Chapter 31/32/33
Chapters Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, & Thirty-Three
Mon/August/2008 07:00 AM
Chapter 31 -
Up On The Roof
It was Ransom and two other guys. Gomez and Lucifer. Brick had worked with both men before.
The guys back at headquarters, the ones who’d thought up the “Agent Butterfingers” title, were always quick to test out nicknames on the newcomers. When Lucifer first joined up two years ago, they’d tried to nickname him “Lucy.” When they saw the way he handled a gun, they quickly changed it to “Luke.”
Where Luke was serious, and above all things, humorless about his name, Gomez was the jokester, more than adept at his job, but never overwhelmed by the situations their line of work got them into. He also had a penchant for eating marshmallow circus peanuts, and kept the pockets of his vest and cargo pants stuffed with them.
They took the elevator to the top of the north wing, where it was just a one story climb to the roof. The smoke from the construction site fire was thick in the air as they opened the hatch and stepped out onto the gravel and tar roof. The fire was under control now, but the smoke and fumes it had created were hanging in the stagnant air.
“Christ, man! It stinks out here,” Gomez muttered.
Ransom pulled out the field print ups of Murray’s plans - both an overhead view, and a series of smaller pages with cross sections of the buildings. Since the hospital and the medical center had been build in sections over the past seventy years, each building was both a snapshot of the architectural tastes of its particular decade and an illustration of the financial and service needs as perceived by the university’s board of directors at the time of construction. As a result, every building was a three dimensional, very tangible economic bar column. In short, none of the rooftops were the same level, which meant getting from one end of the hospital to the other was going to be a bitch, but with the inside route rigged up like a dirty bomb version of Mouse Trap, this was the only way to get into the guts of the Health Sciences Building and start cutting out the bad guys.
“How the hell are we supposed to get from here to over there?” Gomez asked, pointing a finger to the far end of the complex.
“Lots of jumping onto hard concrete. Some leaping over chasms.” Ransom replied.
“Sounds like fun,” Luke responded.
The first connection between wings wasn’t that bad, maybe an eight foot drop from one roof to the next. Luke uncoiled a thin roll of black wire and fished it through the end of a small, slick grappling hook. He wrapped the rig around his chest, twisting the ends of the hook under the cable to the side of his right hip.
“Might as well get started,” he growled.
Then, without another word, he turned, flexed his legs, one knee cracking audibly, and took off running. At the edge of the roof he tucked into a squat, sprang up into the air, and leapt onto the next roof, where he landed with a muffled thud, stumbling and falling to his knees, then quickly jumping back to his feet.
Gomez turned to Ransom, flashing him a look of comical panic.
“Oh man, at least my girl likes tending to my wounds. This is gonna hurt.”
Ransom nodded, trying to hide his fear. Then the two of them ran for the edge of the roof, hurled themselves up into the air, and glanced down over the edge of the building at the crowd down below. For a moment they seemed to hover in the air. Then they crashed down, a Tasmanian Devil cloud of tumbling equipment and flailing limbs. The two of them climbed back to their feet, picked off the pieces of roofing and bird crap, and took off running to catch up with Luke.
Chapter 32 - Bottom Drawer Answers
They moved the group into the glassed in room in the back of the lab. For some reason the change of location made Raj especially mouselike. His left hand was constantly creeping to the back of his neck, where scratched up to his scalp before suddenly dropping down and clasping his right hand. Jeff watched this display a half dozen times until he finally spoke up.
“What the hell are you doing, Gupta? Why are you so nervous?”
Raj didn’t say anything, but swallowed visibly.
“For Christ’s sake, just say something!” Jeff yelled.
“This is the staging area.” Raj muttered.
“Staging area?” Nina asked.
“For the project,” Gupta answered. “This is the room where we tested the formula on the animals.”
Jeff took a deep breath. “And I’m sure we’re not talking flea and tick formula, right?”
“No,” Raj said calmly. “And before you ask, we’re not talking about a cure for that virus either. That never worked out. The research pinwheeled off in a different direction, something very much outside my field.”
Jeff stared at him. His mouth tightened.
Raj continued, “It was more of a... weapon. If put into the right hands. It could just as easily be used to wipe out carriers of the infection. Instead of hoping the virus would burn itself out, thereby bringing about its own demise, this would act to speed things along.”
“The whole God thing,” Jeff said.
“Maybe,” Gupta nodded. “Certainly in the wrong hands I’d say that might be a possibility.”
