Hand of Fate (4 page)

Cassidy thought about Allison and Nicole. Were they in court today? She couldn't remember. She tried calling each of them, but the circuits were overwhelmed. She asked the universe to protect them, and then tried to let go of her worry. She didn't want to put out negative energy.
,
Being so far above the scene removed some of its impact. The lavishly decorated condo added to the feeling that she was in another time and place entirely. A quiet place, swaddled by wealth. Behind her
,
a massive chandelier hung over the mahogany dining room table that seated sixteen. Handwoven Oriental carpets were scattered over the gleaming red oak floors. The condo even had its own library, where leather-bound books lined floor-to-ceiling shelves.

In the stainless steel kitchen, Cassidy used a dish towel to punch the radio button. It was already tuned to KNWS. But there wasn't any local coverage, just a national feed. That made sense if they had had to evacuate the building. Someone could have flipped the switch on the way out. Still using the dish towel, she tried KXL and KEX, but they didn't seem to know much more than Eric had when he sent her out. Something had hit the studios of KNWS--some kind of gas or maybe a bomb--and there were reports that some of the station's personnel had been injured. Maybe Jim wasn't dead, then.

As she listened to the radio, Cassidy found and retrieved what she had come for. How would Jim react if he found out she had been here? Well, she would cross that bridge when she came to it. If she came to it.

The only new news was that police were now evacuating the downtown core. Cassidy didn't need the radio to tell her that. She could see it by looking out the window.

Of course Cassidy wouldn't leave. You didn't get an award-winning story by running away with the stampeding herd. You got it by going where no one else wanted to go. And that meant she had to make her way to downtown, not away. She looked down at her four-inch heels. They were not meant for walking blocks and blocks.

She tried calling Andy on her cell, but got another fast busy signal. This was why the station had invested in push-to-talks for its staff. She pressed the button on the side.

"Andy? Are you there? Andy?"

She could barely hear him over the noise in the background. Sirens, screams, shouts. "Where are you? I thought you would be here by now."

"I'm about five minutes away," she said, fudging a little. "What have we got?"

"Some kind of poisonous gas. It sounds like the release was deliberate." Andy made a practice of buying drinks or coffee for every cop in town, so he always knew the inside scoop. "I'm hearing there's one confirmed fatality. Jim Fate, like they were saying at the station."

Cassidy's heart contracted. It was hard to believe. Jim saw himself as the strong one, the one who spoke truth to power, who wasn't afraid to tweak those who deserved tweaking, and to press even harder when needed. Jim loved--had loved, Cassidy corrected herself--being macho. That was his personality on air and off. He felt it was his job to take care of anyone weaker--and to prove that no one was stronger. He could drink other men under the table, unfailingly called women "ladies," and always opened Cassidy's car door.

And now he was gone.

"I've got footage of the guys in bunny suits hosing off some woman outside KNWS. Meet me at the corner of Salmon and Broadway. We need to go live with this now."

Cassidy hurried around the apartment, using the dish towel to wipe off any areas she might have touched, not just today, but the other times she had been here. She grabbed a bottle of water, a pair of blue and white Nikes, and a thick pair of socks. For a man, Jim had small feet.

Then she thought of something else. In the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet above the floating granite shelf that held a vessel sink. The Somulex bottle was almost full. Jim wouldn't be needing these now.

Before she opened the door, Cassidy put on a pair of oversized sunglasses. In the elevator, she slipped into Jim's Nikes. And when the elevator doors opened, she broke into a run.

Chapter
6

Mark 0. Hatfield United States Courthouse

This is not a drill," a voice said on a loudspeaker in the crowded stairwell. "Please exit the building as quickly as possible."

"As quickly as possible" did not apply to a woman in her seventies who walked with a cane. Every step was a slow, painful ordeal. Nic felt her stomach clench. They were on the sixteenth floor of a building built for grandeur, meaning the ceilings were unusually high--and the staircases correspondingly longer.

"You go on ahead without me, dear," said the elderly juror, whose name was Mrs. Lofland. "I'll be fine." She smiled up at Nic, the skin pleating around her faded blue eyes.

"I'm not leaving you, ma'am." Nic tucked as close as she could to the older woman. The stairwell was just wide enough that a third person could squeeze past them. And squeeze past they did. There wasn't any panic, not yet, but people were dead serious.

Nic had one hand under Mrs. Lofland's arm and the other on her BlackBerry. With her thumb, she tapped out a note to Leif Larson, asking if he knew what was up. Leif, like Nic, was an FBI special agent. He was also Nic's--well, certainly not her boyfriend, but something to her. Something more than just a friend. Even if she still resisted the idea.

Leif's reply came in less than a minute. Nic stared at her screen
,
glad that it was small enough that even the man pressing up behind them couldn't catch a glimpse of the message.

GET OUT. Poss SARIN 2 BLKS AWAY.

Sarin gas? Oh no. Homeland Security had briefed the FBI on what would have happened in Seattle if the fake janitor had managed to put the gas into the ventilation system, as opposed to spilling it on the carpet. He had died for his mistake, and so had fifty-two other people in the building, as well as five first responders. But if he had succeeded, the number would have been far higher.

Eighty years ago, sarin had been invented in Germany as an insecticide. But the military discovered it worked even better against humans. It was now classified as a nerve agent, the worst of the worst. Extremely toxic. And extremely fast acting.

Sarin was also colorless, tasteless, and odorless. Add a little to the municipal water supply, and kill thousands. Aerosolize it, and it was even more effective. Even just letting it evaporate was enough. In 1995, a Japanese doomsday cult had killed a dozen and sickened hundreds by puncturing containers filled with liquid sarin on Tokyo subway cars.

