Billionaires, Bullets, Exploding Monkeys (A Brick Ransom Adventure)

by Mike Attebery

  The sirens were ringing at the end of the hallway, in the hospital side of the building. She could hear someone speaking over the P.A. system, directing people out of the building. Yet on this side of the facility, in the research sciences wing, everything was silent.

  “The alarms aren’t ringing in this building.”

  “That happens sometimes,” Nick responded.

  “Do you have a funny feeling?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just, like, something isn’t right.”

  “No.”

  They turned and walked into a stairwell. Nick pushed the door open with a clang that echoed through the concrete corridor. Again, all they heard as they walked down the stairs was the sound of their own footsteps.

  “Guess we ought to split up again. Go in one at a time,” Nick said flatly.

  Morgan didn’t respond.

  They stopped at the bottom of the stairs outside the doors to the Immunology wing. Morgan stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his back. He looked down into her eyes.

  “I love you,” Morgan said slowly.

  He hesitated. “You too.”

  They’d never said it before. Maybe it scared them, but it felt right. Then a slow kiss. Cool lips. Morgan took a step back.

  “I’m gonna use the bathroom down the hall.”

  “I’ll see you back there.”

  Before she knew it, he’d walked around the corner and out of sight. She took a deep breath, then walked through the doors and around the corner to the right, heading in the opposite direction. Her hands ran down the front of her shirt and around her waist, feeling to see if anything was askew. She knew more than a few people were onto their shenanigans, but modesty required that she at least attempt to keep up appearances. God, she was acting reckless. They both were.

  Morgan knew from the many times they’d done this before that there was a little-used women’s restroom just through the fire doors at the end of the hall. It felt odd walking into a building where the alarms were going off. In the distance, a voice was still directing people out of the building. Morgan walked to the heavy metal doors. For some reason they were still held open. Normally, even during a drill, the metal latches would have released to let the doors swing closed. These were still fixed open. It seemed odd. She hesitated as a strobe light flashed in her eyes from the ceiling overhead, then she stepped over the threshold, walked ten steps down the hall, and ducked into the women’s restroom.

  She closed the door behind her, locked it, and went into the stall. Something was gnawing at the back of her mind. She was never one of those alarmist girls, but she was starting to feel an unfamiliar panic.

  She stood, flushed the toilet, and went out to the sink to wash her hands. Then, as she stood at the basin, looking into the mirror as she rinsed her hands under the cold water, she heard it.

  Boom!

  She jumped.

  BOOM!

  BAM. BAM.

  It took her a moment to identify the sounds. The first image was of a wrecking ball bouncing off the side of the building. Her second thought was of the doors swinging shut in the corridor.

  Maybe this was a fire!

  She shut off the water and stepped out into the corridor.

  The doors were indeed closed.

  She ran over to them, and that’s when it all changed.

  She tried to force the double doors open. They moved a fraction of an inch, then stopped dead. She pushed harder. Nothing. She peeked down through the narrow pane of glass. A metal bar had been slipped through the door handles on the opposite side. A heavy bolt cut through the bar at a ninety-degree angle, holding it in place. A movement caught her eyes. Morgan peered down the hall through the window, where she saw two men in firefighters’ uniforms carrying guns. Big ones. They were off to the side, half a hall length down, walking away from her. The men turned in her direction as she leaned her weight into the door. One raised his weapon, but the other put a hand on the his elbow, motioning for him to wait, nodding towards the locked doors. It made no difference. By the time they fired, Morgan would be gone. She pushed herself away from the door, turning in a half-circle, her shoes slipping under her as they fought for traction. Then she was off, running through the hospital, alarms blasting in her ears, the image of those men and the gun muzzles flashing in her mind. She thought of Nick, somewhere on the other side of those doors, and she ran faster.

  * * *

  Fire trucks were swarming the building now. Sam Ballard’s eyes scanned the street as he expertly maneuvered his Blazer around the cars in front of him. The lights on the roof of his vehicle spun off around him, red and blue, then bounced back at him from the windshields of the surrounding cars. He cut the wheel from left to right sharply. Sirens blared from every direction, coming at him from side streets, from up ahead, and racing up from behind. Traffic was getting wild. Drivers didn’t seem to know which way to turn next.

  He’d been the fire chief for the University and the surrounding neighborhoods for the last ten years. About once a week, every week, every year for as long as he’d had the position, some sort of alarm had gone off at the college. They were mostly false alarms. Kids would pull them to watch the strobe lights going off like a Christmas tree from outside the building. New researchers would leave some damn thing roasting over a Bunsen burner ‘til the sprinklers went off or the smell cleared the place out. Sure, there were one or two actual fires that broke out each year, but though he always told people to treat every alarm like an honest-to-God emergency, he admitted that more often than not, he and his men showed up in their gear, inspected the buildings, then reset the systems and filed a report for a false alarm.

  Today felt different somehow. This didn’t feel like another false alarm.

