“Almost.”
Nordmann laughed; “You’re a hard man to satisfy.”
“It’s not me,” Graves said. “It’s him.”
Nordmann looked around the room. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what you expect to find here …”
“Neither do I.”
“You seem so certain.”
“I’m not certain. I’m just worried.”
Nordmann raised an eyebrow. “A triple whammy?”
“Maybe.”
“I think you’re giving him too much credit.”
“Maybe.”
Graves continued to prowl around the room.
“Well,” Nordmann said, “in the meantime I think we’d better move these tanks apart. Just in case. I’ll be happier when they’re separated by a distance of several miles.”
“Okay,” Graves said. He was hardly paying attention, looking at the equipment in the room. “You know,” he said, “I can’t get over the feeling that it’s been too simple.”
“Too simple? It’s been complicated as hell.” Nordmann put his arm over Graves’s shoulder. “I think you’re tired,” he said gently.
Across the room Lewis said, “It’s five o’clock, gentlemen.” Everyone, including the cops, laughed. One or two of the men in the room clapped.
On the floor the timer wheel clicked once. There was a loud metallic snap.
The battery light blinked on.
The twin solenoids clicked to the “open” position.
And nothing happened, because the solenoids had been disengaged from the tanks.
“Well,” Nordmann said, “I can’t imagine that there’s anything else.”
“I guess not,” Graves said.
He and Nordmann left the apartment and walked down the corridor toward the elevators.
San Diego: 5 p.m. PDT
Hour 0
AT 5:02 GRAVES PRESSED THE button for the elevator. The light didn’t go on. He looked up at the floor numbers, one of which should have been lighted; they were all dark.
“That’s funny,” he said.
Nordmann frowned. “Maybe they went on the blink.”
“Why?” Graves asked.
“Maybe when we cut the power to the apartment—”
“But they worked before.”
“Yes, that’s true. They did.”
“Why should they break down now?”
At that moment a cop came up the stairs, panting heavily. “Damned elevators are broken down,” he said. “We checked the circuit breakers in the basement. There was a timer wired in to knock out the elevators exactly at five.”
“At five?” Graves asked. He looked at Nordmann.
Nordmann shrugged. “Probably just a little irritant he threw in.”
“An irritant? But that doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s plenty irritating to me,” Nordmann said. “I don’t want to walk down nineteen flights of stairs.”
“Of course,” Graves said. “But why do it now?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well, if Wright wanted to make things difficult, he would have knocked out the elevators at four p.m. And that would have made things very difficult for us. It might even have delayed us until the gas went off.”
“True.”
“But why wait until five? By then we’ve either beaten his system or we haven’t.”
“Listen,” Nordmann said, “I think you’re tired. You’ve been worrying about Wright for so long—”
“I am not tired,” Graves said, shaking off Nordmann’s arm. “Wright was a logical man, and there is logic in this move.”
“There are no more moves,” Nordmann said. “We’ve won.”
“Yes,” Graves said. “That’s exactly what we’re supposed to think.”
And he turned and walked back to the apartment.
“John,” Nordmann said, running to catch up with him. “John, listen—”
“You listen,” Graves said. “What’s the point of knocking out the elevators after five?”
“It has no point. It’s a foolish irritation.”
“Wrong,” Graves said. “It has one important point. It traps everybody on the nineteenth floor. And it traps the tanks as well.”
“That’s true,” Nordmann said. “But it hardly matters. We’ve disarmed the mechanism.”
“Have we?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course we have. You did it yourself. You know it’s disarmed.”
“But what if it’s not?”
“How can it not be?”
At that, Graves sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He reentered the apartment.
HE OFTEN FEELS THAT A PROBLEM IS SOLVED WHEN IT IS ONLY HALF FINISHED, OR TWO-THIRDS FINISHED.
Graves remembered the psychological report as he paced the apartment, talking out loud. Nordmann watched him and listened. In the background, cops were disassembling the tank mechanisms.
“All right,” Graves said. “Let’s think it through. Wright designed a mechanism.”
“Yes.”
“And the mechanism had a purpose.”
“Yes, to dump nerve gas over the city at five p.m.”
Graves nodded. “And we have thwarted that.”
“Yes,” Nordmann said.
“Did he have any other purpose?”
“Well, I don’t know. You could answer that better than anyone. Somebody mentioned something about disagreeing with the President over China—”
“No, no,” Graves said. “Let’s forget about motivation. Let’s consider only the intent of his system. Did he intend to do anything besides dump the nerve gas?”
“Raise hell, create panic …” Nordmann shrugged.
Graves was silent, frowning at the room. “I mean,” he said, “did Wright intend his elaborate mechanism to do anything besides dump the gas?”
“No,” Nordmann said.
“I agree,” Graves said.
There was a long pause. Graves considered everything he knew, from every angle. He could make no sense of it, but he somehow felt certain that pieces were missing. Vital pieces …
“He knew about you,” Graves said suddenly.
“What?”
