City of Strangers (22 page)

The man did his best at an elaborate shrug. “We ain't got keys. That's the point. You use your own lock.”

“And when people don't pay and leave their padlocks on your doors, you don't have a big bolt cutter here to break in?”

“I don't know, man. I can't go letting anybody break in our lockers.”

“There's a voice inside crying for help. You want to come check?”

“We oughtta just call some cops.”

“In five seconds, I'm going to rip the oxygen line off that tank. One … two … three—”

“Sure, sure, guy. Okay.” He had it right there under the counter, a huge bolt cutter with bright red handles and lots of little scars on its jaws.

“Give me five minutes, and then you can call all the cops you want.”

“Sure, sure. I ain't lookin' for no trouble, mister.”

The wind swept a big flapping sheet of newspaper toward the fence as he hurried back to the locker and he saw the paper plaster itself flat to the chain-link fence, dimpling and bellying through the little diamonds. The Santa Ana was picking up. He could feel the desert air drying his sinuses.

“Stand back,” he said to Fariborz. “The bolt cutter might throw a bit of metal.” As he pressed, there were warning twinges in his hand but he worked through them.

The hardened jaws of the cutter went through the hasp easily with a satisfying little
chomp
at the end. Fariborz plucked the remains of the lock off the door and wrenched it open. A whiff of some peculiar smell, like the ionized air off electrical equipment, was sucked out of the dimness by the wind. The first thing he saw was three boys lying on their stomachs on the cement, hogtied and gagged with duct tape, and then he saw, with a renewed chill on his spine, a big finned container of black metal with the universal radiation symbol on it. Fariborz knelt and began ripping tape off the biggest boy, and the narrow room filled with gagging sobs.

Jack Liffey went gingerly to the container, a fat lid propped open, and without touching it, he peered down into it. There was a thick, slit-open foil liner that had been peeled back, and then a layer of foam peanuts. Then a second foil liner that was also cut open. Inside the inner barrier, his eye came to rest on a number of square metal boxes, each the size of a half brick, marked

He had seen something the same size before, inside the boom box that Robert Johnson had shown him. But he doubted that these contained sifted flour. More ominously, there was an empty space right in the center of the top layer, where a box should have been.

His spine crawled at the thought of the evils of whatever substance was packed in those metal boxes. He used his elbow to tip the lid back down.

The first of the freed boys sat up, and a second began to sputter as Fariborz worked on his tape. Jack Liffey turned to the boys. “Where did he go?” he demanded, and he had no doubt they knew exactly who he meant.

“Allah-u akbar,
” the largest boy said.

“You have five seconds,” Jack Liffey said. “Or I will personally tape you back up and shove your nose in that container.”

“Tell him!” Fariborz insisted.

For the first time, Jack Liffey noticed that this stocky boy seemed to be missing a hand, his stump bandaged and apparently tender, as he cradled it with his good hand.

The next boy sputtered and coughed. “Hassan went downtown,” he said. “You've got to stop him. He tied us up because we wouldn't help him.”

The biggest boy glared and then seemed to come to a decision inside himself. “We were away from the
madrasa
with Hassan when the police raided it and caught everybody else. But Hassan got mad at us when we wouldn't help him fight back.”

“Iman!” Fariborz demanded. “Where did he go?”

“He said he'd get the whole town. He said we're all infidels, and he meant you and me, too. We've been in the West too long and been corrupted. He said he'd go to some high-rise downtown and set the thing off on the roof and scatter that dust into the Santa Ana wind. What is it?”

“Is he armed?” Jack Liffey asked.

“He's got a little machine gun.”

“Shit! Take care of them and
don't
touch that box,” he said to Fariborz, sprinted back to the office, and banged in through the door. The manager was on the phone, his eyes going wide in fright.

“I hope that's the cops. Call the FBI, too.” And then he was out the front door, hurrying to his Chevette.

“Dad, what is it? What?” Maeve stepped out of the car. He was astonished that she had obeyed and waited there.

“Fariborz needs you.
Now!
Hurry!”

He could tell she was suspicious, but she went hesitantly to the office. As soon as she was in the door, he started the car. In the mirror, he saw her come back out and stare as the car accelerated sluggishly down the ramp to the street. His heart thudding in his chest, he dialed the cell phone one-handed, peering at Robert Johnson's card.

“Who is this?”

“Johnson?”

“Liffey?”

“Look, I'll trade you. You tell me who the hell you are, and I'll tell you where a guy named Hassan is going with a can of Pu-238. I know you're not FBI—I called them.”

“Lighten up there, Liffey. You don't need to know exactly who I work for. You pay my salary every April 15—that's good enough.”

“Do better or I hang up.”

