Vertical Burn (28 page)

58. TEN MINUTES TICKING

1630 HOURS

Finney could hear voices behind him across the water, maybe two hundred feet off, several men shouting at once. He’d taken his oldest single kayak, knowing he would be forced to abandon it somewhere along the shoreline, had stepped out through the missing wall in his spare bedroom and paddled quietly into the fog on the lake, leaving behind confusion and outrage.

He knew G. A. would call the police boat stationed on Lake Union and that, if not for the fog, they would be on him in minutes. Still, G. A. couldn’t know for certain he’d taken a water craft. There were three kayaks left in the spare bedroom, the new single, the double, and a half-completed kit on sawhorses. Who would guess he owned four kayaks? When a lull came in the shouting at the dock, he guessed they were conducting a search, possibly extending to the neighbors. Mrs. Prosize next door wouldn’t be happy. The last people to raid her domicile had been Nazis in World War II Poland.

1805 HOURS

Accompanied by a tall, elegant-looking woman with narrow hips and long, pipe-stem legs, Robert Kub, dressed in slacks and an open-collar shirt under a sport jacket, was exiting his house when Finney’s cab scraped its tires on the curb. Finney thrust a handful of bills at the cabbie and climbed the front steps of Kub’s house.

Kub began to retreat back inside, but Finney ran up the steps, jammed his foot in the door, and shouldered it open. Walking across the room as Kub backed across it, he pushed Kub’s chest repeatedly with both hands, forcing Kub up against the living room wall. The drapes were open, the television on. Kub always left his television on when he left the house as a deterrent to burglars. Finney reached over and killed the big-screen.

“What’s going on?” Kub said. “You get my call? They’re looking for you right now. What?”

“After everything you’ve done, you’re still trying to be my friend?”

“I haven’t done anything. Tell me one thing I’ve done.”

“Leary Way.”

“Where do you come off saying that? We almost got fried trying to get out of there.”

“Yeah? Tell me about the pipes.” When Kub gave him a blank look, Finney said, “You don’t know any more about the pipes than Charlie did.”

“You been talking to Charlie?”

“Enough to find out you’re both liars.”

“Okay. I’ll bite. What pipes?”

“You guys never went down that corridor.” Kub had no answer for that. “Where did you search?”

“Not in that corridor.”

“I don’t get it. Why lie about it?”

Clenching his jaws, Kub said, “I never lied.” Kub glanced at the long-legged woman, but oddly, she didn’t seem interested in the proceedings. She sat down in a leather armchair to wait. “I never took no award. I didn’t want it.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“God, I’m sorry.” Kub dropped down into a squat, his back propped against the wall, his long fingers cradling his face. “You know how long it had been since I had a mask on?”

“Save the excuses for your mother. Just cut to the chase.”

“Shit. I hadn’t been in a fire in eight years. I almost couldn’t even get the mask to work. We were just a couple of guys who hadn’t fought fire in a while trying to do our best. We honestly thought we were going to find you both.”

“Go on.”

“We searched two rooms right near the entrance, but the smoke was so disorienting. Then before we knew what happened, we ran into you, and you were like some sort of . . . Your face shield was half-melted, and smoke was coming off your shoulders, and you looked like you’d just been dragged out of a steamer trunk somebody’d put in a furnace. Skin was coming off your ears. You could barely move, but you told us to go down the corridor you’d come up, that we’d hear your PASS device outside a hole in the wall. Twenty-eight steps, you said. Like we were going to go down there and end up looking like you. We were scared, but we were headed that way after you left, and then a gust of heat came down the corridor and forced us onto our knees. Reese was leading, and for the longest time he just knelt there in front of me. Finally I said, ‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ And he said, ‘Calm down. Wait another minute.’ We couldn’t see shit, man. It was like somebody put sticks in our eyes. To make matters worse, we heard electrical wires popping. Every time we moved I kept thinking we were going to get electrocuted. Tell you the truth, I think we both figured if we waited long enough, Cordifis would come marching out of the smoke just like you did.”

“I
told
you he was trapped.”

“I know.”

“How long did you wait?”

“I’m not sure.”

“A minute? Two minutes?”

“Longer.”

“Five?”

“Longer.”

“Are you kidding? Ten minutes?”

“Maybe.”

“But you were practically on top of him.”

“I kept tapping Reese on the shoulder. He kept saying not yet. It wasn’t like we sat down and said we’d wait
ten
minutes.” Tears were running down Kub’s face. He wiped them away with his opposite index fingers, moving them side to side like windshield wipers.

