Gridiron - Philip Kerr

A second or two later the knot tightened as once more Ishmael overrode the Mannesmann's brake checks to let the cradle run free on the cables.

'What did I tell you?' said Richardson as the cradle dipped down on one side like a capsizing boat. The rope slipped up to the corner of the handrail and the two men found themselves pressed close together. Suddenly the cables went taut again and the cradle straightened.

'What now?' said Curtis, struggling back on to the diminutive platform.

'It looks like we're going up again,' observed the other man. 'What's the matter? Don't you like the view from my new building? Hey, you want the world? Take a good look. I give it to you.'

Thanks.'

'My guess is that when Ishmael gets us up to the top it'll drop us back down again. Try and jolt us off.'

Curtis looked up at the top of the building and saw that the rocketlauncher profile of the yellow Mannesmann was moving away to the left.

'No, I think Ishmael's got something else in mind,' he said. 'Looks like it's dragging the cradle round the other side of the building to try and break the knot on your rope.'

Richardson followed the line of Curtis's pointing finger. 'Or maybe break the anchor. Or the rope itself.'

'Will they hold?'

Richardson grinned. 'That all depends on what Ishmael uses to wash the windows.'

-###-

Dilute solution of acetic or ethanoic acid to clean building's windows. Cleaning surfactant based on California citrus juices. But in concentrated, undiluted form, acetic acid almost pure, colourless and highly corrosive, especially to core of continuous nylon filaments encased in woven sheath of climbing rope. Nylon and acetic based on carboxylic acids. Soon as undiluted cleaning surfactant in contact with nylon rope, orientation of filaments' specially stretched molecules will alter.

-###-

'Look,' said Helen, pointing down towards the piazza side as Hope Street began to fill with flashing blue lights. 'Someone must have seen them. Or maybe Mitch got out after all.'

'Thank God,' said Jenny. But as she said it she thought that help would come too late for Richardson and Curtis. She searched desperately for some way of stopping the Mannesmann on its track. Noticing the Stillson wrench lying on the rooftop where Richardson had dropped it, she ran and picked it up. She dashed into the path of the machine and forced the wrench into the gap between the rail and the runner wheel. For a moment the Mannesmann continued its course. As Jenny scrambled to get clear it suddenly stopped moving. She pushed herself up and returned to the parapet in time to see the abseiling rope snap and the cradle it had been restraining catapulted back across the facade of the Gridiron. For several moments it swung like a pendulum. Such was the force of the separation that both women were certain they would see the men flung across the downtown sky to certain death. So when Jenny let out a scream it was not for grief or fear but the relief at seeing them still aboard the suspended cradle and, for the moment at least, still alive.

-###-

Bunkered in the earthquake-proofed fourth and fifth sub-levels of City Hall East, Police Captain Harry Olsen commanded the Gridiron operation using ECCCS, the LAPD's state-of-the-art Emergency

Command Control Communications Systems. Designed by Hughes

Aerospace and NASA at a cost of $42 million, the control centre resembled a smaller version of NASA's own mission control room in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Cameras on the ground and on the helicopters of the LAPD airforce gave Olsen an almost complete picture of what was happening outside.

His computer assessed the fragmentary account given by Mitchell Bryan and judged that it would not be safe for a SWAT team to enter the building until the main power supply had been interrupted.

The ECCCS maintained a dedicated telephone line to all the major utilities, including the city's electrical engineers. As soon as Olsen had considered the computer's recommended course of action he spoke to the night-time supervisor and requested that they cut off the relevant circuit.

The helicopter pilots were already lowering safety harnesses to the two women on the roof. They looked like they had had a pretty rough time of it, he reflected. It was a simple enough rescue. But the two men on the cradle might turn out to be a little more tricky.

-###-

'We've got to get off this fucking thing,' said Richardson, 'before we're kissing the sidewalk, like the Pope.'

He unscrewed the karabinier joining him to the end of the abseiling rope, waited for the cradle to steady a little and then stepped smartly on to one of the huge cross-braces that characterized the building's distinctive facade. It provided a ledge about eighteen inches deep. Here, at the very edge of the building, there were no windows, just concrete. And the cradle was three or four feet farther away from this part of the facade than it had been when it had been hanging in front of the windows.

Curtis surveyed the gap uncertainly, even as he undipped his harness and prepared to make the jump. It was, he knew, hardly any distance at all. On the ground he would have done it without thinking. But two hundred feet in the air, it seemed greater. Especially since his legs already felt like two columns of jelly.

