A Picture of Guilt (34 page)

“What is it?” Nick’s voice was tight.

Clarence pressed a key, bringing up a screen with columns of three-digit numbers. He tapped another key, and a different column came up. He sucked in a breath.

“Well?”

“It’s another signal.”

LeJeune shook his head. “It can’t be.”

“It is. On the same frequency as the crib.”

“But we’re miles away from the crib.”

“That may be, but I’ve got a signal registering three on my S-meter.”

They exchanged looks.

“What does that mean?” I asked quietly.

Neither of them answered.

“What are you saying, Clarence?” I asked, my voice louder.

He turned around. “Another signal, tuned to the same frequency as the device on the crib, was just transmitted—from somewhere around here.”

“But we’re heading west on the Eisenhower. Away from the lake.”

“I know.”

Another signal. “Does that mean there’s another…” I hugged my knees, trying not to panic. My throat suddenly felt full of dirt. We were on the Eisenhower. Going away from the crib.

The Eisenhower.

Something about that picked at my brain. Something I should know.

The snow swirled up, then down, then circled in a vortex of its own design. I couldn’t see farther than a few feet. The Eisenhower. The complicated cloverleaf design connecting the Eisenhower to the Dan Ryan and the Kennedy. Could that be—

“Oh God!” I turned to look at LeJeune and Clarence. “Dale Reedy has a line of sight from her window to the Eisenhower! I saw it from her window.”

There was dead silence. Then everything happened at once.

“Holy shit!” Horror spread across Clarence’s face. “Fuck it, Drummer! You gotta stop the team at Great Lakes! Now!”

LeJeune dug out his cell phone and started punching in numbers.

“Why?” I asked shakily. “What’s going on?”

“Because—because—” Clarence started rubbing his palms up and down his thighs, gazing wildly around. “Christ! Shit. We may have already set things in motion. Jesus, man. You gotta get through.”

“Clarence, why? What’s going on?” He kept rubbing his hand up and down his leg. My heart thundered in my chest. Anxiety was contagious.

I grabbed one of his hands. The rubbing stopped. “Tell me.”

He stared at me. His eyes looked haunted. “We haven’t had time to analyze the system. We don’t know how it’s programmed. There might be a code that needs to be entered when you disconnect the system.” He let out a shuddering breath. “Which means if there is a second device, and if the right code wasn’t entered…” His voice trailed off.

“Which means what, Clarence? What are you trying to say?”

He took another long breath. “If those guys mess with the head end at Great Lakes, and they don’t have the right code, the device could blow. The other bomb will go off.”

Blood shouted in my ears. I whirled around to Nick. His cell was in his ear, his face ashen.

Nobody said a word while we waited for his cell to connect. I held my breath. It felt like hours. We heard fast, repetitive beeps.

A false busy. LeJeune snapped it off and tried again. Snowflakes danced and spun past the car. Again, a false busy.

“Fuck.” LeJeune threw the phone down. “We gotta head back to the Loop.”

“In this shit?” Clarence motioned outside. “We’ll never make it.”

“We gotta. We can’t let them fuck with the system.”

“How much time do we have?” I asked.

LeJeune didn’t answer.

“Nick?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. They could be in her office already.”

Ice replaced blood in my veins.

LeJeune turned to Clarence. “What can you tell me about the source of the signal? Where’s it coming from?”

“The range of the Doppler is about two miles. The signal could be anywhere within that radius.”

“Can we track it?”

“Hold on.” Clarence crawled to the front seat of the van where he picked up a small black box about the size of a cell phone. A stubby antenna extended through its top, and there was a digital panel on the front.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A frequency finder,” he said.

“I thought you already knew the frequency.”

“We do, but if we happened to be within 100 to 150 feet of the signal, the Scout’ll give me a readout.” He depressed a few buttons, muttering. “Come on. Come on. Gimme a break.” He shook his head. “Nothing.” He put it down. “We’re gonna need at least one more transmission—probably two—to plot it on the Doppler.”

“But that might not be for another six hours,” I said. “What if—”

Clarence cut me off. “Keep tryin’ that phone, Drummer.”