“What were you waiting for? As long as there’s fuel and oxygen, a fire gets worse. You know that.”

“We were calling him. We never stopped calling him.”

“I’m sure that gave him some comfort as he burned to death.”

“When it started coming down on us, we turned around and made a run for it. By then we could hear flame ripping down the corridor. Man, it sounded like a freight train. I’ve never been that scared. Next thing I know, I’m trying to cool off under a jiffy hose and Reese is in front of the cameras. I never heard what he said until the next day. I swear. Then what was I supposed to do? Call a news conference and say he was conning everybody? You know how I freeze up in front of a camera. After a while I thought, why not make it all a little more heroic than it was? What was it going to hurt?”

“Oh, yeah. You didn’t hurt anybody.”

“I didn’t think about you until later. All I knew was I couldn’t start a scandal, and nothing I said was going to bring Cordifis back. Then, after a few days, Reese told me if I contradicted him, it would blow any opportunity I might have as an insurance investigator for a private company. You know I been counting on that second income after retirement. The way that fire was running, we probably couldn’t have got him out anyway. You know that.”

“You’ve had a lot of time to work on your excuses, haven’t you?”

Somewhere in the room a pager went off. As Kub went to get it, Finney became aware they’d been hearing sirens for some minutes. “I gotta go,” Kub said wearily when he returned. “They got two multiples going on. Plus, there’s something at the Columbia Tower.”

PART FOUR

59. THURSDAYS WITH SHEILA

Patterson Cole watched Norris remove the contracts from the safe and pack them into the briefcases, musing that there was something about Norris that made him look like a poof, something about the way he used his hands. He’d had this thought before, and deep down he supposed it didn’t really matter whether Norris was a poof or not, but still, it bothered him. The bow ties bothered him. The manicured fingernails bothered him. Did he actually apply polish? Norris was using a cane today, had stubbed his toe walking to the pissoir in the middle of the night. Norris was always nursing some sort of ache. Just thinking about it made Patterson old. Maybe after this was all over, he’d send Norris to Sun Valley to oversee his Idaho holdings with Dithers. Maybe it was time Norris had a little change of scenery. Time he did, too, for that matter.

Norris Radford and Patterson Cole had taken a series of elevators to forty-two where they’d removed forty-seven thousand dollars in cash from the safe in the main office. Now they were on floor seventy-three in Patterson’s private hideaway. Nobody ever came up here but Norris and, every other Thursday, a woman named Sheila from the service. It was a luxury apartment with a desk, computer, fax, and in the back room, a double shower, a Jacuzzi, and a bed about half the size of a tennis court. When he wasn’t using the bed for his play time with Sheila, Patterson would sneak up after lunch to take a siesta, maybe twenty, thirty minutes of shut-eye. It was his guilty secret—well—one of them.

They’d planned this meticulously, and now all they had to do was empty the other safe and skedaddle. Everything else was taken care of. After tonight all of Patterson’s troubles would be over. He would pay off the damn bitch, sign the divorce papers, and in time, they would rebuild this tower with more safeguards than the original.

Why couldn’t they all be like Sheila? No fuss. No muss. He’d found her ad in the back of
The Stranger:
ALL THE COMFORT YOU WANT FROM A WOMAN, $
175
. NO EXTRA FEES. NO DISAPPOINTMENTS
. She wore a little too much makeup, but her body was as advertised. And it didn’t hurt that she was fifty years younger than he was. The one thing he was going to miss about this building was Thursdays with Sheila. He’d have to find another cozy spot.

Looking around the office, Patterson saw several personal effects he wanted to take with him. Sure, the firemen had told him to leave everything, but there was a montage of photos on the desk he needed, photos of his first wife, Ruth, their two children when they were toddlers, and shots of himself as a young lumberjack. They’d worked his ass off at Weyerhauser, but he found more and more he was looking back on those days as the happiest of his life. He picked up the montage and stuffed it under his coat.

“What do you want out of this safe?” Norris asked, looking up at him from across the room.

“The bonds. There’s some jewelry in that black box. Any cash.”

Patterson sat in the leather office chair and rolled it over to the window. Four floors lower than the famous women’s rest room stalls with their panoramic view, it looked out over the same vista: the east portion of the city and, beyond that, Lake Washington, the growing city of Bellevue, and the bedroom community that was Mercer Island. The lake was fuzzy with fog, and most of the east side was already sketchy. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Six-fifteen. Plenty of time.

His eighty-fourth birthday would be coming around in March, and he knew he was slowing down. He’d thought about retirement, but then who would run things? He had two sons, in their sixties now, but they were both numbskulls. One, Hardy, hadn’t spoken to him in four years, not since he married the bimbo.

