City of Strangers (23 page)

An inexplicable spasm of nervous energy swept through him, and he nearly laughed: At least if it killed him, it would kill his toothache.

The man thrust the little spray gun straight up over his head and squeezed off a burst of shots, exulting. The gunshots made Jack Liffey's teeth hurt even more. Hassan began to chant again in Arabic, bobbing his head hard and belting out something in a furious rhythm that made it seem like his final outburst of apocalyptic energy. Jack Liffey could feel his own psyche grow more excitable with the chanting, his perceptions changing, seeing color fringes, a kind of molten border to things, hearing phantom squeakings.

His eye went to the timer. Still 11:58. He rolled his head away from the clock and what he saw sent an electric shock through his whole body. He knew it had to be a hallucination, a brief near-death dream, a wild, weird wish—that glimpse of Maeve sneaking up behind the robed man with a fire ax in two small hands. The ax had been too big and heavy for her, one of those implements you saw hanging on big metal brackets behind glass in hallways. He was afraid to look back to check his perceptions.

But just in case it was a real Maeve and not the psychotic hallucination it had to be, he kept his face to the boom box so that he wouldn't give her presence away. 11:59! He hadn't seen the number trip. Less than a minute to live in good health and think you had a future.

The man's rant picked up in volume, with a single word interjected repeatedly, screamed out louder than the others. Jack Liffey chanced another peek and the Maeve-like chimera seemed real enough this time. Tiptoeing up behind the bellowing gunman. How did she get on the roof? How did she get there at all? But who cared? Hurry, he thought. If you're not just a crazy desperate wish imprinting itself on my consciousness,
please hurry.

As if hearing his entreaty, the putative Maeve swung the flat of the ax at the gunman. In that instant he had to smile inwardly: it was the real Maeve, all right, squeamishness and all. His own imagination would have gone for the sharp end.

The big tool was far too heavy for her. Its inertia resisted, and the flat of the big ax-head only made it to the man's shoulder. At the punchless impact, he took a step and spun around in a swirl of robe, firing a three-round involuntary burst that sprayed the air. Then Fariborz was there, too, running forward to tackle the man!

But Jack Liffey didn't waste any more time watching. He grabbed the boom box and came woozily to his knees. He almost passed out in a pink haze as he launched himself for the elevator. How much time did he have?

He kicked the mop bucket aside and slapped indiscriminately for a button, any floor. The door seemed to sigh in satisfaction and began to close the last few feet with its maddening lethargy, a molasses-slowed nightmare, and he clutched the boom box and watched the man swing his submachine gun around toward the elevator in a swirl of fluttery white cloth. Jack Liffey hurled himself into the shielded corner of the elevator just before three rounds splatted into the back wall, then three more slammed into the closing doors. The door chunked shut as three more bullets hit outside. The floor seemed to drop out as the elevator started its descent just as abruptly as it had risen.

Jack Liffey slammed his hand into the bright red
Emerg Stop
button, and he hurled the boom box away from himself across the big cab. A honking alarm went off in the confined space just before a concussion hammered him off his feet and something hard hit him in the chest. His jaw hurt terribly, his arm, his whole body, and he started to cough where he had crumpled in the corner as the air in the small, loud room had grown viscous with dust.

It was too much to take in all at once, and his consciousness decided it would rather not be in attendance. He dropped straight into a noisy, urgent dream of flying away from the skyscraper without sufficient support.

“Do you think we could come up with some even more imaginative indignity?” Jack Liffey suggested.

The nurse offered a very thin smile. “Breathe in and then cough, Mr. Liffey. Then we'll try the suction one more time.”

He was propped up in bed, retching into a little metal basin, and she was about to stick the hideous long suctioning tube back down into his chest again, making him gag and giving him another spell of breathing panic. The act of retching stirred up the pain in his jaw and in his left hand, as well.

He was teasing the nurse to keep his mind off the warnings he had absorbed over the last day from whispered conversations near him: having one lung collapsed, it was all too easy for the other to fill rapidly with fluid and drown him.

“Woo.”

“Has anyone ever taught you real breathing?”

“My mother?”

She shook her head. “You just use your chest muscles like most people. I'm going to show you how to draw from the diaphragm and then expel almost all the air from your lungs.”

“Great! Have you got something to replace it with?” He knew it was just a question of getting the foreign stuff out of him, but after two full days of suctioning and other unpleasant procedures, and coughing and retching phlegm, he was getting pretty tired of it all.

In the fateful elevator in the Library Tower, stuck just above the sixty-seventh floor, he'd been summoned back to consciousness by a disembodied voice speaking to him out of a little metal grille. The voice had to pace its words to fall between the buzz-buzz of the
Emerg Stop
alarm. “Are you … hurt? Liffey … are you hurt?”

He had looked around and seen a thick film of dust on everything. When he touched his chest, a powdery puff billowed up. He came slowly to his knees. Everything he touched whiffed in the same way. In the corner there was the mangled remains of the boom box, much of the top blown away. Luckily, most of the small blast seemed to have been directed upward.

