NYPD Red (20 page)

WE FOUND THE halfway point of the co-ax cable and wrapped it four times around the terrace railing. Kylie took one end, I took the other, and we braided them together.

I found a pair of work gloves in Dino’s studio and put them on. Then the two of us grabbed the end of the cable, backed up into the living room, and pulled as hard as we could.

It held.

“Ready?” she said.

I threw one leg over the railing.

“Eleven minutes. Go,” she said.

I swung my other leg over, jammed my toes into the narrow space under the bottom rail, and lowered the cable. It dropped at least five feet past Kylie’s terrace. I grabbed on for dear life, wrapped my left foot around the cable for stability, looked up to the sky, and whispered the last few words of the Policeman’s Prayer.

Please, Lord, through it all, be at my side.

There was no time for the rest. I lifted my right foot and stepped off into space.

The cable snapped taut. Once again, it held. And there I was, dangling eight stories above lower Manhattan, my life depending on all the skills I had learned in Coach Coviello’s gym class twenty years ago.

I relaxed my death grip and began to walk monkey-style, keeping my knees bent and my hands down, using my legs to keep me from sliding.

I heard screams from the street below. Then another one from above: “Zach, don’t look down! Focus.”

I focused. I looked straight ahead. All I could see was red brick. I moved slowly, hand over hand, inch by inch, brick by brick.

And then I saw a glimmer of glass—the top of Kylie’s terrace door. Another few feet and I was looking into her living room. Finally, my left foot connected with something solid. I lowered my right foot. Contact.

I looked down. I was standing on the seventh floor terrace railing.

I inhaled deeply, blew out hard, and with both legs on the safe side of the rail, I lowered myself to the terrace floor.

“I made it,” I said, looking up.

“I’m coming down,” Kylie said. “Nine and a half minutes.”

The glass door was unlocked. I took off my gloves, slid it open, and stepped carefully into the living room.

The Skype image I had seen on Kylie’s cell phone had been horrendous enough. But being in the same room with Spence—naked, bleeding, and taped to a chair—was that much worse. I’m not sure Kylie could have handled it on her own, which is why I lied to her about taking a demo course at Quantico.

“Spence, it’s Zach,” I said. “Don’t even turn around.”

He let out a long moan.

I stood behind him and stared at the front door. I had been right about the booby trap. Five feet to the right of the doorjamb, a block of C4 was molded to a table leg. There was a wire running from the doorknob to the charge.

Like a lot of cops, I had a few hours of basic post-9/11 bomb training under my belt. I didn’t know a lot, but I knew that if Kylie had opened the front door, it would have triggered the detonator, and the three of us would have been blown apart in an instant.

Spence couldn’t get out of the apartment until someone disarmed it. I sure as hell hoped I was that someone, because right now I was the only option he had left.

MICKEY HAD BEEN right—rigging the explosives was not complicated. But it sure as hell wasn’t easy peasy. Sweat poured off The Chameleon’s face, and the white shirt under his waiter’s uniform was soaked through as he inserted the remote detonator into the C4 on the starboard side of the yacht.

“One down, two to go,” he said to the semiconscious seaman who was trussed, gagged, and secured to a six-inch-wide stainless-steel pipe. “According to my friend Mickey, all it takes is three perfectly placed charges, and you can sink this tub without a ripple. Let’s hope he was right, God rest his soul.”

The man pulled hard at his bonds, straining the veins on his neck and forehead.

“Don’t do that,” Gabriel said. “You’ll give yourself a stroke or some kind of a brain hemorrhage. Relax. Stick around for the fireworks.”

Connor stopped squirming.

“Good,” The Chameleon said. “You know, if you and I had met under different circumstances—I don’t know, like in a bar or something—I bet we’d have hit it off great. We’ve got a lot in common. You’re down here in the goddamn boiler room and all the stars are up on deck. That’s the kind of shit I have to put up with. I’m either a guy reading a newspaper in the back of a bus, or a businessman getting out of an elevator, or a dead soldier on a battlefield. Never the hero. Never the big star. You know what I’m talking about?”

The man’s only response was the tear that streamed silently over his duct-taped mouth and onto the floor.