“An inevitability,” Renoir muttered.
Nina looked up. “So that canister?”
“That’s it,” Raj whispered. “Most likely, your friend is dead.”
Nina and Jeff fell silent.
The people scattered around the edges of the room were whispering to one another or crying softly. Others sat and stared, mentally removing themselves from their current situation.
“If we get out of here. When we get out of here,” Jeff said in a slow, deliberate voice. “Your career is over. I’ll do everything in my power to be sure you go to jail for this.”
“That’s the least of my concerns now,” Raj replied.
“So how does it work?” Renoir asked. His voice was growing weaker as time went on.
Jeff looked at the older man. In the hour or so that he’d seen him, Renoir’s face and hands had turned about ten shades lighter. His face was glazed with a mist of cold sweat. His lips were pale. The blood loss was taking its toll.
“The formula is delivered in a gaseous state. It acts on contact, whether inhaled through the lungs or transferred to the nervous system through physical contact with the skin, within a few moments of exposure, cells, every cell, almost instantaneously deteriorates and breaks down.”
“And I’m sure that’s not pretty,” Jeff muttered.
Raj shook his head. “But it acts too quickly for the subject to feel any pain.”
“I’m sure you’d like to believe that,” Jeff continued. “Makes it easier on you.”
“Not that that’s a consideration,” Renoir added. “He’s never exactly been the most humane researcher in our department.”
“In what range does this concoction of yours take effect?” Nina interrupted.
Raj looked away from the men, turned to Nina and responding in a slightly condescending tone. “If it’s in the air in a self contained environment, like this room, the range is virtually unlimited. Larger areas may bring partial exposure, but the effects are still lethal. The question of a safe distance is virtually irrelevant.”
“So, I’ll just say what you’re worrying about. What we’re all worrying about then,” Jeff said. “You think they’re gonna kill us.”
Raj said nothing.
“Any idea what we can do about it?” Jeff asked.
Raj glanced through the glass at the gunmen in the next room, then he turned and looked towards the hostages lined up against the back wall. Satisfied that no one else was watching he reached down to the a drawer near the bottom of the lab bench and slowly pulled it open. Two metal canisters rolled from the back of the drawer forward, clinking against one another as they rolled to a stop.
Chapter 33 - Forks
Ransom was hurting by the time they reached the west wing of the hospital.
This was something new.
Time was, he could run across three football field length rooftops, jump down from any number of gravel covered rooftops, climb up just as many brick walls and AC systems, and still not break a sweat. Now he was definitely in some pain.
Was it was getting time to start thinking of settling down, maybe take a desk job, squire a serious lady friend, like Victoria, or that chick Morgan? Maybe it was, maybe it was.
Still, the last ten or fifteen minutes had been a lot of fun, and now his adrenaline was pumping to beat the band, so he might hold off on the desk job for now, stick with the exciting work a little bit longer. Victoria and Morgan were another matter, whichever one got to him first, that was good enough for him. Which reminded him of his onion tartlet; it was after all “seal the deal night,” and he still had a lot of prep work to wrap up when this whole situation was resolved. His mouth was watering in anticipation, hot, delicious anticipation. His only hope was that Victoria’s performance would live up to that of his tartlet, it would be some tight competition.
“You ready for this?”
“You bet your ass I am,” Ransom answered without hesitation, the tip of his tongue tickling the corner of his mouth.
“Uh, don’t look at me that way man,” Gomez responded. “You’re freaking me out.”
Ransom snapped to attention. Stop thinking about the tartlet, Ransom!
“I meant I was ready to move in and get this thing done.”
“We all clear on the battle plan?” Luke asked.
“Not a bit,” Gomez muttered.
Luke pulled out a print out of Murray’s plans and flipped to the second page. “Assuming these guys have rigged all the exterior and adjoining doors, our best best is to come in through the ventilation housing on the roof-”
“Goddammit!” Ransom muttered.
“What?” Luke asked.
“It’s just so clichéd. I was trying to avoid the air ducts, they always do that in the movies. You know that never works.”
“We don’t go in through the ducts. We just get into the building through the exhaust fans for the ventilation system, then we pop out a panel on the inside and go through the maintenance accesses above the top floor.”
“And how to we get down to where these guys are standing, rubbing their hands together and cackling,” Gomez asked.
