Countdown

by Ruth Wind

“Very good. So did you arrest a group there?”

  “We got a couple of guys,” he said, “but they’re peons and they’re not about to talk.”

  “You didn’t get the owner?”

  “No. He was out of town. We recovered a shitload of explosives though, I’ll tell you that. Most of them were packed into a single moving van. Could have taken out a sizable building.”

  “Or a bridge?”

  “Oh, yeah. No problem.”

  “All right, thank you. I’ll keep you posted on anything that seems to feed into it.”

  She hung up and frowned. Who else had talked about tires? She flipped through her notes, through the paragraphs sent via Oracle. Nothing.

  She knew it was somewhere. She just had to remember.

  A small electronic noise alerted her to incoming e-mail. Kim switched screens and found a note from Scott.

  Check this out.

  He included links to articles on earthquake preparedness, bridge stability and a lengthy article on the Coronado bridge.

  I’m thinking we need to look more into this one.

  Kim wrote back:

  Maybe. Let me do some more translations.

  She picked up the file of original, decoded documents, which were all in Arabic, and began to sort through them, dividing them into stacks according to who wrote them.

  Her phone rang. “Agent Valenti,” said the receptionist, “there’s a camera crew here to see you.”

  “Sure.” Kim brushed hair from her face, wondering just how bad she’d look on camera. She glanced around at the room, and realized this part could be embarrassing. “Put the woman on the phone, will you?”

  The phone changed hands. “Tory,” Kim said. “Let’s try to keep this as low-key as possible, all right? I don’t want a lot of resentment between me and the rest of the staff.”

  “You want to meet us down here instead of up there? I’d be happy to do that.”

  For a minute, she was very tempted, then she thought of Scott and Lex, and the need to include them in the interview. “No, that’s all right. We’ll meet you in the conference room.”

  She popped her head in Scott’s office. Both Lex and Scott were bent over something spread out on the desk. “C’mon, gang,” she said. “It’s showtime. The UBC crew is here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Scott said with annoyance.

  “Television. They want to do a story, and this woman is a graduate of the Athena Academy, too, so I know she’ll do a good job. C’mon. Let’s just get it done and get back to work.”

  Scott took a comb out of his pocket. “Is she cute?”

  “Very.”

  “Excellent.” He smoothed his hair.

  Lex was grinning at Kim. “What?” she asked.

  “You’re gonna look real cute.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. There’s nothing I can do.”

  He sidled up to her. “You look hot to me, honey.”

  “Sigh,” Kim said. “Let’s go.”

  Just as they came into the hallway, Tory and her cameraman came from the elevator. Kim had seen Tory at Athena as a teen and on television many times, but it was still startling to see her tiny, neat beauty in person as an adult. Dressed in a white suit with a red blouse, Tory looked as crisp as a new dollar bill. “Kim!” she said warmly, coming forward to hold out her hand. “I’d say you look wonderful, but you’d know it was a lie.”

  Kim chuckled. “I’m not a big makeup kind of girl. Do you want to do something about the face?”

  Tory firmly shook her head. “Not at all. You’re fine.” She turned and introduced her cameraman. “This is Jay.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Kim said, shaking her hand.

  “That was really something, you at the television station,” he said with a flirtatious smile.

  Kim thought of what the columnist told her—that she was a male fantasy. “Thanks. Let’s go to the conference room, shall we? My partner is there, along with Lex Tanner, who was critical in defusing the bomb at the airport.”

  “Excellent,” Tory said. “And don’t mind Jay, he flirts with all the hot women.”

  Jay laughed and followed them into the room. Kim introduced everyone, watching as Scott straightened, ready to charm his way into the tiny brunette’s long-term memory. Jay had competition in the flirting department. “Cool it, Shepherd,” she said in his ear. “I think she’s involved with someone pretty seriously.” She’d heard rumors that Tory was dating Bennington Forsythe, the playboy brother of another Athena grad, Alexandra.

  The cameraman checked light levels and set them all up around the conference table. Tory said, “I’m mainly focusing on Kim if you don’t mind, guys. I’ll do a clip with each of you, but it makes a better story if she’s the main hook.”

  “But they were instrumental!” Kim protested.

  “Fine with me,” Lex said.

  “She did the work,” Scott added. “Do you want us to clear out then?”

  “Up to you.”

  “Let’s go,” Lex said, and they left.

  Kim gnawed her lip for a minute. “I didn’t do it on my own,” she said. “I’ve had tons of help.”

  Tory clipped a mike to Kim’s blouse. “I know. I also know you’ve distinguished yourself.” She grinned. “Love that video of you coming out of the ceiling.”

  Kim chuckled. “Seems to be a favorite moment.”

  “Let’s get started.”

  Putting a hand to her tummy, Kim said, “I’m nervous, I think.”

  “All right. We’ll just start the cameras and shoot some footage, and we can talk about Athena Academy to start with. Just talk, just as we’ve been doing. How’s that?”

  “Okay.”

  Tory gave Ben the signal, and the camera started rolling. “Tell me, Kim,” she said, “what was it like for you to leave home and go to the Athena Academy?”

