Signal: A Sam Dryden Novel (Sam Dryden series Book 2)

by Patrick Lee

  Marnie started up the next flight, unsnapping the safety harness of the Glock 17 holstered beneath her jacket.

  * * *

  For the first fifteen stories, Dryden saw nothing that could pose a threat to anyone. Just one empty floor after another, each one a wide-open concrete space running out to its edges. Beyond was blue sky and the spread of Santa Maria planing away to the mountains that encircled it.

  Equipment failure.

  Extenuating circumstances.

  Of course.

  No equipment on any of these floors. No people around to be killed by it, even if there had been; the voices were all still above him.

  He was turning to start up to the sixteenth level when the static from inside the case guttered. He stopped, knelt down, and cracked the case open an inch.

  He heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing about a girl named Dani California. He clicked the case back shut and kept climbing.

  * * *

  The first floor that wasn’t empty was Level 22, the one directly below the rooftop. On this floor there were still no people, but there were stacks of building materials everywhere: plywood and granite slabs and huge volumes of Sheetrock, which were plastic-wrapped against exposure to moisture.

  And here at last was the equipment. Giant air compressors with tanks the size of couches. Table saws of all kinds, only some of which Dryden recognized. These were specialized, heavy-duty tools built for cutting metal and masonry and high-density composites.

  None of the equipment looked like it was about to kill anyone. Most of the machines weren’t even plugged in—to electrical power or pneumatic lines.

  Maybe one of the big air tanks could go off like a bomb. It seemed plausible until Dryden walked among them and eyeballed each pressure gauge. The tanks were empty. They were about as capable of exploding as the stacks of Sheetrock.

  He could hear all the workers on the rooftop above him. Their voices, shouting and sometimes laughing, rang clear in the late morning air.

  Atop one of the stacks of granite slabs, a dozen men had left their jackets. Four had left hard hats, and three had left cell phones.

  Dryden turned and stared out past the north edge of the floor, into empty space. The crane’s mast was right there, hugging the building, fifty feet from where he stood. At this range it didn’t look like it was made of glued-together toothpicks. The steel members of the truss structure were as big around as Dryden’s leg, and fused together by welds and bolts that looked unlikely to spontaneously come loose.

  He walked to the north edge. Put his feet right to the lip, beyond which a drop of two hundred and fifty feet yawned. He’d never had much of an issue with heights. Respect for them, sure. He braced a hand on the nearest corner of the crane’s mast and leaned out over the void, looking up.

  A hundred feet above him, the crane’s jib arm stuck out almost straight north, away from the building. The jib’s cable trolley was positioned about a third of the way out on the arm, bearing the pulley system from which the lifting cables extended down—all the way down to the hook, which was currently lowered to ground level. Dryden couldn’t see anyone down there hustling to attach a new load. What he could see were men sitting around, eating from lunch boxes and drinking from thermoses. Break time. The voices he heard just above him, on the roof, suggested it was break time there, too.

  Dryden stepped back from the edge. He turned and looked up, as if he could see right through the concrete above him. Could see the men up there, sitting around on stacks of materials like the ones down on this level. Then he imagined he was looking up beyond the men, a hundred feet higher, to what was hanging directly above the building right now. The crane’s counterjib arm. The short arm that balanced out the long one. Balanced it out because it weighed just as much, by way of the counterweight attached to it: a massive concrete block assembled in sections, the whole thing weighing—what? A hundred thousand pounds? More?

  He was still looking up when the static crackled and receded again. He looked down at the case, and even before he opened it, he heard a man’s voice coming from the tablet computer’s speakers.

  Not a commercial. A news report. The cadence was a dead giveaway.

  Then he cracked the case open, and realized he recognized the man’s tone, though the words themselves were still too distorted to make out.

  The man speaking was Anderson Cooper.

  Dryden had heard local radio stations carry CNN reports at times. Some kind of affiliate deal. Usually it happened during large-scale events. Election-night coverage. Maybe a hurricane.

  When the static began to clear a few seconds later, the first words Dryden discerned from Anderson Cooper were Santa Maria.

  His stomach gave itself a little twist.

  What the hell was about to happen in this place?

  Equipment failure.

  Extenuating circumstances.

  Of course.

  Anderson Cooper said, “I mean, you can just see it behind me. The power is still out throughout the entire city, and the only lights we’re seeing are the worklamps of the search teams, obviously all of them working at just the one site.”

  Anderson Cooper wasn’t just talking about Santa Maria. He was in Santa Maria. He was here. Would be here. Ten hours and twenty-four minutes from right now.

  Worklamps of the search teams.

  Just the one site.

  “I want to bring in Aaron Spencer again,” Anderson said. “You’ve got something new?”

  “Anderson, yeah, I’ve just gotten the latest revised numbers from USGS. They’re mostly dialing it in at this point, but they’re now saying the magnitude was 6.1, the depth was very shallow, only about nine miles, and the epicenter was close to the city, striking just minutes before noon today.”

  Dryden looked at his watch.

  11:54.

  “Again,” Anderson said, “not a massive quake, not a great deal of shaking, but enough to trigger the accident that brought that high-rise down.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  He could run.