  He swerved the wheel to the left and gunned the engine. Depending on which buildings were in question, they had set locations from which to direct emergency operations. This alarm was coming from the main facility, the heart of the hospital, from which a series of wings flailed outward. Sam would get to park in his favorite spot. The hospital had a valet service for hospital visitors coming to see patients. The entrance was a little half loop that branched off from the road in front of the building. A lot of people used the service when they came to take their loved ones home, too. There were numerous handicap-access ramps cut into the pavement. Sam turned into the loop. People were streaming out of the building; some looked confused, others scared. They were all on their cell phones. Sam aimed for a handicap ramp and stomped on the gas. His tires caught the edges slightly, but the Blazer forced its way up and over. He slammed on the brakes, his vehicle swerving slightly as his tires squealed to a stop on the sidewalk. There were probably some cool skid marks on the ground behind him, but unfortunately, there was no time to look. He hopped out of the cab and headed toward a police officer who had also parked on the sidewalk. The guy was in his mid-fifties, same salt and pepper hair as Sam, minus the walrus moustache. Mark Price, chief of police. Mark was talking into his radio as Sam approached. Just as Price looked up to say something to him, a massive explosion rang out behind them.

  B-OO-M!

  It felt about a block away. The ground rumbled beneath their feet. Sam looked over his shoulder at the huge construction crane hanging over the far wing of the building. A fireball roared up into the air, engulfing the crane’s metal arm.

  Mark’s gaze followed the spires of flame that twirled up into the air. He raised his radio again, clicking the button and releasing a gasp of static.

  “Guys, what the hell was that?”

  * * *

  Morgan was just rushing out the fire exits when she saw the accident. It was like something out of a movie. The crowd was pouring through the doors, then milling about in the building’s courtyard. They were on the side facing the back driveway leading into the hospital, where the road looped down along Lake Union as it swept into the main parking garage. It was sunny. That was what caught her off guard. Amidst the fear
of the events going on inside, after seeing two men with guns securing the fire doors upstairs, while her heart pounded harder and harder in her chest, as she realized that this was serious, deadly serious, amidst all of this, the sun had broken through the clouds and was shining on the crowd of people outside. People who probably assumed that everything was normal. Just another drill. The sunlight made her look up and follow the beams of light shooting down at the cars on the highway. Then she heard a truck slam on its brakes and turned to follow the sound of squealing brakes as everything around her slowed down. Morgan and the crowd could only watch in dismay as a line of cars stopped along the main road was slowly and methodically twisted, crunched, and plowed out of the way by a big rig truck, one hauling what looked to be a petroleum tanker behind it. Petroleum, gas, whatever it was, it had the little signs on the sides, the bright orange triangles with the dancing flames. Morgan heard herself gasp. A woman behind her screamed. Then the crowd started running for cover.

  The truck’s brakes shrieked as its tires locked up and skidded across the pavement. The driver pulled the horn as the tanker careened back and forth behind the rig, smashing into cars and sending them shooting off to the sides. The sounds of smashing glass and screeching metal were deafening. Then the driver either jerked the wheel too far to the side or lost complete control, for the truck took a sharp turn to the left, jumped the barrier in the middle of the road, and cut across the path of oncoming traffic, where it clipped a hatchback, sending the vehicle spinning ahead like a top. The little car’s tires blew out a moment before the rig caught up to it, sweeping the car against its grill and driving it forward as sparks shot from the tortured rims. The car skittered back and forth against the speed before breaking free and spinning out to safety. The truck hopped the curb and picked up speed. Morgan caught a glimpse of the driver as he opened the cab door, leapt to freedom, and tumbled in the dirt a split second before the tanker’s back tires plowed over his legs. Above the chaos, Morgan could hear the man’s scream as the bones in his legs exploded.

  The truck continued on, picking up speed now, seemingly possessed by a phantom driver, its front wheels turning back and forth wildly as it drove over the uneven soil. The tanker followed behind, its hitch twisting and pulling with each impact. All at once, the crowd saw where the truck was going and a gasp rose up from the mass of people. Construction crews were hard at work on the new wing of the hospital. The iron and glass skeleton of the new building stood a block or so away. Men in hard hats stood atop the half-completed structure, watching the truck in horror as it ran out of ground. The cab turned in on itself, the bumper and grill digging into the dirt, sending a geyser of sand and gravel roaring up into the air.

  Construction workers were running for cover.

  Then-

  Impact.

  The briefest pause, and...

  F-OoOom!

  The tanker hit the back of the truck, twisted to the side, and slammed into the base of the construction crane that towered over the site. The tanker’s metal skin peeled away as its jelly-like contents blasted out, then ignited. The explosion blew out what windows had already been installed. Flames engulfed the base of the crane, shooting up into the sky as the paint blistered away from the metal base.

  Workers fled the building, running for safety and heading for the elevators at the far end of the site. The crowd behind the hospital watched warily, unsure where to go or what might happen next. Their eyes moved from the flames at the base of the crane to the massive arm that hung a dozen or so stories above them. The sounds of protesting metal began to fill the air, drawing the crowds eyes back to the base, now engulfed in fire.

  Everyone started running.