  “I was very excited,” Kim said. “But also terrified. It was a very long way from home, and I’d never been away from my very large family. But I was also very excited at the things we were studying—languages and math and all the physical activities. Girls were not really encouraged to be very, very physical in my neighborhood, and I loved that part of Athena.”

  Tory smiled, and Kim realized her nervousness was gone. “Good,” Tory said. “Let’s talk about the Chicago bomb.”

  Kim nodded. The interview covered much the same ground as the questions that had been asked and answered till now, though Tory gave it a better, more sophisticated spin.

  When it was over, Kim shook her hand again. “That was relatively painless.”

  “Good. I’ll give you a call when it’s going to air. I think we have some good material.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll go film a little with the boys, then, and talk to you soon.”

  Four hours later, Kim was twittery and jumpy as the clock crept closer and closer to 5:00 p.m. and the time they would quit and then Lex would—what? Go stay in a hotel nearby? Try to go out with her? Come to her apartment? She didn’t know.

  As she sorted through code and e-mails in the original Arabic, trying to piece together some usable picture of what the terrorist cell had planned, her mind circled around and around and around the fact of Lex. Lex and the fact that he was in town. And she didn’t know what was going on tonight.

  That was the trouble. No, the fact of him was the trouble. A man who wasn’t going to ever take no for an answer, who was so alluring and intriguing and different from anyone she’d ever met that she was—for the first time in her life—in danger of actually falling in love.

  And he knew it. How did he know? Was he so used to seducing women of all ilks that he just knew which buttons to push? Was she falling for a very sincere player?

  And wasn’t sincere player an oxymoron?

  “Oh, good grief, Valenti,” she muttered to herself in exasperation at about three in the afternoon. She pushed away from her desk and marched to the ladies’ room, refusing to even glanc
e toward the room where Lex was working with Scott on bridge schematics.

  In the bathroom, she turned the tap on cold and put her hands under it, rinsing them over and over as she lectured herself. This was exactly what she did not want to do: work herself up into a lather over a man. Start letting him take over her thoughts. Invade her work time. Claim her life, inch by inch.

  Kim glared at herself in the mirror. “Stop it,” she said aloud.

  But she examined her lips closely, wishing they were more shapely. Her mother had a beautiful, perfect mouth. Why hadn’t she gotten it? Certainly she wished the black eye wasn’t so bad. It looked awful today. She smoothed her skirt, backed up and looked at her butt in the mirror. Definitely not little.

  She realized what she was doing and halted.

  Insane. She was insane. Maybe the only answer was just to sleep with him and get him out of her system. Then she could go back to Marc and her ambitions and stop mooning.

  “Get a grip. He’s only a guy.”

  But she was still tense three hours later when she closed the door to her condo and automatically clicked the alarm system on. Before she moved farther into the apartment, she kicked off her shoes, then holding the mail in one hand, she padded into the room, shedding keys, coat, purse. It was good to be home, in the silence of her sanctuary, where there was no lure of Lex, no hammering awareness dragging on her all day.

  God, he had the pheromones of a rock star.

  Standing beside the trash can, she sorted through the mail, tossing circulars and flyers from mortgage lenders into the trash, sliding the credit card and cell phone bills into a folder on the small table by the kitchen window.

  It was then that she spied the wire. A blue wire running along her windowsill.

  A wash of foreboding poured down her spine. Dropping the mail on the table and without touching it, she followed the thin blue wire to see where it would go.

  It snaked down the wall, along the floor, to the window in her study, then along the floor again, out of the study, up the wall toward the loft bedroom. Kim felt sweat start to prickle beneath her blouse. Grimly, she raced up the stairs and found what she knew she would: the bedroom windows were wired, too.

  And the front door. And the back door, and every window in the condo.

  The bomb was barely out of sight—simply sitting on the floor behind the small table next to her front door—wired into her home security system. She’d armed it herself when she came in. They’d wanted her to know she was trapped.

  Kim swore.

  She was about to pick up the telephone when she realized that the burglar alarm was wired into the phone. Could a ring set it off? She grabbed the phone and turned it over. For a long moment, she stared at the line that connected it to the wall, wondering if it, too, was booby-trapped. If she just turned off the ringer, maybe that would be safer. Her upper lip was sweating. She clicked the switch to the off position.

  From behind her came a shrill, electronic ring. Kim startled so hard she nearly dropped the phone, and her biological reaction was a jolt to the heart so fierce it felt as though someone jammed a lance through it.

  Her cell phone. Ringing in her purse. Kim grabbed it, saw by caller ID that it was the office calling. “Hello?” she barked.

  “Kim, thank God,” Lex said. “Did I catch you before you got home?”

  “No, unfortunately.” She took a breath. “If I unplug the phone line, will it arm the bomb attached to my security system?”

  “Fuck.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “Turn off the ringer on your phone immediately. And can you see your front walk? Nobody should ring the doorbell.”

  “I don’t know if I can disconnect the doorbell.”

  “No! Don’t.” He cleared his throat. “I’m going to walk you through disarming it. Don’t worry.”

  She chuckled bitterly. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Walk me through it. Tell me everything you can see.”