Luke ran his hand over to a cross section diagram of the building. He stopped on a glass enclosed stairwell at the southeast corner. “To get downstairs we’re gonna take the express route, open the hatch above the back stairs, hitch a rig to the cross beam, and repel down down the middle of the stairwell as quickly as possible without cracking our heads on the handrails.”
“Then what?”
“Then we find this kid and see if he can show us around.” Ransom answered.
The three of them looked at the plans one more time, then exchanged glances.
Ransom nodded his head. “Let’s do it.”
Luke pulled out a Zippo sized gadget, flipped open the top, and exposed a small, two pronged metal fork, which he lifted to one corner of the ventilation housing, and fit into a matching set of eyes on the top of one of the fastening bolts. He pressed his thumb against the back of the tool, and a tiny motor quickly spun the fork around, twirling the bolt free in seconds. He did this for each of the remaining bolts and tipped the cover free. Gomez and Ransom helped him lower it silently to the rooftop. With the cover free, the hot air from the exhaust system began swirling around them. Ransom looked in through the metal screens and saw two massive fan blades whirling about inside.
“What do we do about those?” He began, but was cut short as Luke pulled open the breaker panel on the side of the exposed ducting, studied the inside fleetingly, and jammed another fork shaped tool between two circuits, which immediately shorted out the system, sending up of plume of smoke.
“How many of those fork things have you got?” Ransom asked.
“Plenty,” Luke replied as pulled the cover from the fan, moved the blade to the side with his foot, and leaned his back against the metal ducting. “See you inside.” He pulled his arms against his chest and slid into the darkness.
Ransom and Gomez listened carefully for a thump or a muffled scream.
Gomez looked at Ransom a little warily. This was the part of the operation where Brick was often known to get a case of the… butterfingers, or at least, that was the rumor. Gomez knew the guy’s reputation in the department, and especially in this type of operation, was top notch, but there was a part of him that couldn’t help but worry about getting tripped up if the guy had one of his Inspector Clouseau incidents in the middle of the job. Oh hell, what was he worrying about? Luke was the one who would probably end up running into trouble: He was humorless, and he was mechanical, and at this moment, God only knew where he was slipping and sliding to inside the building ventilation system. After a few moments, when no sounds of panic or stifled agony echoed up to them from the access hatch, Gomez and Ransom each climbed up to the entrance of the system and followed Luke’s example.
It was Ransom and two other guys. Gomez and Lucifer. Brick had worked with both men before.
The guys back at headquarters, the ones who’d thought up the “Agent Butterfingers” title, were always quick to test out nicknames on the newcomers. When Lucifer first joined up two years ago, they’d tried to nickname him “Lucy.” When they saw the way he handled a gun, they quickly changed it to “Luke.”
Where Luke was serious, and above all things, humorless about his name, Gomez was the jokester, more than adept at his job, but never overwhelmed by the situations their line of work got them into. He also had a penchant for eating marshmallow circus peanuts, and kept the pockets of his vest and cargo pants stuffed with them.
They took the elevator to the top of the north wing, where it was just a one story climb to the roof. The smoke from the construction site fire was thick in the air as they opened the hatch and stepped out onto the gravel and tar roof. The fire was under control now, but the smoke and fumes it had created were hanging in the stagnant air.
“Christ, man! It stinks out here,” Gomez muttered.
Ransom pulled out the field print ups of Murray’s plans - both an overhead view, and a series of smaller pages with cross sections of the buildings. Since the hospital and the medical center had been build in sections over the past seventy years, each building was both a snapshot of the architectural tastes of its particular decade and an illustration of the financial and service needs as perceived by the university’s board of directors at the time of construction. As a result, every building was a three dimensional, very tangible economic bar column. In short, none of the rooftops were the same level, which meant getting from one end of the hospital to the other was going to be a bitch, but with the inside route rigged up like a dirty bomb version of Mouse Trap, this was the only way to get into the guts of the Health Sciences Building and start cutting out the bad guys.
“How the hell are we supposed to get from here to over there?” Gomez asked, pointing a finger to the far end of the complex.
“Lots of jumping onto hard concrete. Some leaping over chasms.” Ransom replied.
“Sounds like fun,” Luke responded.
The first connection between wings wasn’t that bad, maybe an eight foot drop from one roof to the next. Luke uncoiled a thin roll of black wire and fished it through the end of a small, slick grappling hook. He wrapped the rig around his chest, twisting the ends of the hook under the cable to the side of his right hip.
