Vertical Burn (30 page)

63. THE OLD MAN TRIES ONE MORE TIME

For almost a full minute, Diana watched Robert Kub pounding on the plate-glass window with his service axe, the pick head bouncing off with no discernible result. They all knew the designated breakout windows in a high-rise had white dots in one corner, but nobody had ever bothered to tell them how to locate them from the outside, especially when the windows were tinted.

After a while Diana heard the sound of glass breaking and looked up to see parts of a window dropping to the sidewalk. She could hear the two men talking through the intercom at the tip of the aerial.

“Damn,” Kub said, gasping. “If I’d known it was going to be this much work, I wouldn’t have volunteered.”

“You never did like work,” Finney joked.

“Look who’s talking. I’ll be dragging your sorry ass up those stairs.”

“I’ll clip a carabiner to your backpack to make it easier for you to give me a tow.”

The next voice Diana heard was so close it startled her. “Listen to me.” Jerry Monahan was on the turntable behind her, one of his eyes beginning to swell shut from Finney’s fist.

“There’s no stopping this,” Monahan said. “Bail out now, while you can.”

Tinny and laced with the sounds of rubber boots on broken glass, Finney’s voice came across on the speaker. “Diana. Come on up.”

They’d left a spare hour bottle, the Halligan/flathead axe combination, and a bag of webbing for her to carry, the tools banded together with a strip of rubber. It was going to be tough enough without battling Monahan. As she reached for the spare bottle, Jerry Monahan took her in a bear hug from behind, from which she quickly managed to extricate both arms, though he kept hold of her torso.

“Let me go.”

“No can do, Miss Moore. I’ve done some boneheaded things in my life, but one of them is not going to be letting you get yourself killed.”

Diana freed the flathead axe from the tool package and dropped the Halligan. “Let me go.”

There was an intimacy to the assault that Diana couldn’t escape, this old man breathing into her ear like a lover, smelling of cloves and hair oil and perspiration and the blood on his face. “Listen to me. Finney doesn’t have anything to prove. Finney didn’t have anything to do with that woman in the burn ward.”

“The police think he did.”

“Paul was at Riverside Drive that morning. After Finney left, Paul set the fire. That old woman just happened to get in the way.”

“Lazenby?”

“Yes. When he realized that old woman could ID him, he hit her over the head and dragged her upstairs; tied her up with some twine.”

“What about Gary Sadler?”

“They set that other fire to get rid of John and Gary both. Gary was on to me. They hauled Gary back into the building. It was hard for me when I found out. I mean, I worked with both those guys. None of this has been easy. But we can change that. We can do something good here. We can use my invention to get those people out.”

“Let go.”

“I know it doesn’t make any difference in the real scheme of things, but I can’t let you guys die the way Gary did.”

With the flat head leading, Diana swung the axe between her legs. A short, crisp blow. Monahan dropped onto his side, then rolled off the apparatus and fell eight feet to the ground. She’d broken his leg.

64. HERDING CATS

Using a grease pen, Oscar Stillman scrawled a floor plan for the building on the wall next to the stairwell. Chief Reese had appointed him information officer in charge of briefing the stairwell teams. The teams would, directly after speaking to him, climb to floor sixteen, take a short breather, and from there go to the fire on eighteen.

Years from now when people asked Oscar what part he’d played in the Columbia Tower debacle, he would tell them he’d been at the hub of the conflagration, had been head information officer. With time, Reese would, of course, develop into a pitiful and despised figure, especially since he’d personally vouched to the police that Finney’s allegations about the building were spurious. It tickled Oscar to think of Reese trying to explain himself, particularly after Oscar and the others denied Reese had asked him to inspect the Columbia Tower’s fire suppression systems. There was supposed to have been a written report, but Oscar hadn’t turned it in.

Information officer. He liked that. It was a lofty-sounding moniker and would lend credence to the details he would parcel out in the years to come.

So far, most of the groups Oscar briefed were comprised of mutual aid companies from outside the city, young men eager to die in a building they knew little about and had no stake in. Oscar had to admire their gung-ho attitudes and youthful faces, even as he mentally ridiculed their commitment to this folly.

