The Liar's Lullaby (37 page)

Jo rushed to the door. In the hall people were running. Lewicki came up beside her and slammed the door.

From the lobby the man shouted, “This is the New American Revolution. We are watering the tree of liberty.”

The gunfire was loud and sudden. Jo jumped. Screams furrowed the air. Footsteps pounded in the hall.

Jo reached into her pocket for her phone. It wasn’t there.

She’d left it in her purse in Vienna’s office. She ran to the credenza and grabbed the office phone. She got a circuits-busy sound.

Lewicki eased the door open an inch. Jo saw lawyers and assistants rushing into offices, crashing into walls and potted plants and each other. More shots, deeper and closer. The screaming was intense. Lewicki shut the door and grabbed a chair. Before he could jam it under the knob, the door burst open.

He swung a fist, hard. He hit Dana Jean in the nose. She bounced against the wall. Lewicki cocked his arm again, but Dana Jean covered her nose with one hand and slugged him back with the other. “Son of a bitch.”

Jo jumped between them. “She works here.”

Behind her came a portly attorney, glasses askew on his face. He barreled through the door. Lewicki slammed it and jammed the chair under the handle.

“They’re shooting at people.” The man was in his late fifties, an African American who looked like he was ten seconds from a heart attack. And five seconds from running back into the hall to grab his colleagues.

Lewicki pushed him away from the door. “How many?”

Another shot. Dana Jean squealed.

Lewicki pointed at Jo. “Shut her up.”

The attorney put his arm around Dana Jean. “Who the hell—”

“All of you, be quiet,” Lewicki said.

The attorney straightened his glasses. “I’m Howell Waymire. This is my firm.” He pointed at the door. “Those are my friends out there, and they’re being shot at like dogs.”

“How many shooters?” Lewicki said.

Dana Jean fought not to sob. “A man and a woman with crazy white hair.”

Lewicki blinked. “White?”

“As soap. They’re wearing Blue Eagle Security uniforms. Armored car drivers. They pulled guns out of their briefcase.” She stuck her fingers in her mouth. She was shaking like a loose wheel.

Down the hall a door was kicked open. “Where’s the president?”

Lewicki looked confounded by Dana Jean’s description of the attackers. He tried his phone again. Hung up. “Nothing. They’re jamming the cell phones.”

A woman screamed, “Who?”

The shot was deep and carried the sound of finality. Dana Jean jumped and cringed against Waymire’s lapels.

“Why do they think the president is here?” she said.

Waymire looked at Lewicki. “I know who you are.”

Another door was kicked open, closer. Jo’s throat constricted. The walls themselves seemed to constrict. Claustrophobia crawled over her skin.

“Where’s the president?” the man bellowed. “Take me to him or I’ll shoot you.”

His voice was deep and backwoodsy. It was not Ace Chennault.

Waymire stepped toward the door. “We have to get out of here.”

Dana Jean grabbed his sleeve. “No. They jammed the elevator doors open and put chains on the fire stairs. The woman’s guarding the lobby.”

Sweat beaded Waymire’s forehead. “We don’t have phones, we can’t call for help. We have to do something.”

In response, Lewicki picked up the phone on the credenza, though Jo had already tried it. He seemed to believe things only when he did them himself.

Dana Jean said, “They don’t know we’re in here. We’ll hide.”

Jo no longer heard fleeing footsteps or screams outside. Nobody from the firm was left in the hall. The conference room felt like a shrinking cardboard box. And the shooters were working their way toward it.

The chair jammed under the doorknob wouldn’t stop them. “They’ll shoot through the door,” she said.

Lewicki turned to the conference table. “Barricade. Come on.”

He picked up one end of the conference table, his neck and shoulders bulging with the strain. Jo and the others added their muscle and they dragged the table to the door. Waymire shoved it hard against the wood.

He winced. His face had gone gray and sweaty. He put a hand to his chest, swiped at the table for support, and sank to his knees. Jo’s throat turned papery. He actually had been ten seconds from a heart attack. And now he was having it.

