The Tower

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Twenty feet later, he broke through the trees, and the steel gates of Maingate lay open before him. He saw a shadow flash, deep within the prison. He had been right—after all the struggle, Allander had returned to his starting point.

  Jade sprinted through the gates.

  Allander threw the bag of supplies in the speedboat, untied the rope mooring it to the dock, and revved the motor, edging the boat out into the turbulent water. As he pulled away, the rope slid from the dock to the water, where it trailed the boat like a slippery eel.

  Loud, hammering footsteps sounded on the dock, and as Allander turned to look, he saw a shadowed figure take flight after the boat. He screamed and jerked the throttle all the way down.

  A sudden peace washed over Jade as he broke the water’s surface. He had aimed his jump at the retreating rope, so he was not surprised to feel its coarse fibers against his palm. It jerked suddenly away and slid through his hand, tearing the skin along his palm. Despite the pain, Jade squeezed down tight on the rope. His body lurched forward, and he was off in a spray of bubbles.

  Bound together, even through the jagged waters of the inlet, Allander and Jade headed for the Tower.

  58

  AS he steered the boat, Allander noticed the drag of Jade’s weight, and he could see a figure outlined beneath the surface of the water. He thought of the inevitable pain spreading through Jade’s arms, tightening his shoulders and tensing his stomach. And the burn, Allander thought. The burn in his lungs must be divine.

  As the boat approached the base of the Tower, Allander steered a tight semicircle. Jade, who had been struggling to get his feet in front of his body, hoping to pull himself into a skiing position, felt his feet sinking as the sudden turn yanked his body forward. His torso half-broke the surface as he was flung into a new trajectory. Although the water slowed him, he was almost airborne as he saw the stone wall of the Tower rushing directly at him.

  Bringing his knees to his chest, Jade struck the wall sideways, his body in the fetal position. A loud crunch in his hip and he knew the bone was shattered. He slid down the wall into the water’s embrace.

  Allander brought the boat forward, crashing hard into the side of the steel ladder that crept up the side of the Tower. It was low tide, so the lowest rung was above water. Straining, he pulled the bag up across his shoulders and seized the ladder’s side rail. Laughing now with excitement at being so near his goal, he began the steady climb up. The strap from the bag dug into his shoulder, but he was too wired to pay attention to the pain. As he climbed, he stared up at the full moon, his face splitting in a grin.

  Below him, a hand reached out of the water and gripped the bottom rung. Climbing hand over hand, Jade pulled his body from the sea. He was unable to use his legs, and they dangled uselessly below him. The rope burn on his palm stung horrifically, first with the saltwater and now with the pressure of his own weight. The ladder shifted under him, loose on the bolts from the speedboat collision. If he slipped, he knew he’d never be able to keep himself afloat in the water.

  When Allander reached the top, he turned and looked back, noticing Jade struggling after him. In the dim light of the moon, their eyes locked for a moment. Allander smiled, then blew a kiss. He drew himself up from his crouch, his head momentarily framed by the full moon. Intoxicated by his sense of complete power, Allander threw back his head and laughed. Then he doubled over, shaking with childish laughter.

  He noticed that the speedboat was drifting out to sea a little bit. He’d have to hurry through his plan before it floated farther away. Hearing a scraping noise, he turned and saw the guard lying near the Hole, gasping, his hands cupped around his throat. The bullet had nicked the side of his neck—a deep wound, but not lethal. The man’s whole body heaved as he drew air, his limbs jerking almost mechanically. His hands were speckled with blood to the wrists, and his submachine gun lay on the ground a few feet from him.

  Allander stormed over and kicked the gun down the Hole, then drew Jade’s Glock and pressed the muzzle to the top of the guard’s head. His eyes looked up at Allander, wild with terror, but he couldn’t speak or even move away from the gun. He wheezed and sputtered, trying to hold his blood in his throat.

  “Well, that wouldn’t be very sporting, would it?” Allander said. He lifted the gun from the guard’s head. “I’ve got better plans for you.”

  He walked to the edge of the Hole and peered down. “And for you, you fat wretch.” He could see Claude’s hands around the bars of Unit 11A, his face a fleshy white orb staring up at him. “You didn’t do it, not as I’m going to. What’s the fun of fornicating with a corpse? It’s about cognizance—it’s about looking into the eyes of the one who conceived you, holding sway over her, over life itself. It’s in her knowing, you unworthy simian, not just the deed.” The anger in his voice surprised him. “It’s in the knowledge of what you’re doing!”

  He ran to the edge of the Tower to check on Jade again. He was still barely above the water’s surface, hanging on and gasping for breath. Allander had time. He had plenty of time.

  He walked over to a large diesel drum, hauling the heavy supply bag; he had watched them haul the drum up earlier in the week to refuel the water pump. He removed the large plug and noticed that the drum was almost empty. Pulling a tube from his bag, he siphoned some diesel fuel from the water-pump tank, sucking on the end of the tube to start the flow and spitting out a mouthful of the bitter liquid. After a certain amount of diesel fuel had poured into the drum, he yanked the tube out, letting the fuel wash over the top of the Tower. Then he removed three bags of fertilizer from his bag, raking them open with a knife. He dumped them into the drum, one after another, aiming the spill through the large plug hole.