  * * *

  Renoir didn’t feel the bullet. It must have gone in and out in one clean motion, clipping him in the knee and causing one hell of a flesh wound. Hell, who was he kidding, it must have torn into something pretty vital, ‘cause his leg was killing him. The bleeding was profuse. It didn’t help that his assailant had forced him to walk on the injured leg and lead him to Raj’s lab downstairs.

  Raj, of course that fucker was the cause of this. Michel often joked that Gupta would be the death of him. Looks like he’d been morbidly correct. Now here he was, stumbling through his own department, leaning against the wall, the water cooler, anything along the way that could support his weight, as this man with an assault weapon followed behind him, shouting orders to a dozen similarly armed men in fire fighters uniforms. The men ran past the two of them and headed down a side hallway, where they split off, guns held at the ready.

  “If this is a bank heist, you have your buildings mixed up.” Renoir mumbled.

  “Just get me to the labs sir!” Tim shouted.

  “I’m doing my best. I could move a bit faster if you’d chosen a different persuasion method.”

  The man opened his mouth to speak, but stopped short at the sound of twisting metal. The noise rumbled through the building.

  Tim ran to the windows as Renoir staggered behind. A wall of thick black smoke filled the air beyond the glass. It was the kind of smoke Renoir had seen in news footage during the first Gulf War, when fleeing troops had set fire to their own oil wells. It had been all the flames could do to keep up with the geysers of thick, choking oil as it spewed up from the ground and ignited. This was some sort of oil and gas fire. Flames roared up through the smoke. Renoir held his hand above his brow, trying to block the sunlight from his eyes as he looked down at the area below. He could see a fire truck to the north, circling around the main road in front of the hospital, coming down the back driveway that led to the main parking garage. A crowd to the south, in the courtyard behind the hospital, was starting to move down to the lake behind the building. Most of them were running. Some looked up in the air, an expression of terror passing over their faces, like the shadow of a cloud racing over the earth.

  What were they looking at?

  Renoir looked up, as did his attacker, this man Tim.

  “Oh shit,” Renoir said, at the same time his attacker sucked in a quick gasp of air.

  The new wing of the hospital had been dwarfed by a construction crane for the last ten months. A massive construction crane. As he drove into the garage each morning, under the shadows of overhead beams being hoisted above, and as he left at night, again under the shadow of the hulking, silent beast, he’d often wondered what would happen if that piece of machinery should come down. Looked like he was gonna find out.

  His captor watched the far end of the crane’s arm, then his eyes shot down to the base, where a wall of flames danced around in a fiery ring. Flames crawled up the metal latticework, where strips of metal were curling and pulling away like footage from a time-lapse camera. The cries of tearing metal screeched through the windows.

  That crane was definitely going to come down.

  Renoir watched Tim’s eyes as they moved from the base of the crane, back to the top, then swept downward. He, like Renoir, was calculating the arc its massive arm would follow should its base give way. They both came to the same conclusion.

  “Is there a problem?” Renoir asked through tightened lips.

  Tim turned to him, his eyes set, angry.

  “You’re parked in the garage, aren’t you?” Renoir almost laughed.

  Tim’s hands tensed around the weapon in his hands.

  The sounds of screaming metal rang out again as the two men turned back to the window, just as the crane gave way. It always surprised Renoir how much life could be like the movies. Big movies. This crane, this crane was big. And now here it was, collapsing under its own weight. The noise was cacophonous, a series of shrieks and moans that was only growing in intensity. Renoir’s eyes pulled back in awe as the massive structure corkscrewed ever so slightly in place, then slowly began its fall sideways, towards the lake, towards the building’s entrance and the main roadway. The people below ran for cover, while those on the north side watched helplessly as the crane pulled loose from its molt
en base and tore downward, through the air, through the surface of the roadway, and into the earth below, where it must have hit a series of gas and sewer lines, which themselves went up in flames, the explosions ripping up through the road every 30 yards, manhole covers and sections of roadway peeling off like blistered asphalt skin.

  As quickly as it began, it was over.

  The roadway was now completely obscured. What wasn’t blocked in by the metal grillwork of the destroyed crane had been torn apart by the ensuing utility explosion. There was virtual silence, save for the sounds of dozens of car alarms going off inside the main garage. At his age, Renoir had seen a lot, but even this took the breath from him. He looked at his captor.

  Renoir felt a tickle in his stomach.

  Now they were both trapped.

  Tim stared at the ground below, then clenched his jaw, turned to Renoir and motioned towards the door.

  “Keep moving.”

  * * *

  Jeff was trying to figure these guys out. They didn’t look the way he might have pictured such men, but in his mind, they were undoubtedly terrorists. Was that a prejudice? Could you be prejudiced against terrorists? More often than not, wouldn’t that make you prejudiced towards prejudiced people? The point was, he couldn’t guess at the cause these men were fighting for, at least not based solely on their appearances. Maybe they were just after money. After all, except for the uniforms, which many of them had already removed, these guys looked like they could have been American businessmen. That’s probably how the fuckers had gotten as far as they had.