  He could just run for it, right now.

  The stairwell was right there, thirty feet away.

  Twenty-two flights, two to three seconds each, he could be out of the building in about one minute.

  One minute, out of six remaining, at most. A one-in-six chance of surviving. Russian roulette odds, even if he hauled ass immediately.

  He clicked the case shut and ran, but not for the stairs. He ran to the stack of granite slabs with the jackets and hard hats and cell phones on it.

  He set down the plastic case and grabbed the nearest of the phones. He switched it on and hit the phone icon and punched 9-1-1.

  * * *

  Marnie moved slowly, keeping low among the stacks of Sheetrock and the industrial tools. She stuck her head up and saw that she was just twenty feet from Dryden. He was facing the other way, holding a phone to his ear.

  A moment earlier she’d heard him listening to what sounded like a radio with bad reception. She hadn’t caught any of the transmission—some kind of news clip, she thought, but she’d been too far away then to tell.

  Over the short distance to where Dryden now stood, Marnie heard the phone call connect. Heard the other party answer: a rapid little burst of syllables through the earpiece, rehearsed and automatic.

  Into the phone Dryden said, “I just parked a panel truck full of high explosives at the corner of Second and Palm.” He spoke clearly but kept his voice low, inaudible to the men talking and laughing on the rooftop above. “Second and Palm,” Dryden said again. “Right by that big tower they’re building.”

  On the last word he hung up and tossed the phone onto some guy’s jacket, and in the same movement he scooped up a yellow hard hat and ran for the stairs, putting the hat on as he went.

  * * *

  Dryden hit the first tread and vaulted upward, taking the steps three at a time, running, forcing himself to hyperventilate, making it look and sound like he’d just s
printed up the full height of the stairwell.

  He burst into sunlight atop the structure and started yelling even as he took in the men sitting there.

  “Everyone listen!” he shouted. “I have an evacuation order from the police!”

  * * *

  Marnie crossed to the stack of granite slabs where Dryden had left the hard plastic case. There was static coming from inside it—the radio with the bad reception.

  One level up, she could hear him yelling at the work crew, talking about a bomb threat, telling them to vacate the site. He made it sound like the real deal. Marnie heard one of the men start to ask a question, but the guy cut himself off after the first word.

  The reason was obvious.

  From far away over the city, a police siren had begun wailing. An instant later a second one started up, and then a third. Coming in from all over, converging toward the building. From the rooftop, it had to be a damn convincing visual.

  In the next second Marnie heard the scraping and thudding of men on the roof getting to their feet and running.

  * * *

  Dryden stood atop the stairs and waved them down ahead of him, his eyes automatically doing a head count as they passed.

  Twelve men exactly, one of who had to be the crane operator; the cab atop the mast was empty now.

  The report had described twelve dead, nine injured. The nine must have been bystanders in the street.

  As the last of the men went by, Dryden swept his gaze over the roof for any possible straggler.

  No one there.

  He threw aside the hard hat and ran full-out down the steps, one flight behind the workers. He reached the twenty-second floor, turned toward the granite slabs where he’d left the machine in its case—

  And stopped.

  A woman had just stepped out from behind a stack of plywood, ten feet away.

  She had the plastic case in one hand, and a pistol in the other—leveled at his chest. She looked shaken but held the weapon steady enough.

  “Keep your hands out,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Marnie thought of her training at Quantico, with regard to holding a subject at gunpoint by yourself. You stayed out of the subject’s reach—that much was obvious. You allowed no ambiguity into your voice or your physical presence. Above all—

  When Dryden moved, maybe a second after she’d spoken to him, it was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was sure as hell nothing she’d trained for.

  A friend of hers in college had tried to give her a few boxing tips once. Had shown her how a jab was supposed to be launched, the leading shoulder pointed at the target, the back foot pushing off, the jab coming up directly inward along the opponent’s sightline, because the human brain was slower to react to inward movement than side-to-side movement.

  Dryden didn’t throw a jab at her, but he sure as hell moved in along her sightline. Beyond that, she didn’t know what he did. What she knew was that in one instant she had him at gunpoint, and in the next she was being slammed bodily backward into the plywood stack she’d stepped out from behind.

  He had one hand around her neck, his fingertips applying just a bit of pressure to her carotid arteries. His other hand was holding her Glock 17—when exactly had he taken it?—with the barrel touching her cheekbone.

  Just like that, he had every advantage on her.

  Yet he looked scared.

  He looked rattled all to hell, for some reason.

  His eyes narrowed. He looked like a man trying to work something out in bare seconds. Like some huge piece of bad news had just been dropped in his lap, and he was trying to grasp its implications.

  The moment lasted maybe two seconds, and then he seemed to shove all the confusion away and refocus on her.

  “When I let go,” he said, “you’re going to run down the stairwell as fast as your body can move. Or else you’re going to die.”

  No ambiguity in his voice. Or his physical presence.

  “And hang on to the case,” he said.

  Marnie found herself nodding, the movement difficult with his hand tight under her jaw.

  Then he let go of her, grabbed her by one shoulder, and shoved her toward the stairs leading down.

