Quake (23 page)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Dykstra was certain he was in the right place, and yet he couldn't see Columbia University anywhere around him. Could the subway signs have been deliberately tampered with? He supposed it wouldn't be impossible. He wouldn't put it past somebody like that psycho down there, Charles Leighton.
The guy I had to shoot.
But unbelievably, there was a street sign still standing. He directed the beam of his flashlight onto it: 116TH STREET.

This was it!

And then it hit him, like a sucker punch to the gut.

This was it!

Columbia University.

No . . . no . . . no!

All the way around him for 360 degrees the land was absolutely flattened. He couldn't make out a single building still standing. It was some of the worst damage he'd seen so far. He thought about the aftershock that had hit with sudden, uncompromising ferocity not long ago. Whatever buildings may have withstood the day's seismic events up to that point, they'd have been demolished for certain. Nick was only too glad to have barely emerged from the subway when it hit.

Lauren!

And then suddenly thinking her name was not enough. He tipped his head back and roared her name into the night.

“Lauren!”

But his voice merely rolled unanswered across the wasteland of destruction.

He sat on the ground, exhausted physically from his long journey across the ruined metropolis, and mentally from worrying about his daughter. Seeing the general place where she had been so thoroughly devastated . . . It was almost more than he could bear, but he knew that sitting around wasn't going to help anyone so he forced himself to his blistered feet. His pricy loafers may be perfect for the courtroom, but they sure as hell weren't made for the serious hiking he'd had to do today. Damned things were already falling apart, he noted, feeling how the sole of the right shoe had begun to separate.

Nick told himself that maybe the actual damage to the university wasn't as bad as it looked from this distance, once he actually got onto the campus. Surely there'd be some buildings still standing? Taking some care to orient himself amidst the sameness of the flattened area, he set off toward what he thought was the main campus.

The surroundings were dismal. Not only were all of the buildings he passed by leveled, but even the quaint little paved walkways that wound their way throughout the once parklike setting had been buckled and torn apart. This was the school where he'd wanted his daughter to study, so that she'd be close to him. And now look at it. He didn't see how it would be operational for a long, long time. Lauren, assuming she was okay (
How the hell could anyone have survived the likes of this?)
would have an easy out now for wanting to attend some faraway, out-of-state school.

But he'd already made his peace with that. No more dictating, cajoling, influencing, hinting, pushing, or demanding. She was going wherever the hell she wanted to go and he would learn to deal with it.

As long as she had made it through this, he reminded himself.
Just let her be alive.
Please
, just let her be alive....

He continued on, twisting his way through snarls of uprooted trees intermingled with raw building materials. After a while he came to a large sign reading
CAMPUS DIRECTORY
which had been knocked to the ground. He walked over to it and turned his head at an awkward angle to match the random orientation of the sign on the ground. Found the
YOU ARE HERE
marker.

He raised his head to try to reconcile the chaos of what he saw with the stylized perfection of the map. He put his flashlight to good use, probing the inky blackness as far as it would penetrate. It took him a while, but based on the relative locations of the destroyed paths and the sign's former position, he was confident he'd properly oriented himself.

But now a new question pervaded his mind: where to look? He considered this. So far Nick had seen absolutely no signs of people, which terrified him. Unless . . . maybe they had evacuated the campus when the first quake struck? That was a prospect that filled him with hope, but also with dread, for if Lauren wasn't here, then he'd have to track her down somewhere else and hope that she was okay wherever she was.

If she was here somewhere, though, he reminded himself . . . He shook his head to wipe it of the horrendous possibilities it wanted to conjure up. He forced himself to focus on the facts. She was here for a campus tour. He looked down at the map again, but this time noting the names of the different buildings. The usual academic halls, labs, institutes and centers . . . there! Admissions. He wasn't sure but figured that the admissions department would run the campus tours for prospective students, so he might as well start there.

He made sure that he understood the route he would need to take as well as possible, and then took off along what remained of a path that led in that direction. As he wound his way deeper into the beleaguered campus, he did begin to see some signs of surviving life: a small huddle of students crying together on an open lawn, a few lone stragglers wandering about in a daze, like zombies. He stuck to his plan of reaching admissions, not wanting to burn time to talk to people on the off chance that one might happen to be able to help him.