  Of course, he wasn’t able to measure precisely, but he knew ANFO mixture well enough—7 percent fuel oil to 93 percent ammonium nitrate, found in common fertilizer.

  Still clinging to the ladder, Jade shook his head, attempting to clear it. The water and the Tower were spinning crazily around him, and he tightened his hands around the rails, gathering the courage to raise his head. The ladder seemed to stretch up forever. He bit down on his lip and began the climb, the ladder, loose from being struck by the speedboat, shaking with his movements. He crawled willfully, steadily, pulling his straining hands closer to Allander’s throat.

  For the first time, he noticed how much he really hurt. He counted his injuries with each rung. The gun to my head, the cut in my cheek, the fall down the slope, the Tower up my ass. He felt for his pistol, but it was gone. He was not surprised.

  Aware of the need to act quickly, Allander sprinted over to check on Jade once more. He was down about forty rungs, moving slowly, but moving nonetheless. Allander knocked the drum on its side and rolled it a few times, mixing the diesel and ammonium nitrate as best he could.

  He’d taken a stick of dynamite from the site at Maingate because the only blasting caps he could find were eights, which weren’t too reliable when used alone with an ANFO mixture. The his and hers cell phones he’d stolen were lying side by side in the bottom of the bag, and he picked them up, sliding one of them into his pocket. The back panel was already removed from the other one, and he had pulled out and stripped the two wires that ran to the ringer. He intertwined each one now with a wire from the blasting cap, then wound the phone, the primer, and the dynamite in electrical tape and dropped the whole thing into the drum. It landed on the ANFO mixture with a wet thud. He hammered the large metal plug back into the drum, then rolled it over to the edge of the Hole.

  He crouched over the choking guard, gently peeling back the guard’s blood-drenched jacket and removing the elevator control from his inner pocket.

  With a click of the button, he lowered the elevator platform to roof level, then pushed the big drum onto it. He walked back and kicked the guard once in the side as hard as he could. The guard gasped as he rolled onto the platform, his head clanging against the drum.

  Jade still inched up the ladde
r, rung by rung, ignoring the pain through his cramped arms. He had to make it. He had to get his hands on Allander, but he was still a good twenty yards away.

  Allander pushed the red button and the platform started to descend into the Hole. They’d done an admirable job of repairing the elevator, he thought with a snicker.

  Claude watched the bomb and the wheezing guard descend past him, his expression unchanged. He scratched himself, then looked up at Allander with unfrightened interest. The guard’s rasps echoed inside the Tower, bouncing off the hard stone walls.

  The platform clicked to a halt when it hit Level One. Now it was all set. Once he was a safe distance away, Allander would call in with the cell phone in his pocket, and the current would trip the primer, which would trip the dynamite. With the diesel drum containing the initial explosion, the whole thing would go. The shock wave should blast the walls right off the Tower. And Claude and the guard along with them.

  A squeal rose in his throat, and he ran back to the edge, looking down at Jade.

  “The dance ends here, Marlow!” he shouted. “We bring this show to a close upon the same stage on which it began.” He screamed his words to be heard over the crash of the waves. “There are three things I have on you right now, Marlow,” he yelled. “Just three.”

  Jade looked up at him, but couldn’t muster the strength to speak.

  “A bomb … a detonator”—Allander held his arms up to the moon, the cell phone glinting in his hand—“and your gun.” He pulled out the Glock and waved it in the air.

  Jade clenched his eyes until he saw white dots dancing across the darkness. Of course. Blasting caps and dynamite to blow out the rock from the cranes back at Maingate. Fuel from the water pump. The fertilizer scattered by the stairs back at the house. A Timothy McVeigh special. How could he have missed it?

  They had practically given Allander all the pieces of the bomb right here. Right at the prison.

  He glanced down and saw the speedboat knocking against the base of the Tower. Allander could dive in, swim to the boat, and dial in to detonate once he was a safe distance away. And Jade was too weak to do anything but watch him.

  Allander stepped from the parapet to the top rung of the ladder, fanning his arms to balance himself. “I am Allander Atlasia!” he yelled. He lowered the pistol so it was pointing at Jade’s forehead, taking a long, last look into Jade’s eyes. “Hope you said your prayers.”

  A wave of terror flooded Jade’s body for the first time since he had begun the case. Allander was going to shoot Jade and escape. He’d be free, leaving nothing behind but a watery blast. Jade looked up into the bore of the pistol, tightening his hands around the steel railings until his biceps felt as if they were going to burst. Shoving with his legs and arms, he jerked back on the loose ladder with all his might. It shifted, rolling under Allander’s feet.

  Allander screamed, his arms flailing madly. The pistol fired once up into the air, kicking from his grasp and falling away. He tottered on the rung, trying desperately to throw his weight back toward the Tower. When he’d resigned himself to the fall, a calm washed over him. He tapped the bulge of the cell phone in his pocket, smiled, and leaned forward in a dive.

  Jade roared as the body flew toward him, Allander’s eyes open, a serene smile curling his lips. Jade could tell he would pass inches out of his reach from the ladder and would land in the water mere yards from the boat.