  She got her balance under her and kept moving, taking the steps three and four at a stride.

  * * *

  Dryden didn’t count the flights as they descended. There was no reason to. They would make it or they wouldn’t.

  He had the woman’s Glock stuffed in his rear waistband now, his hands free to grab for her if she lost her footing.

  From a few flights below, he could hear the thunder of the workers’ boots, the metal of the stairwell transmitting the vibration upward in strange harmonics and shudders.

  Preview of the coming attraction, Dryden thought.

  Coming soon.

  Maybe thirty seconds had passed since he and the woman had started down. Hard to tell. He didn’t look at his watch. No reason to do that either.

  Flight after flight, they ran. A controlled plummet, palms shoving off against steel uprights as they rounded each landing. Down and down. Every second feeling borrowed.

  All at once the boots-on-metal thudding from below them ended, replaced by the flat, dampened slapping sound of sprinting footfalls on concrete. The workers had reached the bottom.

  Ahead of Dryden, the woman rounded the final landing and took the last flight in three falling strides, catching up to her center of gravity at the bottom and sprinting across the ground floor. Dryden closed distance and then stayed one pace behind her.

  The orange mesh fence loomed just past the edge of the foundation slab. They vaulted it together, and then Dryden grabbed her by the upper arm, steering and propelling her farther.

  “The Explorer, up ahead,” he said. “Get in.”

  “What are you—”

  “Just do it!”

  She nodded. She wasn’t even looking back at him. Maybe she assumed he was still pointing the gun.

  They covered the distance to the SUV in another five seconds, the woman still holding the hard plastic case. Dryden, still gripping her arm, pushed her toward the driver’s-side door, and she fumbled it open and climbed in. He got in right after her, the two of them briefly tangled up in the space behind the wheel; then she clambered over the center console and dropped herself into the passenger seat.

  Dryden shoved the key into the ignition and started the vehicle, then spared half a second to lean forward and crane his neck up at the tower’s bulk. With its base just twenty yards away, the thing loomed over them like a man over an insect.

  Dryden threw the Explorer into reverse, turned in his seat, and floored it. In his peripheral vision he saw the woman thrown forward at the dashboard, just getting her hands up in time to keep from banging her head.

  “Goddammit,” she said.

  Dryden ignored her. He watched out the back window as he reversed, doing 25, veering left and right as cars braked and steered out of his way.

  “What are you doing?” the woman yelled.

  “We need distance,” Dryden said.

  “I already know the bomb is bullshit. I heard you call it in.”

  They’d covered a block and a half now, a greater distance than the building’s height. Safe enough. Dryden came to a stop with the vehicle centered in the one-way road, blocking traffic from approaching the building. He put the selector in park and hit his hazard lights.

  The woman in the passenger seat was staring at him, any initial fear now replaced by anger and confusion.

  “It’s fake,” she said. “I know it’s fake. I heard the call.”

  Dryden nodded. He wasn’t looking at her. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and stared at the tower.

  From this distance he could see the whole structure, including the crane—and its counterweight. It was exactly as Dryden had pictured it: The giant weight hung dead-centered over the building, a hundred feet above the roof. The sword of Damocle
s.

  Behind him, someone honked a horn. The traffic leading toward the building had clotted six or seven cars deep.

  Far ahead, around the building’s base, men from the site were yelling at bystanders to get back, waving off cars, and getting the hell away themselves.

  At the edge of his vision, Dryden saw the woman staring at him, her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t get the chance.

  The first shock wave of the tremor felt like an impact against the underside of the Explorer. Like the vehicle was on a lift, and someone had come along and hit it with a battering ram from below. The SUV rose up on its shocks and slammed back down. The woman grabbed the armrests for support.

  A second and third jolt followed immediately, and before Dryden could process them, the lateral shaking started—the signature movement of a big quake. The whole world was suddenly shuddering, sliding violently left and right. A city on a card table, with a giant gripping its edges and wrenching it forward and backward, again and again and again.

  The Explorer rocked side to side on its suspension. Dryden could see every other car on the street doing the same. He saw people on sidewalks throw themselves down on the grass. Saw the stoplights over every intersection jerk and twist and swing.

  And Mission Tower.

  Twenty-two stories. Concrete and steel. Swaying and pitching and reeling—but handling it.

  It actually looked like it was doing fine. There were ripples racing up and down its height, the whole structure just visibly moving in a kind of belly-dance sway; Dryden had the distinct impression that it was designed to do this. Engineered to move in precisely this way, to dissipate the shock waves. To bend so it wouldn’t break.

  The tower crane was a different story.

  There were ripples racing up and down its height, too. It did not look like it was handling it.

  As Dryden watched, he could see a kind of cumulative effect building up, each oscillation of the crane’s mast just a little more pronounced than the one before it. Like a child on a swing going a bit higher with each pass.

  And then it failed.

  Midway up the mast’s freestanding portion—the part above the building, anchored to nothing—something gave way. Some bolt or weld, marginally weaker than the rest, let go, and in an instant the failure cascaded up and down through the mast, turning rigid steel into something that looked more like cable.