“You know, a big part of what I do isn’t all the bang-bang crap, it’s keeping human contacts and assets warm.”
“How’d ’ja warm up these two cuties?”
“Would you believe Yankees tickets?”
“This ought to be good.”
“Vasily, he’s the smart one, his son was visiting New York and he’s a big Derek Jeter fan . . . Go figure. Anyway, I had done some work with the guy who is now the head of Yankee stadium security, back in the time before you need to know.”
“Priceless.”
“Two seats behind home plate later, we have our means of egress all set for me and Prescott.”
“After you find him and after you break him out of whatever situation he is in,” Brooke pointed out as a reminder that this wasn’t going to be a day at the ballpark.
“Yeah, all that, too.”
Brooke had a moment of contemplation. “Bridge, I am sorry you’re going into this blind. I wish I had time to get you the proper intel. I don’t like the idea of sending—”
Bridge interrupted. “Thanks, I appreciate the sentiment. But I’ve been in tougher scrapes. In the end, even the best laid plans of mice and men and control agents . . .”
“Oft times get all fucked up!” Brooke finished the bawdy homage to planning by bureaucrats.
“Zactly . . .” Bridge said.
.G.
Charlene Logan had just finished copying the duty log for the next three days of the FinCEN investigation. The tall blonde distributed the reports to all relevant agents in the office. She stopped at Agent Worrel’s desk. “Chet, how’s your boy doing?”
“He’s fine, just a little bump on his knee. But you know the schools these days . . . Every little thing . . .”
Charlene stopped listening as something outside the window caught her eye.
.G.
From the scaffold on the side of the building two blocks to the east, Paul switched on the rangefinder. Through the sites of the launcher, he first aimed the laser finder in the middle of the top floor of the Prescott Capital offices. Then he saw a blonde near a window to the right. It certainly looked like the bitch that had killed Shamal, that “Brooke” agent. He smiled as he re-aimed the laser dot on her head through the window of the office she was standing in.
.G.
There was a resounding thud, then the air in the room compressed and popped Brooke’s and Bridge’s ears. Then the horrendous sound of an explosion as the right wall of the office deflected and bulged as it was torn open. All the papers and books in the adjacent room, even the material of the chairs, instantly combusted from the flaming debris that blew through the ruptured wall. Bridge was in midair, diving over Brooke’s desk. She was on her way down to the floor when the heat and flame scorched the entire office. It was as if the oxygen was sucked out of the room. They both gasped for air. Then the windows imploded. Showering them with glass.
Bridge looked at the door. The rug had now also caught fire and the flame was heading toward them, making escape that way impossible. He grabbed Brooke. “We have to use the window!”
Bridge picked up Brooke’s desk chair and ran it around the broken shards of glass that remained in the frame. There was a strong rush of wind as the fire fed itself from the oxygen it drew in from outside. The new air abated her coughing, but at first Brooke didn’t want to go out the window. Then she looked up and saw that Bridge already had one leg out.
“Come on, Brooke, there’s a little ledge. It’s our only chance!”
They both crawled out onto the lintel that jutted out and ran around the older building, right under the windowsills. They flattened against the wall. Bridge took off his belt and slipped the buckle end over a knob-like device that the window washer would use to fasten his safety harness to the window frame as he hung out to clean them. Brooke knew not to look down. Bridge then wrapped the belt around his hand and held Brooke back with the other. The flames blasted out of the window of the office they had just escaped. A secondary explosion rocked the building and Brooke almost lost her footing.
.G.
From the scaffold, Paul watched the devastation of the entire forty-first floor of the building two blocks away. He hit the lever and started the climb to the roof. Then he saw them through the black billowing smoke; two people out on the ledge. One of them was a blonde woman. Paul pulled out his gun. He took aim, but then his brain kicked in. The handgun would never make the shot.
.G.
Bridge knew it was bad. The smell of burning flesh told him there would be a great many casualties. The exterior wall they were flat against was heating up. The fire seemed to be a little farther to the left of where they were standing. “Brooke, do you think you could sidestep your way to the right?”
“Hold on. I mean, hold me.” Brooke crouched low trying to keep her center of gravity back against the wall that was growing hotter and hotter by the moment. She used one foot to push off her high-heeled shoe then reversed the process. “Okay.”
Now in bare feet, she inched to her right. Bridge followed. Sirens wailed. And Bridge could see flashing lights from the corner of his eye coming up and down Park Avenue. They both knew, however, that no NYFD ladder company could reach beyond the tenth floor. It would be a long time until some kind of rescue from the roof would come their way. And the walls of the forty-first floor were sure to crumble from the heat way before that. Twenty feet behind them, another window blasted out. And the distortion of the super-heated air bellowing out bent the view of downtown Manhattan into a funhouse mirror-like distortion.
.G.
Brooke amazed herself by—at a time like this—running her fingers through her hair, and shaking loose pebbles. No, not pebbles . . . little chunks of glass. The windows were tempered. They didn’t shard but instead just crumbled. That was why she and Bridge had not been sliced to death. Although she wondered if that had just forestalled the inevitable as she looked down at the fire engines, cop cars, and ambulances that didn’t have a shot in hell of reaching them in time.
