by CJ Lyons
She quickly cleared the other rooms as she went; no sense letting anyone get the drop on her from behind, and there was no reason why a bomber couldn’t shift to using a gun. The residents were all gone, and no one was hiding in any of the storage or treatment rooms. She reached the nursing station and realized why it was empty: according to the bulletin board, there was a mandatory staff meeting. Given that this was also the residents’ lunch hour, it also explained the empty patient rooms.
But still, there should be someone… She moved past the desk to a door with an electronic keypad lock marked Staff Only. When she rattled the knob, someone pounded from the other side.
“Hey, let me out!” came a woman’s voice. “I’m locked in!”
“I’m getting help,” Morgan told her. With any potential threat contained behind the locked door, she swept past the desk and turned to the other set of fire doors. No bicycle lock on these. Instead, there was an oxygen tank resting in front of the doors.
Coming from it were wires attached to the door handles as well as the magnetic locking strips at the bottom of the threshold. When she crept closer, snapping photos from every angle, she saw that the oxygen tank had a weld around its center—as if it had been cut apart and put back together. How many explosives could be packed into an oxygen tank? A helluva lot more than what the letter bomb had held was the only answer she could think of.
The tank’s gauge had been replaced by something that she guessed was a mercury switch—so any motion might trigger the bomb—and a digital smart watch, the kind that could receive text messages. Or provide a countdown.
Which meant the bomber might be watching. She glanced above her. The security cameras were old, fixed in position aimed at the corridor and the nurses’ station. So old that the system was probably hardwired, not broadcasting a signal the bomber could hijack. But he was obviously familiar with the layout; he’d done enough recon that he knew when the floor would be empty, and how to quickly set his trap and escape. He’d probably placed his own cameras.
But there was no time to search for them now. She backed away and returned to the nurses’ station. The woman behind the door was still pounding on it. “What’s the code?”
“3245,” the woman shouted.
Morgan slid one of her smaller daggers into her sleeve, holding it at the ready and out of sight, then entered the code and opened the door.
A tall woman in her forties wearing a volunteer’s pink vest came tumbling out. “I was on the phone—needed a quiet spot—but someone shut the door on me, and I couldn’t get out.”
Morgan glanced past her into the room. It was clearly where the nurses prepared and stored patient medications. She doubted they’d allow a volunteer access—unless the woman had taken advantage of the staff’s absence to find the code and help herself. But then who had locked her in? “What’s your name?”
“Kelly.”
“Come with me.” Morgan ushered the woman in front of her and back down the hall toward Emma’s room.
“What’s going on? They called a Code Black—do you know what that is?”
“A bomb threat.”
“Then why aren’t we evacuating?”
“We can’t,” Morgan answered, as she practically shoved Kelly into Emma’s room.
“Emma,” Kelly said, rushing forward.
“Kelly, is that you?” Emma greeted the newcomer. “Come sit with me.”
Andre and Tim joined Morgan in the doorway. She handed Andre her phone with the photos. “There’s an oxygen tank that’s been tampered with blocking the far exit. The other exit is blocked with a bicycle lock holding the doors closed. And there’s another resident in the room beside those doors.”
“So there’s no way out?” Tim said, his voice rising. Andre glowered at him, but of course Emma had already heard everything.
“There’s always a way out.” Morgan prowled the room. The police and fire department would be here any minute—and might get themselves killed if they came in too fast. She grabbed Emma’s landline from her bedside table and dialed 911. Of the adults in the room, the only two she trusted were Emma and Andre. She handed it to Emma. “Can you explain to them what’s happening? Tell them the threat is real and not to come through those doors.”
Emma nodded and cradled the phone to her face, speaking in a calm tone as she explained the situation.
Kelly grabbed Morgan’s arm. “But they’ll come cut the lock on the other door, right? So we can get out before—in time, right? They’re coming now, right?”
Morgan shook free of the woman and spun her in Tim’s direction—he was the office manager, let him manage her—and looked out the windows. Police cars and several fire trucks had already filled the parking lot while residents and staff were streaming out the main doors. It would take them several minutes to get up here—if they dared come so close to an explosive device at all.
She clenched her fists in frustration, pressing them against the window so hard the panes shook. If she could reach that damn bicycle lock, she could open it in ten seconds or less. All she had to do was literally cross a few inches of space from their side of the doors to the other…
All she had to do was make it across the space—no one said she had to use the doors. “Everyone, we need to move.”
“Why?” Tim asked. His voice, high-pitched for a man his age, was really starting to grate on her.
“Because you guys are going to take shelter in the room at the end of the hall, while I’m going to get those doors open.”
“How?” This time it was Kelly doing the asking. But Emma was already standing up, taking Kelly’s arm to guide her, giving the volunteer no chance to dawdle.
“I’m going to take a walk outside,” Morgan told her.
Chapter Eight
Andre followed Morgan out into the hall. “This bomb,” he said, peering at her phone and the photos she’d taken, “it reminds me of the school. The bombs the Taliban had rigged there.”
