Quake (10 page)

Nick Dykstra pedaled the Stradalli Fixxx slowly up the destroyed blacktop of Seventh Avenue. Having long ago befriended the bike messenger who usually delivered his last-minute motions and briefs to defense counsel around the city, he knew he was riding an $800 bike. But what truly disrupted his thoughts was trying to figure out the last time he'd ridden a bicycle on an actual street.

Sure, he'd ridden—if
ridden
was even the right word—stationary bikes at his twenty-four-hour local gym, but that didn't count. And although Nick didn't believe in having a car in the city, he'd never once ridden a bicycle to or from work; it was simply too far. He took subways and, when the circumstances absolutely called for it, taxis.

He hadn't ridden a bicycle as a law student either, not that he recalled. But wait, hadn't he ever ridden with Sara, either before or after they were married? She'd talked about riding bikes once in a while, said it was one of her favorite things about growing up in South Jersey: riding bikes along the boardwalk during the off-season, from Labor Day through Memorial Day. But Nick couldn't recall them ever riding together, and that bothered him, because he knew it was something she'd asked him to do.

So many things with Sara had been left undone. They'd talked often about traveling to Tokyo, about taking a cruise to Alaska, about spending a Christmas in Paris. They'd spoken endlessly about writing a novel together; a novel having nothing at all to do with the law, but something more along the lines of
The Lord of the Rings
, a complete fantasy set in another world. They'd discussed how things would change in their relationship (at least the things that would change for the better) once their daughter, Lauren, went off to college. (And this was when Lauren was only a toddler.) They'd have more alone time together, be able to resume their movie nights, go out to dinner, drink cocktails, and make love until the sun came up.

Surprisingly, Nick hadn't given much thought to what Sara would say about Lauren's choice of colleges. Of course, they had no idea Lauren would be as brilliant a student as she was. Sure, they'd said she would grow up to be a genius—maybe cure cancer, invent the flying car, become the first female president of the United States—but they couldn't have known their daughter would actually have her pick of Ivy League schools like Yale and Harvard and Stanford and Princeton.

Sara and I had always used the words “go away” to college,
he thought, and wondered why this had never crossed his mind earlier. Maybe because he didn't want it to. Maybe because then he'd have to admit that if Lauren's mother were still alive, he'd be all for his daughter going off to Stanford, if that was where she wanted to go.

Nick steered around a body lying in the street and took a deep breath. He pictured Lauren on her tricycle during an upstate vacation. Pictured her with training wheels and later without. Always when they were away. For all he told Lauren about how safe she was in New York City, he'd never wanted her to go jogging or rollerblading or bike riding alone around Central Park. Always in the forefront of his mind was that Central Park Jogger case.

Christ,
he thought,
I've been holding her back. I've been clinging to her. She wants to go to Stanford and I'm pushing her to stay here in the city.

Of course, he was. Lauren was all he had. He'd told himself all these years since Sara's death that that was how things had to be. That his wife was taken from him on September 11, 2001, so he'd dedicate himself wholly to his daughter and to his work, both of which were important after all. But did he
really
have to be alone? Or was he just scared?

Nick pedaled past the spot where there had been a small police substation, then pressed his brakes and brought the bike to a halt. In front of him stood Times Square.

Or what used to be Times Square
.

“Jasper, where are you going?”

Jasper Howard had just reached his car in the staff parking lot when he heard the voice: male, booming, pissed-off. He'd heard the man bellow at his employees from time to time over the years, but never had much occasion to work with him. He knew he was the reactor operations manager.

Shit. What does the scientist in charge of the techs who run the reactors want with me?

Jasper clenched his jaw and turned to face Stephen Jeffries.
Someone must have ratted my ass out. Sam? Nah, but maybe Jeffries overheard him talking on the radio?
Even in the face of the compromised containment structures, Jasper felt a wave of embarrassment at being caught running away. He thought fast.

“Hi, Stephen. Glad to see you're okay. I was just heading out to see if I can make it to a hardware store. Machine shop's leveled after the last aftershock. I might also try to pick up some emergency medical supplies while I'm at it. I know there are some guys hurt here, and there could be more.”

Jeffries shot him a no-nonsense stare and spoke in a rapid-fire delivery. “You got some big brass ones, volunteering to drive around right now. I doubt you'll be able to get medical supplies, though. Radio reports I've heard have it that the city's been damn near leveled and all of the hospitals are short on everything. Even if we were up and running, most people can't even use our power because the utility lines are all down.”

Jasper started to acknowledge Jeffries's information but the reactor manager continued, waving him down. “But listen, this is urgent. I'm real glad I caught you before you left. We need a ladder—taller the better. The built-ins we need are all twisted to hell. My guys can't get down to the SFPs. Can you help me?”

