13
THEY EMERGED INTO the street, the sodium lights bright after the dim apartment. Gideon blinked, tried to adjust his eyes.
“Ten days,” said Fordyce, shaking his head. “Do you think they’ll still try to maintain that schedule after all this?”
Gideon said, “I think it’s quite possible they might accelerate it.”
“Jesus Christ.” A chopper passed over, flying low, trailing a net of radiation detectors, and Gideon could hear and see the lights of others hovering in the sky over various parts of the city.
“They’re looking for the terrorists’ lab,” said Fordyce. “How far do you think Chalker could have gone, irradiated like that?”
“Not far. Quarter mile, at most.”
They had almost reached the barriers. Gideon pulled off his respirator and said, “Let’s keep the suits.”
Fordyce looked at him steadily. “I’m beginning to think you like stirring the pot.”
“We’ve got ten days. So, yeah, let’s stir the pot. Vigorously.”
“So what do we need the suits for?”
“To get our asses into the terrorists’ lab. Which we are going to go looking for—right now. The warehouses of Long Island City are right across Queens Boulevard—that’s an obvious place to start. I’m telling you, after getting irradiated, Chalker couldn’t have gone far from the scene of the accident. He was barely mobile.”
Fordyce at least didn’t say no. They reached the car, pulled off the suits, and tossed them in the back. Gideon kept the communications device, tucking it into his pocket and retaining the earbud, so that he could listen in on the chatter. Fordyce fired up the vehicle. As they moved beyond the barriers and eased through the rubberneckers—incredible they were still out at three AM—a change began to take place in the crowd. There was a movement, a wave of fear, even panic. People started moving away, slowly at first, and then faster. There were shouts and a few screams, and they began to run.
“What the hell’s going on?” Fordyce said.
Gideon rolled down the window. “Hey, you, what’s happening? Hey!”
A scruffy teenager on a skateboard careened past them, and others streamed by. A man came huffing up, face red, and seized the rear car door handle, yanking open the door.
“What’s going on?” Gideon shouted.
“Let me in!” he cried. “They’ve got a bomb!”
Gideon reached back, shoved him out. “Find another car.”
“They’re going to nuke the city!” the man cried, coming forward again. “Let me in!”
“Who?”
“The terrorists! It’s all over the news!” He lunged again at the car as Gideon slammed the door, Fordyce shooting the locks.
The man pounded on the windows with sweaty fists. “We’ve got to get out of the city! I’ve got money. Help me! Please!”
“You’re going to be fine!” Gideon shouted through the glass. “Go home and watch Dexter.”
Fordyce punched the accelerator and the car lurched out into the street; he quickly crossed the boulevard and gunned his way into a quiet industrial side street, away from the panicking crowds. It was incredible: lights were going on in all the apartment buildings surrounding them.
“Looks like the news finally broke,” Fordyce said. “The shit’s really going to hit the fan now.”
“It was only a matter of time,” said Gideon. His earpiece was starting to ramp up, voices swamping the public frequencies. The response teams were evidently becoming taxed by panicking people and emergency calls.
They were moving slowly along Jackson Avenue, amid a wasteland of old warehouses and industrial sites stretching off in every direction.
“Needle in a haystack,” said Fordyce. “We’ll never find it on our own.”
“Yeah, and once they find it, we’ll never get in, especially after that stunt we pulled back there.” Gideon thought for a moment. “We’ve got to find a lead that no one else has thought of.”
“A lead no one else has thought of? Good luck.” And Fordyce turned the wheel and headed the car back toward Queens Boulevard.
“Okay, I’ve got it!” said Gideon, suddenly excited. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“What?”
“We’re going to New Mexico. We’re going to look into Chalker’s past life. The answer to what happened to him lies out west. Face it—we’re not going to accomplish shit here.”
Fordyce gazed at him steadily. “The action’s here, not there.”
“That’s exactly why we can’t stay here, wrestling with all these bureaucrats. Out there, at least we’ll have a fighting chance to make a difference.” Gideon paused. “Got a better idea?”
Unexpectedly, Fordyce grinned. “La Guardia’s only ten minutes away.”
“What? You like the idea?”
“Absolutely. And we’d better leave now, because I guarantee you that in a few hours every seat on every plane out of New York City is going to be booked for the foreseeable future.”
A low-flying helicopter churned overhead, trailing detectors. A moment later a voice cut through the babble on Gideon’s earpiece.
“I got a hit! I’m getting a plume!”
It was drowned out in static and other voices.
“…Pearson Street, near the self-storage…”
“They got a hit,” Gideon told Fordyce. “A radioactive plume over Pearson Street.”
“Pearson Street? Jesus, we just passed it.”
“We’ll be the first on the scene. About time we got a break.”