“I know,” The Chameleon said. “It’s a crying shame the way they treat us. But that’s all going to change. Tomorrow morning’s newspaper, you and me—we’re going to be headliners.”

SPENCE’S BREATHING WAS labored. One look at his bloodied face and I knew why. His mouth was taped shut, and his nose had been shattered. This time my little pocketknife was more than enough. I pried out the blade and cut through the layers of duct tape behind his head.

I had no time to be delicate. “This is going to hurt,” I said and yanked the tape off hard, taking hair and skin with it.

Spence hungrily sucked in a mouthful of air. “Bomb to the right of the front door,” he gasped.

“I see it,” I said, walking over to it. “Not very sophisticated.”

“Zach, Spence, what’s going on in there?” It was Kylie on the other side of the door.

“He’s okay,” I said, which was seriously stretching the truth. “Hang on. I’m trying to disarm the booby trap. In fact, I want you to stand in the stairwell…just in case.”

“I thought you said you knew what you were doing?” she said.

“I do,” I lied. “It’s just a precaution. Now, back off, dammit.”

“I’m going. Hurry up. We have less than eight minutes.”

Spence’s face was contorted with pain. I had no idea how he might help, but I was out of my element, and since I was about to do something that could kill us both, I figured two heads were better than one.

“Spence, can you focus?” I said. “I need you to track my thinking.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay, the front door is the trigger. Opening it pulls the trip wire. Trip wire activates the blasting cap.”

“And then we’re dead. Makes sense.”

“Now logic would dictate that if I pinch the wire and cut the piece closest to the door…”

“You take the door out of the equation,” Spence said. “No trigger.”

I pinched the trip wire between my thumb and index finger.

“Do it,” he said.

I cut the wire. One half fell to the floor. I opened my fingers and let go of the other half.

“We’re still here,” he said.

I opened the door and yelled out for Kylie.

She ran down the hall, then stepped into the apartment cautiously, eyes glued to her husband.

“Don’t go in any farther,” I said. “When Benoit Skyped us, the block of C4 he held up had a timer. The one I disabled doesn’t. There’s got to be another bomb somewhere.”

“We don’t have time to look for it,” Kylie said. “Let’s just get Spence out of here.”

“You can’t,” Spence said.

“Yes, we can,” Kylie said. “We’ve got six minutes and twelve seconds, and we’re getting you out of this building if we have to carry you out stark naked, chair and all.”

Spence’s body started to tremble. “You can’t get me out,” he repeated.

“Why?”

His eyes stared straight down at his feet. “That’s why.”

I followed his gaze. I hadn’t seen it before. Probably because there was almost no blood—just small dark stains where Spence’s feet had been nailed to the floor.

“OH MY GOD,” Kylie said, kneeling down at Spence’s feet.

“He had a nail gun,” Spence said.

“We have to pry you loose,” she said, putting a hand on his left foot.

Spence’s head and shoulders jerked back hard, and he let out a gut-wrenching scream. “Don’t—don’t touch. Please.”

“Spence, we have to get the nails out.”

“No time,” he said, breathing rapidly through the fog of fear and pain. “Just get yourself out.”

The reality of what was happening was incomprehensible, yet Spence seemed ready to accept it.

Kylie and I weren’t.

“Spence,” I said. “Where did Benoit go after he started the timer?”

“Kitch-en,” he said, forcing the word out in two syllables separated by a gasp for air.

Kylie and I both ran to the kitchen.

It felt like déjà vu. Only a few minutes ago I had been flinging the cabinet doors open in Dino’s apartment. Now Kylie and I were doing the same thing in hers.

“I’ll do the top. You get the ones on the bottom,” she said.

I dropped to a squat and started opening the lower cabinets.

“Clear, clear, clear, clear,” Kylie said every time she opened another door and found nothing.

And then I saw it. The top of my head was just at countertop level, and I caught a flicker of red. It was the same glowing red light I had seen when Benoit started the countdown timer. It was coming through the glass door of a sleek, stainless-steel Breville toaster oven.

“Kylie, I got it,” I said, standing up.

“We only have two minutes. Can you disarm it?”

