by Dale Brown
It did almost no good. Her body was slipping from her mind’s control.
Think of a math problem.
It was her father again. She flashed on a scene from childhood, age eight or nine, talking with him about a test and how she’d panicked—math, a simple equation, fill in the x value or some such. The details of the problem were lost to her, but his presence, his reassurance, was there, beside her as she walked.
Her footsteps made no sound on the carpeted floor. Chelsea was a stride or two in front of the girl who’d wet her pants; she wasn’t sure how much farther back the other woman and the terrorist were.
Lengthening her stride as she neared the end of the corridor, Chelsea began sketching a plan. The hall formed a T with another hallway. She’d turn left and run, run to the emergency exit at the end of the hall.
If there was one. There had to be.
She held her breath as she got closer to the turn.
“Right!” barked the man behind her. “Turn to your right.”
Chelsea glanced to her left. There was no hallway there, just four doors to rooms.
She swung her attention back to the right, leaning forward and ready to run. But this hallway was the same—four doors, all rooms.
Now what?
“You, first door.”
Chelsea put her hand on the door, expecting it be locked. To her surprise the handle swung down easily.
“Inside.”
She went in quickly, looking to see if there was something she could use as a weapon before the others came in.
An iron! The closet.
The door slammed behind her. Chelsea whipped around. No one had followed her inside.
The door locked from the inside; her captor couldn’t come in.
Unless he had a passkey. Which naturally he would.
She could open it and go out. But he’d be in the hall, waiting.
How else can I get out?
She went to the window and pulled back the curtains. The glass was fixed in the frame; there was no escape short of breaking it. It looked out on the blank wall of a parking garage; she could wave or pound or even strip herself naked and no one would notice.
Something hit the wall in the room next to her, the one to the right. A crash followed—the TV, she thought—then a scream.
Again. More screams.
Oh, God. Oh, God.
14
Boston—around the same time
“We have to move now,” Smith told Givens. “It’s our best chance.”
“If you go in like you’re planning,” Johnny told the commander, “you’re dooming the people they’ve already taken upstairs. The terrorists will just move up and kill them all.”
“We’ll get to them,” said Smith, though his grim expression made it clear he didn’t think they’d reach them in time. “If we wait, they’ll split the rest and we’ll lose them. We already have people in there dead.”
Both men were right, which was the tragedy of it—the team didn’t have enough people in place to prevent more deaths, but if they waited until they did, more would surely die.
Better to go now.
Johnny nodded, grimly turning his attention back to the monitoring screens. They showed people walking in the hallway, women followed by men with guns.
Chelsea?
Chelsea?
Johnny’s breath caught. It was definitely Chelsea, being led into one of the rooms upstairs.
No!
“I’m going to get them upstairs,” Johnny told Smith.
“What?”
“I’ll bring one of the bots with me and we’ll keep them occupied while the team comes up.”
“No! No! We need you helping with the robots on the first team and—”
Johnny was already out of the truck.
15
Boston—around the same time
Borya’s father, Gabor Tolevi, managed to get nearly to Berkley Street before the traffic became unbearably slow, with cars bunched and not moving for more than a few seconds at a time. There was nothing more frustrating than sitting in a car whose engine could produce 585 horsepower at the twitch of his foot and not being able to use any of it.
Well, there were more frustrating things; he just didn’t want to think about them.
He’d told Bozzone that he’d wait until the emergency was over to collect his daughter, but soon realized that would be hours, maybe even days. While he trusted the Smart Metal people and knew his daughter could take care of herself, leaving Borya on her own downtown in the middle of all that chaos bit at his soul. So barely ten minutes after putting the phone down, he set out in his car to get her.
That was an hour ago. At the rate he was inching forward on the street, it would be another six before he reached her.
Tolevi eyed the curb and nearby intersection, balancing his frustration against the potential damage to the underside of his car. Finally, frustration won out: with a jerk of the wheel, he jumped the curb and with one set of wheels on the sidewalk and the other on the pavement, managed to cut the corner just enough to miss both the car in front of him and the no-parking sign. He considered simply leaving the car there, but then saw a driveway nearby. He veered toward it, cringing as the underside of the car scraped against something solid. He managed to angle without seeing sparks; the road in front was every bit as packed as the one he’d just left.
An older woman in a housedress ran down the steps of the house, yelling at him.
“I have to rescue my daughter,” he shouted, pulling his wallet out. “I’ll pay you twice this when I get back.”
All he had were two twenties. He tucked them under the wiper and ran off, ignoring the woman’s continued complaints. It wasn’t like she was going anywhere whether he parked there or not.
Dodging his way through the bumper-to-bumper jam, Tolevi managed to get to the sidewalk. This was relatively open—a few cars had pulled up onto it, and knots of people gathered on stoops and car hoods, but compared to the streets, the walkway was an open plain. He started to run, passing knots of Bostonians listening to reports on laptops and telephones. The snippets he heard sounded ominous and pushed him faster.