Nick punched Redial. The cords on his neck were stretched taut. Another false busy.

We stared at each other. Panic started to seep through my body. I smelled fear in the van.

LeJeune unzipped his parka. I could see beads of sweat on his brow. He turned to the laptop. “I’m gonna pull up a map.”

Clarence started rubbing his thighs again. “If you can’t connect on your cell, how you gonna get online?”

LeJeune squeezed his hands into fists. “Shit. Where’s the closest exit?”

“Paulina, I think. Near UIC.”

“What else is around here? Clarence? Ellie? Come on. Think. What the fuck is around here?”

“Forget it, man.” Clarence shot him a resigned look. “There’s nothing we can do. Except pray.”

“No.” LeJeune’s face turned hard. “It’s not fucking over. We’re gonna think our way through this. What’s near here? UIC? The United Center? Sears Tower? Come on. Help me out.”

Clarence took his time answering. As if he was just humoring LeJeune. Going through the motions. “I don’t think it’s Sears. The signal looks like it’s slightly south of us. Sears is due east.”

LeJeune frowned. “But you don’t know for sure.”

“Not without another plot point.”

“But if this one was planted before Nine Eleven like the other, all it would have taken is some guy in a gas or phone company uniform. He could have stowed it in the basement. Or the loading dock. Even a parking lot. Like the first Trade Center.” LeJeune bit his lip. “We should send men over there.”

He grabbed the phone, punched in more numbers, and shut his eyes while he waited. I heard the fast beeps. “Goddammit.”

I sat up and rolled my shoulders, trying to shake off some tension. “You know, the fact they planted it on the crib might be significant.”

A small vein on LeJeune’s forehead throbbed. “What do you mean?”

“They wanted to sabotage the water supply. To inflict maximum damage to the infrastructure—as well as people.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe they’re doing the same thing with the other.”

Nick’s eyes widened. “That’s good,
chér
.” He nodded. “Infrastructure. So what kind of infrastructure is out here?”

“Shit man. Everything,” Clarence said. “Electric power. Communications. Highways. Trains.” He ticked them off on his fingers.

“You can see the Eisenhower from Dale Reedy’s window,” I said.

Clarence bolted upright. “Fucking A! The junction! Where the Eisenhower, Dan Ryan, and Kennedy come together!”

“What about it?” LeJeune asked.

“It’s the most heavily used access in and out of the Loop. That blows, you got practically no access to downtown.”

“And if it happened during rush hour…” LeJeune added, his head nodding, “…with thousands of commuters pouring into the city…”

“My God!” I covered my mouth with my hand.

“That’s it.” LeJeune’s eyes caught fire. “Now it makes sense!”

“What?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out why they took a chance on the wind.”

“The wind?”

He hunched forward. “The crib bomb. If the wind was blowing from west to east when they detonated it, most of the radiation would drift out over the lake, not the Loop. It would poison the water, but fewer people would die.”

“So?”

“So…these bastards are vicious. And smart. They’d want to inflict maximum damage.” He nodded again, more to himself than us. “I couldn’t figure it out. I kept wondering whether they had something else up their sleeve. But they must have taken the wind into account—”

“Cross-contamination,” Clarence breathed.

“Yes.” LeJeune slammed a fist into his other palm. “With two, on both sides of the Loop, it doesn’t matter which way the wind blows.”

“The crib’s east, the Eisenhower’s west,” Clarence finished. “They’d have the Loop covered.”

LeJeune and he exchanged looks. Clarence moved to the driver’s seat.

“Where are you going?” LeJeune asked.

“The signal seemed to be just south of us. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to move.”

As we pulled onto the highway, tires swished against snowy asphalt.

LeJeune picked up his cell and dialed one more time. His eyebrows shot up. “It’s going through.” He thrust it against his ear. “Shit man, it’s LeJeune. Where are you?” He listened, then yelled. “No. Don’t touch it. You gotta stop. Right now. We got another signal. There may be a second package!”

I heard the exclamations from his phone, but I was only half listening. Part of my brain was tripping over another connection. It was half there. Buried in my subconscious.