 

 

I
VORY MARCHED DOWN the hall, blood ringing in her ears. She hadn’t shot these law firm fools in the head because she needed them to talk. But if they didn’t stop screaming, she was going to open up on them.

Where the hell was McFarland?

She reached the end of the hall and turned the corner, ran to the far side of the building, saw Keyes coming toward her. He booted open an office door and fired a volley inside. Glass shattered and a man begged for his life.

“Where is he?” Keyes bellowed.

Ivory turned in a circle. At the end of the hall was a closed door. CONFERENCEROOM.

“This way,” she said.

 

 

W
AYMIRE SLUMPED TO the floor. Dana Jean grabbed his arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Pain.” He gasped for breath. The beds of his fingernails were blue.

Jo knelt beside him. “Hold on.” She loosened his tie. “Anybody have an aspirin?” No one replied. She helped him to lie down beneath the conference table. She could do little else. He needed an ambulance.

The whole place did.

Lewicki ducked beneath the table. “Come on. Everybody under.”

Dana Jean scooted beneath it.

Jo caught Lewicki’s eye. “The table won’t stop rounds from automatic weapons, will it?”

He hesitated. “Maybe the first couple.”

In the hall, a man shouted, “Surrender the president or be executed for treason.”

Jo eyed the door. Certainty pealed through her. The attackers would blow off the lock, then keep shooting. And if they could kick open the door even two inches, they’d have an angle to fire into the room. It would be open season.

Dana Jean clutched her knees. “We’re trapped. There’s no way out.”

Jo turned to the windows. “Yes, there is.”

G
ABE DROVE THROUGH HEAVY TRAFFIC ON SANSOME, INCHING PAST smoked-glass skyscrapers and neoclassical bank buildings toward Sacramento Street. The stereo was blasting Elvis Costello, “Complicated Shadows.” For the first time in twenty-four hours, he felt that his head was above water. It was raging white water, to be sure, but he could breathe, and was swimming for shore.

He’d reach it. Jo was there.

At the corner, traffic clogged completely. Down Sacramento he saw trucks, a police car, buses. He cruised past the corner. Of course traffic was a mess—the White House chief of staff was at Waymire & Fong. He circled the block. Halfway around, he spotted an alley. He cut through and came out not far from the Waymire building.

When he stopped, he heard sirens.

 

 

J
O’S HEART JUMPED high and hard into her throat. She ran to the window and muscled it farther open. The noise of the city flowed in. Distantly she heard sirens.

Lewicki sounded incredulous. “Are you going to throw paper airplanes with
Help
written on them? Get down. Stand there and your head might as well be a watermelon on a pike.”

Outside the barricaded door, a woman cried, “Keyes, over here.”

The doorknob turned and the door jiggled. Dana Jean squealed. Crouching low, Jo hurried to the conference table. Beneath it, Waymire put a hand to his chest.

“Pain . . . crushing,” he said.

“Hang in.”

The attackers thumped against the door.

Lewicki gave Jo a pitiless bull terrier stare. “Get your ass under the table and brace it.”

“No. We’ll never hold them off. We have to escape.”

Lewicki opened his mouth to bark at her but Jo grabbed him by the necktie. “We can climb down to the floor below.”

“What if there are more of them outside?”

Jo got right in his face. “There are more. Ace Chennault is not here with them. He’s someplace else.”

“I—”

“And he’s going to try to kill the president.”

Lewicki flinched, but briefly, as if she’d poked him in the eye. He had bigger worries than the president. Namely, his own ass.

With thunder and splinters, the doorknob blew off. It clattered across the tabletop. The blast created a ragged hole in the door. Cordite stank in the air.

Jo held tight to Lewicki’s tie. “We have to get out. Waymire’s going to die otherwise. Nobody but you and I know that Chennault’s gunning for President McFarland. And the shooters are going to bust the door down in a matter of minutes.”

Lewicki looked angrier, and more disbelieving, than any man she’d ever seen.

Her skittering heart beat in her ears. “We have to escape—to save ourselves, and the president. I have to climb down to the floor below.”

They heard a hand working to pull apart the broken doorknob assembly. Then grunts and a shoulder slamming into the door.

