What he saw was a space reduced to numerical values. It was an automatic process and it hit him in the brain like a fist of ice. Everything morphed into numbers, numerical representations generated by some hidden mental algorithm that only he recognized as having quantitative values.
He spun in place, arms out, taking in the geometry of the Guggenheim with his one good eye. He downloaded the surroundings into a mental model, bringing the museum alive in a way that not even the genius of Wright could have envisioned—a swirling combination of distances, dimensions, elevations, and volume that was permanently embedding itself in his mental hard drive.
It took a few moments to absorb the environment, and when he was done, he closed his eyes, took another deep breath, and shut the process down.
When he opened his eyes, the world looked as it did for everyone else.
Mostly.
When he felt that all the extraneous mental apps had shut down, he took a few heartbeats to orient his thoughts before beginning the trek to the top of the rotunda.
As he moved through the space, the medical examiner’s acolytes ignored him as just another bureau drone. He stepped over broken glass and avoided the little mounds of soot that were scattered everywhere. The art that had been on display was gone—obliterated. There were no charred rectangles on the wall and nothing had survived, which said a lot about what had happened here.
There were a few bodies still in situ on the top two ramps, and more suited minions were hard at work bagging them up. From what Lucas saw, they’d be identifying these people through their DNA, their dental records, and the jewelry baked into their blackened meat.
It took him six minutes to make the top floor. He stood there, watching the bureau’s technicians working on the charred metal device suspended below the skylight. It didn’t take a degree in stage production to recognize it as a machine used to drop confetti at parties or simulate winter on movie sets; in the film industry it was known as a snowmaker.
He calculated the volume of the room, the number of bodies, the available oxygen. He calculated force necessary to undo all these things. The amount of fuel needed. The amount of time it would take. The way it would unfurl.
Then he stopped. And waited for it to happen.
It took a few moments to begin, and when it did, he was almost surprised.
Time stopped, its progress frozen between two ticks of the second hand. The mechanics of the universe ceased. Nothing moved—not the people around him, not the air currents, not even his own heart.
And then a wormhole opened.
It.
All.
Started.
Back.
Up.
In.
… reverse …
In.
Up.
Back.
Started.
All.
It.
The FBI people unwound through time. Some brought bodies back in. Some unloaded gurneys, pulling their occupants out of body bags and replacing them on the floor. Others walked off the set in reverse.
It happened quickly. It happened in slow motion. It happened both ways at the same time.
The men and women in the white overalls kept walking backward into the room, the dust in the air sucked back into their footsteps, the tracks from their gurneys erased as they were undone by time moving against its only provable direction.
The bodies piled back up, filling the space with charred corpses that lay knotted on the floor, woven into a portrait out of Dante’s Inferno.
And then Lucas was alone with the dead. They lay silent, the smoke in the air rolling back into their bodies.
Then came the fire. It mushroomed into itself.
The explosion.
Glass flew up from the floor, raining up to the skylight in reverse, where it reassembled into 175 individual panes.
The front doors reconstituted.
Warhol’s posters and Adams’s prints unburned, refilling frames that appeared out of the shock wave.
And the dead rose up, sucked to their feet in reverse, their skin unburning, their ribs uncracking, their lungs uncollapsing.
Their eyeballs unruptured.
Their eardrums uncollapsed.
Their clothing unburned.
Drinks went back into hands. Smiles went back onto faces. Words went back into mouths.
Silver confetti rose from the floor, floating back into the snow machines hanging high above the crowd.
It was before.
As it was.
They were alive.
Then Lucas blinked and the clock slammed to a stop and the dead froze in mid-celebration, their laughter and hopes and lives suspended in a slice of time too short to measure in any meaningful way.
Lucas watched them for what might have been a fraction of a second or a fraction of forever. He looked up at the snowmakers. Down at the celebrating crowd. At the sophomore soup can posters. At the banners hanging down from the ceiling that declared, Today’s Solutions for Tomorrow’s Problems!
He blinked. And the clock started back up, this time moving in the direction the universe intended. Time shuttered forward. And caught up to itself.
The world detonated and he was back in the now, with the dead and the dust and the gurneys carrying body bags.
Kehoe was right, this was basic physics and chemistry.
Then his stomach clenched and he grabbed a dented garbage can that had rolled against a wall.
And the taste of soot and death and flesh and time filled his throat and he threw up.
9
FBI Command Vehicle
After dropping his coveralls into the bin marked for the incinerator, Lucas washed his face, doing several passes with the strong disinfectant soap, reaming out his nostrils to scrub away the stink of burned human meat. But the particles wouldn’t leave, so he was now pouring coffee down his throat to mask the taste. It wasn’t working.
The command vehicle had been cleared out and Kehoe had assembled all his top players for the brief. Lucas knew that it was an audition of sorts, and he was fine with that—the bureau teams were a tight-knit community that had built up trust in one another through performance. He was willing to do a little sleight of hand—but that was it. He wasn’t here to be part of a team, he was here as an outside opinion, which required an entirely different approach. But they needed to know that he wasn’t dead weight.
Other than Kehoe, the commander of the Fire Department, a small man named Ben Morrison, was there. Morrison rarely blinked, looked like he didn’t have a sense of humor, and it was easy to see the little guy complex in the way he carried himself. When he shook Lucas’s prosthetic, his shoulder had torqued—a sign that the guy had one of those handshakes designed to break metacarpals. He looked tired and grumpy and like he had passed I-don’t-give-a-fuck a long time ago. One of the other people in the room was the special agent in charge—Samir Chawla. Chawla was thin, somewhere in his mid to late thirties, and was a handsome man with grooming that rivaled Kehoe’s. He sported a very nice dark blue Pee-wee Herman suit offset by a lavender dastar that matched his tie (and, Lucas strongly suspected, his socks). His eyes were dark and accentuated his avian features, the most prominent being a long thin nose that made him appear more visually interesting than he was. It was easy to see that the guy took himself very seriously. But Whitaker said he was smart and Lucas would give him the benefit of the doubt. After Chawla, Lucas was introduced to Calvin-Wade Curtis, a man with a huge grin who was head of the forensic explosives team. Lucas recognized the military background in the way he stood. And he recognized the southern small-town upbringing in his manners. His slow drawl made him come off as more naive than he was. He looked to be about fifteen and had hands that were too big for his arms, but he was to the point when asked a question. Whitaker was also there. She had rolled up her sleeves and was leaning against one of the desks, arms crossed, the big chrome automatic in the pressure holster on her belt at odds with the neutral fabrics she wore. As usual, Lucas couldn’t help feeling like she was watching out for him.