Bridge’s leather shoes slipped on the pigeon shit that was layered thick on the narrow ledge. Brooke grabbed his arm and they both almost toppled over. It was her bad arm and she lost her breath from the pain in her shoulder that had been grazed by a bullet the night before.
“Thanks,” Bridge said.
Brooke just nodded her head in short, abbreviated motion so as not to topple over.
“Look,” Bridge said.
Brooke looked and saw a flagpole jutting out from the side of the building. She immediately knew what Bridge was thinking. “You think it will hold?”
“Maybe one of us at a time. You first; you’re daintier.”
Up against the wall, inching sideways, Brooke didn’t risk turning back to him but she said, as she was sidestepping towards the pole, “Normally, I’d bristle at a crack like that, but right now I’ll take it!”
She looked at the lines that ran to the pulley the flag was attached to. “They look a little skimpy.”
“That’s why you should go first. They might not hold me.”
She watched as Bridge found another cleat to attach his belt to, and used his arm to hold her up against the building as she had to crouch a little to try to unthread the lines from the flagpole. She managed to unwrap the extra rope from the tie-off cleat and separated the two lines. At first she pulled on the top one, but quickly saw the flag moving out further, trying to get through the pulley out on the end. She grabbed the bottom line and pulled. The flag started coming to her. Then she saw the ring on the top line. It would surely get caught in the pulley out on the end. “It’s a square knot. I have to untie it.”
.G.
Bridge adjusted his grip on her, as she had to crouch a little more. He then went to check the belt hooked around the window washer’s cleat and saw the wall ten feet from them starting to pull away
from the building. He knew it was only a matter of time before the weakened structure might collapse across the whole floor. He decided not to tell Brooke to hurry.
.G.
She got the three-inch metal ring untied and was about to toss it when she thought better of it and slipped it inside her bra. She got all of the rope free of the pole and guessed she had twenty or so feet. Carefully, she pulled the length of rope to about half and doubled it.
“It’s too short,” she said to Bridge.
“Here, use this,” he said, lifting the flag with his right foot. She grabbed it. She took the ring out of her bra and looped the rope through the ring and made a double knot. On the other end of the rope, she made a noose and ran the flag halfway through it. Doubled up like that, the flag added another three feet. Brooke slipped the ring over the tie-off cleat and tugged on it. It seemed solid. What choice do we have anyway? she thought.
She let the rope with the flag on the end drop. She held the top of the rope and steadied herself as she slowly sat down on the ledge. Bridge used his hand to keep her back on the ledge. She gripped the rope tightly with both hands and took a deep breath, and said softly under her breath, “I’m going to be home real soon, Mush.”
.G.
Down on the street, a news crew was trained on the man and woman in a life-and-death struggle out on the ledge of the burning top floor of the building. Most folks on the street were also looking up. The crowd collectively let out a gasp, and scattered exclamations like, “Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, shit!” As they saw the woman slip and start to fall.
.G.
Brooke felt herself sliding off the edge and tried to stave off straining the rope, but wound up swinging out like Tarzan on the flimsy cord, only to crash back into the building with a pronounced thud that made Bridge wince. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I just hit my elbow.” She looked at her hands, which were being strangled by the death grip she had on the thin rope. The thin lines making her fingers white from the lack of circulation. “God, give me the strength . . .” she said softly, reminding herself of her mother’s favorite exclamation. Somehow that gave her a little burst of energy.
Bridge called down to her. “What did you say?”
“Talk about hazardous duty pay . . .”
Looking down at her, Bridge was emphatic. “Just pay attention to what you’re doing. Can you make it to the window below?”
“I think so, but it’s closed!”
“Shit!”
“How’s the rope holding?” Brooke said, looking up to him.
Bridge grabbed the cleat the ring was attached to and gave it a tug. “Seems like it’s holding.”
“Let’s hope so.” Brooke oriented herself so that she was facing the façade of the building and gripped the rope; she lifted her legs and pushed herself off. She swung out about five feet as the ring in the cleat groaned from the added stress.
Holding her feet in front of her, stiffening her legs, she hit the window heels first and bounced off. “Whoa . . . Oh . . . Shit!” She banged back into the building, almost letting go again from the pain in her shoulder.
“You okay?” Bridge asked.
“Why does this shit always happen after a manicure?” she said, ignoring the pain by looking at her broken nail on the finger choked off by the rope.
She oriented herself to try again when suddenly they heard a noise. Bridge turned as the sound of the roof above the office next to the one they started in was beginning to collapse. He called down to her, “Make this one good, Brooke.”
“Brooke took a deep breath and coiled up. She was about to push off when suddenly the window opened and a fireman stuck his head out and extended a pole. “Grab the pole, lady!”
Thirty seconds later, they tossed a new, thicker rappel rope with a belay device and carabiner at one end up to Bridge. They tied off the other end to a standpipe by the window and yelled up to Bridge. “Secure!”