Fordyce pulled the sedan into a four-wheel powerslide. A moment later they were screeching around the corner of Pearson. Several helicopters were hovering already, seeking the precise source, and sirens could be heard in the distance.
Pearson Street dead-ended at the railroad yards. The last buildings on the street were a massive, blank self-storage building, opposite a vacant lot strewn with trash, and some ancient warehouses. At the very end of the road stood a long, decrepit railroad storage shed.
“There,” Gideon said, pointing. “That shed in the railroad yard.”
Fordyce looked at him dubiously. “How do you know—?”
“See the broken lock? Let’s go.”
Fordyce drove up on the curb, screeching to a stop. They yanked on their suits, Fordyce grabbed two flashlights from the glove compartment, and they ran toward the shed. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, but there were plenty of holes and tears in the fence and they quickly squeezed through. The sliding doors were chained, but the lock hung from only one link, its hasp cut.
Gideon shoved open the door. Fordyce switched on his flashlight, then handed the other to Gideon. Their twin beams revealed a disused space full of decaying piles of angle iron, ties, rails, rusted equipment, and piles of salt and crushed rock.
Gideon looked around frantically but could see nothing of interest. It was just one big, useless space.
“Damn,” said Fordyce. “Must have been one of those warehouses we passed.”
Gideon held up his hand, scanned the floor. There had been people walking here recently, a lot of scuff marks in the dust and grime. They led toward a far wall, where he could make out the huge double doors of a freight elevator. He sprinted over.
“There’s a level below this one,” he said, staring at the elevator panel. He punched the buttons, but they were dead.
Gideon cast around with his flashlight and quickly located the emergency stairs. He pushed through the door into the pitch dark of a stairwell. The sirens had now converged up above and he could hear muffled radios, slamming doors, loud voices.
Using their flashlights as guides, they made their way quickly down the stairs. The vast room at the bottom was largely empty, save for grids, hoists, and moving racks mounted from the ceiling. But there was an acrid stench of burned paper and plastic in the air, and as Gideon moved into the center of the room he made out, at the far end, a tight warren of spaces with shadowy, abandoned equipment. Fordyce had seen it, too, and they both walked over.
“What kind of a setup is this?” Fordyce asked, looking around.
Gideon had recognized it immediately, and it chilled him. “I’ve seen similar setups in historic photos at the Los Alamos bomb museum,” he said. “Old photos of the Manhattan Project. It’s a crude set of rails, poles, pulleys and ropes used to move radioactive material around without getting too close to it. Very low-tech but relatively effective, if you’re in martyr mode and don’t care about exposing yourself to elevated radiation.”
As he walked past the alcoves, peering into each, he could see more remote-handling apparatuses: crude slides and structures, pieces of shielding and lead boxes, along with discarded HE wires and detonators—and what he recognized, with another chill, was a broken high-speed transistor switch.
“Jesus,” said Gideon, his heart sinking. “I see everything here they’d need to build a bomb—including the high-speed transistors, maybe the most difficult thing to get besides the core itself.”
“What the hell’s that?” Fordyce pointed to another alcove, where Gideon could see a cage with bars and some food trash.
“Dog crate? Big one, by the size of it. Probably a rottweiler or a Doberman—to keep away the curious.”
Fordyce moved slowly, methodically, examining everything.
“There’s a fair amount of residual radiation here,” said Gideon, looking at the radmeter built into his suit. He pointed. “Over there, at that apparatus, is probably where Chalker f*cked up and the mass went critical. It’s hotter than hell.”
“Gideon? Take a look at this.” Fordyce was kneeling before a pile of ashes, staring at something. As Gideon walked over, he could hear a babble of voices on the intercom, shouts and footsteps echoing from above. The NEST crew had entered the building.
He knelt beside Fordyce, trying not to stir the air and thus disturb the delicate pile. Masses of documents, computer CDs, DVDs, and other papers and equipment had been swept up into a large heap and all burned together, creating a gluey, acrid mess that still stank of gasoline. Fordyce’s gloved hand was pointing to one large, broken piece of ash at the top. As Gideon bent closer, his flashlight shone off its crumpled surface and he could just make out what it had been: a map of Washington, DC, with what appeared to be extensive notations in Arabic script. Several landmarks had been circled, including the White House and the Pentagon.
“I think we just found the target,” said Fordyce grimly.
There was a pounding of feet on the stairs. A phalanx of white-suited figures appeared at the far end of the room.
“Who the hell are you?” came a voice over the intercom.
“NEST,” said Fordyce crisply, standing up. “We’re the advance team—turning it over to you.”
In the reflected beam of his flashlight, Gideon caught Fordyce’s eye through the visor. “Yeah. Time to go.”