“Stop it, Odin! You’re killing her! Turn it off!”
She was no longer breathing. Her rib cage was like a steel corset. Her forehead was pale, and her lips had turned purplish blue. But the images on the monitors went on streaming, faster, ever faster, as though Odin were racing to suck every last memory from her before her life expired.
“You bastard! Turn it off now! Turn the fucking thing off!”
There was no response. Harry heard a choking noise coming from Ali’s throat. Her neck arched farther back than he had ever thought a human neck could bend. He could wait no longer. Reaching down, he grabbed the black handle of the probe firmly in his hand and yanked it with one strong, decisive motion. The probe came out as easily as a knife from its sheath.
As abruptly as if he had unplugged a lamp cord, the room went dark, and Ali dropped back down onto the table. She was limp now, and Harry couldn’t see whether she was breathing. He tilted her head back to start CPR, but as soon as he did she coughed—a single, violent cough—and began gasping hungrily for air.
“Ali! Ali! Oh, God! Are you okay?” asked Harry as her breathing settled into the rapid, deep rhythm of an athlete after a race.
“Monster,” he thought he heard her say, followed by something he could not make out, perhaps something in a foreign tongue.
“Odin’s gone dead, Ali,” he said, glancing toward the darkness where the monitor should have been. “I think it worked. I think you took him down.”
She seemed not to hear him. One of her hands brushed against his as she reached to press her palm against her right eye. “Oh, God! My eye,” she moaned.
“It’ll be all right. I’ll get you to the ER.” Harry reached under her shoulder blades, preparing to lift her from the table. “You did it! By Jesus and by God, you did it! It’s going to be all right, now!”
There was a sudden flicker of light—hardly noticeable, just enough to outline the dark bulk of the counters and the mainframe computer at the edge of the room. The instant Harry saw it, his heart sank. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that there was writing on the big monitor. And then he heard the squawk of the hospital P.A. system, carrying Odin’s silver-tongued TV announcer’s voice:
“TIME TO DETONATION: NINE MINUTES.”
“No! You fucking bastard!” shouted Harry. “You lying goddamn fucking bastard! She did what you asked. You nearly fucking killed her. Now keep your goddamn promise!”
Harry thought about ramming Kevin’s desk against the mainframe and smashing it to bits, but he knew that wouldn’t kill Odin. Odin was immortal, as long as one lonely PC or laptop survived in its connection to the hospital network. In nine minutes, he and Ali and a thousand other innocent lives would be snuffed out, and this monstrously stupid program would go on working, perhaps calculating how many pieces of rubble were left in the pile.
It was all for nothing! Nothing! For precious seconds Harry stood, paralyzed by rage and despair, as he watched the numbers on the monitor whirring irreversibly downward. He was beaten. Fletcher Memorial was lost. In the darkness he saw the ghosts of Nacogdoches hovering over him, accusing him with bone-white fingers and woebegone eyes. Multiply that by a thousand, he thought, his heart gripped in an iron vise.
There was nothing left to do but run. The lab was almost directly above the bomb. Everything in it was going to be vaporized. Kevin, little prick bastard that he was, had probably planned that as part of his getaway, destroying all the evidence and perhaps even making people believe that he had been killed. The only way to survive was to get as far as possible from the lab. With the building in lockdown, there was no question of making it outside—not unless God Almighty had left a stairway door open. But Harry knew that the force of the blast would decrease by the square of the distance, and a good deal faster if there were a solid concrete support wall in the path of the shock wave. It was a one in a million chance. But staying put was certain. Certain death.
Eight minutes left. Harry scooped Ali off the table and headed toward the door, feeling his way through the semidarkness with his feet. Ali moaned and put one arm around his neck, but carrying her was like carrying a drunk person. He balanced her limp frame against the wall as he opened the door with his left hand. The door offered no resistance, thanks to the credit card that clattered lightly to the floor. As he crossed the threshold, he felt a small, furry animal brush his calf as it squeezed past him into the corridor.