He meant the bombs in Afghanistan that had killed dozens of schoolgirls and all of Andre’s Marine Recon squad. And left him with burns over sixty percent of his body, forever scarred inside and out.
“Jenna’s bomb looked just like the one which killed her grandfather,” Morgan told him as they reached the old man’s room. Tim and Kelly had found a wheelchair for Emma and were just behind them.
“If he’s copied Afghanistan, then we need to be careful of secondary devices. Maybe I should go, not you.”
They entered the old man’s room. He’d made it upright and was leaning heavily on his walker, too out of breath to talk but not so much that he didn’t send a supremely suspicious glare in Andre’s direction. Morgan ignored him, moving to the window closest the wall shared with the next ward. She cranked it as wide as she could and popped the screen free.
Andre joined her and stopped arguing—it was clear that there was no way he could fit through the opening in the frame. “Not much of a ledge.”
Not much translated to about six inches. And the way the window cranked out it blocked her path to the next ward. “You’ll need to close the window once I’m out so I can make it past.”
“What about the window on the other side? Can you see if it’s open?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She’d refined which weapons she carried while dressed for the office—smaller blades, a pistol in an ankle holster beneath her jeans, and a new toy: a tactical pen made of aircraft aluminum. Where the traditional pen tip would be it had instead a diamond-sharp drill bit-shaped point that could easily pierce flesh or break glass. Inside the body of the pen was a fire starter and a space where she’d slid the two lengths of steel that were her lock picks. If she removed the cap, there was even a functional real ink pen—in case anyone was suspicious. She placed the pen between her teeth, let Andre help her over the sill, and climbed out onto the ledge, flattening her chest against the plate glass.
Andre closed the side window and she inched past it, twisting her feet sideways
, not liking how she could feel her body’s mass aching to surrender to gravity. The aged yellow brick wall between the two wards was about eighteen inches wide, jutting out flush with the ledge—probably some kind of fire-protective reinforcement, she guessed, trying not to look down at the six flights of nothing between her and the ground. There was no way around it except to stretch as far as she could and pray she found a foothold on the other side.
The brick scraped her face as she pressed into it, clawing at gaps in the mortar with her fingertips, trying to keep her balance and weight on her left toes as she reached with her right. She hadn’t climbed in a long time, but she remembered it was more than just strength and agility. Like most things that hovered between life and death, the deciding factor was strength of mind.
All she had to do was convince gravity that she was one with the brick long enough to find the ledge waiting for her on the other side. Her instincts were to move slowly and cautiously, but she knew that was gravity trying to trick her into falling into its greedy embrace. Momentum, that’s what she needed. She just had to trust some long-dead architect had been precise with his measurements and that the ledges lined up.
Then her left foot slipped free. For a heart-lurching second, she was blind to everything but yellow brick and gravity’s hungry claws as she hung, suspended in the air. She hugged the wall, her fingers gripping it with all her strength, and completed the pendulum move, swinging her weight to the right.
Finally, just as she was beginning to doubt, imagining her body hurtling through the air before impacting the ground, her foot connected with the ledge on the other side. She made a blind grab for the window frame and hauled herself past the wall. Not bothering with the screen in the narrow side window, she spit her tactical pen into her hand, closed her eyes, turned her face away, and hammered it into the bottom corner of the main window. She felt the pen go through and quickly pulled it back and punched two more bursts in rapid succession, disrupting the glass’s integrity enough so that its own weight fractured it. The glass shattered and crashed downwards.
Yeah, gravity was a bitch, but she was Morgan’s bitch. Grinning, Morgan eased past the remnants of broken glass and into the empty room beyond. The bicycle lock was even easier than she’d thought, and it yielded to her picks without any resistance. Within seconds she had the door open for Andre and the others.
Andre had gotten another wheelchair for the old man, who was being pushed by Tim. Kelly steered Emma, leaving Andre to take point, scouring their path for any other traps or devices, while Morgan guarded their backs.
“Elevator?” Morgan asked, when they arrived at the empty elevator lobby. She pushed the button to test if they were even running or if the fire department had locked them down. It was likely the bomb squad had kept the firemen out, given that Emma had confirmed the presence of an explosive device.
Andre frowned and considered. “It would take a lot to get inside and rig them. I mean, compared to rolling in an oxygen tank that no one would think twice about in a place like this.” He glanced at the old man who was clutching his own oxygen tank on his lap, sucking in so hard that his cheeks hollowed with every breath.
“Just as easy to hide another bomb in the stairwell,” Morgan said, as the doors chimed open. “And the longer we’re inside—”
He nodded and motioned to Tim to push the old man inside the elevator. Kelly and Emma followed. Morgan entered, then Andre. She stabbed the button for the ground floor. “Hey, it’s only six floors—”
The doors closed with a clang that made Kelly gasp. Then they were sliding down, a chime sounding with each floor passed. Finally they reached the ground floor.
“We made it,” Tim said gleefully as the doors slid open.
An explosion shuddered through the building, and the blast echoed down the shaft, rattling the elevator’s steel walls.