If the recent terrorist attack had succeeded, Homeland Security estimated that 95 percent of the people in the building would have died, most within minutes. And when it got out through the rooftop ventilation stacks, it would have sunk back down to the ground, because sarin was heavier than air. And there it would have killed even more victims. More than three thousand dead in the first half hour. Thousands more from exposure as they fled. The economic damage would have been incalculable.

All from an attack that would have taken ten minutes to carry out.

They were only on the fourteenth floor now. At this rate, getting out would take more than an hour. Which was still no guarantee of safety, not if the gas were there, invisible and deadly.

Nic wanted to abandon this old lady and run. Push her way through all these people, hold her breath once she was outside, and not stop running until she was blocks away and on higher ground.

Who would raise her nine-year-old daughter if something happened to her? Nic knew it was stupid that she didn't have a will, but she always got stuck on the same question. Who did she trust to raise Makayla? Her parents? They were nearly as old as Mrs. Lofland and starting to show it. Her brothers? They didn't always see eye-to-eye with Nic.

They rounded a corner. Already there were bottlenecks. An overweight woman in a blue muumuu inched her way down sideways, stepping down with one foot, and then slowly putting her other foot on the same step. Nic wanted to yell out that they had to hurry, but she knew it might only cause a panic. Mrs. Lofland would be the first to be hurt.

People pressed closer together, not talking, concentrating on getting down. The stairway was at times now coming to a complete halt. When Nic looked over the edge, she saw dozens of hands lined up on the handrail.

People kept trying their cell phones, but it was clear they couldn't get through. A few others with BlackBerrys were offering to send e-mails for those around them.

Suddenly Mrs. Lofland's arm jerked out of Nic's grasp, and the older lady pitched forward. Nic grabbed the woman's shoulders with both hands and yanked her upright, ignoring the pain from the healing bullet wound in her own upper right arm.

"I'm sorry, dear. I tripped."

Nic looked down. Some stupid woman had just abandoned a pair of black, very high heels on the stairs, and the old lady had stumbled over one. Nic picked up one and then a few steps later, th
e o
ther. Not knowing what else to do with them, she shoved them into her bag. The shoes looked expensive. Maybe, if she was lucky, they were her size. Nic realized she was getting giddy. The air seemed stale and close, inhaled and exhaled by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people before them. But did she really want to smell fresh air if it might also carry the invisible scent of death?

Mrs. Lofland's lips were moving. Was she in pain?

"Are you all right?" Nic asked. "Do you need to stop?"

"No, dear, I'm just praying."

"You don't need to worry. I'll get you out of here, I promise." "I'm not worried about myself, dear. If it's my time, it's my time. I'm just praying for you and the others."

Normally, Nic would have had to stifle a retort. Mumble to God or mumble to yourself--what difference did it make? But for some reason, Mrs. Lofland's words made her feel better.

They passed an abandoned black wheelchair left in the stairwell. Where was its owner? Nic's eyes strained ahead until she caught sight of a woman being slowly carried down the stairs by four men--young, old, black, white--all united in their common goal of saving another human being.

"Leave me behind," the woman was saying. "Go on without me. The firemen can help me."

Nic didn't hear their answers, just saw them shake their heads.

They had just reached the ninth-floor stairwell when all hell broke loose. Someone below them must have gotten the same message Nic had earlier.

"It's poisonous gas," a man below them shouted, his voice cracking in panic. "They're evacuating all of downtown!"

His words were answered by screams, shouts, and shoves. The crowd had been slowly pushing forward like a herd of cattle. Now i
t b
ecame a stampede. A man in front of Nic fell. She reached out her hand, but in a second he was gone, rolling down, trampled by panicked people. A woman behind them screamed, "I don't want to die here!" before clawing her way past Nic.

Nic grabbed the handrail on either side of Mrs. Lofland. The cane was gone, lost in the chaos. She flattened herself and the older woman against the wall as the crazed crowd surged forward. If she were alone, she thought she could make it all the way down to the exit. But Mrs. Lofland? She would be crushed. The next time she tripped, Nic probably wouldn't be able to pull her back up.

Time slowed down, the way it had at other times Nic had faced death. She saw people's open mouths, but their screams were oddly muffled. All of her attention was focused on finding a way to keep them both alive.

It was clear they weren't going to be able to make it to the exit. But was that really so bad? Leif's e-mail had said the sarin gas was two blocks away. Not here. And if there was no sarin in the building, then paradoxically, the lower they went and the closer they got to being out of this crazy panicked crowd, the more danger they might be in. The gas would seep out through roof vents and then roll invisibly back to the ground--the very ground these people were trying to claw their way toward.

What if they stayed here, higher than the gas could reach? Almost immediately Nic realized the flaw in the idea. Most buildings' HVAC systems vented stale air through the roof and picked up fresh air at ground level. So even if they managed to get back onto a floor, the ducts overhead could still be spewing invisible death. Unless ...

She thought of a plan. Now all she needed was to get them back out onto a floor.

"We've got to get back inside one of the floors!" she yelled in Mrs.

Lofland's ear. "It's the only way." She felt more than saw the older woman nod.

Nic wrapped her right arm around her companion and then let go of the security of the handrail. Almost immediately, they were buffeted by the shoving mass. Using her left elbow, Nic began to create a space where none existed. She made some headway, but the surging crowd pushed them inexorably down two steps, then three, four. The eighth-floor stairwell was now above them. And there was no way they were going to be able to swim upstream.

She had to make it to the far side of the stairwell before they reached the seventh floor. Each time Mrs. Lofland was pushed off balance, Nic hung on for dear life, pinning her to the empty air, until the older woman could get her feet under her.

There. The stairwell door. She yanked it open. Quickly, Nic pulled Mrs. Lofland through the door and closed it behind her.