“Liffey,” the tinny voice went on insistently. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he had managed to reply. “I don't … think so.”

“Pull out … emergency … button.”

“Can't. Danger. Plutonium.” Words came with difficulty.

“We know. Pull it. Trust us.”

He had given in, as much because the honking sound was driving him nuts, and grasped the fat red button and yanked. It popped out to afford an instantaneous blessed calm. The elevator didn't move, and he sat down on the floor and leaned against the padded wall. A lot of him was sore, particularly his jaw now. He didn't think it was broken, but several of his teeth were, and the right side of his jaw was probably all bruise.

“Your daughter's all right, and the boy,” was the first thing the man's voice had told him once the alarm stopped. Mentally he thanked whoever the man was for his consideration.

“Is the elevator car filled with a fine gray powder?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Okay, my name is Dr. Mourelinho. First, we want to congratulate you for confining the air burst in the elevator. It was a brave thing for you to do and might have saved lives if the boom box had actually contained plutonium, as you thought. I don't quite know how to tell you this.” There was a silence for few moments and all of the hair on his neck and shoulders stood on end. “We have them all in custody now, so we don't need to keep up the masquerade. I work with Robert Johnson's group, and it was our organization who sold the terrorist cell that canister a month ago. It contains mostly ground granite—basically, just silica, very very fine sand. We had one sample pack with enough alpha emitter in it to convince them, but it was bait-and-switch.”

“Oh, shit!”

“You
will
be all right.”

Sure, he'd thought. He probably had just experienced the most thorough exposure to black lung of anyone since the early days of coal mining. But somewhere inside he believed the doctor's comforting voice.

The man talked to him for a while, telling him his daughter and Fariborz were already in a nearby hospital being treated for some bruises, but otherwise quite okay. Maeve's car had been parked up the block, and she had driven them to the building, on the same hunch he had had. The kids had come up the passenger elevator to the floor below and climbed the service stairs to the roof.

“Try to sit still, Mr. Liffey. We're going to bring you down to the lobby level now.”

“I'm having a little trouble breathing,” Jack Liffey said. It was odd, as if something wasn't working quite right inside him.

“We'll see to that. Try not to stir up the powder and breathe any more of it than you have to.”

Powder,
he thought. What a nice innocuous word. Like fresh light snow, baby talcum, a woman's face color. The elevator ground down slowly, in fits and starts, unlike its trip upward, almost as if a few brawny men were heaving it down by a big rope.

It stopped eventually and a tall, thin man with a stethoscope and a graying crew-cut shook his hand with a kindly frown.

“Mr. Liffey, I presume. I'm Dr. Pedro Mourelinho.” He pronounced it, Pehd-ro, in Portuguese fashion. He led him out into the marble lobby, where two men in white coats took him to a child's inflatable swimming pool with red seahorses all over it. They stripped him and sprayed him down with cold water, then they gave him a set of green hospital scrubs and a respirator mask hooked to an oxygen cylinder which made his battered jaw hurt like hell, but soothed the breathing panic that was beginning to set in with gasps and gulps. He couldn't help thinking of the man with the oxygen cannula in the self-storage office. He hoped he hadn't been too hard on him.

Before long they had him in a private room at a small downtown hospital he didn't even know existed on South Grand.

“The X ray shows one of your lungs has collapsed, but don't worry too much,” a nurse told him. “It's fairly common. It happened to Roman Gabriel once, in football practice. It will take care of itself.”

“And if it doesn't?” The respirator mask had big holes in the sides and he found he could talk with it on; it just made his voice sound like it came out of a soup can.

She smiled reassuringly. “Don't you worry, Mr. L. These gentlemen from Bethesda know exactly what they're doing.”

Later they would tell him Bethesda was the home of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. Biowarfare, in other words.

An hour later the gentlemen from Bethesda themselves showed up. Robert Johnson waited calmly to one side with a newspaper tucked under his arm while Dr. Mourelinho gave him an injection, and poked and prodded at him, peered into orifices, pressed a cold stethoscope against his chest, and asked some perfunctory questions.

“Am I going to make it?”

Johnson laughed. “We certainly are optimism-challenged today. Not many people are hit with breathing that much silica all at once, but it ought to work its way out of your system pretty quickly. One of our colleagues was once exposed to the real thing—depleted plutonium dust—and Pedro married her last month. She's got a damn sight more life in her than you do.”

“Did she sink her face in five pounds of it?”

“Exposure is exposure. The nurse been making you cough?”

“Endlessly.”

“Good, well, you cooperate with the nurse, Liffey, you hear me, and you'll be around in six months to get you a presidential medal.”

“I'd rather have a big house with a view, if somebody's in a giving mood.”

The doctor was already on his way out, but Robert Johnson stayed. “You did a fine and noble thing, Mr. Liffey, even if nobody knows it but us, and even if it wasn't plutonium.”

“You know the old mental poser that you hear,” Jack Liffey said. “You see a burning house and you run in and you can either save a kitten or a Van Gogh? I thought of that for just a split instant as I dived into the elevator.”

“So, which is it?” Robert Johnson asked.