Tolevi was in good shape—he prided himself on his workouts—but it was a long way and he was not dressed for a run, wearing jeans and leather shoes with slick wood soles. Sweat built quickly under his pullover, and the sides of his head began pounding with his rapidly increasing pulse.
But each step also increased his anxiety about his daughter. He had already lost her mother; losing Borya, too, was far beyond what he could bear.
Gravity and heat eventually won. By the time he got to the police barricades a few blocks from the Common, Tolevi’s pace had fallen to something between a jog and a fast walk. Practically heaving, he pleaded with one of the policemen to let him through.
“I gotta—get my daugh-ter she—needs—”
“What are you sayin’?” asked the cop.
“Daugh-ter. Meds. Med-cine.”
He added the idea of her needing medicine on the spur of the moment. It worked.
“Your daughter’s down there?” said the officer. It was clear from the man’s face that he had a daughter as well. “Where?”
“Near the river.”
“All right. Stay away from the Patriot Hotel.”
“Got it.”
Tolevi started to run again; energized by the encounter, he entered the Common at a half trot. But he didn’t get far before he came to another policeman, who yelled at him to stop and explain what he was doing. Tolevi tried the same tactic, but this time it didn’t work: he was shunted to a holding area the police had set up near the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Several dozen people milled around on the path and the circle; a good hundred or more were sitting or lying on the grass nearby.
“How do we get out of here?” Tolevi asked the first man he came to, a man in his late twenties. He had a bit of a hipster look to him, with a goatee, pale skin, and engineer boots.
<
br /> “We wait until the police say it’s safe to go.”
Tolevi moved on. People had their cell phones out, listening to or watching reports. As he moved closer to the west end of the park and approached a police barrier, he decided he would adopt an old but solid tactic—simply walk, eyes straight ahead, a man on a mission.
It didn’t work.
“Hey, you—stop,” shouted a policeman as he passed.
Tolevi pretended he didn’t hear, but there was no way to avoid the two National Guardsmen who turned around near the troop truck ahead.
“You have to go back, sir; I’m sorry,” said one of the soldiers.
“What is this, a police state?”
“Don’t be givin’ anybody a hard time,” said a man with a badge swinging from his neck. His Southie accent marked him as a Boston local, though on closer inspection, the badge marked him as a federal marshal. “Get your ass back over with the rest.”
Tolevi took a hard right, feinting in the direction of the crowd until he figured he wasn’t being watched anymore. He walked along the edge of the crowd until he found a place with only one policeman near the barricade. This time he tried a little subterfuge.
“The Bureau guy with the Guardsman back there wants to talk to you about frequencies or something,” he said as he approached. He pulled his wallet out, quickly flipping it as if showing a badge. “I’m with the Marshals Service.”
“What about?” asked the policeman, his eyes trailing Tolevi’s hand as he slipped his wallet back into his pants.
“The fuck I know. The Bureau people think they are the hottest shit going. I only came down here to help, you know? It’s my day off. Hell, I’m supposed to be watching the game by now. I’ll take your spot, but come back quick. I need to take a leak ASAP.”
Luckily for Tolevi, the officer nodded rather than asking what ball game he was talking about. “Just don’t let anybody through, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.”
Tolevi took off as soon as the man was twenty yards away. Within minutes he was hugging the brick wall of a building on Bruce Place—an alley more than a street—slinking toward his destination.
With downtown and the center of the city mostly cordoned off, the side streets here were empty, doors and windows were locked tight. Tolevi walked head down, full man-on-a-mission stride; no one who saw him would stop him, or so he thought.
He was on Derne Street, approaching Temple, when he saw two young men duck into the deli on the corner. Surprised that a store was open, he suddenly realized he could do something about his thirst. He went in and hunted for the cooler, still in man-on-a-mission mode; it wasn’t until he was taking an iced tea from the shelf that he realized he had clipped all of his cash to the windshield wiper of the car.
He started to put the bottle back when he heard a woman say something in Russian.
The words weren’t clear—she was on the phone with someone and hanging up to deal with a customer. But he thought maybe if he spoke to her in Russian, she’d let him come back with the money later. So he took the bottle and started for the cash register. It was only as he turned the corner of the aisle that he realized the two young men he’d seen enter were now robbing the place.
Tolevi reacted instinctively: he threw his right hand forward, smashing the man with the gun in the neck and side of the head so hard with the iced tea that the glass bottle shattered in his hand. As the man went down, Tolevi grabbed his wrist and with a sharp jerk snapped the gun from his hand. It clattered to the floor as its owner rebounded into his compatriot.
For a moment, neither the would-be robbers nor Tolevi moved. Then all three moved as quickly as they could—the robbers scrambling to leave, Tolevi scooping up the gun. But they were faster: by the time he rose, they were gone. He went to the door; not seeing them, he went back to the counter and examined the pistol.
Cheap Chinese knockoff. Sheesh.
