The woman in the passenger seat was staring at him, any initial fear now replaced by anger and confusion.
“It’s fake,” she said. “I know it’s fake. I heard the call.”
Dryden nodded. He wasn’t looking at her. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and stared at the tower.
From this distance he could see the whole structure, including the crane—and its counterweight. It was exactly as Dryden had pictured it: The giant weight hung dead-centered over the building, a hundred feet above the roof. The sword of Damocles.
Behind him, someone honked a horn. The traffic leading toward the building had clotted six or seven cars deep.
Far ahead, around the building’s base, men from the site were yelling at bystanders to get back, waving off cars, and getting the hell away themselves.
At the edge of his vision, Dryden saw the woman staring at him, her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t get the chance.
The first shock wave of the tremor felt like an impact against the underside of the Explorer. Like the vehicle was on a lift, and someone had come along and hit it with a battering ram from below. The SUV rose up on its shocks and slammed back down. The woman grabbed the armrests for support.
A second and third jolt followed immediately, and before Dryden could process them, the lateral shaking started—the signature movement of a big quake. The whole world was suddenly shuddering, sliding violently left and right. A city on a card table, with a giant gripping its edges and wrenching it forward and backward, again and again and again.
The Explorer rocked side to side on its suspension. Dryden could see every other car on the street doing the same. He saw people on sidewalks throw themselves down on the grass. Saw the stoplights over every intersection jerk and twist and swing.
And Mission Tower.
Twenty-two stories. Concrete and steel. Swaying and pitching and reeling—but handling it.
It actually looked like it was doing fine. There were ripples racing up and down its height, the whole structure just visibly moving in a kind of belly-dance sway; Dryden had the distinct impression that it was designed to do this. Engineered to move in precisely this way, to dissipate the shock waves. To bend so it wouldn’t break.
The tower crane was a different story.
There were ripples racing up and down its height, too. It did not look like it was handling it.
As Dryden watched, he could see a kind of cumulative effect building up, each oscillation of the crane’s mast just a little more pronounced than the one before it. Like a child on a swing going a bit higher with each pass.
And then it failed.
Midway up the mast’s freestanding portion—the part above the building, anchored to nothing—something gave way. Some bolt or weld, marginally weaker than the rest, let go, and in an instant the failure cascaded up and down through the mast, turning rigid steel into something that looked more like cable.
The giant horizontal arm that formed the top of the crane—the jib and counterjib—simply dropped. Like a two-by-four held out flat and then released.
The counterweight punched through the tower’s roof without stopping. A massive block of dumb, dead weight, probably twenty mixer trucks’ worth of concrete, it obeyed the primeval physics of gravity and acceleration and momentum. It didn’t even slow down; it crashed through floor after floor, as if the building weren’t there at all. It tore a ragged tunnel straight downward, and left a dust-choked wake above itself, and even as Dryden watched it smash into the ground beneath the tower, his eyes were drawn back up to the building’s top.
Where the floors were failing. The highest one first. It sagged at its center like a collapsing pie crust, settling its weight onto the floor beneath it. After only a few seconds, both floors gave way; they crumbled and pancaked downward and took the whole building with them, compressing it into its own footprint with brutal speed and efficiency. The collapse kicked out a cloud of concrete dust. It surged outward, channeled through the spaces between buildings, as ugly a déjà vu as Dryden had ever experienced. In a matter of seconds the dust cloud had reached the Explorer and engulfed it, plunging the inside into a murky twilight.
In the light that remained, Dryden turned to the woman in the passenger seat.
She was staring at him.
Her mouth hung slack.
Her lower eyelids ticked upward once, and then again, as if she were thinking of something to say. But she said nothing. She just stared.
PART THREE
SATURDAY, 12:00 P.M.–9:10 P.M.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ghosts emerged out of the dust from the collapsed building. The shapes of people, dark gray against the light gray. They materialized from the gloom three feet from the Explorer’s hood, drifted past, vanished behind its back bumper.