A full thirty-seven hours after the bombings and there was little progress in determining the Whos or Whys. They were all good on the What and the Where, obviously, and there was some rough progress on the How: the MPD and the FBI had combined their bomb squads and had found the gas line in each building had been rigged to blow. But who did the rigging, when they had access to the gas lines, and why they had decided to attack in the first place? Nothing.
The public was getting a tiny bit anxious.
The day after the bombing, she and Santino had gone with Zockinski and Hill to Gayle Street. The four of them bumped between teams, helping when they could. They had assumed they would be unwanted or underfoot, but every agency working the site was making the effort to collaborate and they welcomed the extra bodies.
And this odd quest that Sturtevant had set them on? None of them had expected to enjoy it. But (as Zockinski had confided over beers the night before) acting as witnesses? Quite liberating, really. They had no tasks to complete, no reports to fill out, no pressure to find the bad guys. They were free to watch—maybe even pass judgment—as their peers in law enforcement struggled to find answers.
She almost felt like a reporter.
The floor swayed beneath her and she instinctively reached out to grab what was left of a display stand; the scorched metal was cold against her raw palms.
“Hey Peng? Remember not to touch anything!”
“Thanks, Zockinski! You’re such a blessing!”
Santino and Hill, both copious note-takers, had left to rotate through the many press conferences, leaving Rachel and Zockinski on Gayle Street. As this counted as a Mass Casualty Incident, the rescue-and-recovery phase had taken over a day and had ended the previous afternoon. The fire department had followed to assess the structural stability of the buildings: it had been safety first, evidence collection second, with Forensics permitted to enter only after the fire department had cleared the site for law enforcement.
Rachel and Zockinski had attached themselves to a forensics team from the FBI. They were friendly with some of them, having worked with them on the Glazer case. Rachel and Zockinski told themselves they knew better than to get in the way, but when the team had finished clearing a coffee shop, Rachel had made the stupid off-hand comment that she’d like to see the inside of a bomb site for herself.
So, there she was, doing her best to pretend she was working instead of wondering if she could jump across the collapsing floor like Lara Croft if (no, when, definitely when) it finally gave way beneath her.
The store reminded her of a deer carcass shredded by trucks. Its bones had broken through its skin, and those windows that remained intact had a clouded, vacant stare. Her scans and her toes kept working the floor for anything whole, and when she found a spot that felt reasonably stable, she paused to run a full environmental search.
Rachel sent her scans down until she found earth instead of cement. The ground was hard but not frozen, and she slowly pulled her scans upward through the utilities. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t uncommon to find an unused tunnel or cutoff, especially in communities which had suffered the brunt of early civil planning. This building and—she extended her range outward—the street didn’t seem to have suffered from engineering growing pains. In fact, it looked as though some work had been done on Gayle Street within the last few years to clean up the outdated lines.
“How old is this neighborhood?” Rachel shouted.
“I don’t know. Isn’t it a good thing I have Google in my head?” Zockinski yelled back. “Oh wait.”
“About 1870,” said one of the firemen.
“See?” Rachel pointed, and regretted it as the floor swayed ever so slightly. “He’s helping. Learn by example.”
Always walk the crime scene, Rachel reminded herself. You learned that last August. You can miss things when you rely on scans…Forensics has already been all over this floor and it didn’t collapse under them…You will be fine. You will be fine…Oh boy, there’s a new noise, yep, I’m about to die.
She walked forward on the beams, one foot placed carefully in front of the other as she probed the layers of debris. The fire had been out for more than a full day but everything was still damp, and there were large sections of the floor that were covered in broken chips of tile from what must have been a gorgeous porcelain floor. Not an easy place for a midmorning stroll. It reminded her of her jogging path along the train tracks, but smelling of burnt coffee instead of diesel fuel.
“Got anything?” Zockinski shouted.
“Hard to tell,” Rachel replied. “Some asshole keeps yelling at me and breaking my concentration!”
The fire department and the last few members of the FBI’s forensics team colored to blues and purples; Zockinski’s surface colors quickly matched theirs as they all had a good laugh at his expense.
Good, she thought. Different teams working happily togeth—
The heel of her left boot cracked through the subfloor.
Quick as a cat, she threw herself to the right and landed a few feet away, squarely on top of another support beam.
“Peng?”
“I’m fine, Zockinski,” she yelled. “Might have some strong language for the guy who cleared this building, though.”
“I’m coming in,” he told her.
“I’m coming out,” she shot back. “This place barely holds my weight. It sure as hell isn’t going to hold yours and mi—”
The joist beneath her groaned, and Rachel had just enough time to run another scan through it—Solid! Burned but solid!—before one end tipped out of its broken joint and rolled.
The floor shifted from the sudden loss of the joist, and Rachel fell and started a slow, helpless slide towards the hole in the middle of the room. Her nails dug into the wet wood, the shards of porcelain cutting her hands, as she tried to scramble on all fours towards the walls and the concrete sidewalks beyond.
There was another groan from the sinking floor. Rachel froze, hoping, praying… She instinctively looked to Zockinski; he was too far away to help, and was lit with the bright yellow-whites and sickly greens of helpless panic. And then her scans showed a rush of broken wood and tile as she fell.
