The guy thought for a moment. “Maybe you explain all that to Mag-Lev.”
I was about to shoot him in the face just to liven up the conversation when I heard another door open behind me. I spun around to face the newcomer, a chubby Latino wearing gym shorts and a wife beater. He was pointing a gun at me as well. Dumb, Fowler. Really dumb. You should never have let yourself get boxed in like this.
So the question was: Could I take them both out before one of them shot me? I put the odds at about three to one in favor. These guys were clearly not pros; I could put two in Fatty’s chest, pivot and take out Slim before either of them knew what was happening. But here’s the thing: these guys weren’t killers; they were just random losers hoping to make a few bucks. I didn’t want to kill them if I didn’t have to. I wasn’t bullshitting when I’d said they were wasting their time; we could sort this out with a quick call to Mag-Lev. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but a one-in-four chance of getting shot is still way too high. Getting shot sucks. A lot.
I raised my hands in the air, letting the SIG Sauer dangle from my index finger. “Seriously, guys,” I said. “This is a misunderstanding. Kathryn’s gone, and she’s of no use to Mag-Lev anyway. Do you have Mag-Lev’s comm ID?”
Silence.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I do.” I don’t generally have DZ warlords on speed dial, but Keane and I had recently had some dealings with Mag-Lev. “I’m going to holster my gun, all right? Just stay calm.” I turned sideways so that I could see both of them, then ever-so-slowly lowered my hands to chest level, bringing them in front of me. I took the barrel with the fingers of my left hand, grabbed the bottom of the grip with my right, and then gently slid it into the holster. “Airplane goes back in the hangar,” I said as I tucked it into place. “Nobody gets hurt. Now here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tap my comm and say Mag-Lev’s name to call him. I’ll put him on speaker so we can all have a nice conversation together, okay?”
Neither of the men spoke, but Slim shrugged, which I took as a go-ahead.
I tapped my comm. “Call Mag-Lev,” I said. Nothing happened. I tapped it again, glancing down to make sure I’d activated it properly. “Call Mag-Lev,” I said again, louder this time. Still nothing. Technology was not my friend today.
I glanced at the comm display. NO SIGNAL, it read. Fantastic. I wondered if this was a momentary glitch or if the war in the DZ had escalated to the point where the communications infrastructure was being targeted. “Can’t get a signal,” I said.
“Been out all day,” said Slim. “I’m gonna have to go talk to Froggy.”
“Froggy?” I said. “Who the hell is Froggy?”
“Mag-Lev’s guy. He’s the one who came by here asking about Kathryn.”
Great, I thought. Middle fucking management. I’d be in this hallway a week before these guys talked to anybody in Mag-Lev’s organization who knew anything. I was really wishing I had shot Slim when I’d had a chance.
“C’mere,” said Slim. I glanced at Fatty, to my right, who nodded. I walked toward Slim, stopping a few feet in front of him.
“Gimme your gun,” Slim said.
Having committed to a peaceful resolution, I didn’t see any alternative. I gently withdrew my gun from its holster and handed it to Slim, handle first.
“Open that door.” He indicated the door he’d just come out of.
I sighed and turned the handle, and was immediately assaulted by the odors of marijuana and feet.
“Go in.”
I went into the apartment. Most of the windows had been covered with blankets and dirty laundry and other refuse littered the floor. All things considered, I preferred Gwen’s decorating style to Slim’s.
Slim followed me in. “Siddown.”
I moved a pizza box out of the way, removed my backpack, and sank into a couch.
“Jorge,” said Slim to the fat guy in the hall, “you watch him. I’ma go talk to Froggy.”
Jorge waddled into the room, pointing his gun at me. I noticed his finger was on the trigger.
“Jesus, Jorge,” I said. “Trigger discipline. Don’t make me come over there and show you how to use that thing.”
I swear to God, Jorge turned the gun toward his face and looked right down the barrel.