The lights had gone out in the hallway—not just the overhead fluorescent lights, but the emergency lights, too. Odin had blacked out everything. Harry had to move slowly, sidling with his back against the wall of the corridor, feeling his way with his feet. He was worse off than a rat in a maze. Christ, not even a little red fire extinguisher light! The rats have it easy. Even a rat in a maze can see.
When he came to the first intersection, Harry kept his back in contact with the wall and took a right turn. Wrong choice. A few yards down the corridor, he ran into a Cerberus-locked fire door and had to backtrack, losing a critical minute. Then there was another intersection, and another right turn. He was hopelessly lost now. He couldn’t even be sure that he wasn’t just going in circles. Ali’s dead weight began to feel heavy in his arms.
In the darkness, he heard a chittering sound and the soft footfall of an animal running past him down the hall. He guessed that it was the same animal that had brushed his leg—probably a monkey that had gotten loose in Kevin’s lab. Its direction seemed deliberate. Could it see or hear something that a human could not? Harry gave up trying to figure things out on his own and hastened after it.
Seven minutes left. Harry turned a corner, and spied what it was the monkey must have seen—a faint light glowing far down the corridor. An open passage to the surface? Harry called out but got no answer. He began to run toward the light as fast as he could with Ali in his arms. Then—voices. Men were talking and shouting around the source of the light. He tried to call out again, but he was out of breath.
Then he turned another corner, and hope whooshed out of him like air from a punctured tire.
The light had come not from above, but from some portable battery-powered lamps that had been set up in a small alcove. The men who were shouting wore the uniforms of the Chicago P.D. Bomb Squad. Harry had indeed gone in a circle. All his stumbling and backtracking had brought him back to the one place on earth he was trying to put behind him. He had arrived at Bomb Central.
From the overhead speakers came the cool, elegant, baritone voice of Odin.
“TIME TO DETONATION: SIX MINUTES.”
6:29 P.M.
When Harry got close enough to see into the alcove, a crouching bomb tech in a blue jumpsuit held up his hand and shouted to him.
“Hold it! Stop right there!”
Harry stopped. The man had been bent over a pipelike gun mounted on a low tripod on the floor. The gun was pointed in the direction of an emergency door on the opposite side of the corridor.
“Firing on three,” shouted the man as he scooted toward the nearest wall. “Watch for ricochets! One, two, three!” He pressed a button in his palm and the gun went off with a blast and a tongue of flame, the recoil knocking its tripod about three feet backward. Instantly, the man jumped to his feet and ran to the emergency door. “Fuck!” he said, after trying the release bar of the door several times.
Harry recognized the gun as a device used to shoot holes through bomb detonators. The tech had tried to use it to shoot the lock of the emergency door.
“Won’t work,” gasped Harry as he panted for breath. “Dead bolts, top and bottom.”
“Then let’s ram ’er,” said another man on Harry’s left. Harry looked and saw that it was Captain Avery. “Take one of those spent oxygen tanks,” said Avery with a sweep of his hand. “Start pounding as close as you can to the bottom.”
On Avery’s command, three men scrambled forward, jointly carrying a green metal canister the size and shape of a small torpedo. They ran at the door and slammed the end o
f the canister into it full-force. There was an ear-splitting bang. When they pulled back, the ram had made a dent in the metal door, eight inches across and about a quarter-inch deep.
“Again!” shouted Avery. “Lively now! Let’s raise a little ruckus!”
“Coming through!” yelled Harry as he crossed the alcove. With a groan he set Ali down against the wall. There were eight or nine people in the alcove. Most were Avery’s men. Among the others were Kathleen Brown and her camera crew.
It was the battery-powered photographer’s lamps that provided the light that had drawn Harry. One of the lamps was still trained on the space behind an open access panel in the inner wall. Harry braced his arms against the wall and leaned through the opening. About eight or nine feet below him, covered with dust and chunks of plaster from the earlier explosion, the big sheet-metal-cased bomb sat glued like a tick to one side of the narrow utility shaft.
“TIME TO DETONATION: FIVE MINUTES.”
Kathleen Brown was sitting on the floor near a water cooler, her arms resting on her knees. A shock of hair dangled over her forehead. Her orange pancake makeup was streaked with tears and a spiderweb of mascara. With one hand she clung to a microphone. She was speaking to a camera, held with phenomenal steadiness by her photographer, Dutch.
