Binary: A Novel

by Michael Crichton

  “Can you get those chemicals?”

  “Yes, but not in sufficient quantities to protect very many—”

  “Get as much as you can,” Graves said. “Do it immediately.” He turned to Phelps. “Notify the San Diego police. Evacuate this block and cordon it off. Cordon off the blocks on both sides as well. And I mean a cordon—nobody in and nobody out.” He paused. “What happened with the President?”

  “He’s leaving within the hour.”

  “For sure?”

  “I assume so.”

  “Better check again.”

  Phelps nodded toward the lobby. “Is he talking?”

  “He’s saying what he wants to say,” Graves said.

  “My God, he’s a cool customer.”

  “What did you expect?” Graves said, and went back inside.

  When he returned, he found the marshal smoking one of Wright’s slim cigars. Graves shot him a look; the marshal quickly stubbed it out.

  “Waste of a good cigar,” Wright said. “Why can’t we all be friends?”

  Graves sat down. “What did you paint in the hangar?”

  “Paint?”

  “Yes. We found a spray gun and several cans of paint.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “What did you paint?”

  “I don’t believe I’ll answer that.”

  “What did you paint?”

  “You show a certain redundancy of mind,” Wright said. “It’s tiresome, and disappointing. I expected you to be more clever.” He was silent a moment. “I will tell you one thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Graves resented the eagerness that he heard in his own voice.

  “I have devised a multiple staging system. Actually, several interlocking systems. If one fails or is thwarted, another takes over. It’s quite beyond you, I can assure you of that. However, I will tell you I am dependent on one external system, which is fortunately quite reliable.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You,” Wright said. “Everything has been designed especially for you, so to speak.”

  Wright’s calmness was infuriating. Graves bit his lip, trying to control his anger.

  “What time is it?” Wright asked.

  “Three forty,” the marshal said.

  “Thank you. Do you have any other questions, John?”

  “One or two,” Graves said. His anger was so intense that it clouded his judgment. He fought the feeling.

  “I can see you’re upset,” Wright said. “And you haven’t asked me some rather obvious questions. One is, when will the gas go off?”

  Graves stared at him, almost shaking with fury.

  “The answer,” Wright said, “is five p.m. exactly. The gas will go off then. It will begin to drift in a predictable way and will have blanketed the city with good saturation by about five thirty, the peak of the rush hour: maximum number of people on the streets, and so on. Now, it seems to me there was something else I wanted to tell you …”

  Graves wanted to beat the man to a pulp. He wanted to smash his face, to shatter his nose, his teeth … He had a brief image of himself standing over Wright, pounding him.

  “Damn,” Wright said, “it was just on the tip of my tongue. Well, no matter. It couldn’t have been that important.” He sighed. “I think,” he said, “this concludes the questions for today. I have nothing else to say.”

  Graves stared at him for a moment. “You don’t leave us much choice.”

  Wright smiled. “I believe you call it ‘softening up’; is that right?”

  “More or less.”

  “An interesting notion,” Wright said, “but now I must leave.”

  And with astonishing speed he jumped from his chair and raced for the door. The marshal crouched down and held his gun stiffly.

  “Don’t!” Graves shouted, and knocked the pistol away. The marshal looked stunned. “Don’t shoot him!”

  Wright was out the door. A second marshal stood outside. He wore a look of surprise, as Wright slammed him in the groin with one knee. He doubled over. Wright sprinted for the stairs to the basement.

  “He’s going for the garage,” Graves said. He pushed the other marshal toward the door to the basement and then ran outside.

  Phelps was directing a half-dozen marshals and policemen to cordon off the area.

  “Wright’s escaped!” Graves shouted. He ran down the street, looking for the underground-garage exit.

  “Where?”

  “The garage.”

  “Can he get out?”

  The marshals and police all drew their guns. A single shot echoed inside the garage.

  “How did this happen?” Phelps demanded.

  Graves looked at the marshals and the cops standing by the ramp from the garage. “Don’t shoot him,” he said. “Whatever happens, don’t shoot him.”

  There was a long silence. Nothing further was heard from inside the garage.

  “I demand to know what happened,” Phelps said.

  Graves listened.

  Nothing.

  The cops looked at each other.

  “Hey,” a cop shouted, from the garage. “He went out the other exit!”

  Graves instantly realized that he had made a mistake. Wright was too smart to think he could escape from the garage of this building; he would have another plan. Graves started to run. So did the police.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Next building. Other block.”

  Graves sprinted down the ramp into the garage and toward the other garage exit. He ran up a short flight of stairs through an open door and came out into an alley. The alley connected with the opposite block. He ran down it, the cops following, their footsteps echoing.

  They saw no one.

  “Where’d he go?”

  Graves held up his hand. Everyone paused. They heard the sound of an engine. It was coming from the garage of a building on the adjacent block.

  “Where’s the exit from that garage?”

  Graves ran forward. The exit must be on the street. They came out into the next street—deserted, heavily cordoned off at each end, with a police car crosswise blocking the road, cops standing around.