The shooter yelled, “We know you’re in there, McFarland. Surrender or everybody dies.”

They heard metal ratchet against metal, then a slap. Somebody had inserted a full magazine of ammunition into a big weapon. Jo’s nerves tried to jump out of her pores. The urge to flee felt so powerful, she could barely hold herself to the floor.

She clutched Lewicki’s shoulder. “Help me.”

Lewicki looked like a dog with a bone in his teeth. He was fighting to hold on to the notion that he was in control, that things would be determined by his command.

Then he said, “I’ll hold them off.”

Jo squeezed his shoulder. Staying low, she ran to the window, leaned out, and looked down. The view was nauseating: a five-story vertical drop to concrete.

Behind her, she heard a sawing sound. The barrel of an automatic weapon was being wedged into the door frame as leverage.

The window ledge was eight inches wide. The building’s Art Deco design offered her corners and cracks and juts, but the fourth-floor window was ten feet down, recessed in solid stone casements. And the wall directly below her was a flat, virtually featureless surface.

She took a breath. Free climb it?
Holy shit.

She had to find a rope. Then she could get down to the fourth floor. After that Lewicki could lower Dana Jean and Waymire, one at a time, and she could pull them in. Hook their belts to the rope, or use nylons as a swami belt, something.

She scurried to the credenza. Inside—thank you, god of chaos—was the cable for the audio-visual system. It was heavy black television cable, wound around a wooden spool.

She yanked the spool out. She needed maybe ninety feet of cable. If she couldn’t get inside the fourth-floor window she’d have to keep going down the side of the building, so she wanted plenty of extra rope. Cable. Life.

The long barrel of an automatic weapon squirmed through the slit in the door, working up and down like an obscene appendage.

The credenza was a single piece of ornately carved wood, undoubtedly from some endangered old-growth forest. Its feet were three inches thick. The whole thing probably weighed two hundred pounds. Jo tied off the cable on the credenza’s feet and threw the spool out the window. It unfurled and disappeared over the ledge, the cable hitting the side of the building with a sound like a dull whip.

She waved to Lewicki. “Come here.”

He crawled over. She whipped the cable around his back. Then she had him spread his hands and grab the cable at two points.

“Put your feet against the wall under the window. Lean back and anchor the cable.”

If the feet of the credenza ripped off under the strain of carrying her weight and the cable came free, he would have to stop her from plummeting.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

She tested the flexibility of the cable. She hoped she was right about it.

“Body rappel.”

She said it without any spit in her mouth. She’d never body rappelled on a real pitch. She’d done it at the climbing gym, a few meters off the mats. Almost nobody did it anymore, because they now used what she would have given her front teeth for, a harness, a belay device, and a ’biner. And nobody, even in the days of classic Alpinism, had rappelled with CATV cable.

“It’ll go. I think.” She breathed. “I can climb it. If I get over the ledge and rappel about six feet, I can chimney down the window casement below.”

Lewicki inched over to the window. “You’ll fall.”

“No, I won’t.”

Her guardian angel shot her a salute and said,
Good luck with that, honey. You’re on your own.

Behind her at the door came kicking, grunting, boots hitting the wood. “Give him to us, fuckers, or you’re the first to face the patriots’ firing squad.”

Jo eyed Lewicki. “You ever body rappel in the army?”

“It’s been twenty years, but yeah.”

“Good.” She squeezed his arm. “Please don’t let go.”

“I won’t.” He looked dead serious.

The gunshot echoed through the room. It pounded the conference table and wood flew everywhere. Lewicki flinched.

“Hurry,” he said.

Jo took off her shoes and scrambled onto the windowsill. The wind caught her. The blue sky and shining canyon walls of the city should have exhilarated her. This should have been a safe climber’s naughty dream: the chance to scale an urban monolith. But she’d never felt so vulnerable. Inside the conference room, Lewicki braced his legs against the wall beneath the window and leaned back, ready to take her weight.

Jo called to Dana Jean. “Watch what I do. You’re next.”

“Okay.” Dana Jean’s face crumpled. “No.”