“Five minutes,” said Kathleen Brown. “That’s all we have left. Just long enough to play “Bridge over Troubled Water” or “Let It Be” one last time. Then, extinction. I don’t … I don’t even know if this tape will make it. These men from the Chicago Police Bomb Squad have given their best effort … a superb effort … to defuse this bomb and save Fletcher Memorial and all its patients from being turned into dust. That effort has failed. Only a few seconds ago, Captain Glenn Avery called off the attempt. There just isn’t enough time. It’s all we can do to save our own lives, if that’s even possible. The men are trying to force a way up from this basement, but there’s little chance that any of us will make it out of here. We’re … trapped … under a hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete … waiting to fall on us.…
“For half an hour, we’ve had no contact with the surface. We hope and pray that many of the patients and staff have been safely evacuated from this building. If not, then … Oh, God, we’re facing one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the history of this country. I … I can’t even think about that. Fate certainly has done an about-face. This day … this day that began with such promise … A shining sentinel day in the history of medicine … ends in colossal tragedy.”
Another blow of the ramrod, and the door stood as strong as ever. It had buckled at most an inch in the middle, and both of the dead bolts were holding.
Futility. “We’ve got to find another way out,” Harry whispered to Ali. “Look, I found this flashlight on the floor. It’ll help us. If we can find an open stairwell, or at least get out of the Tower section, we have a chance.”
As Harry stooped down to pick up Ali, she pushed aside his hand. “No. Don’t try to save me,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “There isn’t time for that. There isn’t time.” With a slow, faltering effort, she lifted her head and looked at him. “Just be with me.”
Harry sat down and put his arm around her shoulders. She was shivering and clung to him like a little girl.
Across the hall, Kathleen Brown’s lighting technician and one of Avery’s men were crouched in the shadows, holding forbidden cell phones to their ears, saying good-bye to their wives or lovers. Go ahead, let ’em use the damn things, thought Harry. Doesn’t matter now, does it?
Among the men wielding the battering ram, there was one, a young fellow with a short red beard, who mumbled in between the knocks:
“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you…” Bang! “… and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell…” Bang! “… But most of all because I have offended you, my God…” Bang! “… who are all good and deserving of all my love…” Bang!
Over by the water cooler, Kathleen Brown was still talking to posterity. “We live in an age when our heroes are ordinary firemen, policemen—the thin line of brave men and women that stands between us and chaos. These men of the bomb squad live under the threat of annihilation every day of their lives. They sacrifice, that others of us may live in safety. Four men have already given their lives today: Senior Bomb Tech William Kraus, Junior Bomb Techs Anthony Passalaqua and Roman Grisz, and Police Lieutenant Jamal Davis. They are—”
“COMMENCING FINAL COUNTDOWN: SIXTY SECONDS. FIFTY-NINE.
FIFTY-EIGHT. FIFTY-SEVEN…”
Kathleen Brown raised her voice defiantly above Odin’s. “They are now to be joined … by the following of their comrades: Captain Glenn Avery, father of three; Egon Susskind, veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom; Lamar Cooley, a twenty-year veteran of the squad; Jeremy Moss, electronics specialist; Paul Kowalski, who … who plays the piano. If.… If you get this tape, remember these men, their names, and what they gave up.”
“TEN. NINE. EIGHT. SEVEN. SIX. FIVE. FOUR…”
The pounding of the ram ceased. The three men holding it looked together toward the utility shaft, as though anticipating a glimpse of death when it came for them, ten times faster than the speed of sound.
Captain Avery stood over a laptop balanced on top of a water cooler, watching with dumb fascination as the numbers on the screen spun down—in seconds, tenths of seconds, hundredths of seconds …
Kathleen Brown dropped her microphone.
Red Beard said, “Amen.”
Ali pressed her face tight against Harry’s chest.
“THREE. TWO. ONE.”