The Columbia Tower had been built with pressurized stairwells to keep the smoke at bay, phones for firefighters on every floor and in the elevators, water tanks on floors twenty-five, thirty-seven, and fifty-eight, as well as a five-thousand-gallon tank on floor seventy-seven, which should have supplied the initial water for the sprinklers. There were fire pumps on level A and floors thirty-six and thirty-eight. On paper the system worked great.

Because of the elaborate preparations Oscar and his partners had made, few of those systems were operable. What they’d left intact were blinking lights and shrieking alarms, anything that might amplify the chaos. The phones didn’t work. They’d scuttled several key sections of sprinklers and standpipes, so that no matter how much water was pumped into the system it would never pressurize. There was little danger in leaving the fire pumps and water tanks intact—any water from them was destined to bleed down the interior stairwells through a series of strategically broken pipes. A torrent in the stairs would not only make work difficult, but would, after some hours, cause ungodly problems in the basement.

As another group approached with hose lines on their shoulders, Oscar collared the officer and tried to gather everybody together. It took a full minute. Firefighters. Unless they saw flame, it was like herding cats.

“Okay,” Oscar said, surveying the eight firefighters and two officers. It tickled him the way the officers made their men stand with hose loads on their shoulders while he spoke, even though in an hour none of them would have the strength to lift a dirty sock. If they’d been his men, he would have been filling their gullets with Gatorade and making them rest before the ordeal.

Oscar pointed to the diagram on the wall. “You’ll find that most floors in this building will have this approximate layout. The elevators are in the center. They’re not working now, but we have a specialist looking into it. The two main stairwells are fairly close to each other. You are about to enter stairwell A, which we have designated as the firefighting stairwell. When you get inside, you’ll notice lines have been laid. That’s because there’s a problem with the standpipes. The building engineers tell us they’re going to get that licked in the next half hour or so.”

Oscar pulled open the stairway door to reveal a dark and noisy stairwell with eight inches of fast-running water blurring the steps, enough to knock a careless man off his feet. A cloud of smoke drifted out as he closed the door. Water might have escaped, too, but somebody’d diked the inside of the doorway with rolled-up canvas tarps. The whole thing was turning into a delightful clutter. The worse it became, the harder it was for Oscar to stifle his laughter. He’d even heard a story about a dead firefighter in the street. These county guys were so panicked they were inventing their own urban legends on the spot.

“We’ve had smoke problems down here, but you’ll have more higher up. Use your masks. And think about whether your five-minute warning bells are going to give you enough time to find a fresh bottle. The second stairway is not to be used for firefighting. If and when we get it pressurized properly, B will be reserved for bringing down victims. We start fighting fire from both stairways, they’ll both be contaminated with smoke. Understood?”

The first officer, a heavyset man with a florid face and webs of burst blood vessels across his bulbous nose, took off his helmet and said, “I heard stairwell B was shitty already.”

“It is. We’re working on it.”

“Why not put up our own fans? We can clear a stairwell.”

“That’s been tried. It made it hotter. It also fed the fire on eighteen. Okay. Now, there’s a restaurant on seventy-six. The Tower Club. There was a wedding banquet going on below that. We think there’s around two hundred people up there, including staff.”

“No sprinklers anywhere?” asked a firefighter.

“All we know is they’re not working on the lower fire floors.”

“What do you mean lower fire floors?” asked the first officer. “We were told there was one fire. On eighteen.”

“Figuring out which floors are involved and which are not is going to be one of your assignments. We have TV cameras, but there’s so much smoke they’re not telling us much.” Oscar might have told him about the fire on fifty-six, which had been raging for some time, but he thought that was better coming as a surprise; besides, he didn’t officially know about it yet.

“How long are these bottles going to last?” asked the officer. “Going up stairs.”

“What you’ve got here is a seventy-eight-story building—seventy-six actual tenant floors. When they run the Columbia Challenge each spring, even the fittest athlete firefighters running these stairs in full bunkers need a change of bottles before the top. One firefighter who’s run it said he used two bottles and ended up unscrewing his low-pressure hose so he wouldn’t suffocate when he ran the second one dry. Remember, you move slower, you use less air. I’m no physiologist. I couldn’t give you the numbers.