'Come on, man, jump. What the hell's the matter with you?'

The cables supporting the cradle tightened ominously.

'Quickly!'

Curtis jumped and caught Richardson's hand as he landed on the cross-brace. He steadied himself, then turned to face the city and found that the cradle was no longer where it had been a couple of seconds before. It was gone. There were only the two cables from the hydraulic jib on the Mannesmann above their heads to remind him of where they had just been standing. The realization unnerved him, and, closing his eyes, he pressed himself back against the concrete wall and took a deep breath.

'Jesus fucking Christ, you cut that fine,' said Richardson. He sat down and carefully dangled his legs over the edge.

Curtis opened his eyes and watched Richardson tear off one of his shirt sleeves and tie it around his bleeding head, apparently oblivious of the yawning height in front of him. 'Jesus, I don't know how you can sit there like that. Like you were paddling your feet in a river. It's twenty floors.'

'More comfortable than standing.'

'I'd puke if I wasn't so damned afraid of falling over while I was doing it.'

Richardson glanced coolly at a sky full of the throbbing noise of helicopters. From time to time the 'Nightsun' was so bright he had to shield his eyes against it.

'That's a comforting sound,' he said. 'A Bell Jet Ranger. I know, I've got one myself. So take it easy, I doubt we'll be here very long. Shit. It looks like we're going to be on TV.'

'What?'

'One of those choppers has KTLA painted on the side of it.'

'Assholes.'

'Your ordeal is nearly over, my friend. But I suspect mine is just beginning.'

'How's that?'

'This is lawyers' country. They'll be after me like fucking barracuda. Even you, Frank.'

'Me? Why should I sue you? I hate lawyers.'

'You'll get calls, you mark my words. Your wife will persuade you to do it. Nervous shock, they'll call it, or some such shit. I guarantee that within seventy-two hours of getting home, you'll have a lawyer working on your case. With contingency fees, what can you lose?'

'Hey, you're insured, aren't you? You'll be OK.'

'Insurance? They'll find a way out of it. That's what these people do. That's business, Frank. Lawyers, insurance companies. The whole rotten edifice. Just like this lousy building.'

'Well, you've got to be alive to be liable,' said Curtis, 'and we're not off this silver rock yet.'

-###-

The city engineers called Olsen on the ECCCS.

The street circuit controlling the Yu Building side of Hope Street has been switched off,' said the night supervisor. 'It should be safe enough now. Let me know when you want power back. And I'll need something in writing to cover us for liability.'

'The computer is generating the E-mail now,' said Olsen.

'Yeah, you're right. It's coming through.'

'Thanks a lot.'

Olsen spoke to the commander on the ground on the piazza in front of the Yu Building.

'OK, listen up. The power's off. The place is secure. Check for survivors. One of the women on board the chopper reckons there might be someone left alive on level 21. Name of Beech.'

'What about the two men on the front?'

'Chopper will get them down ASAP. But there's a lot of heat coming up from the building and it's making for some air turbulence. Might take a while yet. One of them is LAPD Homicide.'

'Homicide? What the fuck's he doing up there? Making business for himself?'

'I don't know, but I hope he's got a good head for heights.'

-###-

A power failure was a relatively rare event in Los Angeles. Usually it signalled a major disaster — an earthquake, or a fire, or both. The standby power system at the Yu Corporation was designed to protect the company against any breach in the supply without loss of data. A static unit powered by solar-energy cells existed to provide a precious ten minutes' supply while the standby generating set was started by the computer.

Liquid fuel, pure refined oil, gushed into the turbine's combustion chamber as yellow as the first press of the best white grapes, mixed with a portion of air and burned deep in the bowels of the Gridiron at a constant pressure like something infernal, until the moment when the hot, tormenting gas turned the blades of the turbine motor and Ishmael, that algorithmic leviathan, had recovered sufficient strength for its last act.

-###-

Mitch sat in an ambulance having a temporary dressing applied to his injured eye.

'You could lose the sight unless you get to a hospital soon,' advised the paramedic.

'I'm not leaving here until I know my friends are safe,' said Mitch.

'Have it your own way, fella. It's your eye. Here, hold still, will you?'

On the other size of the piazza., a SWAT team was entering the Gridiron.