There were a few stunned seconds where she knew she was alive, but she was unable to do anything besides watch the floor (ceiling?) to see if the whole thing was about to crash down on top of her. Then she took a quick physical inventory; scrapes, nothing broken. She hadn’t fallen very far, only five feet or so, and had landed on a stack of misshapen, melted plastic. The smell of burnt coffee was so strong it was almost an assault.
“Peng!” Zockinski’s voice was muffled; she looked through the walls to see the firemen restraining him from entering the building.
“I’m fine!” she shouted.
“What?”
“I said I’m…” she began, then muttered: “Forget it,” and called Zockinski’s cell.
“Peng!”
His cell continued to ring. “Answer your damned phone, Zockinski!”
There was a pause, then Zockinski’s voice resonated loud and clear in her head. “Peng?”
“Finally,” she growled.
“Peng, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I can walk out of here. Let me talk to one of the firemen.”
There was a pause and muttered conversation, and an unfamiliar voice said: “Agent Peng?”
“Yes, hello. To whom am I speaking?”
“Uh… Novak. Fire Lieutenant Novak?”
She scanned the cellar of what had once been a coffee shop. “Don’t come in after me,” she told him. “The floor joist I was on didn’t break. One of its ends twisted out of its post. I can send images to Zockinski’s phone if you want to see what I’m talking about… Now, I see three ways to get myself out of here. There’s the hole I fell through, a back staircase, and the old skylight window set in the sidewalk. Which one is safest?”
She was hoping it was the skylight. The foundatio
n of the cellar extended past the upper stories of the building, and the side of the cellar closest to the road had been set with glass squares to let in the light. Rachel figured it would need a couple of good whacks with a sledgehammer, and then she could squirm her way to freedom without having to shuffle across that unstable floor or climb through what was left of the burned back room to reach the rear door.
More muffled conversation, and then Lieutenant Novak was back. “Um… Agent Peng? Take the back stairs.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’m practically under the skylight.”
“Those things are stronger than they look. Anything we do to break it might shake the structure.”
“I hear you. I’m not happy about trying to walk across that floor again. Can you get to me through the back door?”
“We don’t think we need to. There’s a window at the top of the stairs. Most of its glass is already broken. We think we can use a propylene torch to cut through the security bars and get you out that way.”
“Okie-dokie,” Rachel said cheerily, as the weight of the building seemed to settle on her shoulders.
“Agent Peng? We’ll get you out of there as quickly as we can, but try not to move around, okay?”
“Not my first time stuck in a bombed-out basement,” she told him. “Take your time and do it right. I’ll be here.”
She broke the connection with Zockinski’s cell and started to pick out the small pieces of porcelain tile from her hands. That killed a few minutes, especially the twinned slivers that had skewered her left palm and wedged themselves in the muscle. She was wondering what else she could do to keep herself occupied when a green version of Phil appeared in the air beside her with a silent pop.
“Rachel!”
“Hey!” She grinned up at him. His vivid lime-green projection was fluffy and distorted. Phil wasn’t good at going out-of-body. Rachel thought it might be because he never bothered to look in a mirror. Not that Phil was an untidy person: he simply didn’t cotton to vanity, and Rachel guessed he didn’t have enough experience with his own face to create a coherent visual image for others. “You’re a sight for sore… me.”
“Zockinski called,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Couple of scratches,” she said, holding up her bloody hands. “I’ll have Zockinski drive me home after this and get Jenny to stitch me up.”
“I’ll crack these idiots open for letting you come in here,” Phil said. Out-of-body projections didn’t carry the emotional spectrum, but she felt his anger through the link.
Oh. She suddenly felt a lot of things through the link; Phil had just spread the word that she had been in an accident. “I’m fine,” she told the collective. “I’m not hurt, the fire department is going to get me out, and do not come running down here to get in their way. I mean that—the building is unstable enough as it is.”
She had added that last bit as more of an implied threat than anything else—Guys, if you all rush in here like a rampaging herd of wildebeests, I will die!—but she had found that a little bit of anger, a little bit of humor, those could cloud anxiety and keep it from the link. Nobody else needed to feel how close she was to screaming.
She hated bombs.
There was a second silent pop, and Josh Glassman’s out-of-body avatar resolved himself on the stack of boxes beside her.
“Penguin,” he said. “You promised you’d stay out of dirty holes.”
“Look who’s talking,” she said. “You didn’t need to come.”
“I never have to come,” he said, sitting back and stretching his legs out to rest on what had probably been a stack of plastic storage bins before the fire. Josh’s avatar was rock-solid, and so intricately detailed she could see each fold of cloth in his trousers. Where Phil was fuzzy, Josh was crisp and polished, with his hair and clothing ever-so-slightly rumpled to prove he had better things to care about than his appearance.
“Well, then, hail hail, the gang’s all here,” Rachel said. “Too bad we don’t have beer.”
A frosty green stein appeared in Josh’s hand. It was as much an illusion as the rest of him, but he went through the gestures of drinking and settling it beside him, using the warped top of a box as his coffee table. Phil tried to copy him; his stein started out with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, but its ears quickly melted as Phil lost his focus and the image got away from him.