“I'm part of a team put together years ago for just this dirty-bomb and biowar contingency. Okay? Our headquarters is Bethesda, just outside D.C.”

“Assuming you're telling the truth and you're not on this guy's side, he's heading for a high-rise in downtown L.A., and he threatens to set off one of those boom-box bombs on the roof, right into the Santa Ana wind.”

“
Shit!
But don't get too worked up. It's not as dangerous as you think.”

People had been saying that for years and Jack Liffey simply didn't believe him.

The man was hollering something unintelligible, apparently to other agents with him. “I'm heading for the Library Tower,” Jack Liffey said. “I don't know how many men you've got, but you can concentrate on the other big buildings downtown, or you can waste your time trying to arrest me. That's up to you.”

The Library Tower was the tallest building west of Chicago, and well known in town for it, seventy-some stories and over 1000 feet, a real New York-scale high-rise, and he figured that was where Hassan would go, though there were a half dozen others pretty near it in scale that would do just as well. The tower had been built in 1990, taller than normally allowed, as part of a deal to help finance the rebuilding of the old landmark central library next door after a disastrous fire. Even now he could see the building's fluted circular top ten miles away as he drove, clearly visible in the wind-scoured air. It had been known briefly and unpopularly as the First Interstate Building until that bank had been swallowed up in merger mania, and then had quickly reverted to its original name, the ugly giant advertising I's taken off the roofline.

Robert Johnson still seemed to be on the phone. Jack Liffey told him where the boys had been tied up and about the big opened container in the locker. “Where the hell did they get their hands on this stuff?”

“Liffey, don't get your ass caught up in this. Take my word—it's not that dangerous.”

“I don't trust you. I don't want my family glowing green at night.”

He hung up.

It was sinking in, the ghastly notion of a powder-cloud of radioactive plutonium. Maybe Johnson was right and it wasn't that dangerous, blown up into the wind and diluted, but how could he believe him? The atomic agencies had been lying for years about the dangers.

He could see the skyscrapers of downtown a few miles ahead. Choose one, a burst up there and then a whitish billowy cumulus spreading outward, maybe faintly yellowish, maybe almost colorless—welling steadily, wisps ripped ahead of the main mass on 80 mph Santa Ana gusts, the cloud growing fainter out at the expanding rim, reaching right toward him, until particles, sparkling with radiation in his imagination, began to settle gently earthward over the car he was driving east on Adams.

He could picture the old black lady on the sidewalk, with her shopping cart, inhaling, drawing in the sparkles. Particles would enter the lungs of penniless Latinos selling oranges on the on-ramps. Movie moguls working overtime trying to peer down their secretaries' blouses. Grocers in aprons sweeping their sidewalks, guys reading comics in the glass booth at the gas station. Maeve, Kathy, Rebecca Plumkill, and Aneliese de Villiers. He felt a chill as his thoughts acquired names.

Then just for an instant a wise-guy corner of his mind made him smile. At least the radiation would get to that fucking lawyer with the little mustache—what was his name?—who had once banged into his car and then sued
him
for negligence. Parking too close to the corner.

Reality: The radioactive cloud would do something to the grim woman driving the station wagon beside him, and the little girl she was scolding. And it would even get the two guys standing at the curb ahead in weird space-alien masks, all pale greenish rubber and almond-shaped Whitley Strieber eyes. They held up a banner that said
Open Up Area 51, Display the Alien Remains.
An unexpected tangle of traffic behind a bus stalled him right in front of the banner, and he wondered why space travelers only made themselves known to schizophrenics, guys who used dating services, and families who kept their fridges on the back porch.

And he wondered how it would feel to come down with radiation sickness in a cuckoo costume like that, off on a cuckoo crusade. Probably, he realized, not much worse than catching it in a three-piece suit, selling short 100 shares of IBM. Abruptly, the alien-lovers stooped to wave shyly and spookily in the window at him, their arms in eerie sync like windshield wipers, probably attracted by the beat-up look of his car, though it might have been some subtler emanation of outsider-ness that he was broadcasting.

That only added to his unease. Alien was an elastic concept. It took in everything from the stocky little Salvadoran holding up a bag of fruit at the corner, to Farshad Bayat writing Farsi poetry in his Persian cave. The outer reaches of the concept even took in the sensibility of a surplus aerospace worker who couldn't hold his girlfriends and couldn't find a place in the world to settle into.

His mind kept spinning away from the reality of what he faced. He wondered if he should take a quick detour up to curse Dicky Auslander as the Author of the tragedy. Why write in something as ugly as plutonium? Why not a little dynamite? Why not something even more harmless, a damp squib that would pop off ineffectually in the bright autumn light of L.A.—like all those perils in ‘50s sci-fi movies that succumbed in the end to something homely like loud noise or stray ultraviolet rays?

