising-falling tones were police sirens.
Still down on one knee, Travis spun hard toward the sound-source, swinging the Remington around with him. Too late. A hand gripped the weapon’s barrel in the darkness and shoved it upward, and then something else—probably a silencer—slammed into his temple. He dropped. Landed facedown on the grid flooring. Just holding on to consciousness.
Paige scrambled forward on all fours—there wasn’t time to get up on her feet. All visual reference was gone. There was only the steel grid beneath her, and the rolling sound, somewhere in the blackness ahead of her.
She was plunging blindly toward it.
And catching up.
That was all that mattered.
Very close now—it couldn’t be more than a foot or two ahead.
And then the sound simply vanished.
Like someone had neatly lifted the needle from a record.
Paige understood. Panic flared across her nervous system. Her hands grabbed for purchase on the grid—anywhere they could—to arrest her forward motion.
The hand that was further ahead came down onto nothing—it plunged into vacant space beyond the building’s edge, five stories above the ground.
Her breath rushed out and for a second she was aware of nothing but her body’s momentum, unstoppable, taking her over the drop-off.
Then her trailing hand closed around a bar of the gridwork, and she gripped it tightly, and her shoulder damn near came out of her socket as she wrenched to a stop. Her legs kicked out from behind her, sliding around and forward on the wet steel.
And then she was still. Her hand gripping the bar. Her body lying sideways along the edge. She could feel the girder’s outer margin pressed firmly against the center of her chest.
A second later the cylinder exploded, fifty feet below.
A burst of blue-white light. Like a collapsing star. Blinding, painful to her dark-adapted eyes. It lit up the pines and hardwoods that crowded the base of the building, and the broken and canted slabs of Central Park West lying across exposed roots. She saw the cylinder’s casing shatter. Saw its internal structure burst, fragile wafers of alien technology scattering over the wet ground. Strange, spherical pockets of light flickered and popped from a few components. In the larger spheres Paige saw a fish-eye view of the present-day street. Warped, distorted police cruisers with their flashers on. The intact front of the building, blazing with internal light from dozens of windows. The images lingered for less than a second and then vanished. A moment later there was nothing to see but the fragments of the cylinder’s casing, their concave inner surfaces glowing deep blue in the night, haloed by the rainfall. And then they went dark too.
Travis saw it. Saw the eruption of light thirty stories below, with his face pressed to the grid, and understood. It was the last thing he saw before the toe of someone’s boot connected with his head and shut everything off.
Chapter Forty
He faded in and out. More out than in. His head hurt like hell.
He was lying on thin, bristled carpeting. There was something rumbling beneath it. His thinking cleared a bit, and he understood that the rumbling came from a spinning axle.
He opened his eyes. He was lying bound on the floor of an SUV. He was in the back. The rear seat had been removed to make a flat storage bay. The vehicle was still in the city. The high steel and stone and brick faces of buildings slid by overhead.
He heard Finn and at least two other men talking up front. He heard a wash of static and then he heard Finn tell someone in another vehicle—or a number of vehicles—to take 495. A minute later the roof of a tunnel drew across the view, and the city was gone. The hum of the tires echoed in the enclosed space.
Travis took in fragments of the conversation between Finn and the others. Pieced together what’d happened. They’d hauled his unconscious body down through the ruin of Garner’s building and carried it two blocks to where it was safe for them to come back through the iris—inside a private garage. They didn’t have Paige and Bethany. The two of them had been long gone by the time Finn’s men had reached the bottom of Garner’s building.
The procession of SUVs traveled for a long time on the freeway. Travis didn’t bother keeping track.
Finn made a phone call. It wasn’t on speaker, but over the drone of the vehicle’s engine, Travis heard it ring four times before voice mail answered.
“Audra, it’s me,” Finn said. “Everything’s tied off here, at least as well as it can be. I should be on-site about eight hours from now. I’ll call you again from the air.”