Chapter Nine
Jenna was giving her statement to the police—for the fourth time—when the call about another bomb came in. “I know that address,” she told the detective, a middle-aged guy named Burroughs. “It’s a nursing home. My partner’s there, visiting his great-grandmother.”
“I think you better come with me,” he said, not giving her any choice in the matter as he escorted her to his unmarked white Impala.
They followed the bomb squad’s mobile command RV, careening around the curves and through red lights as they headed from Regent Square to Squirrel Hill. Older neighborhoods like these had narrow roads, often with a only thin sheet of blacktop plastered over cobblestones, stalwart relics of a time when carriage houses meant horses and carriages and there was no need to leave space for parked cars. The RV was wide enough that it had to stick to the main thoroughfares, but Burroughs peeled off, heading down narrow alleys that had no names, zigzagging past brownstones and yellow brick houses perched above steep concrete steps leading down to the street, speeding behind storefronts shouldered together, and dodging delivery trucks threatening to block their path. He had a heavy foot on the gas and an even heavier hand on the horn, but Jenna didn’t mind—not with Andre still not answering his phone.
They were almost there when the radio crackled to life, and the dispatcher urged all first responders to stay clear because there was a confirmed IED inside the premises and to wait until the bomb squad arrived. Burroughs skidded the Impala into the drive leading to the parking lot in front of the old yellow brick building. Dozens of residents and staff were congregating around two marked police cars, the fire truck, and the rescue vehicle that had parked on the lawn. The first responders had their hands full managing the crowd of confused and frightened elderly residents.
“Wait here,” Burroughs told her as he left the car.
As if. Jenna waited until the detective’s back was to her and he was busy talking with one of the firefighters, and then she ducked out of the car. The bomb squad’s arrival provided extra camouflage as she scoured the crowd for any signs of Andre, Morgan, or Emma.
No sign of them. And no one was answering their phone. Until finally a call came through from Morgan.
“What the hell is going on?”
“We’re fine,” came Andre’s voice. And suddenly Jenna felt light-headed. She leaned against a car, hugging the phone to her ear. “But I need to talk to one of the EOD guys.”
Explosives, ordinance, and demolition, or something like that. She remembered the acronym from when Andre had told her about his time in Afghanistan. Clutching the phone, she jogged over to the bomb squad’s RV. “Why are you still inside? The bomb squad’s here—let them take care of things.”
His pause made her stomach clench. “We’ll be out as soon as we can. Morgan’s working on it. In the meantime, I’m texting you photos of the device.”
A shout from the crowd brought her focus back to the building. Someone—Morgan—had climbed out of one of the sixth floor windows and was standing on the ledge. Jenna quickly counted windows. It wasn’t Emma’s room, but one a few doors down. What the heck?
“Stay back, ma’am,” a uniformed officer told her when she approached the bomb squad’s RV.
“I have information,” she told the officer, raising her voice to reach the men in tactical uniforms behind him. “Photos of the bomb.”
That got their attention. Two of the bomb guys turned around and gestured to the cop to let her through the cordon. She showed them the phone with the photos. “My partner’s inside. He was a Marine, Force Recon. He says he needs to talk to one of the EOD guys.”
“Get her in here,” called a man’s voice from inside the RV.
Jenna climbed the stairs and found herself inside a command center where every inch of space had been put to good use. One guy wearing shorts and a tee was climbing into a bulky bomb suit while two others were working on a robot and a fourth sat at a computer. The man overseeing it all turned to Jenna and gestured for her phone.
“Andre, I love you. Now get the hell out. Here’s the bomb guy.” She relinquished the phone but ignore
d the man’s dismissive wave. Instead of leaving, she stepped closer so she could listen as he placed the phone on speaker while he swiped through the photos Andre had sent. In a few moments they popped up on the computer monitor, and the other men leaned forward to examine them.
“I ran into something similar in the sandbox,” Andre said. “Guy had secondaries rigged to nail the first responders. You guys need to be careful.”
“We always are,” the bomb squad leader assured Andre. “Son, you just work on getting those people out of there. Let us handle the device.”
“We’ve got two in wheelchairs, and one guy’s pretty bad off. Are the elevators clear?”
“Not by us. But the administrator said there’ve been no recent repairs or outages.” Meaning, Jenna interpreted, that the bomber hopefully hadn’t had a chance to infiltrate and plant a device there. They hoped.
“Understood,” Andre answered, his tone formal, clipped. Not at all the Andre she was used to. “Morgan’s got the doors open; we’re moving.”
“We’re watching for you. As soon as you’re clear, we’ll move in.” He nodded to the guy now fully encased in the bomb suit except for his helmet. The other two had already lowered the robot to the ground and were moving it toward the building’s front entrance via its remote control.
Jenna grabbed the phone back. “Andre, be careful.”
Too late; he’d already hung up. She left the RV and fought her way to stand as close to the building as the police would allow. One of the windows in the sixth floor was now shattered, but there was no movement inside that she could see. Please, God, she prayed, closing her eyes for one brief moment.
As if in answer to her prayer, a noise like thunder sounded and the ground quaked. Her eyes popped open. People around her cried out. More windows were now broken, and smoke billowed from the top floor.