He tied it around his waist as a safety line, and lowered himself onto the flagpole. Dangling with one hand, he snagged Brooke’s rope with the other and let go of the pole. He lowered himself to the sill. The firemen pulled him in.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sir, miss, we have to get out of here. We came up the back freight elevator. But we’ll have to take the stairs down . . .”
A huge crunching sound interrupted the firefighter as plaster fell in the room they were in. New York’s bravest immediately took of his helmet and placed it on Brooke’s head. “Let’s go!”
They bolted out of the room as the ceiling collapsed and made it to the exit just as burning debris fell from the burning roof above. They double-timed it down the forty flights to the lobby.
The commander on the scene was surprised that Brooke was alive. “That was you hanging off the flag pole?”
“I need a casualty report. Who’s the senior responder?” Brooke said out of breath, rubbing her hands to get the circulation back in them.
“First, you need to let us check you, over there, by the ambulance.”
“No time. This was an attack on a federal office in the middle of a national security investigation. What I need is intel. If you can’t give it to me, then who can?”
“Me. Inspector Rynes. Are you Burrell?”
“Yes.”
He turned to his aide. “Notify the Secretary of the Treasury, we got her.”
She addressed the same aide. “Better yet, let me speak to him.”
The inspector ceded. “FDNY tells me most of the upper floor was fully involved. Right now, we have fourteen survivors, mostly from the offices towards the south side of the building, but the FDNY captain on the floor below has pulled his men, fearing imminent collapse, otherwise they’d still be trying to knock down the fire at the point of origin.”
“Do we know the cause yet?”
“From the debris field down here on Park Avenue South, it looks like an explosive event. Followed by fire.”
Brooke looked up at the black smoke billowing out. “We had metal detectors and package inspection. No one got a bomb up there.”
Just then a female detective came over. “Sir, we have a multiple homicide two blocks away.”
“Who are you?” Brooke asked.
“Detective second grade, Paige Greyson. Midtown South.”
“Brooke Burrell, Treasury. So what makes you think we need to know about the homicides?”
“Two window cleaners and a freight elevator operator killed in the last hour.”
“Window cleaners? What building, Paige?” the inspector said.
“Right over there, Thirtieth and Lex. See the scaffold on the roof right now?”
Brooke looked and saw a few cops’ heads over the edge around the window-washing platform.
“And we found this on the rig.” Greyson held up her iPhone with a picture of an army-green case. It was opened and inside had a cutout in the familiar shape of a Javelin shoulder-fired missile.
Just then the aide came over with a phone and handed it to Brooke. “Sec Tres for you, miss.”
She took the phone. “Yes, I am fine, sir. We have lost a lot of good people this morning, sir. Still trying to get a survivors list now. Me? I got out with Bridgestone.” Then she remembered he wasn’t aware of Bridge. “Sorry, he’s someone I was consulting with. I’ll give you hourlies once I set up a temporary command post. Nothing definitive yet, but I got one sharp cookie of a detective here that thinks we may be talking a missile attack from a building a few blocks away.”
Detective Paige Greyson smiled at the overheard complement.
Then Brooke saw the first stretchers emerging from the building. She ran over and walked with one on the way to the ambulance. Harrelson was burned and his arm deeply gashed. He was barely conscious. “Ben, hold on there, buddy.”
“Brooke . . .”
“Who was with you?”
“Walters, Fred, and . . . and that new kid . . . What’s his name . . . Oh, I can’t remember the kid’s name . . .”
“That’s okay, just rest and get better. I’ll come by and see you later,” Brooke said as the stretcher’s legs folded into the ambulance and the EMTs jumped in. She turned and saw George limping out the front door.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I was in the bathroom when all hell broke loose. A woman collapsed in front of me on the stairs and I went to grab her and twisted my ankle. How many made it out?”
“Seventeen, you’re eighteen,” Brooke said as she resisted the impulse to grab his arm and help him walk.
George looked up at the smoldering top floor. The smoke trail had now expanded all the way uptown.
Brooke spent two hours aiding the injured and supervising the recovery.
Detective Greyson found her slumped on the side of a fire truck catching her breath. “Here.”
Reaching for the coffee, Brooke thanked the female detective.
“We got a temporary command post set up across the street. There’s a quiet place in there and a pretty clean bathroom.”
“Yeah, it was getting to be that time.”
On the way over to the bathroom she noticed something lodged in the windshield of a cab that was covered in bricks, dust, and debris from the building. Embedded right into the glass was a mangled cameo pin. With effort she removed it from the shattered windshield.
Brooke exited the bathroom and found a small office in the large blue and white motor home the NYPD had converted to a mobile command post. She shut the door and sat in the desk chair. She put her face in her hands and let out a deep breath. Then she felt something in her hair. She rolled out a glass pebble, another piece of the window they’d broken to get free. Then she pulled the broach out of her pocket. Charlene had a brooch just like it. She hadn’t seen Charlene amongst the survivors. Then she thought of all the people she worked with, most of whom wouldn’t be going home tonight, wouldn’t be kissing their loved ones or hugging their kids, all because they worked for her in one way or another. Her bottom lip began to quiver and she had herself a good cry.
Give Us This Day Page 20