LeJeune was watching me. “What is it,
chér
?”

“I’m not sure. Something you said earlier.”

“I said a lot of things.” He grinned.

I was astonished he could kid around at a time like this. I tried to call back the conversation. Infrastructure. Power. Electricity. Uniforms.

LeJeune went back to his call. He was frowning when he got off. “We have a problem.”

Clarence twisted around.

I sat up straighter.

“You were right, buddy,” LeJeune said. “We disconnected the radio temporarily when we disabled the device on the crib. We reconnected it as soon as we could, but our guys are saying there’s no way to tell whether that altered the sequence of codes. And there’s no time to go into the program to find out.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Disconnecting the system—even for a second—may have alerted the computer that something was different. That the system has been penetrated. Tampered with. As a result, the blast we just heard…” He paused. “…may have tripped the code to detonate.”

My stomach clutched.

“They said it can take about thirty minutes to run through the codes for detonation.” He looked at his watch. “It’s one-seventeen now. And we heard the signal about ten minutes ago.”

“Are you saying we only have twenty minutes to find it?”

“If we’re lucky.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-FIVE

Despair, not necessity, is the mother of invention. I know that now, because it was while I was staring out the van’s window in stunned silence, trying to absorb the fact that life in this city might end, that thousands of people might perish, and that I might be one of them, that it came to me.

It was one of those moments when the future lies in your hands. And you know it. Not one of those times that, in hindsight, turns out to be significant. You know—right as it’s happening—that your actions will have a huge impact. That they might even change the world.

Some people welcome those moments. They feel it’s their destiny. Not me. I felt nothing but terror. I spoke anyway.

“When I was calling scuba diving schools,” I said quietly, “a woman gave me a number for Samir at work. Or at least where he might have worked at one time. When I called it, a 773 area code by the way, the man who answered said it was the maintenance room at People’s Edison.”

No one said anything. Then Clarence drew in a long, slow breath. “There’s a PE substation just south of the junction.”

LeJeune’s mouth tightened. “Let’s go.”

***

We veered off at the next exit, crossed over the highway, and reentered the Eisenhower going the other way. Clarence pushed, but in this weather, we couldn’t go faster than thirty. I checked the dashboard clock. One twenty-one. Four minutes had passed. Sixteen left. I was desperate to hug Rachel, to brush her hair off her forehead one more time. I wondered if I’d have another chance.

LeJeune spent most of the time on his cell, and Clarence concentrated on the road. I found myself measuring my breaths, trying to space them out evenly. Was I subconsciously devising an internal clock? Or hoarding air while I had it?

After what seemed an eternity, I felt the van turn south. I got to my knees and looked out. The van’s headlights caught a small People’s Edison sign at the edge of the road, and we pulled into a field that stretched at least two or three acres. A stand of trees, cloaked in an eerie snow-induced twilight, were in front, their bare branches curled upward as if begging for mercy.

We parked and got out. Through the trees was a forest of steel towers, strung together with thickly coiled wires. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, snow falling softly around them. They seemed almost haphazardly placed. Different shapes, too. Some were traditional towers, each side with steel bracing, but others looked like giant monkey bars you find on a playground. Still others were T-shaped poles.

On the ground between some of the towers were boxy units the size of refrigerators, and perched on nearly everything were strings of what looked like super-sized lightbulbs. Insulators, I discovered, that help attach power lines to their structures. Though the snow muffled much of the sound, the hum of a gazillion volts zipped through overhead lines.

A Chicago patrol car pulled up and parked horizontally across the entrance, its revolving Mars light turning the snow into a veil of pink and blue specks. Within minutes, two more sedans pulled up. Men piled out. LeJeune went over to huddle with them. Another van arrived, and half a dozen men climbed out wearing hazmat suits and masks. Two of them were carrying a boxy piece of equipment that was small enough to fit in a backpack. They looked vaguely familiar.

“NEST,” Clarence said. “Nuclear Emergency Support Team. They were out on the crib.”

“What?”

“They run around patrolling for dirty bombs. They’ve got their sniffing gear with them.”