  Seeing Allander escape was too much agony for Jade to bear, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he had wedged his leg against the stone behind a steel rung and had pushed his torso away from the Tower.

  Allander’s eyes went wild with fear as he saw the impossibly outstretched arms and clutching fingers shoot at him as he neared. He let out a high-pitched scream as Jade caught him, his fingers grasping Allander’s shirt and pants. Jade’s torso was extended horizontally from the Tower wall, his leg the only thing keeping him from dropping to death by water below.

  Jade held Allander weightlessly for a moment, savoring the feel of the fabric between his fingers. Then, as the force of Allander’s fall pulled them downward, Jade tightened his leg with all his might and rotated both their bodies around the point of his wedged knee. Bellowing, he let Allander’s momentum carry him down and into the stone wall.

  Allander’s face met the stone of the Tower and came apart instantly, his nose driven back through its hole, his cheekbones shattering, his forehead giving way to the cracking lines of his skull.

  The moment Allander’s face struck the Tower, Jade’s leg snapped. He heard it before he felt it, heard it even over the dull thud of Allander’s head imploding, and the pain was unlike anything he had ever felt. He released his grip on Allander’s body and it drifted away from him, down to the ocean.

  For a moment, the ocean buoyed Allander on its breast, his shirt flapping in the wind like a wounded bird. A pool of crimson flowered from his head. Then, with excruciating slowness, the body sank from view until, from his upside-down perch near the top of the Tower, Jade could no longer discern where its outline ended and the ocean began. Dangling from one grotesquely bent limb, he watched even the body’s wake disappear into the swells.

  He was suddenly struck with an overwhelming exhaustion that left him too weak to consider moving. He prayed that his leg would not give way entirely. Every time his body swayed in the wet wind, a pain beyond description tightened its grasp on his insides.

  He hung from one thin steel rung for over ten minutes before, through the thick haze clouding his mind, he heard the chopping approach of a helicopter.

  59

  DARBY woke up alone in bed for one of the first times in thirty-eight years. She instinctively turned to her left to extend her arm across Thomas’s chest before she remembered he wasn’t there.

  She rose from her bed with the routinized motions of a woman living alone, and pulled on a robe. She went to the kitchen, put coffee on, and called the hospital, just as she had done every day this week.

  “Good morning, love. How are you feeling?”

  Thomas’s voice was not quite right. It would never be right again, never the voice that had wooed her and carried her in sickness and in health. But that seemed a small price to pay to have her husband alive, so she buried her sorrow beneath her gratitude.

  His larynx had been severely injured, and it had taken a delicate surgery to get him to the point where he could speak at all. But he had remained optimistic all the way through, reassuring her with his eyes when he couldn’t with his words.

  “Oh, great. Or should I say, stable?” Thomas laughed a dry, croaking laugh. “Just three more weeks in, love.”

  Darby smiled. “And one more operation.”

  Thomas tried to laugh, but it came out a dull wheeze. “Oh yeah. Nose job, right?”

  Darby laughed softly and tears moistened her eyes. “I’m leaving in five.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  Her voice cracked and she struggled to keep it from shaking. “I love you too.”

  She hung up and sat on the couch in the living room, sipping her coffee. The very couch where they had met Jade time and time again, she realized, where he had helped them in his own guarded way.

  She had come to care greatly for Jade. She had come to respect him and almost love him. She knew that some part of her emotions had to do with his role in protecting them, and some part had to do with her son. Though she didn’t understand, entirely, her feelings for Jade, she sensed them, as if through a fog that wouldn’t lift. It saddened her that they would never see Jade again. There was too much there for her, too much there for them. He had freed them, finally and painfully, from a lifelong ache, but she could never forgive him for it.

  She heard the soft rattling of the mail truck outside and she rose and went to the door. It was a splendid morning, she thought as she moved down the walkway to the mailbox.

  Turning to face the sun, she fanned through the mail. Mostly bills and mailers. At the bottom of the stack was
a plain white envelope, her name and address written neatly in black.

  Opening the envelope confirmed it: a single earring.

  Placing it back in the envelope, she crumpled them together into a ball and walked over to the trash can at the end of the driveway. She lifted the lid and tossed the small ball of metal and paper inside.

  She whistled softly to herself as she headed back inside, closing her eyes and tilting her face to the sun. It was a splendid morning.

  60

  THE room was dark, as always. Once again, Travers sat in the gloom, across the desk from Wotan. She held a thick folder in her lap.

  She inhaled deeply and continued. “Well, sir, that just about covers it.”

  “Very well,” Wotan said softly.

  “We’ve placed Marlow’s money in an account that he can claim when he gets out of the hospital.” Travers cleared her throat. “Although we’re not really sure when he’ll get out, sir. I put in an order to cover his full medical expenses.”

  “Very well.”

  “He did …” Travers tilted her head back a little, biting her bottom lip. “He did a good job, sir.”

  Wotan nodded once, running his fingertips over the dry socket of his eye. “Put the file to rest,” he said, turning his attention back to some papers on his desk. A long silence ensued as Travers watched him work.