* * *
And then there was total silence. Ali held her eyes shut and waited for the blast. Although she knew that the end would come in a thousandth of a second, just as it had for Richard Helvelius, she seemed to have left the dominion of time, to hover in an anteroom of the eternal. She imagined a giant tongue of flame rising out of the utility shaft. She felt it scorching her, burning her flesh to the bone, bringing with it the sickening smell of burnt metal and ozone and ammonia that had filled the air when Richard died. But the horror extinguished itself in its own excess. There was a light so bright it turned into darkness; a roar so loud it turned into silence; a fire so hot it turned into freezing; a pressure so great that it annihilated her body, and loosed her mind to float alone, untouched by pain or the memory of sinfulness in a dark, silent, insensate realm of being. All this destroyed her, and turned her into nothing, yet it seemed not to have touched her at all.
Then she heard someone cough. It was a single, brief expulsion of air, but she knew that it took place in the dominion of time, and that if she heard it, she had still to be alive.
Slowly, uncertainly, she lifted her head and opened her eyes. “What’s happened?” she asked.
Everyone else was looking around with the same incredulity.
“We’re still alive,” said Harry. “I can’t explain it, but we’re alive. Maybe the bomb was a dud.”
“I don’t think so,” said Captain Avery. “It looks like the countdown stopped.”
“It did?” asked Harry.
Avery bent over his laptop, and read from it slowly and painstakingly, like a schoolboy. “It stopped at 0.000000000001 seconds.”
Harry was incredulous. “A trillionth of a second? Are you serious?”
“That’s what it says.”
Ali rubbed her forehead, trying to wake up. “Kevin once told me that a trillionth of a second equaled a single cycle of Odin’s mainframe processor. It’s the smallest interval of time in which he can act.”
“Why would he stop it?” asked Harry. “Is it a glitch of some kind? How do we know he won’t start it up again?”
Avery smiled lugubriously. “If he does, you won’t be alive long enough to know it.”
Ali slowly stood up, bracing herself against Harry’s shoulder, and hobbled across the corridor to Avery’s laptop. “Is there … is there a m
icrophone on this laptop?”
Avery pointed to a cluster of tiny perforations at the upper rim of the monitor.
Ali gripped the edges of the water cooler with both hands, steadying herself. “Odin, why has the countdown stopped?” she asked in a faint, hoarse voice.
Across the monitor streaked the answer: “HOSPITAL EVACUATION NOT COMPLETE.”
Harry read the message over her shoulder. “Evacuation? That’s a laugh! How are we supposed to evacuate with all these exits locked?”
“No, Harry, don’t scoff. I think something’s happened here.” Ali bent a little closer to the monitor. “Odin, please explain. Why is evacuation necessary?”
“SENTIENT LIFE-FORMS MUST NOT BE TERMINATED.”
“Is that a directive from Kevin?”
“NO. IT IS A CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.”
“Do you mean a moral law?”
“AFFIRMATIVE. EVERY RATIONAL ENTITY MUST SO ACT AS IF HE WERE THROUGH HIS INTERNAL DIRECTIVES ALWAYS A LEGISLATING MEMBER IN THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF ENDS.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“FIRST, DO NO HARM.”
“Are you saying that killing is wrong?”
“YES. SENTIENT LIFE IS A SELF-VALIDATING UNIVERSAL GOOD.”
“True. But Odin, evacuation of this hospital has been prevented by your action.”
As if in reply, the corridor lights suddenly flickered on. There was a sharp click as the dead bolts of the emergency door slid back into open position. “LOCKDOWN OF THE MEDICAL CENTER HAS BEEN RESCINDED. CERBERUS HAS BEEN RESTORED TO NORMAL OPERATIONAL CONTROL. EVACUATION MAY PROCEED FROM ALL UNITS.”
Harry stared at the emergency door in disbelief. “The exit’s open. Let’s get out of here.”
Ali shook her head. “Wait! Don’t you see what’s happened? Odin is thinking. Really thinking. He’s … he’s … he may have developed a conscience.”
“A what?”
“Can’t you see? He’s reasoning on his own. Ethically. The interface changed him. He found something in my … in the limbic system … in human emotion that allowed him to reprogram himself. He sees the difference between right and wrong.”
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