“Maybe if I had two days. I might have exaggerated my bomb experience,” I said. “I can’t even take a chance on opening the oven door. It could be rigged to blow. We have to ditch it—the whole thing.”

“Well, we can’t throw it out the window,” Kylie said. “God knows how many people we’d kill.”

“Do you have a safe?” I said. “That would contain some of the explosion.”

She shook her head. “What about the basement?” she said. “It’s like a bunker down there.”

“Not enough time. Even if your elevator managed to get us down there, we’d never get out.”

“We don’t need the elevator,” she said. “Grab it and follow me.”

The toaster oven was freestanding, about the size of a small microwave, and unplugged. I picked it up and followed Kylie.

“Garbage chute,” she said, bolting out the front door.

The incinerator room was just past the elevator. We went in, and Kylie pulled the chute door open.

As soon as she did, we both realized her mistake. The door was hinged at the bottom, and the hopper was designed to drop down only about sixty degrees. Plastic garbage bags could be squished and squeezed to cram down the chute. Stainless-steel toaster ovens couldn’t.

“Pull hard on the door,” I said. “Rip it right out of the wall.”

Kylie sat on the floor, grabbed the handle, and put all her weight on it.

“It won’t budge,” she said. “The bomb is too damn big to shove through the door.”

I stared at the red glow. We had ninety seconds.

“GET ME A sledgehammer,” I said.

“I don’t have a sledge—no, I have something. Give me a second,” she said, running back to her apartment.

“I can give you seventy-two seconds,” I yelled back after her. “And then we’re toast.”

I watched the timer count down to 1:00, 0:59, 0:58, and I wondered how much C4 Benoit could stuff into the guts of a toaster oven. From what I knew about his style, he wouldn’t skimp on the ingredients.

Kylie came back carrying a twenty-pound dumbbell. “Best I can do,” she said. “Hold the door open.”

I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than Kylie, but I wasn’t about to debate which one of us should be wielding the dumbbell. We had only thirty-seven seconds, and I figured whatever she lacked in brute strength, she would make up for with pure adrenaline.

I set the toaster oven on the floor, pulled down the chute door as far as the hinge would go, then grabbed the handle to hold the door in place.

“I’m hoping you’re as accurate with a dumbbell as you are with a Glock,” I said. “Try not to hit me. We’ve got thirty seconds. When we get down to ten, we should run like hell for your apartment.”

So we can die in there with Spence, because as sure as shit, when this blows, the blast radius is going to go a lot farther than your living room.

Kylie brought the dumbbell down hard. The force reverberated up my arm, but the door didn’t budge.

“Twenty-five seconds,” I said.

She swung it again.

The door hung on tight.

“Hit it again,” I said. “Third time’s the charm.”

I was right. The door gave. Not a lot, but it gave.

“It’s loose,” I yelled. “Again.”

She lowered the boom, and this time chunks of cinder block fell to the floor.

“One more time. Eighteen seconds.”

Kylie raised the dumbbell high and brought it down with a loud grunt worthy of Serena Williams.

The steel door hit the floor with a clatter.

I picked up the toaster oven as Kylie lashed out at the cinder block wall again and again.

It crumbled, leaving a gaping hole where the door had been. I could see the garbage chute. It was round. And wide.

“Out of the way!” I yelled.

I took one last look at the clock and dropped Kylie and Spence’s ultrachic, stainless-steel, countertop toaster-bomb into the abyss.

The window of time for us to get out of the incinerator room had passed.

“Seven seconds!” I yelled. “Hit the dirt.”

She dropped to the floor.

“Six.”

The irony of it all hit me in an instant. If Kylie and I had been able to run back to her apartment, we probably would have had a chance. But here in the incinerator room, we were directly above ground zero.

“Five.”

The bomb would explode in the basement, a fireball would travel up the chute like a cannon shot, and we would both be engulfed in flames. But maybe it didn’t have to be both of us.

“Four.”

We all die sooner or later. I always figured I had till much later, but if it had to be today, there was no place else I’d rather be, and no one else I’d rather be with.

I threw myself on top of her and covered her body with mine.

“Three. Two. One.”