Slim grabbed his hand and pointed the gun to the floor. “Leave it like this unless he gets up,” Slim said. Jorge nodded. That seemed like a compromise I could live with. He put my gun on a shelf behind Jorge. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
Slim walked out, closing the door behind him. I smiled at Jorge. Jorge stared dumbly back at me, his gun pointed directly at his big toe. It was going to be a long hour, assuming Slim wasn’t being overly optimistic. I found myself wondering how trustworthy someone named “Froggy” was likely to be. If Froggy were a stand-up guy who knew his business, I might actually be out of here in an hour. If he were some whacked-out paranoid drug addict, he might instruct Slim to shoot me in the head to appease the lizard people. There was no way to know.
I was still pondering this half an hour later, when I heard shouts and gunfire from somewhere nearby. We’d been hearing gunfire in the distance for some time, but it seemed to have gotten a lot closer. Jorge went to a window and pulled back the blanket. From the rosy glow that shone through, I deduced that the sun was setting. More automatic fire sounded somewhere below.
“What’s going on, Jorge?” I asked, eyeing my gun on the shelf a few feet away.
“Shooting,” said Jorge.
“No kidding,” I said. “You might want to turn off the—”
There was another burst of gunfire and Jorge fell backward to the floor, covered with blood and broken glass. He’d taken at least one bullet in the face, just below his left eye, and several more to the neck and chest. Jorge never knew what hit him.
I lunged off the couch, grabbed my gun off the shelf, and crouched low to the floor, then crawled back toward the door and turned off the light. Now the room was dark except for the minimal red glow coming through the crack in the blanket over the window. The gunfire below was near constant. I went into the adjacent bedroom and pulled the blanket over the window aside slightly.
Outside it was chaos. In the thirty seconds that I scanned the street, I counted three different groups of armed men, and I honestly couldn’t tell who was fighting whom. There was one group hunkered down behind a pile of broken concrete down the street to the left, another group that was firing from the several windows and doorways across the street and, although I couldn’t actually see them, another group that was firing from the alley between the building I was in and the one to my right. At first I thought the two groups I could see were both targeting their fire at the group in the alley, but those two groups seemed to be trading occasional potshots at each other as well. It was unclear what they were fighting over—it was possible somebody had found out one of the iota coins was inside this building, but I doubted it. Most likely it was just a coincidence that this particular skirmish was happening right outside. More accurately, there were probably dozens of skirmishes like this going on all over the DZ, so the odds that one would happen nearby were pretty good. There didn’t seem to be anyone deliberately directing fire at Gwen’s building; Jorge had probably been mistaken for a sniper.
I crawled away from the window and back into the living room. It looked like I wasn’t going to be getting out of here for a while, and if I was going to have to spend the night, I wasn’t going to do it in Slim’s nasty apartment. Still in a crouch, I opened the door to the hall and peeked out. It was empty. I stood up and ran back to Gwen’s apartment. This time it only took me ten seconds to get the door unlocked. I went inside, relocked it, and threw the deadbolt. Then I spent half an hour listening to gunfire while crawling around Gwen’s apartment, pushing heavy pieces of furniture up against the door. If anyone tried to get in, I wanted them to have to work for it.
When I’d finished my barrier, I crawled into the kitchen and ate some cold spag
hetti and drank a quart of milk. My hunger satisfied, I crawled to the bathroom and took a quick shower, then crawled into Gwen’s bedroom. I shoved the mattress off the bed, lay down on it, and fell asleep.
SIXTEEN
I awoke to the sound of gunfire. I know, I just said I’d been hearing gunfire all night. But this was different. Not the guns themselves, but the way they were being fired.
There’s a difference between the sound of automatic weapons being fired by gangbangers and automatic weapons being fired by professionals, just as there’s a difference between the sound of kids playing sandlot baseball and the sound of the World Series. The languid, sporadic firing broken by long intervals of silence had given way to regular, controlled, staccato bursts broken only by the few seconds it would take to reload or advance. Gone, too, were the taunts and coordinating shouts. The only vocalizations I heard now were screams and cries for help.