  The sound of a racing engine. They saw a ramp.

  “Don’t sh—”

  Wright’s Alfa came up the ramp, moving very fast. The cops and marshals scrambled out of the way. They fixed as they ran.

  Graves felt sick.

  But the Alfa was still going. It made a twisting right-hand turn, slamming into a parked car. There were more gunshots. The side windows shattered into great spiderwebs, but somehow the car continued, gears grinding as it raced down the street.

  Wright had planned it well, Graves thought. He would have made his escape by sneaking through the buildings if it hadn’t been for the roadblock. He didn’t expect that; Graves himself had ordered it on the spur of the moment.

  The Alfa roared down the street.

  “He wasn’t expecting the roadblock,” Graves said. “He didn’t count on that.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Phelps demanded.

  At the end of the street four policemen waited by the parked patrol car. As the Alfa bore down on them, they dropped to their knees, holding their guns stiff-armed before them.

  “Don’t shoot!” Graves screamed.

  The cops began to fire. The tires on the Alfa exploded. The front windshield shattered. The car wobbled, flipped on its side, and slammed into a parked car. The horn began to blare.

  Graves ran over to the Alfa and tried to open the door. It was jammed shut. He looked in through the shattered windshield and saw Wright’s face, a bloody pulp, the features indistinguishable. As he watched, a tiny stream of blood spurted rhythmically from Wright’s neck. Then it became a seeping red stain across his collar.

  He turned away from the car.

  “Is he dead?” Phelps said, running up.

  “Yes,” Graves said. “He’s dead.”

  “How can we turn off that fu
cking horn?” Phelps said.

  Graves stared at him and walked away.

  San Diego: 4 p.m. PDT

  Hour 1

  HIS SENSE OF SHOCK WAS profound. Of all the alternatives, of all the possibilities and options, he had never expected this. He had never expected Wright to die.

  Graves walked back up the street slowly, trying to gather his thoughts. What did he do next?

  Nordmann came up to him. “That’s a damned shame,” he said.

  “You bet it is,” Graves said.

  Nordmann looked at the crowd clustered around the wrecked car. “One thing, though,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It proves he could make a mistake.”

  “It was a big one,” Graves said.

  “Yes,” Nordmann said, in a calm, logical voice. “But it was a mistake.”

  Graves nodded and walked back toward the surveillance building. He thought about what Nordmann had said. The more he thought about it, the more encouraged he was. Because Nordmann was right.

  Wright had erred. And that was encouraging.

  One of the aides came running out of the building, waving Wright’s ticket. “Mr. Graves,” he said. “There’s something very strange going on. We just checked this ticket. He canceled that reservation yesterday.”

  Protect me from fools, Graves thought. “Of course he did.”

  “Of course?”

  “Look,” Graves said. “He planned to let us catch him, and he planned his escape. But he couldn’t get far if we knew his real airplane reservation, could he?”

  “Well, I guess not …”

  “Keep checking the airlines. Check Los Angeles, too. You’ll find he had a reservation somewhere.”

  Phelps came over. “The sniffer’s arrived.”

  “Has it? Good.” Graves walked across the street to Wright’s apartment building. Phelps trailed behind him in silence.

  Finally Phelps said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Graves didn’t answer. Because the fact was that he didn’t know what he was doing. He knew only in a general way what Wright intended. Wright had made Graves a part of the total mechanism, and therefore Graves would have to cancel himself out—inactivate himself—by not doing what was expected of him.

  In order to do that, he had to decipher as many elements of the total staging mechanism as possible. Only then could he determine how he was intended to participate in the staging sequence that controlled the final release of gas.

  The sniffer was the first step in deciphering the sequence.

  Graves stood outside the door to Wright’s apartment. Next to him Lewis held a gunlike instrument in his hand. The gun was attached to a shoulder pack with a dial. Lewis pointed the instrument at the door and ran it along the cracks and seams.

  Behind them at the far end of the hallway, six people, including Phelps, stood and watched. Graves wanted everyone away from the door so that they wouldn’t accidentally trip the vibration sensors. He didn’t know how sensitively they were tuned, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  After a moment Lewis turned away with the instrument. “Wow,” he said.

  “You get a reading?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “High nitrogen and oxygen content, trace phosphorus.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Plastic explosive, very near.”

  “Near the door?”

  “Probably just on the other side,” he said.

  Graves said, “Is there any chance you’re wrong?”

  “The sniffer is never wrong,” he said. “You’ve got oxide of nitrogen fumes, and that’s explosives. You can count on it.”

  “All right,” Graves said. He walked away from the door. He had to trust the sniffer. It had been developed for use in Vietnam and had been adapted for customs operations, smuggling, and so on. It was incredibly sensitive and incredibly accurate. If the sniffer said plastic explosive was behind the door, he had to believe it. He walked back to Phelps at the end of the hallway.

  “Well?”

  “There’s explosive on the other side of the door.”

  “Nice,” Phelps said. “What do we do now?”