“Might as well get started,” he growled.
Then, without another word, he turned, flexed his legs, one knee cracking audibly, and took off running. At the edge of the roof he tucked into a squat, sprang up into the air, and leapt onto the next roof, where he landed with a muffled thud, stumbling and falling to his knees, then quickly jumping back to his feet.
Gomez turned to Ransom, flashing him a look of comical panic.
“Oh man, at least my girl likes tending to my wounds. This is gonna hurt.”
Ransom nodded, trying to hide his fear. Then the two of them ran for the edge of the roof, hurled themselves up into the air, and glanced down over the edge of the building at the crowd down below. For a moment they seemed to hover in the air. Then they crashed down, a Tasmanian Devil cloud of tumbling equipment and flailing limbs. The two of them climbed back to their feet, picked off the pieces of roofing and bird crap, and took off running to catch up with Luke.
Chapter 32 - Bottom Drawer Answers
They moved the group into the glassed in room in the back of the lab. For some reason the change of location made Raj especially mouselike. His left hand was constantly creeping to the back of his neck, where scratched up to his scalp before suddenly dropping down and clasping his right hand. Jeff watched this display a half dozen times until he finally spoke up.
“What the hell are you doing, Gupta? Why are you so nervous?”
Raj didn’t say anything, but swallowed visibly.
“For Christ’s sake, just say something!” Jeff yelled.
“This is the staging area.” Raj muttered.
“Staging area?” Nina asked.
“For the project,” Gupta answered. “This is the room where we tested the formula on the animals.”
Jeff took a deep breath. “And I’m sure we’re not talking flea and tick formula, right?”
“No,” Raj said calmly. “And before you ask, we’re not talking about a cure for that virus either. That never worked out. The research pinwheeled off in a different direction, something very much outside my field.”
Jeff stared at him. His mouth tightened.
Raj continued, “It was more of a... weapon. If put into the right hands. It could just as easily be used to wipe out carriers of the infection. Instead of hoping the virus would burn itself out, thereby bringing about its own demise, this would act to speed things along.”
“The whole God thing,” Jeff said.
“Maybe,” Gupta nodded. “Certainly in the wrong hands I’d say that might be a possibility.”
“An inevitability,” Renoir muttered.
Nina looked up. “So that canister?”
“That’s it,” Raj whispered. “Most likely, your friend is dead.”
Nina and Jeff fell silent.
The people scattered around the edges of the room were whispering to one another or crying softly. Others sat and stared, mentally removing themselves from their current situation.
“If we get out of here. When we get out of here,” Jeff said in a slow, deliberate voice. “Your career is over. I’ll do everything in my power to be sure you go to jail for this.”
“That’s the least of my concerns now,” Raj replied.
“So how does it work?” Renoir asked. His voice was growing weaker as time went on.
Jeff looked at the older man. In the hour or so that he’d seen him, Renoir’s face and hands had turned about ten shades lighter. His face was glazed with a mist of cold sweat. His lips were pale. The blood loss was taking its toll.
“The formula is delivered in a gaseous state. It acts on contact, whether inhaled through the lungs or transferred to the nervous system through physical contact with the skin, within a few moments of exposure, cells, every cell, almost instantaneously deteriorates and breaks down.”
“And I’m sure that’s not pretty,” Jeff muttered.
Raj shook his head. “But it acts too quickly for the subject to feel any pain.”
“I’m sure you’d like to believe that,” Jeff continued. “Makes it easier on you.”
“Not that that’s a consideration,” Renoir added. “He’s never exactly been the most humane researcher in our department.”
“In what range does this concoction of yours take effect?” Nina interrupted.
Raj looked away from the men, turned to Nina and responding in a slightly condescending tone. “If it’s in the air in a self contained environment, like this room, the range is virtually unlimited. Larger areas may bring partial exposure, but the effects are still lethal. The question of a safe distance is virtually irrelevant.”
“So, I’ll just say what you’re worrying about. What we’re all worrying about then,” Jeff said. “You think they’re gonna kill us.”
Raj said nothing.
“Any idea what we can do about it?” Jeff asked.
Raj glanced through the glass at the gunmen in the next room, then he turned and looked towards the hostages lined up against the back wall. Satisfied that no one else was watching he reached down to the a drawer near the bottom of the lab bench and slowly pulled it open. Two metal canisters rolled from the back of the drawer forward, clinking against one another as they rolled to a stop.
