Contest

by Matthew Reilly

  Marshall, Levine and Higgs came closer.

  Higgs swallowed. ‘We put him in the rotunda over there, sir.’ He pointed back over his shoulder. ‘I was going to call it in, but I didn’t think there was any hurry.’

  ‘Special Agent Higgs, I want you to go straight to that rotunda and find that bum for me, right now.’

  Higgs hurried off immediately.

  Quaid glanced up at the others as they saw what he had been looking at.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ Levine gasped.

  ‘Well would you look at that,’ Marshall said as he saw the spiderweb of electricity that spread across the small ground-level window. Tiny shards of glass lay strewn on the grass around the base of the window.

  There was nobody in sight.

  Quaid leaned close to the window. It was just big enough for a man to fit through. But why would somebody break it? That would serve no purpose whatsoever.

  Unless they wanted to get in . . .

  Higgs came running back. He spoke breathlessly.

  ‘Sir, the bum is gone.’

  Hawkins burst through the flames and fell out of the doorway and dropped to the floor of the study hall.

  He checked his body. His police trousers and parka had survived the dash through the fire intact and unharmed. But for some reason his head stung like crazy.

  He reached up to touch the crown of his head and suddenly felt the searing heat.

  His hair was on fire!

  Hawkins frantically took off his parka and smothered the tiny flames on his head with it. The heat died down quickly, and he began breathing again.

  The janitor’s room was glowing bright yellow now, lighting up the study hall outside. Flames flared out through the doorway.

  It wouldn’t be long now, he thought.

  Hawkins crawled to the side of the doorway, pushed his back up against the wall.

  He only had to wait a few seconds.

  The chemicals inside the janitor’s room combined well. After the first aerosol can exploded in a ball of gaseous blue flame, a chain reaction of chemical explosions was set in motion.

  The concrete wall behind Hawkins cracked under the weight of the shock wave as a golden fireball blasted out through the doorway, rocketing past Hawkins, setting the study hall aglow in a flash of brilliant yellow light.

  Marshall, Levine and Quaid all looked up at the same time as the entire third floor of the building flared like a fiery flashbulb, lighting up the night.

  Voices came in over their radios:

  ‘ —fire is spreading!—’

  ‘—corner room just exploded—’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Levine breathed.

  It sounded like thunder.

  Close, booming thunder.

  The whole building rocked under the weight of the explosions.

  On the Second Floor of the library, Holly and Selexin reached desperately for handholds as they tried to stay on their feet.

  The Second Floor of the New York State Library was comprised mainly of two large computer rooms. In the centre of each room, long wooden tables were covered with PCs. A tangle of air-conditioning units and aluminium air ducts hung from the ceiling, providing much-needed humidity control for the computers. Glasswalled reading rooms lined the perimeter of the floor.

  The explosions from the Third Floor were growing in intensity, and on the Second Floor they were received with all their violent force.

  The glass walls of the reading rooms shattered all around Holly and Selexin. Computers fell from the edges of the tables, crashed to the floor.

  Selexin pulled Holly under one of the long tables in the centre of the floor and they huddled together, covering their ears, as the building shook and the explosions boomed and monitors and keyboards fell from the tables all around them, smashing down onto the floor.

  Chaos. Absolute chaos.

  In the study hall, Hawkins pressed his hands tightly against his ears as waves of flames lashed out from the doorway next to him.

  Several of the L-shaped desks around him were on fire—ignited by the initial flamethrower-like finger of fire that had blasted out from the janitor’s room.

  The explosions were bigger now—bigger than he had expected them to be, bigger than any chemical fire he knew.

  They were almost, well . . . too big.

  Why had that—?

  Hawkins froze. Something else must have happened. But what?

  And then he saw it.

  A small pipe, running horizontally, high up on the wall near the ceiling.

  It ran out from the janitor’s room, across the wall of the study hall—above the northern windows—and then, halfway across, it turned abruptly downwards and ran down to the floor, and then through the floor down to the other floors below . . .

  A gas pipe.

  There must have been a gas valve in the janitor’s room that he hadn’t seen. A gas water heater or a gas—

  The small pipe ignited.

  Hawkins watched in horror as a yellow-blue flame sped in a thin line across the pipe’s horizontal length, and then turned as the pipe did, darting downwards, heading for the lower floors.

  Hawkins watched as a droplet of fire fell from the gas pipe and landed on one of the wooden desks. With a sudden whoosh, the desk went up in flames.

  Hawkins leapt to his feet. The explosions from the janitor’s room were finally beginning to die, but that didn’t matter anymore.

  A fire was spreading through the gas piping.

  Soon the whole building would be alight.

  He had to find a way out.

  In a small toilet on Sub-Level One, somebody else was feeling the shuddering explosions that were rocking the New York State Library.

  Stephen Swain MD sat with his back pressed up against the white-tiled wall of a cubicle in the ladies’ room of Sub-Level One. The water in the toilet bowl next to him splashed about wildly as the building around it tilted and swayed.