  “Try to get a better look inside the apartment,” Graves said. He glanced at his watch.

  “It’s four ten,” Phelps said. “When did your friend say it would go off?”

  “Five,” Graves said.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Phelps said again.

  Graves sighed. He wondered if he could ever explain to Phelps that that wasn’t the problem. The problem was figuring out what Wright expected him to do—and then not doing it.

  Across the street in the surveillance room looking down on Wright’s apartment, he talked to Nordmann. Nordmann had brought a cardboard box full of medical supplies—syringes, needles, bottles of liquid. He was frowning down at it. “This is the best I could manage on short notice,” he said.

  “Will it work?” Graves said.

  “It’s the standard therapy,” Nordmann said. “But we haven’t got much. This quantity will treat two or three people for exposure, that’s all.”

  “Then let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

  Nordmann smiled slightly. “It better not,” he said. “Because you need somebody alive and well to administer it.”

  “Is it hard to administer?”

  “Tricky,” Nordmann said. “There are two different chemicals, atropine and parladoxime. They have to be balanced.”

  Graves sighed. “So the antidote is a binary, too.”

  “In a sense. The two chemicals treat different effects of the gas. One treats the peripheral nervous system, the other the central. The chemicals are dangerous in themselves, which makes it all much harder.”

  “Fighting fire with fire?”

  “In a sense,” Nordmann said.

  The two men stood staring out the window at the apartment opposite. Phelps was in a corner using a walkie-talkie. “You in position?”

  A response crackled back. “In position, sir.”

  “Very good.” Phelps clicked off the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got two cops stationed outside the door to that apartment,” he said.

  “Fine,” Graves said. “Just so they don’t get too close to the door.”

  “I have them ten feet away.”

  “That should be fine.”

  In the hallway outside Wright’s apartment, officers Martin and Jencks of the San Diego Police Department stared at the closed door and leaned against the wall.

  “You understand any of this?” Jencks said.

  “Nope,” Martin said.

  “But they said not to get too close to the door.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know why?”

  “I don’t know nothing,” Martin said. He took out a cigarette. “You got a match?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t smoke …”

  “Who’s going to know?” Martin said.

  Jencks gave him a match.

  Graves stood with Nordmann in the surveillance room across the street.

  “Wright booby-trapped the apartment?”

  “Elaborately,” Graves said. “He told me some of it. I’m sure he didn’t tell me everything.”

  “And it goes off at five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forty-five minutes from now,” Nordmann said. “Is the Navy sending people with protective suits? Because protected people could just walk right in.”

  “Nobody can walk right in,” Graves said. “He’s wired the room with explosive. That’s why we’ve got the guards over there.”

  Nordmann grimaced. “Explosive?”

  “Twenty pounds of it.”

  The TV in the corner of the room showed the Convention. A monotonous voice was saying, “Mr. Chairman … Mr. Chairman, we request the floor … Mr. Chairman …” There was the loud banging of a gavel.

  “Turn that damned thing off,” Graves said. Someone turned it off.

  A
t the window two men grunted as they lifted a huge lens onto a heavy-duty tripod. It was screwed into place and adjusted. “Ready, Mr. Graves.”

  “Thank you.” Graves went to the window.

  “What’s that?” Nordmann said.

  “A fifteen-hundred-millimeter telephoto,” Graves said. “It’s the best look we can get.”

  He peered through the giant lens. The view was so enormously magnified that at first he didn’t know what he was looking at. Using a fine-knurled knob, he moved the lens and saw he was focused on a crack in the floor. He moved across the floor to the boxes. He shifted the lens upward, examining each box in detail.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, stepping away.

  Nordmann squinted through the lens. “Three stacked boxes,” he said. “I can’t make out much …”

  “Neither can I.” Graves folded his arms across his chest and stared out the window. He tried to think logically, but he was having trouble; Wright’s death had unnerved him, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

  And the system seemed so complicated. Staging sequences, timers, vibration sensors, explosives … His head ached. How the hell would he unravel it?

  “Let’s work it backward,” Nordmann said. “What’s the most important element in the system?”

  “The gas.”

  “How is it controlled?”

  “There are spring-loaded valve mechanisms. They can be tripped by a solenoid.”

  “And they presumably have a timer of some kind.”

  “Presumably.”

  “Battery-powered or line-powered?”

  “Well, he’s plugged one of the boxes into the wall. But the valve mechanisms are probably battery-powered.”

  Nordmann nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “He wouldn’t have the most important elements dependent on an external system. So what did he plug into the wall?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Vibration sensors?”

  “Maybe,” Graves said. He looked at his watch. It was 4:20. He would have to move soon. What had Wright expected him to do? The psychological report was folded up in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the last few lines.

  IF THERE ARE ANY DEFECTS OR HIDDEN FLAWS IN HIS BEHAVIOR, THEY ARE HIS IMPULSIVENESS AND HIS DESIRE TO FINISH A TEST SITUATION RAPIDLY.

  Well, he didn’t have much choice now. He was going to have to make a move, and soon.