Chapter 33 - Forks
Ransom was hurting by the time they reached the west wing of the hospital.
This was something new.
Time was, he could run across three football field length rooftops, jump down from any number of gravel covered rooftops, climb up just as many brick walls and AC systems, and still not break a sweat. Now he was definitely in some pain.
Was it was getting time to start thinking of settling down, maybe take a desk job, squire a serious lady friend, like Victoria, or that chick Morgan? Maybe it was, maybe it was.
Still, the last ten or fifteen minutes had been a lot of fun, and now his adrenaline was pumping to beat the band, so he might hold off on the desk job for now, stick with the exciting work a little bit longer. Victoria and Morgan were another matter, whichever one got to him first, that was good enough for him. Which reminded him of his onion tartlet; it was after all “seal the deal night,” and he still had a lot of prep work to wrap up when this whole situation was resolved. His mouth was watering in anticipation, hot, delicious anticipation. His only hope was that Victoria’s performance would live up to that of his tartlet, it would be some tight competition.
“You ready for this?”
“You bet your ass I am,” Ransom answered without hesitation, the tip of his tongue tickling the corner of his mouth.
“Uh, don’t look at me that way man,” Gomez responded. “You’re freaking me out.”
Ransom snapped to attention. Stop thinking about the tartlet, Ransom!
“I meant I was ready to move in and get this thing done.”
“We all clear on the battle plan?” Luke asked.
“Not a bit,” Gomez muttered.
Luke pulled out a print out of Murray’s plans and flipped to the second page. “Assuming these guys have rigged all the exterior and adjoining doors, our best best is to come in through the ventilation housing on the roof-”
“Goddammit!” Ransom muttered.
“What?” Luke asked.
“It’s just so clichéd. I was trying to avoid the air ducts, they always do that in the movies. You know that never works.”
“We don’t go in through the ducts. We just get into the building through the exhaust fans for the ventilation system, then we pop out a panel on the inside and go through the maintenance accesses above the top floor.”
“And how to we get down to where these guys are standing, rubbing their hands together and cackling,” Gomez asked.
Luke ran his hand over to a cross section diagram of the building. He stopped on a glass enclosed stairwell at the southeast corner. “To get downstairs we’re gonna take the express route, open the hatch above the back stairs, hitch a rig to the cross beam, and repel down down the middle of the stairwell as quickly as possible without cracking our heads on the handrails.”
“Then what?”
“Then we find this kid and see if he can show us around.” Ransom answered.
The three of them looked at the plans one more time, then exchanged glances.
Ransom nodded his head. “Let’s do it.”
Luke pulled out a Zippo sized gadget, flipped open the top, and exposed a small, two pronged metal fork, which he lifted to one corner of the ventilation housing, and fit into a matching set of eyes on the top of one of the fastening bolts. He pressed his thumb against the back of the tool, and a tiny motor quickly spun the fork around, twirling the bolt free in seconds. He did this for each of the remaining bolts and tipped the cover free. Gomez and Ransom helped him lower it silently to the rooftop. With the cover free, the hot air from the exhaust system began swirling around them. Ransom looked in through the metal screens and saw two massive fan blades whirling about inside.
“What do we do about those?” He began, but was cut short as Luke pulled open the breaker panel on the side of the exposed ducting, studied the inside fleetingly, and jammed another fork shaped tool between two circuits, which immediately shorted out the system, sending up of plume of smoke.
“How many of those fork things have you got?” Ransom asked.
“Plenty,” Luke replied as pulled the cover from the fan, moved the blade to the side with his foot, and leaned his back against the metal ducting. “See you inside.” He pulled his arms against his chest and slid into the darkness.
Ransom and Gomez listened carefully for a thump or a muffled scream.
Gomez looked at Ransom a little warily. This was the part of the operation where Brick was often known to get a case of the… butterfingers, or at least, that was the rumor. Gomez knew the guy’s reputation in the department, and especially in this type of operation, was top notch, but there was a part of him that couldn’t help but worry about getting tripped up if the guy had one of his Inspector Clouseau incidents in the middle of the job. Oh hell, what was he worrying about? Luke was the one who would probably end up running into trouble: He was humorless, and he was mechanical, and at this moment, God only knew where he was slipping and sliding to inside the building ventilation system. After a few moments, when no sounds of panic or stifled agony echoed up to them from the access hatch, Gomez and Ransom each climbed up to the entrance of the system and followed Luke’s example.