Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Don’t threaten me, my friend,” said McLaughlin. “I’m holding all the cards here. More than you realize. Now, I can give you Coyote and tell you exactly where and when the Green Warriors are planning to hit. I can stop dozens of people from dying—make you all look like heroes.”

  “In return for what?” asked Krause.

  “I retire. With my money. And, with a walk on the Café Treize fire.”

  “No,” Georgia shouted. She turned to Krause. “Please don’t do this, sir. There must be some other way. Don’t bargain away the lives of Russo and Fuentes like this.”

  “What’s it gonna be?” asked McLaughlin. “The lives of two firefighters? Or the lives of dozens of civilians?”

  “I’m sorry, Marshal,” said Krause. “I have to consider the bigger picture.” He turned to McLaughlin. “You’ve got your deal.”

  McLaughlin nodded. “The Green Warriors have sabotaged the Dalcor plant. When it goes on-line for a test run this morning, there will be a fireball inside.”

  Nobody had to be told the implications. The Dalcor plant opening was a major photo op for business and political leaders. The mayor would surely make an appearance. So would the city council president, several well-known community activists and plenty of press. But Krause looked personally pained by the news.

  “My daughter,” he choked out. “She’s photographing the event. She’s supposed to be there.”

  “Of course she’s there,” said McLaughlin with a slow smile. “In the Manolo Blahnik boots I bought her—to replace the ones Marshal Skeehan ruined. She’s Coyote.”

  46

  McLaughlin’s words hadn’t fully dawned yet on Charles Krause. But they had registered on Scott Nelson.

  “We’re toast,” Nelson said to Reese. He was right, Georgia knew. Everyone in the New York office would be transferred and punished after a fiasco like this. And Krause would be ruined—in one fell swoop, he’d lose his daughter and his career. For at least three years, the Feds had thought they’d cultivated an inside line on the militant underbelly of the Green Warriors. And all along, it had been the other way around. McLaughlin was in bed—literally—with the enemy. And the enemy was closer than any of them had imagined.

  Krause whipped out his cell phone. “This is bullshit, I’m calling my daughter.”

  “No,” said Georgia, grabbing the phone away from him. “She can’t be alerted. We don’t know what she’ll do.” Georgia called over a police captain. “Please keep Mr. McLaughlin and Special Agent Krause under your close supervision. They cannot make any phone calls.” Then she got on her handy talkie to Marenko. “Is Chief Brennan here?”

  “Out front,” said Marenko.

  “Tell him we need units at the Dalcor plant, ASAP. We’ve got to stop the plant from going on-line—and evacuate everyone assembled. I’m coming out to explain.”

  As Georgia walked down the length of the stalls, Nathan Reese hustled over. He looked overwhelmed and confused. His boss and organization were going under, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  “I want to help,” he said to Georgia.

  “Not now,” she told him. She had no time for niceties.

  “But I can help you,” he insisted. “Most plants these days are run by computer. I know computers.”

  “Speak to my chief,” she said. “If he says it’s okay, it’s okay by me.”

  Outside, the block was closed off to traffic. Dozens of emergency vehicles were clustered around the perimeter of the building. And it was all going to have to move about thirty blocks south. Georgia found Brennan. He looked ready for retirement after the last twenty-four hours. For the first time Georgia could ever recall, his shoes lacked their gleaming spit-polish shine, and his tie looked hastily knotted, with the result that his two chins became three.

  “McLaughlin’s full of shit,” he said by way of greeting. “Once again, we’ve been had.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Georgia.

  “The plant went on-line ten minutes ahead of schedule—at eight-fifty-one A.M. It’s operating without a hitch. Everyone is being evacuated as a precaution. But the engineers and plant officials say it’s a hoax. The mayor’s embarrassed. And believe me, Skeehan, the mayor doesn’t like to be embarrassed. Our next budget comes up, you better believe he’s gonna remember this.”

  “How about Krause’s daughter, Lauren?”

  “No one can find her.”

  “She wasn’t there?”

  “She signed in, but since the evacuation announcement, no one’s been able to find her. The PD’s got cars out patrolling for her and waiting at her apartment in case she shows.”

  “It’s possible McLaughlin made the whole thing up,” said Reese. Brennan frowned at Reese like he was a homeless person trying to bum a cigarette.

  “Who asked you?”

  “You’ve met Agent Reese,” Georgia reminded Brennan. “He’s a computer expert for the FBI. He offered to check out the plant’s computers and see if anything has been sabotaged inside the operating system.”