The whoop-de-whoop mechanical screeching in the corridor outside the office started without any warning. The fire alarm.

“Go see if you can get that turned off,” Patterson said. “Also, you get the lottery numbers today?”

“Yes, sir.” Norris was heading for the phone, but he stopped, took a notebook out of his pocket, and began reading numbers off, while Patterson compared them to a pair of tickets in his arthritic fingers. No winners tonight. Norris made the phone call, spoke for a few seconds, then hung up.

Cole said, “I suppose they think a bunch of false alarms will put everybody off their guard, make it that much easier, eh?”

“I’m not entirely sure this is a false alarm, sir. Apparently there’s smoke on one of the floors below us.”

“Some idiot burned his popcorn in the microwave again?”

“Quite a lot of smoke.”

Patterson turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”

“A
lot
.”

“You got everything out of the safe?”

“Just about.”

“Get the rest. Let’s get moving.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I call the garage and have the car ready?”

“Absolutely.”

Five minutes later Patterson Cole stood near the elevators. “Is that smoke I smell?”

“Sure seems like it.”

“What the hell’s wrong? Where’s this elevator?”

“They don’t work when the building’s in alarm.”

“I know that, goddamn it. But they work with that special key. The firemen have it. The security idiots downstairs have it. Why aren’t they up here? Get somebody up here.”

“Yes, sir.” Norris Radford set the briefcases at his feet and took a cell phone from a pocket. “This is Radford. I’m on seventy-two with Patterson. You need to get somebody up here with an elevator. Now.” He listened for a few seconds. “Uh, huh. So where are the engineers? Uh, huh. Okay. Call us when you’re ready.” He gave a phone number.

“What is it?” Patterson said, thumbing the elevator button again with a gnarled index finger.

“They can’t make them work even with the key, and they don’t know why. They’ve got a couple of people running up the stairs to see what’s happening on twenty-six. That’s where the alarm is.”

“Shit, boy. You look like you need to hose out your trousers. This’ll work itself out. Let’s go up to the restaurant and get some grub while we’re waiting.”

“How are we going to get there?”

“We could walk,” Cole said. “Or don’t you think you can handle four flights.” The old man was already headed for the stairway.

Hobbling along with his cane and the two briefcases, Norris passed the old man and opened the door for him.

“God! What the hell is that?” Cole said, as a blast of smoke came out the door. “Close it, for Christ’s sake! Close it!”

“I thought it wasn’t supposed to start until two
A.M.,
” Norris said, his eyes watering. Cole wondered whether it was from the smoke or because Norris was such a damned pansy.

“The bastards started early,” Cole said.

Norris glanced around helplessly at the empty floor, his brow beginning to bead up with perspiration. When the lights in the corridor went out, he said, “Now what do we do?”

“Give me that goddamned phone.”

60. THE WEDDING PARTY

Because of a shortage of rigs in the city, Diana and the other overtimers had been forced to walk the few blocks up the hill from 10’s to the Tower. On the west side of the Columbia Tower, on Fourth Avenue, uniformed police officers in bulletproof vests and winter coats began taking charge of the street. When Diana looked up, she couldn’t see anything but dark windows, and then, near the ten-story mark, just above the reach of the tallest aerial ladder, a halo of fog.

Inside at the security desk they found a bewildered county chief surrounded by three county firefighters and a couple of building security people. There were alarms on twenty of the seventy-six floors, floor sixteen being the lowest, the highest seventy-six, although the report by phone to the security desk was that the smoke on seventy-six was extremely light. The first real smoke was on sixteen.

Nobody’d been able to make the elevators work, so a team of county firefighters ran up the stairs to sixteen, where they reported via portable radio that the stairwell was full of thick, black smoke. They’d been forced to axe open the door to sixteen, which should have unlocked automatically when the building went into alarm.

They investigated sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and twelve minutes later reported a small room fire on what they believed was the north side of the building on eighteen. They radioed that they were going to hook up the two hundred feet of hose line a second team had lugged up to the standpipe in the stairwell and make an attack on the fire. The officer in charge was a county lieutenant, and he seemed to know his stuff. He said they thought the fire was being fed fresh air from an unknown source, possibly a broken window.

Diana hoped it was only a room fire on eighteen and that the smoke on the other floors had drifted up or been pumped down through ductwork. A room fire on eighteen was doable. More likely it was the malfunctioning ventilation system in the building, Diana thought. There was smoke on too many floors. The elevators were not running. Doors that should have been open were locked. Finney had predicted this.