He found the admissions building easy enough because it was partially still standing with its sign still in place. If he was
very
lucky, Nick thought, Lauren would be in here. Maybe she breezed through the library and knew the place was for her and wanted to tell admissions right away?
If wishes had horses, and all that.
But then he thought about Lauren and her love of books and libraries, how she'd once spent seven hours in the New York City Public Library (
probably rubble now
) and had burst into tears when he came to take her home. Making that scenario seem more unlikely than ever.

He was preparing to climb the crumbled stone steps to the former building's entrance area when he heard a faint noise somewhere off to his left. High-pitched, sort of bubbly sounding.

Crying!

Someone was beneath a clump of uprooted shrubbery over on the left side of the building. Nick ran to the source of the noise. There, lying on the ground underneath the displaced foliage, lay a woman. Not college-aged, unless she was one of those nontraditional students Nick had heard about. But given her location, most likely an administrator. He parted some branches and stooped down low to make sure she could see him.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” Nick called out.

The snuffling stopped.

“Yes, yes! My goodness.”

“Let me help you up.” Nick reached out a hand. The woman looked at his face, as if judging his intentions, and then allowed him to grip her own arm and pull her from the bushes.

She had numerous small scratches about her face and neck. “What happened to you, are you okay?”

She wiped her eyes before answering. “Yes, I think so. Oh, my, I'm afraid I just fell asleep right here on the ground, how ridiculous. Thank you. I was . . . I was inside my building, what's left of it,” she said, “when the shaking started. The windows shattered out and . . .” She carefully ran her fingers across her face. “How bad is it?”

Nick cupped his flashlight in his hand and shone it over her face. “Not too bad, really. Mostly surface scratches. Here, I see a couple of fragments that I can easily remove if you let me.”

The woman held her face still while Nick extracted three small pieces of glass. He examined her neck and shoulders and removed one more piece. “I think you made out pretty well, all things considered,” Nick said. “Tell me, what's your name?”

“Caroline Reignier, very pleased to meet you. I'm the director of admissions here at Columbia. Thank you so much for your assistance. You are a ray of sunshine.”

“Don't mention it. Listen, it's a bit of a ray of sunshine for me that you're the admissions director, because I'm looking for my daughter, who unfortunately was here today for a campus tour. Just graduated high school.”

“When the earthquake started, the tour would have been in the main library—Butler Library, it's called.” She pointed off to their right. “About a five minute walk in that direction, under normal circumstances.”

“Thank you very much, Caroline. My daughter's name is Lauren Dykstra. I'm her father, Nick Dykstra.” He started to add more but could see from the look on Caroline's face that something about what he said had bothered or confused her.

“Wait, did you say Lauren Dykstra?” Nick's heart seemed to petrify. He thought that maybe she'd heard Lauren was one of the deceased and was about to break the news. But in fact what she told him chilled him even worse than that.

“Yes, Lauren Dykstra,” he repeated. He stared at her intently. Although she'd been through some mild trauma and one heck of an experience overall, he judged her to have her faculties about her and to be a cognizant, reasoning human. She wasn't cracking up, spouting random nonsense.

“Well that's funny, because . . . unless I'm really losing my mind here, which is possible . . . but no, I'm quite certain of this. Another man already came by asking for Lauren Dykstra.”

“What? When?”

“I don't know exactly. I don't wear a watch, but I haven't been asleep for that long. He wasn't anywhere near as helpful as you, by the way. He said he was her father, the Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Dykstra. I recalled from her admissions application that's what his occupation was, so I believed him. But I'm positive he asked about her. And of course I remember Lauren, a terrifically bright young woman, asked some very intelligent questions before the tour started. Anyway—”

“Who was the man?” Nick demanded. It came out a little more pointed than he'd intended, but he couldn't help that.

“Well, I thought it was little strange because he was of Middle-Eastern descent, and Lauren, she's a Caucasian girl, but you know how it is these days—that doesn't really mean much, she could . . .”

But Nick was already off and running toward the library.

Butler . . . Butler . . .

Nick slowed his mad dash to a jog while he looked around for the library. Everywhere he glanced, he saw only mounds of rubble. He slowed to the point where he was only jogging in place, spinning in a circle while trying to determine in which direction he should go.

Alivi escaped the courthouse, made his way here and is going for Lauren! Do something! But don't do the wrong thing. No time to go running off in the wrong direction . . .