  “I’m sure the engineers are already doing that.”

  “It can’t hurt to get another opinion,” said Georgia.

  Georgia could see Brennan wanted to argue, but he also wanted to get over to the plant and try to placate the mayor. He nodded to his Crown Victoria with a fire marshal at the wheel. “Get in. I’ll decide what’s necessary when we get there.”

  The marshal flipped the light bar and siren and sped thirty blocks south to the plant. Already, HazMat trucks and police cruisers were jockeying for space beside the limousines of important city officials, who could neither leave the site nor enter the building. If the mayor and his aides left, it might imply they didn’t think the plant was safe. If they stayed, they were forced to huddle in groups or sit in their limos with no real time frame as to when they’d get to go back inside.

  Georgia and Reese followed Brennan to a tight knot of men in hard hats and silk suits. Dalcor’s senior management. The hard hats were all for show. They were being interrogated by operations chiefs in the FDNY and NYPD. A paunchy man wearing a hard hat was standing in the middle with some sort of intricate map of the plant spread out on the hood of a police cruiser. His thick, snowy eyebrows were knitted together behind black horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed bewildered and annoyed by the circus of emergency personnel before him.

  “The plant went on-line at eight fifty-one this morning,” the man explained. “It was operational for twenty-one minutes before we received the order to shut it down. There were no problems. The bomb squad has been through every inch of this facility and has been unable to locate any devices or abnormalities. If there was going to be a problem, it would have happened by now.”

  “Has everyone been evacuated?” asked Brennan.

  “Yes,” said the man with the snow-white eyebrows. “We evacuated them through the rear exit of the plant, as per our standard operating procedure.”

  Georgia focused on the glass-block building now. The whole plant was like a giant display window. Everything was visible. There was a front lobby area that appeared to be sealed off from the manufacturing portion of the plant. The manufacturing portion had two large emergency exit doors in front, immediately off the driveway, and an emergency exit in back, at the end of a long glass corridor with panoramic views of the Hudson River. There were a couple of forklifts and payloaders positioned along the driveway as well. They looked hastily parked, as if the construction workers had been here this morning, then evacuated with all the other civilian personnel. Like all construction jobs in New York City, the Dalcor plant was probably behind schedule.

  “Why did you evacuate from the rear exit?” asked Georgia.

  “That was the nearest exit,” the man explained. “We were hosting our breakfast reception along the corridor. There’s a viewing platform there, so people can see the storage tanks in the basement. We didn’t want our guests walking through the manufacturing portion of the plant if there was a bomb.”


  “And you keep those doors open?”

  “Once they’ve been activated, they can only be closed electronically from the main switchboard.”

  A stiff breeze blew off the Hudson River. Georgia turned up the collar of her coat. But it was more than the wind giving her a chill. She shoved her hands into her coat pockets and cursed softly. Nothing about the plant seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing. Is this another one of McLaughlin’s games? she wondered. If so, then he’d succeeded brilliantly. He’d gotten himself out of a jam and helped further the Green Warriors’ cause in the process. He could easily claim he was duped by the Green Warriors too. Georgia pictured him sitting down in some nice warm police station, quietly amused at the ruckus he’d created. She gritted her teeth. Score another point for Freezer.

  47

  The man with the white eyebrows and the black-rimmed glasses was a Dalcor engineer. Georgia knew it the moment he began talking about applied flux and damping coefficients to the group of officials gathered at the front of the building. He agreed to take them on a tour of the plant’s control room, in a sealed-off area overlooking the manufacturing floor, to demonstrate how efficiently the plant operated.

  The room looked like the sound booth of a recording studio. It was filled with computers, gauges and digital equipment that meant nothing to Georgia. While Reese grilled the engineer, Georgia wandered about the room. The only window offered a view of conveyor belts stopped in midproduction and plastics cooling in injection molds. She recalled they were making computer casings.

  She walked over to a stainless steel panel with three black dials on it. The needles on the first two dials were steady; the third was spinning erratically. Above the dial, a nameplate read Storage Tank #3.

  “Where’s storage tank number three?” asked Georgia. The engineer looked up from his conversation with Reese and the chiefs.

  “There is no storage tank number three.”

  “But there’s a dial for it here.”