Three minutes later, the upstairs team reported they were not receiving water from the stairwell standpipe. Outside, Diana had seen Engine 10 pumping into the building’s connections, so there should have been water. The county chief dispatched a pair of firefighters to trace down the problem, then told the firefighters on eighteen they’d have to wait.

At the incident command post on four, the county chief, two of Seattle’s newly arrived lieutenants, and a pair of firefighters from Station 10 who were familiar with the building began poring over the heavy, yellow, looseleaf binders that held the prefire plan for the building.

The lobby was filling rapidly with weepy civilians who’d straggled down one or another of the smoky stairwells and were stumbling around the open spaces on four, trying to figure out where to go next. Many had come down without car keys or purses or coats. All were coughing; one woman vomited. Several more mutual aid companies from outside the city showed up, most from jurisdictions where the tallest buildings were four or five stories. An alarm in a seventy-six-story building had to be daunting for them. Diana knew it was certainly daunting for her.

Diana remembered a fire they’d had at the Morrison Hotel. The Morrison was only five stories, but one of the elevators hadn’t worked, so they’d been jamming men and equipment into the remaining tiny, slow-moving elevator. Most of their lines, pump cans, ladders, and fans had been hauled up four flights of stairs, and she still remembered how so many of the firefighters, after a couple of trips up and down those stairs wearing fifty pounds of protective equipment and carrying another twenty or thirty of firefighting gear, had knelt by open windows in the hallway, gasping for breath.

An Engine 10 lieutenant, Wilder from A-shift, quickly took the overtimers and the personnel from outside fire departments and began forming them into teams, passing out assignments as they came up. They established a medical area downstairs in the food court. A team of three firefighters was sent outside to set up a base area well away from the building, where the incoming apparatus would park. They announced the command post would be on floor four, which was actually at street level from the Fifth Avenue side of the building.

“What about all these other floors in alarm?” asked the county chief, who turned out to be from Bothell, a small city at the north end of Lake Washington. “When do we send somebody to investigate?”

Lieutenant Wilder said, “Use sixteen for staging. Send a backup team for the first crew, an RIT to back up both of them in case they get into trouble, and then have extra crews investigate the higher floors one by one. Bottom to top. We’re going to have to send runners up with spare bottles so they can change right there in the stairs. It’s all we can do.”

“What good’s a backup team without water?” asked the chief.

“We’ll get water. We also have to pressurize those stairwells. The building engineer is on his way.”

During the next few minutes they received reports over in-house phones—just before they inexplicably conked out—that there was smoke on floors eighteen through twenty, on twenty-six, sixty and sixty-one, seventy-six, as well as unconfirmed reports that smoke had been sighted drifting off the roof. “Probably coming out the vents,” said one of the nearby county firemen, but even as Diana wondered how anyone could see smoke coming off the roof in this fog, she began to doubt the veracity of some of the information they were receiving.

By now forty or fifty civilians were wandering the lower floors, cleaning personnel and office workers who’d been putting in overtime. There were gawkers and a couple of homeless men who’d walked in off the street carrying bedrolls. Even as they organized the rest of the fire, the command post area began to deteriorate into bedlam.

Diana remembered reading about the First-Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles, where the flames could be seen from eight miles away. She hated to compare this to the First-Interstate, because she had a gut feeling this was going to be worse. For starters, L.A. had poured four hundred firefighters into the effort. Seattle had two hundred on-duty firefighters, so even if they used the entire shift, they would need another two hundred to duplicate L.A.’s effort, as well as another fifty or so to give minimal coverage to the rest of the city.

So far, including the county chief, who was overwhelmed with the situation, Diana counted sixteen firefighters on the command floor, a few more upstairs, another handful outside. The building security people were tied up trying to explain to the firefighters how the fire suppression systems worked, even though none of the fire suppression systems seemed to have activated properly, none that is but the piercing whistle and loud honking from the alarms. A firefighter from 6’s finally took the bull by the horns and broke the closest speakers off the wall with a pike pole. It was remarkable how much confusion the noise alone had caused.

A Seattle air rig arrived, and spare masks and bottles were brought in for the overtimers to use. The man running the
up
elevator would take people up and come down empty. The man in the
down
elevator would go up empty and come down full. Trouble was, the elevators weren’t working.

Waiting for an assignment with the others, Diana drifted over to a console of television monitors in the security enclosure, where she was astonished to see one of the upper floors had dozens of people milling about in formal dress.