  Another explosion boomed and the building shook again, although not as drastically as it had before. The explosions seemed to be losing their muscle.

  Swain checked his wristband. It read:

  INITIALISED—6

  DETONATION SEQUENCE TERMINATED AT:

  * 0:01 *

  RESET

  The top line flickered, then changed to:

  INITIALISED—5

  High above Swain’s head, just below the ceiling, the grid of blue electricity was still sizzling. Beyond the glowing window he could hear the faint voices of the NSA agents.

  He pressed himself closer against the tiles and breathed deeply.

  He was back inside.

  It was the thought of Holly that had done it.

  Holly on the First Floor, in the dilapidated Internet Facility. When the hoods had been pounding on the door and Swain had handcuffed it shut, he had found Holly over by the window.

  She had been holding the broken telephone receiver up against the electrified window. When the phone was brought in close to the window, the electricity seemed to pull back in a wide circle.

  Away from the phone.

  At the time, Swain hadn’t realised what was happening, but he knew now.

  It wasn’t the phone that the electricity had been pulling away from, but the magnet inside the phone. The earpiece of a telephone is like a common stereo speaker: at its centre one will find a relatively high-powered magnet.

  And as a radiologist, Stephen Swain knew all about magnetism.

  People commonly associate radiologists with X-rays, but in recent years radiologists have been endeavouring to discover new ways to obtain cross-sections of human bodies—views taken by looking down on the body from above the head.

  There are a number of techniques used to obtain these cross-sections. One well-known method is the CAT-scan. Another more modern method involves the splicing and ordering of atomic particles and is called Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

  Basically—as Swain had explained to the troublesome Mrs Pederman earlier
that day—MRI works on the principle that electricity reacts to magnetic interference.

  And that was exactly what had happened when Holly had held the receiver to the window—the magnetic waves disrupted the very structure of the electronic waves and, hence, made the wall of electricity pull away from the magnet in order to maintain their frequency.

  To get inside again, Swain had grabbed the receiver from his pocket and held the ear-piece to the window. The electricity had instantly pulled back from the receiver, forming a wide two-foot hole in the grid, and Swain had simply thrust his arm in through the hole.

  The wristband, once detecting itself to be inside the electric field again, stopped its countdown immediately.

  Just in time.

  After a minute’s careful wriggling and squirming—to make sure he did not move his body beyond the two-foot magnetic circle in the electric grid—Swain was back inside.

  In fact, he had just pulled his right foot inside the window when he fell from the high window sill. The electric grid sizzled immediately back into place and Swain fell clumsily onto the toilet seat below.

  Inside.

  Paul Hawkins was halfway across the study hall when the explosions ceased.

  Only the loud crackling sounds of a fire out of control remained. The desks over by the janitor’s room were now blazing wildly. The janitor’s room itself was still glowing bright yellow. The whole study hall was bathed in a flickering golden haze.

  Suddenly there came a crashing sound from behind him and Hawkins spun.

  There, hovering in the doorway to the janitor’s room, silhouetted by the flickering yellow flames behind it, was the Codex.

  Hawkins froze.

  Then he saw it wobble slightly.

  The Codex was hovering unsteadily. It began to swirl dizzily. And then, abruptly, its flat triangular head snapped upward and the Codex fell, crashing down on top of a crumpled desk.

  After that, it didn’t move.

  Hawkins sighed with relief.

  He was about to turn back for the stairwell when he caught sight of something on the floor not far from the door to the janitor’s room. Something white. Slowly, Hawkins stepped forward until he could see what it was . . .

  He stopped cold.

  It was a guide. Or at least what was left of him.

  It had probably been the Codex’s guide, stationed outside the janitor’s room while the Codex had gone inside for the kill.

  The guide’s body lay in a wide pool of blood underneath one of the L-shaped desks and it had been mangled beyond recognition.

  Small clusters of parallel red slashes ran across its face, arms and chest—one of which had broken its nose, making for an especially gruesome excess of blood. Deep scratches on the little man’s palms suggested futile defensive efforts. His eyes and mouth were wide open—frozen in eternal terror—a snapshot of his horrifying final moments.

  Hawkins winced at the sickening sight—it was disgusting, brutal. And then, as he looked more closely at the clusters of slashing cuts all over the guide’s body, he had a sudden, terrifying realisation. Parallel cuts indicated claws . . .

  Bellos’ hoods had done this.

  It was time to get out of here.

  Hawkins immediately turned back for the stairwell—

  —only to see a big black hand rush toward his face.

  And then he saw nothing.

  Stephen Swain stepped cautiously out from the ladies’ room and saw the familiar glass-walled offices of Sub-Level One.

  He checked his wristband and found that the screen had changed again.

  INITIALISED—4

  Another contestant was dead. Only four were left now.

  Swain wondered which contestants were still alive. He shrugged off the thought. Hell, he only really knew of three other—Balthazar, Bellos and Reese. Including himself, maybe they were the only four left.

  Got to find Holly, he told himself. Holly.

  He stepped out among the offices. Across the floor, through the glass partitions, he saw the elevator bay. He also saw the heavy blue door that led out to the parking lot. It was open.