He eyed one heap of rubble that was much higher than the others and headed for that. As he approached, he passed the dead body of a young man who'd somehow been crushed beneath a large boulder fitted with a dedication plaque.
Gotta love that gift from the Class of '86, right, buddy
, Nick thought, as his light beam swept over the plaque.

He'd been exposed to so much death today that he guessed he was becoming desensitized to it. Here he was, cracking mental jokes over dead college students when less than twenty-four hours ago he'd never come across a corpse in his entire life. As a prosecutor he'd seen more than his fair share of crime scene photos, sure, but that was nowhere near the same thing. Not even in the same ballpark, he now understood.

But there was one body that should he come across it, he sure as hell wouldn't be trying out any experimental coping mechanisms, and that was Lauren's. He fingered the gun in his pocket and considered what he would do if he were to stumble across his daughter's dead, trauma-ridden body lying somewhere among this ruinous landscape, even without Alivi's intervention. He couldn't—didn't want to—guarantee that using one of his remaining bullets on himself might not be his preferred action. And if he were to find her in the hands of the jihadist . . . Well, then of course he would need his bullets in a different way.

But with Alivi on the scene, Nick knew that the chances of simply walking around, finding Lauren, and taking her home (if he still had one to go to) without incident were now approximately zero.

He kept going, hiking over a spread of bricks on the way to the massive rubble complex. He was petrified of what he might find there. Yet another possibility crept into his badgered consciousness: What if Alivi was lying in wait for
him
rather than Lauren? He might have chosen to come here because he knew it was only a matter of time before Nick showed up, rather than any real hope of finding Lauren. It was a possibility.

Keep telling yourself that, pal. He wants you, not Lauren. Yeah, put your head back in the sand.

No, Alivi was coming for Lauren—he could take that to the bank. That didn't mean he might not be hiding in a sniper's nest among all this rubble, though, waiting to shoot Nick in the kneecap so that he could take Lauren that much easier. As he ran, he allowed his thoughts to run with him, unbridled, dark, and out of control. Alivi would kill her—just take her life, if he was lucky. If he wasn't, he'd torture her or maybe even sell her into some Middle-Eastern sex slave ring. Whatever would bring the most pain and anguish to Nick, that's what Alivi would try to do. If he could, Alivi would do terrible things to Lauren and then kill Nick also.

No, if Lauren had survived the quakes, he had to find Alivi before Alivi found her. But was he already too late? It ate him alive that he had no way of knowing. His only option was to keep moving, cover more ground.

When he neared the wrecked edifice, he could tell that this building, while no doubt permanently destroyed, did still retain a limited amount of structural integrity. From where he stood, it appeared that the upper levels had collapsed completely, but the first, perhaps even second, he judged, looked like they might still be entered on foot. He could tell that before today it must have been an impressive piece of architectural work, too, with classical columns and balustrades and all that, but right now he didn't give a rat's ass what it used to be. What it was now was all that mattered: the possible location of his only child in the wake of the worst disaster in the history of New York.

He eased closer to what was left of the entrance, until at his feet lay a slab of marble with the name
Dante
chiseled into it.
Talk about circles of Hell
.
Alivi, you're on the bottom floor.
Glancing upward, Nick spotted more names on one of the toppled columns: Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire. . . . This had to be the library. He was hyperalert for Alivi, scanning his uneven, 3-D surroundings intently, only using the light when absolutely necessary to avoid giving away his position, before committing to any significant forward motion.

And like a bolt of lightning burning his head, yet another daunting thought careened around inside of his skull.
What if Alivi isn't even alone? What if he has people with him? He'd already managed to find Lauren within hours of escaping, after all.
Nick knew that the terror leader's reach was nearly as long as the arm of the law.

He lifted a foot onto a large section of rubble and tested it for stability. Satisfied it would hold his weight, Nick climbed on top of it and had a look into the former university library. He was greeted with what looked to him like a never-ending field of ruin, a lethal hodgepodge of fallen load-bearing elements and randomly strewn chunks of wall, ceiling, and floor.

Jumping down from his perch, Nick trudged deeper into the mess, moving however he could—climbing, walking around, slithering under, whatever it took. He never knew for certain if the route he chose would lead him astray until he tried it.

But he did know one thing: He was now entering what was left of the building that Lauren Dykstra was last known to have visited.