An army had moved into the DZ.
I crawled to the window and looked out. The new group was advancing from the south, to my right. A dozen or so men had taken up positions in the street, taking advantage of what cover they could find from doorways and parked cars as they went, but moving too quickly for anyone to get a bead on them. From their positions and the way they were directing their fire, I got the sense that the group behind the building had been vanquished: either they’d been killed or had run away. The group across the street from Gwen’s building seemed on the verge of doing the same. A few guys were still taking potshots from windows, but the street out front was silent, and bodies littered the pavement. Within a few minutes, if the newcomers kept up the pace, they were going to scare off the gang down the street to my left as well.
The good news, from my point of view, would be that there would soon be fewer stray bullets flying through the air in the general vicinity. The bad news was that if these guys really were pros, they wouldn’t leave an entire apartment building unsecured for long. They’d break in and go door to door, making sure there were no snipers or other threats in the building. The bad news trumped the good news, in my opinion.
I would have liked to pretend I didn’t know who these people were or what they were after, but I was fairly certain I did. Gerard Canaan had sent Green River to take over the DZ. And while I’m sure there were lots of good reasons for someone to want to take over the DZ, number one in Canaan’s mind was undoubtedly locating every last iota coin in existence. If they ID’d me, word would go up the chain to Canaan that I’d been found nosing around the DZ. Even assuming they knew nothing about Gwen’s iota coin, Canaan would quickly figure out what I’d been looking for. They’d get the coin and I’d probably end up “collateral damage” of the invasion, dead in an alley. Keane would go to prison for Selah’s murder, and April and Gwen would probably join him.
I was tempted to flush the iota down the toilet just to keep Canaan from getting it, but that negated the possibility of me using it as leverage against him. And we still didn’t know why the iota coins were so valuable. For all I knew, it could hold the key to keeping all of us out of prison. I could hide it, but where? Green River was taking over the equivalent of a small country to find it. Tearing apart an apartment building with sledgehammers and crowbars was not going to be a problem for them.
The fighting was right in front of Gwen’s building now, and I chanced another look out the window. I got a pretty good look at the newcomers: they were wearing full combat gear and Minotaur helmets. A battalion of military veterans armed with equipment like these guys had could probably pacify the entire DZ in a few days. It made me wonder why nobody had ever tried it before. A question more germane to my immediate predicament, though, was: how the hell was I going to get out of here? I had been banking on the gangbangers getting bored and moving on; these DZ skirmishes were more like pissing matches than actual battles. One gang would move into another gang’s territory to test the other gang’s will to defend it. Depending on the outcome of the skirmish, boundaries would be solidified or redrawn, and then everybody would go home. The gangs didn’t hold territory in a strict tactical sense; they depended on a mutual understanding of where the lines were. This was another of Keane’s collective delusions, I suppose: the boundaries between two gangs were where they were because everybody agreed that’s where they were.
The Green River guys didn’t fight like that. They moved forward inch by inch, foot by foot, pacifying everything in their path. You knew exactly where the line between Green River territory and non–Green River territory was, because it was defined by scary-looking men with guns. If I was ever going to get out of this building, I had to do it before I was firmly on the wrong side of that line.
The first thing to do was to identify my escape route. I moved all the junk away from Gwen’s door as quietly as I could and then checked the hall. It was still empty. If there was anyone else alive in this building, they were asleep or hiding. Just as well to leave them that way. I went to Slim’s and peeked out the window where Jorge had been shot. The Green River guys were all over the street in front. That meant taking the stairs was not an option: once I got to the first floor, the only way to get out of the building was by the front door.