  Swain hastened over to the door and examined it. It had been torn from its hinges, presumably by Reese when she had been chasing them before.

  He remembered the chase into the parking lot, remembered Balthazar coming up the concrete ramp from the floor below . . .

  The floor below.

  Sub-Level Two, the Stack.

  That was where he had been separated from Holly and Selexin, so it was the obvious place to start looking for them.

  He had to get down there.

  Go down the stairwell?

  No. There was another way. A better way.

  He remembered Balthazar again, coming up the ramp in the parking lot. That was the way in. Balthazar had come from another, lower, parking level. And that level had to have an entrance of some sort, a door that would open onto Sub-Level Two.

  With that Swain ran through the big blue door and out toward the parking lot.

  From the outside it looked like a scene from The Towering Inferno. The State Library of New York—standing proudly in the centre of a beautiful inner city park—with long flaming tentacles spraying out from two flat rectangular windows up near its roof, while rows of windows on the third and second floors were illuminated by a glowing golden haze.

  John Levine was back at the front of the library, watching as the building before him burned.

  Behind him, the big blue NSA van pulled out from the kerb and headed for the western side of the library building.

  Levine watched as the van jumped the kerb and drove straight onto the grass lawn surrounding the library. Then it disappeared around the corner.

  He turned back to see headlights—lots of headlights—and he knew what that meant. The fire department was arriving—closely followed by the media.

  Multi-coloured vans screeched to a halt just outside the perimeter of yellow tape. Sliding doors were flung open and cameramen charged out. Behind them, pretty reporters emerged from their vans, fluffing and primping.

  One bold young reporter hustled straight over from her van, ducked under the yellow police tape and walked straight up to Levine and thrust a microphone into his face.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, in her best, most serious voice, ‘can you tell us exactly what is happening here? How did the fire start?’

  Levine didn’t answer. He just stared at the young woman, silent.

  ‘Sir,’ she repeated, ‘I said, can you tell us—’

  Levine cut her off, speaking softly and politely, facing the young reporter, but clearly addressing the three NSA agents standing nearby.

  ‘Gentlemen, please escort this young lady outside the perimeter and inform her that if she or anyone else crosses that line again they will be arrested on the spot and charged with Federal offences relating to interference with matters of national security, sentences for which range between ten and twenty years, depending on what sort of mood I’m in.’

  The three agents stepped forward and the reporter, mouth agape, was led ignominiously back to the perimeter.

  Levine was watching her legs as she walked off when his radio came to life. It was Marshall.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Quaid and I are at the entrance to the parking lot,’ Marshall said. ‘TV there yet?’

  ‘They’re here all right,’ Levine said.

  ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Good. We’ll be down here from now on. This fire has raised the stakes. Now we have to get inside before the whole place burns down. Is the truck on the way?’

  ‘It just left,’ Levine said. ‘You’ll be seeing it any second now.’

  The ramp leading down from the street to the underground parking lot was on the western side of the library building.

  Marshall was standing at the base of the ramp, not far from the metal grille that closed off the parking lot. In the centre of the grille, just touching the
ground, was the large circle of criss-crossing blue electricity.

  Behind him, the big NSA van reversed around the corner and backed slowly down the ramp.

  ‘Okay,’ Marshall said into his radio, seeing the van, ‘it’s here. I’ll call you back soon. For now, you just keep those firemen and reporters behind the tape. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Levine’s voice said as Marshall hung up.

  The van stopped and the back doors burst open and four men dressed in SWAT gear jumped down onto the ramp. The first of them—a young technician—came straight up to Quaid and they spoke quietly. Then the technician nodded vigorously and disappeared inside the van. He re-emerged several seconds later carrying a large silver box.

  Quaid walked over to Marshall, standing in front of the electrified metal grille.

  Marshall said, ‘How long will it—?’

  ‘We’ll be in there soon,’ Quaid said calmly. ‘We just have to do the math first.’

  ‘Who are you going to get to do it?’

  ‘Me,’ Quaid said.

  The technician placed the heavy box down on the concrete next to Quaid, then bent down and flipped open its silver lid to reveal three digital counters. Each counter displayed red numbers, which at the moment read: 00000.00.

  Quaid then pulled a long green cord out from the box and led it over to the metal grille. The cord had a shiny steel bulb at the tip.

  Another heavily armed agent came over and handed him some insulated black gloves and a long pole with a loop of rope attached to its end. Quaid put the gloves on and inserted the steel bulb into the loop at the end of the pole.

  He took a long, slow breath. Then he pointed the pole away from his body, toward the wall of criss-crossing blue lightning.

  The steel bulb at the end of the pole glistened as it edged closer and closer to the wall of blue light.

  Marshall watched tensely. Quaid swallowed.

  The NSA team stared in anticipation.

  None of them knew what would happen.

  The bulb touched the electricity.

  The counters in the steel box immediately began to tick upward slowly, measuring the voltage. They sped up slightly, the numbers getting larger and larger.

  And then they went into overdrive.