Jasper visualized the spent fuel pools and the system of catwalks and iron rungs fixed to various walls and structures that provided access. Then he pictured one of his maintenance sheds, roof askew but still standing and probably accessible; more important, with an extension ladder inside.

Jasper eyed his car. Seemed like Jeffries had bought his lie, or maybe he just didn't give a crap one way or the other. But that only made him feel guilty for some reason. He could tell him where the ladder was and be on his way. But then a new direction of thinking took hold. Maybe he should just stick around. This could be his chance to shine. He recalled the time about ten years ago when he was still just a maintenance worker and the maintenance supervisor had fallen suddenly ill. Jasper had stayed on extra shifts, volunteering to pick up the slack wherever possible, and it had worked. A few months later when the supervisor retired early for health reasons, Jasper had been promoted as his replacement.

If he helped Jeffries out now during his time of need, when others—no doubt at least a few of Jeffries's own—were fleeing in fear, Jasper Howard could save the day, even be a bit of a hero of sorts. Maybe get promoted. Besides, both Jeffries and Sam had a point. It wasn't exactly safe to be driving around out there right now, and if he could only get a few miles away that wouldn't help if this place melted down. He noticed the wind was strong and blowing toward the city, ready to carry a radiation plume to millions of New Yorkers. . . .

“Jasper? You okay? We need that ladder,
stat
.”

Jasper thought about asking him how close they were to melting down but decided he'd rather not know. What the hell. Live a little. Ride out a nuclear meltdown, maybe end up some kind of a hero, get your fifteen minutes of fame.

Got anything better to do with yourself?

The truth was that he did not. He had a wife but as good fortune would have it she was in Kansas visiting relatives. He'd been invited but made the excuse that they needed him at the plant and he couldn't take off (
how's that for karma?).
He had a daughter in Omaha, also suitably far away. He did have a son in the city but he was his own family man now and wouldn't be waiting around for dear old dad to help him out, if that was even possible. In fact, Jasper reasoned with himself, the best way to help him just might be for him to help Jeffries and do his part to contain that spent fuel.

“I think I can get to one. You want to come with me or should I bring it to you?”

“Is it on the way to Reactor Two?”

“No, east perimeter.”

“I've got to get back in there. Just bring the ladder to the Reactor Two entrance.”

 

 

Twenty-five minutes later, Jasper reached the door to Reactor 2, carrying the extension ladder with one of his employees who had earlier worked on the perimeter fence. As soon as they approached the door, however, the worker dropped his end of the ladder and took off at a jog in the opposite direction. He was still there, helping, but he obviously had his limits. Jasper eyed the security camera over the door and just as he was wondering if it still functioned, Jeffries appeared in the doorway with one of the reactor security detail. Jasper noticed that this man had a service pistol at the ready—not drawn, but one hand over it in the holster, catch undone. That kind of state of readiness wasn't usual for the plant.

“Thanks, Jasper. This way, please.” Jasper noticed that Jeffries now wore what he knew to be a dosimeter on a lanyard around his neck—a credit card-sized electronic device with a color LCD screen that measured radioactivity levels.

Jeffries motioned for the security detail to assist with the ladder and he did so, apparently satisfied that no security threat presented itself. The two men carried the ladder into a hallway, Jeffries walking a few steps ahead of them, talking into his radio as he went. Just as Jasper read a sign on the wall (
ALL INJURIES ARE PREVENTABLE!
) he heard a new distress signal start up, blasting from speakers placed every few feet along the ceiling. He wasn't sure as to its meaning, but whatever it represented, somebody sure as heck wanted people to hear it on this floor, Jasper thought, hefting the ladder to negotiate a corner turn.

They came to a concrete stairwell, the tubular metal railing hanging askew from the wall. Jeffries trotted down the steps while waving his hand for Jasper and the security detail to hurry up with the ladder. They reached a landing. The stairs continued down but a metal door set into one of the landing walls opened. A technician Jasper didn't recognize, wearing a white lab coat, nodded at Jeffries and jerked his head, indicating they should follow him through the door.

Jasper noted that the tech was not wearing protective gear and it made him feel better about his own lack of radiation protection.

We must not be close enough to the waste to need protection. Better not be. I'm not going near that stuff.

They wrangled the ladder through the door. Jeffries slammed it behind them and the shrieking alarm faded. The tech pulled a blue rubber suit from a hook on the wall and started pulling it on. As he did, he looked both the security detail and Jasper in the eye, in turn, and then eyeballed the other suits hanging on adjacent hooks.

“Each of you, put one on, please.”

Francisco Mendoza limped west along Thirty-fourth Street toward St. Luke's-Roosevelt Medical Center. After Nick had taken off on the bicycle, Mendoza realized how good it had been to have company in this situation. Now he stumbled alone through the obstacle course the city had become with his Glock held in one hand. He couldn't run on his bad ankle and had no one to watch his back. He wanted his weapon at the ready until he reached the hospital.