“Damned if I know. Maybe I thought I was saving my daughter. There's never much of a question about that. I'd probably doom the whole West Side to rescue Maeve. Is she going to be able to come see me?”

“By tomorrow, I think. Just us professionals for now.”

“That's gloomy.”

“Do you read Spanish?” he asked out of the blue.

Robert Johnson untucked the paper he was carrying, a particularly garish
¡Alarma!
and showed it to Jack Liffey. The front page was a full-page photo of the courtyard of a hacienda with dead bodies lying all around, including some women and children. The headline screamed:
Guerra de Drogas!
Just the sight of the magazine made his hand start hurting again.

“I barely read English.”

“Early in the
A.M.,
two days ago, a squad of professional hit men with automatic weapons burst into the Miramón family rancho just north of Guaymas and killed everyone they could find—the paterfamilias himself who called himself Frankie, the wife, kids, aunts, cousins, and henchmen. Twenty-three in all. That fat one lying there is Frankie. You may not recognize him in this posture, but I bet he's the one you had your little trouble with. Just another drug hit, I suppose. But you could probably go get your car now without looking so hard in the rearview mirror.”

“Maybe Becky can come home now, too.”

“The IRS will be on her like a coat of paint, but who knows? Any of Miramón's guys left alive are running to the forests of Chiapas about now. Life's tough, but it's a lot tougher if you're stupid and your side just lost a gang war.”

“Frankie Miramón wasn't stupid,” Jack Liffey said. He told Robert Johnson some of the man's history as a student activist who was tortured by the police. “He could probably have done something useful with his life, but who knows what it is that kicks anybody out of orbit?”

“Yeah, who knows?”

Jack Liffey wondered himself how easy it might be to take a step or two across the line someday and then just get lost and never find your way back. You'd have changed your whole settled view of yourself and what was possible.

“This Hassan is more my speed,” Robert Johnson said. “No ambiguity at all. A good old fanatic, and the guy is so proud of it, he's over in the federal lockup right now singing like a thrush.”

“In your line of work, I'd think a thrush'd be a yeast infection.”

He smiled. “Doc Pedro handles that end. I'm responsible for tracking the human vectors. You know, this is the first-known terrorist attempt to use a dirty bomb.”

“So I'm into the
Guinness Book of Records?
”

“Oh, in a couple of ways, Liffey.”

“If my one good lung doesn't fill up with fluid and kill me.”

“There's always that.”

The next morning he woke up short of breath and with a scratchy throat, and was engulfed immediately in a wave of the blackest panic. He rang for the nurse and she peered into his throat with a tongue depressor and declared that he was a bit dehydrated. She tut-tutted and said he should be drinking more water. She upped the oxygen and switched him to a nasal cannula, which made life a lot simpler, and then gave him more painkillers for his hand and his jaw. They were going to see about debriding the burn soon, she promised. By the time he'd eaten his soggy hospital breakfast one-handed, he had calmed down and noticed there was no phone in the room and he wondered if they were isolating him for some reason.

The nurse brought him more pills and a note that she said had been approved by “the men from Bethesda.” The note said Dicky Auslander had heard from his daughter, indirectly, and he was so relieved and thankful that he was offering a huge bonus. “You can take Maeve to Europe and show her the sights,” the note suggested.

His mind immediately started toying with the idea. He couldn't think of a cheerier prospect than sitting at a Left Bank bistro with Maeve, sipping espressos and watching leggy well-dressed Parisian couples drift past—except maybe having Rebecca Plumkill walk up to join them at the table, and then dropping Maeve at a museum for the afternoon and rushing right back to their quaint-but-comfortable hotel room and …

Rather than dwell too much on that, he switched to imagining confronting Auslander one final time in his office, giving him hell as the “Author” of the whole terrorist incident on top of his private hell in T.J. Why me, Dicky. For God's sake, the world's first victim of a dirty bomb! My hand hurts. My jaw hurts. I can barely breathe. Enough is enough.

Hey, man, Dicky laughed at him. I could have made it
real
plutonium, and then there'd be guys in lead space-suits launching you out to sea on a raft for the very short rest of your life. You could really wallow in being an outsider
then.

He put the reverie away and was just beginning to enjoy a sense of calm that had come over him from somewhere—maybe the pills—when suddenly he realized he had to talk to Aneliese de Villiers, and
soon.
He knew he'd be seeing Rebecca Plumkill now, it had all felt so good and so right to him, even his libido seconding the nomination. He owed Aneliese a call, not to leave her dangling, he owed her an explanation before she came hurrying to the hospital with flowers. His gloom rushed back in.

“I'm sorry, it's the only loose phone we have. We shut down a pediatric wing.”

The men from Bethesda had given permission for a call and she plugged in the Mickey Mouse telephone beside his bed, Mickey's cheerful gloved hand holding up a bright blue handset. Only three fingers, he noticed with a frown, like all cartoon characters.

“What if I were calling someone to report a terminal disease?”

She lifted one eyebrow. “I could cover Mickey's face with bandages, if it would help.”

“Let it go.”

He called information for the number. His little address book had gone somewhere during the ordeal.