“He knew about you. He knew that I had called you in.”
“So what?”
“Why should he care?”
“He didn’t care.”
Graves began to see. It was coming into focus. “Because,” he said, “Wright knew about you. He knew your position, and he knew your expertise. He must have known that you could provide an antidote to the binary gas.”
Nordmann said nothing.
“If he knew you could provide an antidote, then he also knew his protection—filling this room with gas—would not work. We’d break in. He knew that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. And he didn’t care.”
“Perhaps he was bluffing,” Nordmann said.
“It’s too important for a bluff. He must have had another part of his system to cover that eventuality. He must have planned it so that if we did break in, he’d still manage to win.”
Nordmann considered it all very carefully. At length he sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, John,” he said, “I think you’re entirely wrong about this. You’re making hypothetical sand castles in the air—”
“No!” Graves snapped his fingers. “No, I’m not. Because there was a second purpose to his system.”
“What second purpose?”
“Wright was going to Jamaica, or somewhere, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And he was not suicidal, correct?”
“Correct. He expected to get there.”
“All right. Then that establishes the need for a second purpose. His mechanism had to do two things.”
“What two things?”
“Look,” Graves said. He spoke as rapidly as he could, but he was hardly able to keep pace with his racing mind. “Wright planned all this a
nd planned it carefully. If he succeeded, a million people would die, including the President. A major political party would be wiped out. There would be national panic of incredible proportions. And for some reason, he wanted that.”
“He was insane, yes …”
“But not suicidal. He planned an escape. And the question is, what about afterward?”
“Afterward?”
“Sure. Wright is on some beach sunning himself and gloating as he reads the headlines. But for how long?”
“Damn,” Nordmann said, nodding.
Phelps was also listening. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“You never do,” Graves snapped. “But the point is this. Sooner or later, Navy men in protective suits would enter San Diego. They would determine that people died of nerve gas. They would search for the source. They would find this apartment. They would enter it. They would find the tanks. They would put the pieces together.”
“And they would come after Wright,” Nordmann said.
“Exactly,” Graves said.
“Wherever he went, he wouldn’t be safe. He would be a mass murderer and he would have left a very clear trail behind him.” He gestured at all the equipment. “Would he really leave such a clear trail for others to follow?”
“It must be true,” Nordmann said, getting excited. “He had to have two purposes—first to discharge the gas, and second to obliterate the evidence.”
“Obliterate the evidence how?” Phelps asked.
Graves leaned on a tank. He turned to Nordmann. “How long would it take this cylinder of gas to discharge?”
Nordmann shrugged. “Ten or fifteen minutes.” Then he said, “I see. You want to know exactly.”
“Yes,” Graves said.
“Why exactly?” Phelps asked.
Graves ignored him.
Nordmann said, “Normal Army pressure tanks are usually stabilized at five hundred pounds per square inch. So these tanks … Anybody got a tape measure?” He looked around the room. One of the cops had a tape. Nordmann measured the tank. “Thirty-seven inches in circumference,” he said. “Eight feet long, that’s ninety-six inches, with a radius of …” He wrote on a small pad, doing rapid calculations.
Phelps said to Graves, “Why do you need it exactly?”
“Because,” Graves said, “Wright didn’t care if we broke into this room. He had another contingency plan to cover that. And we need to know when it will take effect.”
Phelps looked totally confused.
“A radius of six inches,” Nordmann was saying. “And a length of ninety-six inches gives a volume … well, figure for a cylinder … at five hundred psi … let me check the nozzles …”
He wandered off. Graves said to a cop, “What time is it?”
“Five oh seven, Mr. Graves.”
Nordmann finished his calculations and turned to Graves. “At normal discharge rates, it would take these tanks sixteen minutes to empty.”
“That’s it, then,” Graves said. “At five sixteen, a bomb will go off in this room, destroying everything. We’ve got to find it.”
Everyone paused. They stared at him.
Phelps said, “A bomb?”
“Of course. That’s why he knocked out the elevators—to trap us here. In case we managed to disengage the mechanism, he wanted us here when the bomb went off, releasing the gas and eliminating the evidence.”
Phelps said, “But there’s no evidence of a bomb—”
“Remember the sniffer?” Nordmann asked.
Phelps frowned.
“The sniffer,” Graves said, “picked up oxides of nitrogen. Plastic explosive.”
“Yes …”
“Okay,” Graves said. “Where is that explosive now?”
Phelps looked around the room. “I don’t see it anywhere,” he said.
“But the sniffer detected it.”
“Yes …”
“There must be a bomb,” Graves said. “And it must be in plain sight.”
“Five oh eight,” a cop said.
“We better get these tanks out,” Nordmann said. “We don’t want them damaged by the bomb.”
“Right,” Graves said. “And let’s get the sniffer in here: It’ll help us find it.”
The sniffer had been taken to the other building. Phelps turned on the walkie-talkie and talked to Lewis. Lewis said he would bring it as soon as he could, but it would take time to climb nineteen flights. Phelps told him to hurry and added a string of expletives.