Jana
.

He prayed she was all right. He tried his BlackBerry again, just in case, but no luck. He plodded on, avoiding any signs of people in order to stay on track. It surprised him how easy it was to lose his bearings (even in an area of the city he knew well) with most of the structures in shambles. Once he passed a parking garage with odd noises emanating from within, arguing, perhaps, but mostly there was only a little-changing expanse of ruin, almost to the point of monotony. The bleak uniformity of his once vibrant surroundings lulled him into a near daydream state. He thought about many things as he dragged himself toward the hospital. At first he considered whether his wife's place of work would still be standing, or if it would prove to be like so many of the other buildings he passed—seemingly destroyed by an invisible wrecking ball. But this line of speculation proved too worrisome and so he soon pondered other parts of his life. His old FBI days, some of the cases he had, how trivial some of it now seemed by comparison.

Nick
. He was a good guy and would have made a good friend. Mendoza reflected on whether he'd made a mistake telling him about the Boneta case.
No. He had to know,
Mendoza thought as he sidestepped over a fallen billboard, trampling across the face of some young Calvin Klein model. He regretted his mistake, but what's done is done and the only thing he could do now was to try to make amends. Thinking about the old case took his mind off his ankle and he found himself subconsciously inching his way faster toward the hospital as the details of the Boneta case welled up in his brain once again.

That bastard Boneta, he'd terrorized most of New York City, but he'd concentrated his efforts on Mendoza's old neighborhood in the South Bronx. Growing up, Mendoza had hated watching his family and friends in constant fear for their lives. His mama cooking, worrying that a stray bullet would come through their window and strike Francisco or his kid sister. As he grew older, Mendoza realized that, as run-down as it was, it wasn't the physical neighborhood that was inherently dangerous, it was the warring gangs that made it that way. It was domestic terrorism, pure and simple. And Mendoza had decided long before he finished high school that he'd wanted to be in law enforcement, wanted to dedicate his life to cleaning up hoods like the one he'd grown up in.

Boneta reminded Mendoza so much of the bastards he and his friends and family had grown up fearing that Mendoza had wanted off the FBI-NYPD Joint Terror Task Force so he could take the lead against Boneta and his minions. But his boss, Craig Carson, wasn't having any of it. So Mendoza continued his counterterrorism work and watched the Boneta case unfold from afar.

When Boneta was finally arrested, Mendoza was ecstatic. Finally, the bastard was going to get what he deserved. The night Boneta was being interrogated, Mendoza hung around. He watched Beltran and Lefkowitz switch off, listened to them discussing tactics. When Beltran finally broke away from his partner, Mendoza had grabbed him and pulled him over to the water cooler.

“What's going down?” Mendoza had asked his old friend.

Beltran shrugged. “He's clamming up. Gonna ask for a lawyer any second now. He's been playing us these past few hours.”

“But you got enough on him for a conviction, right?”

Beltran shrugged again. “Maybe yes, maybe no. The AUSA wants murder and racketeering, and I don't know that we have that. If we don't get a confession out of this son of a bitch, the prosecutor may drop the case.”

“Who's the assistant U.S. attorney on the case?”

“Dykstra. Nick Dykstra. Downstairs they call him ‘Conviction Nick' because he doesn't take anything to trial he might not win.”

“So, this Dykstra, he'll let him walk?”

“He's pissed that we pulled Boneta in early. But we had no choice. Our CI told us Boneta was about to blow the country, head down to Caracas or some fucking place.”

“And you told this to Dykstra? What the hell did he say?”

“Dykstra said if our confidential informant is right and Boneta takes off for Venezuela, then he's not our problem anymore.”

“Christ.” Mendoza shook his head. “But Boneta, he hasn't lawyered up yet, right?”

“Nah,” Beltran said. “But it's just a matter of time, Frank. We even found a lawyer's business card in his wallet.”

“Who's the lawyer?”

“Some fucking Muppet.”

“Muppet?” Mendoza thought about it. “You mean, Kermit Jansing?”

“That's the one. You know him.”

“Hell, yeah, I know him. He reps a lot of the Islamist radicals we take in.”

“He any good?”

Mendoza frowned. “He's the best.” He watched as the door to the interrogation room opened again. Lefkowitz walked out shaking his head.

“There it is,” Beltran said. “Must have asked for counsel.”

Mendoza said, “I didn't just hear you say that. Go take Lefkowitz out for a cup of coffee, all right?”

“Why, what are you going to do?”

“I'm gonna have a little talk with Boneta before his Muppet lawyer shows up.”

