Dryden let go of her and grabbed the chute’s steering lines, Velcroed to the straps above his shoulders. He pulled the left line and felt the canopy respond, turning hard counterclockwise, swinging him and Rachel outward like a pendulum. Within seconds they were facing away from the building and gliding just fast enough to beat the wind.
In the relative calm, Dryden considered their situation. It would take ninety seconds or more to reach the street. By then the choppers would spot the chute and report it to whatever ground units Gaul had dispatched along with them. Dryden had no sooner formed the thought than a trio of vehicles appeared to the south, veering fast through the sparse traffic on Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t even necessary to hazard a guess: Those units would be parked below the Hancock long before he and Rachel touched down.
Dryden sought other options. The white marble tower across the street, directly to the south, rose from a base structure wider than itself—a building that occupied its entire block and stood perhaps ten stories tall. The roof of the base building offered a broad and easy landing zone and, more importantly, the tactical advantage of the building itself. Within the labyrinth of its interior, he and Rachel would have at least a fighting chance to evade Gaul’s people. The layout almost certainly extended two or three levels beneath the street, with egress points into service tunnels through which neither satellites nor helicopters could track them.
The parachute’s glide angle was already taking them toward that rooftop. They were a minute above it—they would land on it around the time Gaul’s ground units arrived, or maybe sooner. This could work.
At that moment the parachute’s canopy flared bright, and in the street far below, the circle of a spotlight shone, with the chute’s rectangular shadow eclipsing its center. One of the choppers had spotted them.
The remaining sixty seconds it would take to reach the broad rooftop suddenly felt like an hour. It was enough time for the chopper to do a lot more than report them—it could attack them.
Already Dryden heard its turbines changing pitch and saw the spotlight angle swing: The chopper was coming down to their level.
A minute wouldn’t do. Dryden reached above his head, coiled his hand around three of the chute’s lines, and pulled hard. The effect was immediate. The canopy partially collapsed, dumping air, and he and Rachel began to plummet at twice the chute’s normal descent rate, spinning wildly as they did.
Spinning—and no longer gliding. No longer heading south, toward the rooftop of the white building far below. While in this spin, they were once again at the mercy of the wind; it was shoving them north, back toward the cliff face of the Hancock.
There was a judgment call to make: How long to drop like this before filling the chute again and trying to glide for the white building’s roof? Before Dryden could make the decision, the wind gusted. With each rotation he got another glimpse of the Hancock, and with each glimpse it was closer. A lot closer. They were going to hit it. He let go of the lines and held on to Rachel as tightly as he could. The chute reinflated and stopped spinning just a few yards from the tower’s face, but they were still closing distance with the building at something like twenty miles an hour. Dryden had just enough time to consider that this was about as fast as he could sprint on the ground. Which meant that this impact would be like running full speed into a wall. He spun to take the collision with his own body instead of Rachel’s, and tensed for it.
It felt like being hit by a bus. Every joint screamed. Rachel lost her hold around his neck, and for an instant—the instant that counted—momentum turned her eighty pounds into five hundred, and her body was wrenched from his arms. All pain vanished from Dryden’s mind under a flash of adrenaline. His hands shot out for her, felt one of her sleeves—for a horrible second he imagined getting only her shirt as she fell free of it—and then locked around her wrist.
They were sliding down the glass wall now, her eyes looking up at his, wide and intense. Below her was the abyss, easily forty stories of open space.
There was something else below her as well, rushing up to meet them: a horizontal stretch of the tower’s famous exterior bracing. There were diagonal beams that crossed to form X shapes, and there were lateral beams running sideways through them. One of these flat beams, forming a ledge maybe eighteen inches deep, lay thirty feet below their position. Thirty feet and coming on fast. Dryden looked up and saw the reason for their speed: The chute had partly caved against the building, losing over half of its drag.
Twenty feet to the ledge now.
Ten.
Dryden pulled Rachel up to his level and got his arms around her, once again meaning to take the collision himself first, though in this case there was no reason to think it would help.