Meanwhile Nordmann supervised the removal of the tanks to the hallway. The cops carried them, four men to a cylinder, grunting under the weight. Graves searched the room—scanning the wall surfaces, the door, the window ledges for any irregularity, any discontinuity that would suggest the location of explosive. Plastic explosive, Compound C, could be shaped and molded into a variety of forms. That was its advantage.
It could be anywhere.
Nordmann stuck his head into the room. “Maybe you should get out of here,” he said. “We can let the room blow if the tanks are far enough away. No sense in risking anything.”
“I’ll stay until we find it,” Graves said. He walked to the window and looked out. He saw Lewis running across the street with the sniffer on his shoulder.
“Five ten,” Phelps said.
It would take Lewis at least two minutes to scramble up all those stairs. Graves stared out the window, wondering what was happening to Wright. Had they managed to cut his body out of the wrecked car yet?
Odd, he thought, how the game continues.
“Lewis is coming,” Phelps said.
“I saw.”
“How much explosive is supposed to be in this room?”
“Twenty pounds.”
“Christ.”
Graves continued to stare out the window. Where would Wright hide twenty pounds of explosive? What would be the supremely logical hiding place? Nothing less would satisfy Wright, he was sure of that.
He shifted his position at the window, careful to avoid the jagged splinters of glass around the sill. As he did so, he looked down at his shirt. There was printing on the shirt; some of the lettering from the tanks had come off on his arms and chest when he had leaned on them.
it said, and then faintly,
He looked at his watch. 5:12.
“Where the hell is Lewis?”
Lewis appeared, running down the corridor red-faced and out of breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Came as fast as I could.” He turned on his sniffer and walked around the room, pointing the gunlike wand, staring at the dial on the shoulder unit.
Graves and Nordmann watched him.
Lewis began with the door, then turned to the walls. He checked carefully from baseboard to ceiling. In a slow, methodical way he went entirely around the room. Finally he stopped.
5:13.
“You get a reading?”
“No,” Lewis said, checking the machine. “Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s in another room,” Nordmann said.
“I doubt it,” Graves said.
“Let’s check it,” Lewis said. He disappeared into the bathroom, worked through it and through the adjoining bedroom of the apartment. He came back a moment later. “Maybe the machine’s broken.”
“How can we test it?”
“Give it a smell of some kind.”
“Like what?”
“Anything strong. Cologne, perfume, food …”
Graves went to the refrigerator, but it was empty. When he came back he saw Nordmann strike a match, blow it out, and hold the smoking tip in front of the sniffer wand.
“Off the dial,” Lewis said. “It works all right. Reading sulfur and carbon, minor phosphorus. It works.”
“Then why isn’t it picking up explosive in this room?”
Graves sighed. “Maybe I was wrong,” he said. “Maybe there isn’t any explosive. Maybe it’s over, after all.”
“There’s certainly nothing in here,” Lewis said.
5:14.
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One of the cops came in to Nordmann. “We’re going to carry the tanks down the stairs now,” he said. “We—”
“Take them one at a time,” Nordmann said. “I want those tanks well separated from now on.”
“Okay,” the cop said and went back to the hallway.
Graves stared at Lewis. “Look,” he said, “there was a lot of information Wright gave us that hasn’t paid off. The washing machine, the spray paint …”
As he spoke he wandered restlessly around the apartment, from the living room into the empty bedroom, then into the bathroom. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
“Well probably never know,” Lewis said. “Maybe they were all false clues designed to throw us.”
“And those plastic tanks,” Graves said. “We’ve completely forgotten the fact that—”
He stopped. He stared at himself in the mirror. The lettering from the tanks that had come off on his shirt was clear now. It was reversed in the mirror.
do not
chemi
“My God,” he said. “Of course!” He went running back into the living room.
“What is it?” Nordmann said.
“What? What?”
“The tanks!” Graves said, going out to the hallway. The first tank was already being carried down the stairs. The second still lay on the hallway floor. It was the black tank, with yellow and white stenciling.
5:15.
Graves bent over the tank and rubbed the lettering. It streaked on his finger.
“Go to the window,” Graves said to a cop. “Use the bullhorn and clear the street below. Do you understand? Get everybody the hell away from the street.”
The cop looked confused.
“Go!”
The cop ran.
Graves pushed at the surface of the tank in front of him. His finger left a minute indentation. “That’s where your plastic explosive is,” he said. “It’s wrapped around the tanks in thin strips—strips pressed through the rollers of an old washing machine. There must be a timer …”
He ran his fingers quickly along the surface, feeling for lumps and irregularities. He couldn’t find it, but he was in a hurry.
“Christ,” Lewis said, pointing his sniffer. “This is it. Plastic explosive.”
“The timer, the timer …”
“It’s after five fifteen,” Nordmann said.
“Get those cops in the stairway away from that tank,” Graves said. “Tell them to drop it and run.”
Binary: A Novel Page 13
