Hoffner opened the passenger door for Kehoe, then squeezed in behind the wheel. Lucas and Whitaker got in the back. Lucas’s beach clothes—jeans, a pair of Vans slip-ons, and a black V-neck sweater over a T-shirt—didn’t contrast too much against Whitaker’s business casual.
She had been silent for the flight in, but now that they were inches apart and free to speak without headsets, she asked, “So, are you any nicer?” She had her full smile out now, and it looked like she had too many incisors.
“Define nicer.”
“That’s a no.”
The van swung around the helicopter and Lucas watched the faces in the crowd, all turned down the street, cameras up, hoping to capture something that might get them a few more dopamine-generating YouTube hits. Welcome to the future—where everyone wants to be vicariously interesting to the feedback loop of the echo chamber.
Fifth was closed from where they had touched down to two blocks south of the museum—a three-block spread. Traffic control and pedestrian management alone would be a logistical nightmare.
Lucas was no stranger to the mechanics of investigations, but the display of resources was on a level he hadn’t seen before—half of the law enforcement officers in the city had to be on Fifth. Uniformed cops were stationed every ten feet and posted at every door, all dressed like the storm troopers back at the LZ. Besides acting the part of security, they were monitoring the flow of citizens and no doubt making certain that people who didn’t belong here were kept out. Fifth Avenue resembled a major artery in a police state.
Hoffner kept the speed dialed down as he threaded the blacked-out van through emergency vehicles, various official worker bees—mostly of the law enforcement and medical examiner variety—and all manner of equipment. Lucas knew that the reduced pace had to be pushing Whitaker’s blood pressure up; she hated being a passenger almost as much as she hated driving slow.
The ocean liner form of the Guggenheim materialized ahead, a building that opened to derision, evolved into a classic, and was now the location of the incomprehensible.
“You ready?” Whitaker asked.
Lucas wondered if she knew how much meaning was packed into those three syllables.
8
Lucas stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the Wes Anderson geometry of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous public commission. The structure appeared remarkably intact considering the explosion had killed 702 people and incinerated a billion dollars of banana posters and photographs of an America that no longer existed.
The front door and entry windows had been covered with plywood, but the char marks indicated that plenty of bad things had happened inside. An oversize plastic gerbil tube was installed as an air lock, the kind the CDC used out in the field. The sidewalk in front of the main entrance was carpeted with a grid of electric cables, conduit, and Danger! tape. There were bits of glass and garbage strewn about, and a bird was near the air lock, picking at what looked to be insulation.
The medical examiner’s people were still carting bodies out—two jumpsuited women were negotiating a body-bag-laden gurney through the outdoor entrance to the air lock, to a line of black vans at the curb.
Cops were everywhere.
Whitaker put her hand on Lucas’s shoulder; the action startled him. “I’m at the end of the radio in your pocket if you need me.”
Lucas double-checked the plastic zipper on his crime-scene overalls, then shook his head. “If I need you, I might as well leave.”
“There’s that sweetness I missed so much.”
“You’re welcome.”
Lucas took a breath, then pulled the door open and stepped into the plastic tunnel. The thirty feet felt deceptively long, and when he stepped through the second door into the nave proper, he found himself transported to a familiar place—hell.
They had the Quasar task lighting dialed to equatorial solar mode. Lucas always wore sunglasses—even inside—but they did little to mask what he saw.
He stood by the exit for a few moments, waiting for his pulse to slow the disco beat in his chest. The things he saw, heard, and smelled were driving iron nails into his sensory memory, and he wondered if he could do this.
He leveled out his breath, trying to keep the rhythm even and full, a task directly at odds with how the dust mask was designed; every lungful of filtered air he pulled in sounded like a spider clawing through a rusty muffler, and when he let it out, the mask lifted and the air that escaped tickled his eyelashes.
He closed his eyes for a second, but the darkness and the sound of his own wheezing made it feel like he was buried in someone else’s coffin, and a low-grade fear started to snap its fingers. He opened his eyes, pulled off the mask, and wiped his face with his good hand. And somehow he felt a little bit better. So he took a step.
Lucas had been in the Guggenheim dozens of times, and even with its unique layout, it was unrecognizable. Every square inch of surface—from the curved outer walls, to the ceilings of the ramp that wound up to the skylight—was charred and black, with drifts of soot built up in the corners and filling every depression. The now-black floor was crisscrossed with footsteps, gurney wheel tracks, and patterns from the emergency crews. There was broken glass everywhere. Thousands of yards of electrical cable snaked along the walls and over the floor, delivering juice to the lighting and other imported systems. Wright had designed the space with very little in the way of texture, and there was not much in the basic design that was flammable, but if it had a burning or melting point, the explosions had erased it from history in any meaningful form. There were no bodies on the main floor of the atrium, but an easy thirty people in anti-contamination suits were busy packing up the dead on the floors above and Lucas could hear the errant squeak of gurney wheels as they ferried bodies to the morgue.
Lucas started to get a feel for what had happened here.
He walked to the middle of the large room, watching where he placed his feet. Somewhere off to his left, one of the hazmat-suited bureau women said, “Hey, mac, put your mask on!”
Lucas knew she was right—the airborne dust particles alone could clog up a vacuum. But he couldn’t take the claustrophobia it caused or the way it amplified the sound of his breathing, so he dropped it and it touched down in a cloud of dust like a dead squid settling on the ocean floor.
He pushed the molten fist of adrenaline to the bottom of his stomach and took in a deep breath to smother it. This one tasted of soot and something sour that he didn’t want to think about. He looked slowly around, cranking his neck to the end of its tolerances so his good eye could take in the space.
High above, centered under what used to be the skylight but was now just a hole in the ceiling covered with tarps and plywood, was what looked like a pair of spaceship engines. They were roughly the size of pickup trucks, and four men in harnesses were dismantling them, aided by several winches and a ground crew positioned on the top walkway.
The space was getting smaller and his breaths were getting shallower and he knew that the only way to make it all stop was to get out of here. Which would happen only one way. So he closed his eyes, forced himself to forget where he was, and flipped the switch.
Then he opened his eyes.
He no longer saw color.
Or texture.
Or a room where too many people had died.