I went down the hall to Jorge’s apartment, which was on the back side of the building. This looked more promising. There was a door to a small landing, which led to a fire escape down to an alley that was bordered by an old redwood fence. They alley was dark; if there were streetlights in the area they’d broken or been shot out. If I could get down the fire escape into the alley without being seen, I could climb over that fence and follow it to the north, deeper into the DZ and away from the territory claimed by Green River. Then I could cut west toward the border. I might run into some fighting, but if I stayed low and took advantage of cover, I figured my odds were pretty good. The only problem was the group of Green River guys who seemed to have set up shop about thirty feet away from the end of the building, right below Gwen’s apartment. If I climbed down the fire escape now, chances were at least one of them would see me. Mag-Lev’s deadline was now less than six hours away, but as anxious as I was to get out of the DZ with the coin, I couldn’t help Gwen if I was dead.
The fact was, the Green River guys didn’t particularly care about me at this point. They didn’t know who I was or that I had one of the precious coins they were looking for. Unfortunately, if they saw me leaving the building now, they were very definitely going to be taking an interest in me. They’d ID me and search me, and it would be all over. I just needed to give them something else to focus on for a while, so they wouldn’t bother me as I was leaving. Explosions are good for that.
I went into Gwen’s kitchen and verified that she had a gas oven. I retrieved an oscillating electric fan I’d seen in the bedroom, closing the door behind me. I put the fan on the kitchen counter, plugged it in, and turned it on full blast. I set my flashlight on the floor with a napkin draped over it so that it would give me just enough light to see but not enough to be obvious from outside. Looking under the sink, I found a box of thirteen-gallon trash bags. I took one of them and a twist-tie, then dug around in the junk drawer in the dark until I felt the pair of pliers I’d noticed earlier.
I pulled the stove away from the wall and felt for the nut connecting it to the gas line. Once I found it, I loosened the nut and pulled the connection apart. Putting down the pliers, I grabbed the trash bag and put the opening over the supply line. I set the timer on my comm, then wrapped the opening of the bag tightly around the gas line and secured it with the twist-tie.
While I waited for the bag to fill, I grabbed a tape measure from the aforementioned junk drawer and made a quick measurement of the room. Subtracting for cabinets, appliances and furniture gave me a volume of about 1,200 cubic feet. When I’d finished measuring, I checked my trash bag. It was nearly full. I gave it a few more seconds, then removed the bag and checked the timer. One minute and thirty-eight seconds.
Assuming the good people at the Glad Products Company w
ere being straight with their measurements, that came to seven point five seconds per gallon, or eight gallons per minute. A gallon is zero point one three cubic feet, so I was getting a flow rate of about one cubic feet per minute.
I’d learned quite a bit about improvised explosive devices during my time in Saudi Arabia, and here’s the thing about methane explosions: they’re harder to pull off than you might think. You need a concentration of between 5 and 15 percent methane to get the gas to ignite. More than that, there’s not enough oxygen for it to burn; less than that, the methane is too diffuse to catch fire. Additionally, even if you’re in that range, you might just get a flash fire rather than an actual explosion if the mix is too rich or too lean. Ideally, you want right around 10 percent methane to get an actual supersonic, window-shattering explosion. The other problem is that methane is lighter than air, so it’s going to tend to collect against the ceiling, giving you a rich mix up high and a lean mix toward the floor. Hence the fan, which would help distribute the gas more evenly. There was a small chance a spark from the fan would prematurely light the gas, but that was a risk I was going to have to take.
With a room volume of 1,200 cubic feet, I needed one hundred twenty cubic feet of methane to get to 10 percent. So at one cubic foot per minute, it was going to take nearly two hours for my bomb to be ready. An hour and a half would get me to 7.5 percent, which would probably do it, but I wouldn’t want to go any lower than that—particularly since there was a pretty high margin of error with all these back-of-the-envelope estimates. For good measure, I moistened a towel and shoved it against the gap below the door that led to the rest of the apartment. I moistened another towel for the door to the hall. I could smell the gas already, but it wouldn’t be dangerous to breathe for a few minutes yet. Methane isn’t poisonous, but you get a high enough concentration of it and it will shove out the oxygen, and oxygen is kind of important for breathing.
The Last Iota Page 15