The rest is history,
Mendoza now thought. But telling Nick Dykstra didn't quite lift the weight off his chest as he'd expected.
That's okay. I've got bigger fish to fry tonight.

MEDICAL CENTER
. The two words jogged his consciousness back into action. He almost didn't even recognize the building and was glad he'd snapped out of it before he trudged into God knows what in his retrospective stupor. The rest of the sign atop the fractured—yet somehow still standing—building was gone. As he looked to the ground beneath the sign, he spotted a litter of alphabet letters strewn about like some giant baby had dumped them on the floor, letters which only hours earlier had spelt “St. Luke's-Roosevelt.”

Jana.

He'd made it. And there was hope. The structure was still upright—a fact that he did not take for granted. But as Mendoza approached the hospital, his initial rush of elation was quickly replaced by a deep sense of dread. There were no people going in or out, and in the turnabout that fronted the main walk-in entrance, an ambulance lay overturned, lights still flashing, smashed into two other cars. A section of the overhanging roof lay crumpled atop the vehicular wreckage. Tipping his head skyward, he could see that many of the windows in the upper levels were dark.

But none of this mattered. Jana was inside this place. He winced as he forced his bum ankle to propel him much faster than it should. He had almost reached the double glass entrance doors when they blew open in front of him, a massive African American woman shouting as she crashed through onto the street, eyes wide as if she had seen terrible things.

“They can't help nobody in there. Can't help no-bodeeeeeeeeee . . .” She screamed off into the night, a trail of bloody slime defacing the ground in her wake.

Mendoza slipped through the first of two sets of double doors just before they swung shut to avoid having to touch the handles. He bypassed a trickle of what he hoped was only water falling from the ceiling and then had to pull open the second set of doors. He stepped into a lobby that looked more like a scene from a military field hospital than a major urban healthcare center.

Dozens of people lay about the room in various states of infirmity. A few had set up small camplike enclaves and talked softly among themselves, playing cards or reading, but most were periodically yelling for help or arguing with other patients that they were here first. Some of these people, Mendoza thought, looking around, appeared not to even be seeking medical aid but merely the shelter of a building still standing. But there were also those who were gravely injured, including one elderly man bundled in soiled sheets in a wheelchair pushed into a corner. Mendoza went to him and put two fingers over his carotid. He was dead.

Mendoza looked up, expecting to find a hospital worker on whom to target his outrage, but there were none in sight. He walked deeper into the hellish reality, approaching the intake window where he caught a glimpse of a harried woman in an admin uniform trying to appease far too many patients at once.

“. . . been waiting seven hours!”

“We were here first!”

“Doctor Sykestra said I need my painkillers right now!”

But even worse to Mendoza than the general pandemonium was the smell of the place. There was still some of the antiseptic tang common to most hospitals, but it was nearly overridden by the unbridled stench of too many ill, unwashed people in a confined space at once. It made him nauseous to think of his wife being inside this horridly unsafe place, exposed to all of the germs that must be running rampant though here. A major metropolitan hospital wasn't the greatest place to be, even in the best of times; this was just insanity.

A minor scuffle broke out when a white-coated doctor, respirator mask over his face, latex gloves on, breezed through a swinging door out into the lobby. He glanced at a clipboard and called out a name, but he was forced to backpedal in the face of the approaching throng.

“People,
please
,” he called. “We can't help you if you don't remain calm. We're doing the best we can. Please . . .”

Mendoza saw an opening through the door the MD had just come out of and took it, slipping behind his back into the intake office where the admin worked. The young woman shook her head at him immediately upon his entry. “Sir!” she began, already pointing out into the lobby. He continued to approach. Her eyes grew wide in fear, centered on his midsection, and he realized that his Glock was still in his hand. He quickly tucked it in his waistband and apologized.

Jesus
. He was lucky he hadn't gotten himself killed already. If there had been a cop in here . . .

Suddenly the woman scrambled for something just out of sight, under a counter. Mendoza stepped forward quickly and saw her slapping at a small hidden area, but he knew what she was doing. It saddened him to think that he had frightened her enough to hit a panic button—an alarm signal that would summon security or police. But from the way she repetitively batted the thing, her face growing more and more panicked, he guessed that it wasn't working.

He held up both hands, palms out. “It's okay, it's okay! I'm law enforcement.” The nurse appeared to relax just a little but was still plenty scared.

“My name is Frank Mendoza. I'm looking for my wife, Jana.”

The woman let her hand slide from the button, throwing her head back in exasperation as she exhaled heavily and jerked a thumb upward. “Jana's on floor four.” She held up four fingers, accustomed to over-instructing people in the chaotic environment, before adding, “She'll be real glad to see you. Elevator's out, take the stairs—out this way to the left, down that hall, first right.”

“Thanks, and sorry.” Mendoza pulled his shirt over the Glock and took off at a wobbly trot.