  Kim told him about the windows and doors, the thin blue wire trussing her into her house like a doomed turkey. Told him about the wires trailing up the wall to her security system. “And the wires go into a white boxlike package, very neat, sitting beside the wall, near the front door.”

  There was a little pause from his end. “Okay. This is a little different scenario than the bomb we had at the airport.”

  “I get that.”

  “It’s hard to know if this is wired to time or to movement. Don’t touch it, but tell me what you see about where the lines go into the box. Usually, the initiator is close to the top.”

  “There’s nothing, really,” Kim said. “Just a smooth box.”

  “Hold on a second.” He covered the receiver and Kim could hear the garbled sound of conversation—Lex asking a question, getting an answer, asking another question.

  He came back on the line. “Tell me the layout of your apartment.”

  “Front door opens into a living room that’s a good size. Stairs go up to my bedroom, which has an open loft that overlooks the living room. There’s a bathroom upstairs.” She took a breath, eyed the bomb. It looked so innocuous. “Back downstairs, you go into the kitchen, and there’s a second bedroom-study off the kitchen.”

  “How much of a wall between the living room and the back study?”

  Kim lifted a shoulder, her spirits sinking as she guessed what he was going to have her do. “Pretty serious walls, actually. The main crossbeam, then two smaller walls. The study is also in a little area that juts out from the rest of the apartment, so it’s just a single-level roof.”

  “Okay. Let me think a second here.”

  Kim waited. Her arms ached with tension. With the need to act. She didn’t want to blow up her condo. She liked it. There had to be a better way. “Lex—”

  “I want you to prepare an area in the back room as if there was a tornado. Couch cushions, pillows, that kind of thing, all right?”

  “Lex, I don’t want to blow up the apartment. It’s my home.”

  “I can appreciate that, Valenti. But you have no idea what this bomb could do, and I’m not taking chances. Insurance will repair the condo.”

  “But—”

  “Get the pillows.” It wasn’t a request.

  She put down the phone and followed orders, carrying cushions and pillows into the back room. Then, before she picked up the phone, she took down paintings, and gathered all the knickknacks from her Arizona youth, and put them under the desk in the study.

  “Done,” she said, picking up the phone. “Now what?”

  “You say the whole house is wired, every window?”

  “Yeah.” Outside, there was a commotion, and Kim looked out to the parking lot to see police cars, fire trucks and all her neighbors being herded away from the area.

  Kim felt faintly ill and looked down at the bomb. How had Lex known there was a problem here, anyway? “Can’t you send one of those bomb squad guys in here?”

  “If you open the door, the bomb blows. Sorry.”

  She swallowed. “This is scaring the shit out of me, Luthor.”

  “I want it to. Fear will make you careful.”

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  “You see the scenario here—the bomber was pretty sure you’d go out the front door, so that’s where the device is located, but it’s keyed into the security system, so it will blow if the perimeter is disturbed.”

  “Right.”

  “Go to your study, get into position as well as you can—cover your head, all that—then open the window with a long handle. Maybe a broom? Then dive under your desk.”

  “I don’t know if I can open these windows with a broom. They’re aluminum, with a pretty tight fit and no lip to speak of.”

  “What happens with your alarm if you break a window? Does the alarm go off or do you have to move the window physically?”

  “I would guess it goes off if the window breaks. I haven’t tried it.”

  “Work with
me, Kim, dammit. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t know the answer to your question! That was honest.” She rubbed a spot on her chest, realizing that her heart was rushing, speeding, tumbling over itself. “Is this going to kill me?”

  “No. Not if you don’t take chances.”

  “No, I’m not going to die because I need to collect on a debt you owe me,” she said, and headed into the study.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah.” In the study, she shoved her second desk against the far wall, and put a cushion beneath it. She banged her hip, hard, and swore. “I’m in the study, everything is ready. I can try breaking the window with a…” She looked around, picked up a hefty candleholder made of iron. “An iron candlestick.”

  “Can you throw it? You can’t be standing up and swinging it. It’s gotta have heft enough that you can do it from beneath the desk.”

  “No, I can throw it.” A ripple of anticipation or terror or both went through her as she imagined the explosion. “Now what?”

  “Get a broomstick, too, something long enough that you can use it to shove open the window if breaking the window doesn’t work.”

  She dashed into the kitchen, grabbed the broom, dashed back in. “Can we get this over with now?”

  “Yep. Get in position beneath the desk. Cover your head, throw the candlestick and put your knees up, tuck your head down with your hands—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kim said. “Tornado position. I got it.”

  “Keep the phone on, will ya?”

  “Sure. Are you ready?”

  There was a pause. “I hate this.”

  “Not half as much as I do.”

  “You’re gonna be fine, Valenti. Get ready. Tell me just before you’re going to throw the candlestick.”

  Kim tucked herself beneath the desk, settled her cushions around her properly, with a sofa pillow on her shoulders, the phone in one hand. Her heart was racing.

  “Okay, Lex, I’m putting down the phone now. I’ll count to three as loud as I can so you know when I’m throwing it. Then…uh…I hope I’ll be talking to you in a minute.”