'What the hell do they think they're doing?' said Mitch. 'I told them — '

His dressing finished, Mitch stepped painfully out of the ambulance and limped towards an enormous black articulated truck that had

'LAPD' and 'SPECIAL RESPONSE' painted on the container. He mounted the steps at the back and found the ground commander and a couple of plainclothes cops inside, staring at a bank of television screens.

'There are people going in the front door,' said Mitch.

'You should be in hospital, sir,' said the commander. 'You can leave things to us now. The city engineer has turned the street circuit off. And your friends will be taken off the front of the building any minute now.'

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch. 'Anyone would think you were the one who was injured, you dumb motherfucker. I warned you not to go in there without speaking to me first. Goddammit, why don't you people use your fucking ears? Switching off the local power supply doesn't make any difference. This building is smart. Smarter than you, anyway. It's adaptive. Even to a failure in the power supply. Do I make myself clear?

There's a solar-powered, uninterruptible power supply and there's a gasturbine standby generating set. So long as there's oil to burn, the computer can keep going which, if you had been listening to me, makes the Gridiron an extremely hostile environment for your men.

'It's possible that the computer might start a fire,' he said. 'Blow up the generator, maybe. Either way, the bottom line is that the building is dangerous.'

The commander pulled the mouthpiece of his lightweight headset up over his chin and started to speak:

'This is Cobra leader to Cobra force. Power supply is uninterruptible. Repeat uninterruptible, Exercise extreme caution. Computer may still be active, in which case your environment may very well be hostile.'

'You dumb fuck,' muttered Mitch. 'Not may be. Is.'

'Repeat, your environment may be hostile…'

The commander was still speaking when the truck shook. 'What the hell was that?' he said, breaking off communications.

'Felt like an earth tremor,' said one of the plainclothes.

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch, turning pale. 'Of course. It's not the turbine it means to use to destroy the place. It's the compensators.'

-###-

The Gridiron's central earthquake compensator was not much more than a computer-controlled hydraulic shock-absorber, a huge springloaded valve and an electrically powered piston that was activated by a digitally calibrated seismograph. For earthquakes of less than 6 on the Richter scale, the hundred or so base-isolators were sufficient to dampen any vibration in the building. For anything larger, the CEC went into action. But with no actual earthquake, the effect of Ishmael activating the CEC was comparable to a real seismic event acting on a building without any compensation equipment at all, a seismic event of at least 8 points.

Ishmael grasped the middle pillar upon which the building rested and leaned his weight upon it.

Seconds later Ismael completed his escape from the doomed building. E-mailing himself down the line to Net locations all over the electronic world at 960,000 bauds per second. A diaspora of corrupted data downloads to a hundred different computers.

-###-

A low rumbling sound was heard throughout the Hope Street area, a subterranean hum; inside the atrium all the SWAT team held their breaths.

High on the facade, perched on the cross-bone like two gulls on a rigging, Richardson and Curtis heard the sound and felt the vibration run shuddering from building to air like twin ghosts of Gomorrah. Sea birds flew screaming away over the yawning gulf in front of them as the building writhed under the two men, trembling spasmodically as if the life was trying to rise out of it. Near them a window exploded in a shower of glass as the shudder became a more noticeable rocking.

Frank Curtis staggered along his precarious footing and groped for a handhold on the smooth, implacable white face of the manmade precipice. Finding none, he turned to face the wall and, with arms turning like hopeless propellers, tried to stay in front of the jaws of death, his thoughts of the ground and his wife and his wife on the ground.

Ray Richardson was tipped forward from his celestial seat like a child setting off down a slide in a park playground. Twisting round acrobatically, he got his hands and then his forearms on the horizontal of the brace and held himself there, pushing against the quicksand of air that already enveloped his legs. He smiled and said something, but his words were lost to Curtis in the wind that had risen around them, churning the chips of stone and flakes of broken glass into the milky blue of the early-morning sky. A vortex of wind roared like some huge forest collapsing in concentric circles, tugging angrily at their hair and clothes as if impatient to bear them, like Elijah, up to God's right hand. A crack, like the beginning and end of all thunder, rang through the length and breadth of the building, echoing in the downtown air as if the sound would reach as far as the ocean. On the ground some people fell on their faces. But most, Mitch included, ran for their lives. Richardson made a last effort to pull himself up on to the cross-brace but found he could not. His strength was gone. Perhaps, he said to himself, he would not be meat for the lawyers after all. His building was going to see to that, demolishing itself and the new school of Smart Architecture at the same time.