Rachel laughed, and felt the weight of the building lift away. Phil and Josh smiled at her: apparently she hadn’t been fooling anyone in the link.
“So,” Josh said after about ten minutes of idle talk and playing with shapes of green light. “Phil, show us where this bomb went off.”
“Oh no,” Rachel said. “Oh no no no. I am staying right…” She realized what Josh was saying when he and Phil started laughing at her. “Shut up,” she sighed, and slipped from her body to join them.
The three of them set out to explore, their green avatars easily climbing around and through the ruins of the basement. There was an impromptu game of tag, with Rachel and Phil ganging up on Josh as he flew gracefully through the broken building, eluding them with casual ease.
When they reached the back corner of the basement, Phil waved them over. “Here,” he called out. Rachel and Josh drifted over to him. Phil was kneeling in the center of what might have been a crater if debris from the ceiling hadn’t fallen and filled in most of the hole. Phil poked around until he found the edge of a pipe. “You guys want the full lecture on how we think this happened?”
“Yes,” Rachel said, while Josh said, “No.”
“Ignore him,” Rachel said to Phil. “I want to hear this.”
“All right,” Phil said, pointing his finger at a small piece of metal sticking out of the wall. “This was probably part of the gas line, which we think was rigged to make a single-source explosion. Now, natural gas is actually really safe. There’s safety equipment along each juncture, and it gets replaced on a regular basis to make sure it’s kept up to code. In the United States, gas lines cause only about one explosion per day.”
“Only?” Rachel asked.
“Mathematically speaking? Yes, only. There’s about seventy-two million homes and businesses heated by natural gas, so we’re talking a fraction of a percent. Really, we lose more buildings to space heater malfunctions.”
“Okay,” Rachel said. “So what happened here? I’m assuming Gayle Street didn’t just happen to beat the odds?”
“Nope.” Phil shook his head. “This is the weird part—this is how you know someone planned this. If Gayle Street were an accident, there’d be a single ignition point, followed by an explosion. That’s pretty much the universal progression of an accidental natural gas explosion. Then, after ignition, the blast continues until the fuel source is exhausted. With the last generation of safety equipment, this usually happened when the utility company or the fire department closed down the gas line.
“Since this is a business district in downtown D.C.,” Phil continued, “these gas lines have been updated with an auto-shutoff feature. Too much gas goes through within a certain period of time, and the main line supplying the block shuts down. That’s the only reason the rest of the street is still standing, by the way. If PHMSA hadn’t upgraded to that standard—”
“PHMSA?” Rachel asked.
“Sorry. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. It’s a subset of the Department of Transportation,” Phil said. “I don’t think we’ve got any PHMSA in OACET.”
“You’re right. We don’t,” Josh said. He knew the full roster of Agents like the back of his hand, and knew exactly who had been recruited from which government organization. “We’ve got one from DOT, but he specialized in civil engineering.”
“Thought not,” Phil said. “Anyway, whoever did this knew about the shutoff feature, so they front-loaded the gas line at each site.”
“Front-loaded?” Rachel asked.
“Phil?” Josh’s avatar was slouched against the wall,
arms crossed. “Can you show us? It might be easier.”
“Yeah…” Phil’s voice trailed off as he stared at the half-full crater. A green pipe emerged from the wall, with a cylinder the size and shape of a large oxygen tank slowly materializing beneath it. Rachel noticed that while Phil had difficulty maintaining coffee mugs and his own face, he had no problem at all envisioning the fundamentals of a bomb. “Gas line,” Phil said, pointing at the pipe, then pointed to the cylinder. “Storage tank. This tank is the main fuel source for the bomb.”
He then pointed at the wall. “The shutoff is back there along the utility lines somewhere. There’s only one per five blocks, which means there were three involved in this incident. I took a look at them yesterday, and they did exactly what they’re supposed to do.
“We think somebody installed the gas storage tank down here a few months ago. They must have shut off the local gas line going into the building, installed the device, and then restarted the line. The storage tank then gradually drew on the line, so it would fill over time and wouldn’t trigger the auto-shutoff. From the scrap we’ve collected, it looks like it could have stored fifty to seventy times the BTUs this building requires during peak operation.”
“BTUs?” Rachel asked.
“Ah… British thermal units. Sorry, there’s no easy volume conversion. It’s basically calorie counting for household appliances.”
“Fifty times the normal capacity doesn’t sound like enough fuel to do the level of damage that happened here,” she said.
“It’s plenty,” Phil said. “Natural gas is a cryogenic liquid. It’s lighter than water and air, and it needs to be in a vapor state to ignite. You have no air? Then you have no fire. And if natural gas gets too diluted when it’s in the air, that’s a non-starter, too.
“But this,” Phil said, indicating the cylinder, “is an extra reservoir that the local gas line wasn’t designed to handle. Add that to the fuel that would still be coming down the main line before the blowback shutoff cut on, and you might be talking a hundred-plus times the average BTUs, depending on location. The extra capacity was enough to turn a small, probably manageable explosion into one big enough to take out a store.”
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