The greenish corona at the top of the Library Tower grew more menacing as he approached, looming over the other buildings around it. He headed north on the Harbor Freeway, past the green bulk of the Convention Center and then past Staples Arena, looking more than ever like a giant oven knob, and dropped off again at Fifth. He tried to remember how the one-ways ran and guessed right, taking Grand up to a curving little road called Hope Lane. The narrow lane edged nervously up Bunker Hill and there it was: a drive-in portal for the Library Tower. He had to crane his neck out the window to make sure it was the right building.

A sign announced some exorbitant parking price for every fifteen minutes, and he took the dark driveway down at speed, like an animal diving into a burrow. As he turned hard right to follow the tunnel, the Chevette engine roared suddenly in the confined space, as if it had muffler trouble. This was it, he thought with a chill: Ahead of him, the wooden barrier arm had been snapped off, three-quarters of its red-and-white length lying on the ground. He touched the butt of his .45 to make sure it was still there under his arm.

He slowed at the parking kiosk where there were two bullet holes in the glass and no attendant in sight. Hassan must be running on adrenaline, starting to lose it. All he'd had to do was take a ticket.

Jack Liffey tried the cell phone to alert Robert Johnson, but surrounded by concrete and steel, he couldn't get a dial tone in the garage. A parked Mercedes ahead of him had been sideswiped recently, the rear fender creased and the shattered remains of its big taillight on the ground. That told him which way Hassan had gone, driving like a maniac—toward the big
Monthly Reserved
sign.

Then he saw a panel truck abandoned at an angle up ahead. The driver's door hung open to leave the interior light glowing faintly in the garage. He came up cautiously and cut his engine to drift toward the van. The .45 was heavy in his hand as he stepped out of the car. He heard the crackly buzz of a fluorescent going bad, and its flicker from overhead pressed on a raw nerve. Air-conditioning machinery kicked on and started to blow air out a big vent.

No one was in the van. In front of the van there was a freight elevator with a set of keys dangling from the switch on the wall. He wondered where the man had got the keys and how he knew how to use them, but it didn't matter now.

He twisted the elevator key, like starting a car, and was a bit shocked when the heavy door trundled open slowly. He stepped to one side, aiming his pistol self-consciously into the wide cargo elevator. No one was there. It must have been programmed to return on its own to the basement.

The walls of the elevator cabin were padded with big gray grommeted quilts that hung from brackets, and someone had left a wheeled bucket and mop inside. He studied the double row of buttons that ran from B-4 up to B and then from L up to 82. Above 82 there was a square button labeled R. It didn't take a genius to work out what that probably stood for. He pressed the R and the doors exhaled once and closed sluggishly, and then—as if to rebuke the indolence of the doors—the elevator jolted hard and shot upward faster than any elevator he'd ever used. But he supposed if workers were meant to go up 1000 feet on company time, somebody would want them to do it pretty fast.

He marked his progress by the lighted numbers counting off above the door, pinging at each decade. The door was almost the full width of the big elevator cab, but there was a small wall-space on the right side for the controls. As the indicator entered the 70s, he pressed his back against the wall to stay as far out of sight as he could. He was so scared he felt woozy, felt his vision tunneling down to a small central vortex, and he was giddy with unformed thoughts—awareness of the .45 in his hand, memories making him almost catatonic with anger: his drugged dog, his daughter staring at his receding car, a sparkly mist spreading over the city.

The car stopped so suddenly that much of his weight went airborne. His stomach was just settling back into place when the door groaned once and started its dawdly withdrawal. Bright light and warm dusty air flooded in, along with muted traffic sounds, swelling as the heavy door retracted. There was no question he'd reached the roof, with the elevator giving directly onto the outside world. He had the pistol up in both hands and his heart thudded like something trying to burst out of his chest. Jack Liffey counted to three. Just as he whirled around to dive out the door, something swung fast into his field of vision and the side of his face seemed to explode.

He went down hard across the threshold of the elevator clutching his jaw and he felt himself howling in pain. It felt as if a dentist had broken through suddenly into a rotten tooth, and his left hand had scraped something and started acting up again, though the bandage still seemed to be in place. He spat out blood and pieces of tooth. The pistol was no longer in his hand. He clasped his jaw hard and rolled onto his side to see an olive-skinned man in a billowing white robe staring at him over an ugly little submachine gun.

They stared at one another. Then the man leaned down, grabbing Jack Liffey's shirt and dragging him out of the elevator along the rough roofing surface. He seemed very strong and he gave off a strong aroma of some sweet male perfume. When he let go, Jack Liffey ground his remaining teeth to see if anything would help the pain. It didn't.