“What’s this?” she asked a short, balding man of around thirty, who sat in front of the monitors reading a magazine called
Combat Readiness Quarterly
. The building security personnel all wore dark gray blazers, and she’d heard rumors they were ex-FBI men, though that was hard to believe. This guy seemed particularly unimpressed with their predicament.

“Some sort of wedding party,” he replied, growing more interested when he looked up and saw Diana.

“Those people don’t even look like they know the building’s in alarm.”

“Oh, they know all right.” He sat up straight. “They’re on emergency power up there right now.”

“How many people are in the building, total?”

“Probably a couple hundred.”

“What floor is that?”

“Seventy-five.”

“So why don’t we send someone up there to bring them down?”

“The elevators above forty aren’t working. In fact, we’ve been having trouble with these down here. We’re trying to figure it out now.”

“What about the stairwells? I thought they were automatically pressurized with clean air when the building went into alarm? Why don’t they come down the stairs?”

“Maybe they’re supposed to be pressurized, but they’re all smoky now. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work, but you could be right. Hey, is it hard to get in the fire department?”

“It’s not hard at all,” Diana lied. “I think you should sign up.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Diana knew that in L.A. the First-Interstate Bank fire had burned at temperatures close to two thousand degrees, that it had taken most of the night to extinguish. Yet there was one notable difference between that fire and this: Except for a few stranded office workers and about forty maintenance personnel, L.A.’s building had been vacant. The Columbia Tower was like a bee colony.

It was all too easy for smoke and heat to travel upward and sometimes downward in a high-rise building via plumbing and electrical chases, ventilation shafts, air-conditioning ducts, elevator wells, and tenant staircases. It was possible for a fire to be contained on a lower floor while people twenty or thirty stories higher were dying from smoke inhalation. It was even possible for this to happen with almost no smoke on the floors in between. And this was not a building where people could open windows for fresh air. Diana had seen a 250-pound man slam away at similar windows using a pick-head axe with absolutely no effect. None of the windows opened in the conventional sense, and the only ones that could be broken were those designated by small decals in the lower corner.

There were two ways of looking at this. The first as a tactical fire problem. The second as a trap. John had been right. Leary Way had been rigged. Bowman Pork had been rigged. And this building was rigged, too. They were standing on a big piece of cheese in a very tall mousetrap, cheese oozing up between their toes.

In L.A. they’d done their rescues with fire department helicopters and teams of specially trained paramedics who’d rappelled down the outside of the building from the roof. Seattle didn’t have any helicopters, nor did they have rappelling paramedics. Even if they did, Diana knew the roof of this building was filled with antennae and microwave dishes and wouldn’t accommodate helicopters on a good night, much less in the fog.

Floor four, which acted as the lobby from Fifth Avenue and accessed most of the elevators, was still accepting stragglers from the smoky stairwells. These latecomers had traveled farther and looked worse than the earlier escapees. Because the doors to the stairwells kept opening and closing, the area soon began to reek of smoke.

Moments later Chief Reese rushed in, flanked by two administration chiefs who hadn’t seen combat in some time. This was going to be good.

Chief Reese began reorganizing in a surprisingly calm and methodical manner. After assigning division commanders, mostly lieutenants who would later be replaced with captains or chiefs, Reese ordered SPD to clear floor four of nonessential personnel and to have any civilian who’d been in the smoke taken downstairs to the medics.

Thirty-five minutes into it they managed to get water to floor eighteen. Thirty-five minutes was an unacceptable amount of time to leave a fire burning, and now reports from upstairs said it had spread to the entire wing. The original teams had been replaced by fresh troops, a move that had all but exhausted their meager resources. Diana was one of the few people left in staging, a factor she attributed to the county staging officer’s reluctance to put a female at risk. She could wait. There was going to be plenty of fire to fight.

Now that she was witnessing it firsthand, the whole thing seemed so much easier to pull off than she’d imagined. A natural gas leak at Northwest Hospital, twenty-one firefighters and assorted hospital personnel tied up in the process of evacuating two wings. A multicar accident on the 520 floating bridge with persons trapped. Eighteen firefighters and five units sent to that one, the bridge gridlocked with thousands of cars backed up into town. Two additional engines locked up in traffic because of the backup from the accident on 520. A warehouse burning in Ballard. A ship fire, also in Ballard. Short of a once-in-a-lifetime natural calamity, it was improbable, if not impossible, for this many large incidents to occur coincidentally at once. On the other hand, it would be easy for an individual to break a gas line at the hospital. Easier still to drop some debris from a moving truck and cause an accident on either of the two floating bridges that spanned Lake Washington.

She was thinking about all this when she saw Finney enter the building in his bulky yellow bunking suit.