“Okay. Listen, it’s going to lap on you. It’s going to break out the windows and work its way outside the building to the floor above. There are plumbing and electrical chases cut through the floors, so it’s traveling up in that manner, too. Remember the three firefighters in Philadelphia? They ran out of air, called for help, and gave the wrong floor number? By the time they found them, they were dead. Keep an eye on those gauges. Know which floor you’re on. This isn’t a pissy little house fire, where you can bail out a window. You bail out of one of these windows, you better sprout wings.

“Now, one important fact we do know is that none of these doors have unlocked the way they’re supposed to unlock when the building’s in fire mode. If it hasn’t already been broken into, you’ll have to break into every floor you enter.”

“What about master keys?” somebody asked.

“We got some keys, but for some reason they don’t work. This also means any civilians coming down are in serious trouble unless they can hold their breath for seventy-odd stories; they won’t be able to rest up on a clean floor. Hasta la vista, amigos.”

After the group left, Oscar began to wonder why he felt so smug. A typical house fire drew temperatures around twelve hundred degrees. This would be a lot hotter. Cold-drawn steel, such as that used in the elevator cables in this building, failed at eight hundred degrees. The building was constructed around a steel core, and the heat would eventually deform that at around two thousand degrees. More than one of these boys probably weren’t coming back. Still, he felt smug.

Oscar couldn’t even imagine the commissions they were going to convene trying to explain tonight. Not that he had to worry about it. When this was finished, there would be no evidence and no witnesses. The others would be long gone and he would be in Costa Rica reading about it four days late in the
Wall Street Journal.

The question was, did he feel anything over the fact that he had planned and was in the process of murdering some two hundred souls, including one Patterson Cole, who’d paid for the whole thing? It was hard to tell. Oscar’s primary concern right now was whether they would actually get the money. A million five in his pocket would go a long way toward assuaging his guilt. There was so much testosterone and adrenaline in the air, Oscar didn’t really know how he felt. Besides, there was no stopping it now. They’d done it, and they would have to live with it.

65. GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

Stillman had just sent another group upstairs, this with two women firefighters in it, their round faces reminding him for some reason of a pair of semi-pro women softball players he’d once met in a bar in Portland. He turned back to the wall just as G. A. Montgomery stepped out of the confusion, G. A.’s face dripping with perspiration, his nose and cheeks red.

“Everything moving along according to plan?” G. A. asked.

Oscar glanced around to see if anybody had noticed them. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand we’ve been getting cell phone calls from upstairs, from Patterson. You got the cash?”

“Jerry started it early. Stupid bastard.”

“I wondered what happened. I got your call that everything was starting, and I just went ahead and did what I was supposed to. I guess the others did their share ’cause the city’s in a tizzy. But what about the money? You got it?”

“You know I do.”

“Where?”

“Don’t get your nose out of joint. It’s close. Right now I need to know how things are going.”

“There’s three firefighters trapped in the mid-fifties. Everybody else is below the lower fire. On sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.”

“And they’re sending people to get above it?”

“They tried. The stairwell’s too hot. You get up around twenty, it’s hotter than a hooker on payday. It gets worse as you go up. A lot worse.”

“What about elevators?”

“With the exception of one we left for ourselves, they’re all disabled.”

“How many more hours do you estimate this will take?”

“Not long. Our highest fire has been burning over an hour with no water on it. Hell, by now every floor between fifty-four and the roof has to be full of smoke.”

“Nobody’s going to believe this is an accident,” G. A. said. “The papers will be full of speculation. It will go on for years.”

“All the same, it couldn’t have gone better.” Oscar tried to smile, feeling his lips and cheeks stiff with the trying. G. A. always had been a worrier, ever since the night he’d recruited Oscar into this little group. G. A. had received the initial offer from Patterson Cole’s man, Norris Radford. Together they’d approached Jerry Monahan. Monahan had in turn suggested Marion Balitnikoff, and Balitnikoff brought in the Lazenbys. He couldn’t remember how Tony Finney got into it. One or more of them might have backed out, except that Norris Radford had been FedExing Oscar bundles of cash so that they’d been paid nearly $50,000 each for their practice runs, $10,000 a week to prepare for tonight. And that didn’t take into account the cost of the engine they’d had built to ensure they were the first firefighters responding to the Columbia Tower. Good thing, because tonight the real Engine 10 was in Ballard fighting a ship fire.

“Know where everybody is?” G. A. asked.

“I think so.”

“Good. Round them up. I need to see the whole team. Now.”