“Babushka,” Tolevi called in Russian, not seeing the woman. “Grandma, where are you? It’s all right—they’re gone.”
“Oh, my God, my God, my God,” she answered, crawling out from under the counter on her hands and knees. She had armed herself with a sawed-off baseball bat.
Tolevi went around and helped her up.
“Are you all right?” he asked, still speaking Russian.
“Yes, those thieves—you are Russian?”
It was easier to say yes than explain that he was actually a mix.
“You are a good boy,” said the woman. Then, with some alarm, she added, “You are bleeding!”
He glanced at his hand. The glass had cut into the palm. It was barely a scratch, but the woman pulled him toward a sink behind the counter and made him rinse it off. He took a wad of paper towels and pressed it against his palm.
“What do you want?” asked the woman, switching to heavily accented English. “Anything!”
“I came in to get something to drink, but—”
“Whatever you want! Free! Take! Take! Wait until my son comes. He will give you a reward.”
“I don’t need a reward,” said Tolevi. “Thanks.”
“Don’t go. Wait!”
“I have to find my daughter,” he told her. “There are terrorists—didn’t you hear?”
“I heard, I heard. Go, get your daughter. Go.”
“Why don’t you hold on to this,” he told the old lady, giving her the gun. “Just in case those bastards come back. You know how to use it?”
She mimed the action of pointing a pistol with her hand. “Between the eyes,” she said. “Bam.”
“Good.”
“Then I kick them in the nuts,” she added in vulgar Russian. “To be sure.”
He gave her a thumbs-up as he left the store.
That’s my kind of grandma, Tolevi thought. I wonder if she’s available for babysitting.
16
Boston—around the same time
Massina watched the SWAT officers getting ready to make their assault. There had already been shooting inside the hotel; they were taking too long.
Too damn long!
“Johnny wants to talk to you,” said Telakus, the computer whiz who’d broken into the video system at the Patriot and was feeding data to Givens and the team preparing to enter the hotel.
Massina picked up the handset.
“Chelsea’s up on the seventh floor,” said Johnny. “I’m getting her.”
“What?”
“I saw her.”
Massina turned to Chiang. “Check the surveillance feed on floor seven. Get the face-recognition program online—Johnny says it’s Chelsea.”
“I need to get on the roof. But I want to know what room she’s in. Can you use her GPS in her phone?”
“The terrorists are blocking transmissions,” Massina told him.
“How about with the UAV?”
The penetrating radar aboard the Nightbird UAV was powerful, but it wasn’t designed to identify people inside buildings.
“Maybe if we look at the image,” said Massina, though he was doubtful. “We’ll try. It’s not overhead yet.”
“How long?”
“Soon.”
“I need help to get on the roof,” added Johnny.
“How is the team getting there?”
“It’s just me.”
Massina rubbed his chin.
“Let me get Blake on the line,” he told Givens. “Get to a place where a drone can hover.”
Chelsea had already pushed a chair against the door when she heard the explosions. They were below her somewhere, two or three together, then a few more.
The assault had begun.
She made sure the chair was as tight as possible against the door panel, then stepped back, looking for something else to block the way. The nightstands flanking the bed were bolted to the floor. The bureau with the TV was either too heavy or fastened as well. The only thing was the chair near the window; she carried it over, lifting it just high enough to get it on
the first chair.
She’d taken a step back when the door lock sprung open, unlocked by the master key of one of the terrorists. Before she could react, the door rammed against the chairs, pushing forward until it was stopped by the bar lock above the handle.
The man outside yelled at her to open the door.
Something warned her what would happen next: she threw herself back behind the wall that separated the bathroom from the bedroom proper. As she hit the floor, bullets flew through the door.
If I’m quiet, she thought, maybe he’ll think I’m dead.
The Lifter was designed to pick up machinery and heavy parts like bridge supports, not people; the grappling claws were metal and hardly gentle as they clamped around Johnny’s arms.
He shielded his face as best he could as the twin rotors filled the air with a thick mist of dust and grit. A discarded plastic bag and some pieces of paper flew against Johnny’s legs as he was lifted. Blake said something in his earset, but Johnny couldn’t hear over the drone’s engine.
The UAV took him straight up into the air. Johnny’s arms felt as if they would be ripped off his shoulders. He glanced down and immediately wished he hadn’t: the ground seemed to be spinning.
It wasn’t the ground, it was him: between the motion of the helicopter and the wind, his body twisted and swayed, arcing in a nauseating dance. Blake said something—he was trying to tell Johnny how to extend his legs to help brake his momentum—but Johnny couldn’t make out the words. The UAV slowed and tilted, cutting off some of Johnny’s momentum. He forced his eyes open and saw that the roof of the building was to his right, a flat expanse dotted with what looked like sloped aluminum tents—roof shelters for the mechanical equipment. Johnny braced himself as the Lifter darted toward one of the “tents,” aiming to deposit him near an access point to a stairwell. The drone slowed abruptly and he swung forward, not quite as wildly as before.