“Who are you?”

The little submachine gun must have been what smacked into his jaw. It came around to aim right between his eyes now and he'd seen enough Navy SEAL movies to recognize an MP5, the little black collapsible-stock submachine gun that looked more like a leftover part from an oil rig.

The man snapped out something angry, probably in Arabic.

From where he lay, Jack Liffey could see above him a huge green glass flute that he recognized as part of the crown at the top of the Library Tower. Opposite was a low parapet, and beyond the parapet, deep blue autumn sky and a lone seagull soaring happily. No other buildings were visible from where he lay. He was atop the big one.

Jack Liffey tried to imagine himself into that seagull, setting off for some destination far, far away, but he couldn't. Gusty wind tugged at his clothing but he knew he'd never make takeoff speed.

Then he saw it and his heart sank. A black boom box sat on the parapet, about twenty yards away. For some reason, it had been wrapped around and around with silver duct tape to seal it tight.

“Don't move one centimeter.” The gunman backed to the elevator and dragged the mop bucket out to wedge it into the door just as it was starting to close. The door trundled slowly into the plastic bucket, a bell rang, and then the door opened about halfway, thought it over for a moment, and tried to close all over again. This went on and on in unhurried repetition,
ding … whirr-whirr … whump, ding … whirr-whirr … pause.

The sounds from the door irritated everything that already hurt, like a thumb on a bruise, so that his jaw gave an extra throb every time the heavy door rammed into the plastic bucket. It was like a lighthouse of pain, flashing regularly out of some private inner darkness.

“Now nobody comes.”

“This is not going to be Islam's finest hour,” Jack Liffey managed to say. “There's babies out there. There's even a lot of devout Moslems.”

The man glanced around at the boom box and then back at Jack Liffey with a flat panicky look in his eyes, as if part of his mind were somewhere else.

“You fucking people kill babies in all the wars you fight against us. You say you got smart bombs, but they're not so smart. So mine's not smart either.”

“We're not at war, man.”

Wind yanked and fluffed the robe the man wore. The elevator door went on and on, like a madman set a single task:
ding … whirr-whirr … whump, ding.

“Course we are. You been sending armies to beat on us ever since the Crusades.”

From somewhere there was a faint whistle like a piccolo, the Santa Anas tootling over some antenna on the building, punctuated by the elevator's indefatigable
whump, ding.

“Listen, I'm just speaking for myself here, not America or anything else.” Jack Liffey winced at a sudden spasm of pain. “I don't care what you think of our leaders, I don't like them much myself, but there's a lot of little kids out there who never did a thing to you and your people.”

The man took two quick steps and plucked the boom box off the ledge. He banged it down hard where Jack Liffey could see it. The timer in its little window said 11:56. The radio fizzed away softly, the volume turned to minimum.

“No stopping now! Twelve o'clock noon!”

“Oh, shit.” This was absolutely real. Up until that instant, it had still been inconceivable, like the bomb drills in grammar school, waiting for the lumbering Russian planes that had never come over the horizon. “Man, at least slow it down so we can talk.”

“Shut up.”

Jack Liffey shivered. “Take it apart. You don't need the bomb. You can open the package and throw the powder up in the wind any time you want.”

“I said shut up!” Hassan's jaw set fiercely, and his eyes started to go odd again. The readout flickered to 11:57. Suddenly Jack Liffey resented the accuracy of digital clocks. There wouldn't even be any leeway, no possibility of a few extra seconds after a big hand lined up over a little hand. It would be accurate to the precise digital stinking instant.

“What about you? It'll get you, too.”

“I'm ready!
Allah-u akbar!”

“Calm down, man.”

There was a small noise, like the squeak of a tennis shoe on a slick surface. They both heard it. The man froze and then half-turned, his robe billowing like a big nesting bird.

He threw his head back and started chanting something in Arabic. Jack Liffey thought of lunging for the boom box, but what would he do if he got it? The top was so sealed with wads of duct tape, he would never get it open in time. And for all he knew, flicking the off switch would trigger the charge instantly. He seemed to remember Robert Johnson's suggesting something like that. His attention switched to his immediate surroundings. Wind. Brightness. Threat. The elevator door seemed to be banging a lot slower, though he figured it was just time itself slowing to a crawl. He certainly hoped so.

11:58. Jack Liffey felt himself go jittery with something approaching panic, even a peculiar sensation of sexual arousal, clouding his perceptions. Two minutes to stop this bomb. It might not even be very dangerous, but how could he take the risk? It wasn't a task he wanted on his plate, and there was nothing he could see to do.