Equipment failure.
Extenuating circumstances.
Of course.
No equipment on any of these floors. No people around to be killed by it, even if there had been; the voices were all still above him.
He was turning to start up to the sixteenth level when the static from inside the case guttered. He stopped, knelt down, and cracked the case open an inch.
He heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing about a girl named Dani California. He clicked the case back shut and kept climbing.
*
The first floor that wasn’t empty was Level 22, the one directly below the rooftop. On this floor there were still no people, but there were stacks of building materials everywhere: plywood and granite slabs and huge volumes of Sheetrock, which were plastic-wrapped against exposure to moisture.
And here at last was the equipment. Giant air compressors with tanks the size of couches. Table saws of all kinds, only some of which Dryden recognized. These were specialized, heavy-duty tools built for cutting metal and masonry and high-density composites.
None of the equipment looked like it was about to kill anyone. Most of the machines weren’t even plugged in—to electrical power or pneumatic lines.
Maybe one of the big air tanks could go off like a bomb. It seemed plausible until Dryden walked among them and eyeballed each pressure gauge. The tanks were empty. They were about as capable of exploding as the stacks of Sheetrock.
He could hear all the workers on the rooftop above him. Their voices, shouting and sometimes laughing, rang clear in the late morning air.
Atop one of the stacks of granite slabs, a dozen men had left their jackets. Four had left hard hats, and three had left cell phones.
Dryden turned and stared out past the north edge of the floor, into empty space. The crane’s mast was right there, hugging the building, fifty feet from where he stood. At this range it didn’t look like it was made of glued-together toothpicks. The steel members of the truss structure were as big around as Dryden’s leg, and fused together by welds and bolts that looked unlikely to spontaneously come loose.
He walked to the north edge. Put his feet right to the lip, beyond which a drop of two hundred and fifty feet yawned. He’d never had much of an issue with heights. Respect for them, sure. He braced a hand on the nearest corner of the crane’s mast and leaned out over the void, looking up.
A hundred feet above him, the crane’s jib arm stuck out almost straight north, away from the building. The jib’s cable trolley was positioned about a third of the way out on the arm, bearing the pulley system from which the lifting cables extended down—all the way down to the hook, which was currently lowered to ground level. Dryden couldn’t see anyone down there hustling to attach a new load. What he could see were men sitting around, eating from lunch boxes and drinking from thermoses. Break time. The voices he heard just above him, on the roof, suggested it was break time there, too.
Dryden stepped back from the edge. He turned and looked up, as if he could see right through the concrete above him. Could see the men up there, sitting around on stacks of materials like the ones down on this level. Then he imagined he was looking up beyond the men, a hundred feet higher, to what was hanging directly above the building right now. The crane’s counterjib arm. The short arm that balanced out the long one. Balanced it out because it weighed just as much, by way of the counterweight attached to it: a massive concrete block assembled in sections, the whole thing weighing—what? A hundred thousand pounds? More?
He was still looking up when the static crackled and receded again. He looked down at the case, and even before he opened it, he heard a man’s voice coming from the tablet computer’s speakers.
Not a commercial. A news report. The cadence was a dead giveaway.
Then he cracked the case open, and realized he recognized the man’s tone, though the words themselves were still too distorted to make out.
The man speaking was Anderson Cooper.
Dryden had heard local radio stations carry CNN reports at times. Some kind of affiliate deal. Usually it happened during large-scale events. Election-night coverage. Maybe a hurricane.
When the static began to clear a few seconds later, the first words Dryden discerned from Anderson Cooper were Santa Maria.
His stomach gave itself a little twist.
What the hell was about to happen in this place?
Equipment failure.
Extenuating circumstances.
Of course.
Anderson Cooper said, “I mean, you can just see it behind me. The power is still out throughout the entire city, and the only lights we’re seeing are the worklamps of the search teams, obviously all of them working at just the one site.”
Anderson Cooper wasn’t just talking about Santa Maria. He was in Santa Maria. He was here. Would be here. Ten hours and twenty-four minutes from right now.
Worklamps of the search teams.