  The engineer tilted his black-rimmed glasses and gave her a patronizing look beneath his snowy eyebrows. “There are two storage tanks inside the facility, Marshal. Butadiene from the holding tank outside the building is pumped into two storage tanks in the basement. Storage tank number three is merely a designation for a tank that Dalcor will build if it expands the plant.”

  “Oh.”

  The engineer went to return to his conversation, but Georgia again interrupted.

  “If there’s no storage tank three, wouldn’t the dial read zero?”

  “It would. And it does.”

  “Then why is it spinning?”

  “Huh?” The engineer walked over and frowned at the gauge. “That’s ridiculous. The entire plant’s been shut down. We don’t even have a third tank. There’s no way we can have a…” His voice trailed off.

  “A what?” asked Georgia.

  The man didn’t answer. He tapped some buttons on a keyboard. The basement storage tanks flashed on a grainy security monitor. None of them needed an engineering degree to see what the problem was. The return line that was supposed to direct overflow back to the holding tank outside had a valve on it—probably in anticipation of Dalcor eventually fitting it with a third storage tank. The valve was open and butadiene was pouring out of it and collecting in a depression on the basement’s concrete floor.

  “I thought you said the bomb squad went through this facility?” said Brennan.

  “They did,” said the engineer. “But it would’ve taken at least twenty minutes for the first two tanks to reach capacity. The return line is only for overflow.”

  Immediately, the engineer and the other officials from Dalcor began trying to redirect the flow of butadiene away from the return line. Brennan could see they were just in the way. He ushered Georgia and Reese out of the control room and into the driveway. There was nothing any of them could do until the leak was under control. Georgia walked the length of the driveway down to the pier. Reese followed.

  “So much for my engineering knowledge.” He shrugged. “A simple leak and I couldn’t even pick it up.”

  “I don’t know if it’s such a simple leak,” said Georgia.

  Reese kicked at a loose piece of gravel and turned his face to the stiff breeze coming off the water. “Georgia, I’m really sorry about what happened to Doug Hanlon. I feel like it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t given you that tape…”

  “You did nothing wrong,” Georgia assured him. “Somebody else decided to take the law into their own hands. It’s not your fault.”

  “I don’t want to see any more firefighters die,” he said wearily. “It seems like no matter how much good you try to do, it can never make up for the bad.”

  Georgia gave him a quizzical look. He seemed to want to tell her something, but in the end, he just reached into his coat pocket and pressed an envelope into her hand.

  “What’s this?” asked Georgia.

  “The Café Treize tape,” said Reese. “I had to break a few rules to get it, but I don’t think Krause is in a position to string me up anymore. I want you to have it.”

  “Thanks,” said Georgia, stuffing the tape into her bag. Suddenly, a bright white flash caught their eyes. Georgia and Reese turned toward the building. Inside, beside one of the conveyor belts, they could see a woman on fire. Her hair was in flames. Her skin was blackening and her right arm had been blown off at the elbow. Georgia thought all the civilians had been evacuated. Then she saw the remnants of a camera splayed out across a conveyor belt. She didn’t need to see more to know that the figure was Lauren Krause.

  Georgia heard voices over her handy talkie ordering companies to stretch hose lines and take the doors. One of them was Chief Broward, calling Ladder Seventeen to open the front emergency doors of the plant and evacuate the badly burned woman, while Engine Twelve hooked up the hose.

  Georgia stood at the back of the building watching the woman writhe in agony. She was no longer on fire, but a box of computer casings was. The flames were consuming the cardboard and heating up the plastic. Noxious black smoke began to mushroom from the box and darken the windows. Even if the woman didn’t die from her burns, she most certainly would die now from the smoke. Georgia watched the blaze with a sense of disbelief. Lauren Krause didn’t seem like the kind of person who would blow herself up in a political protest. Had the bomb backfired? But McLaughlin was the Green Warriors’ torch. Wouldn’t he have rigged it? Surely he knew how to take down this whole building if he wanted to. But here was a small fire that had destroyed nothing except Lauren Krause and a few computer casings.

  Maybe that was his intention, Georgia decided. After all, if McLaughlin really did want to get out of this racket, he wasn’t the kind of man to leave loose ends. And Lauren Krause, his secret lover, was definitely a loose end. Still, the fire seemed nowhere near as deadly as the one that McLaughlin had promised.

  A fireball. He’d called it a fireball. She had seen a fireball in Jamie Sullivan’s apartment. She could still picture that long, narrow hallway and that persistent rush of air.

  Georgia studied the open exit doors at the back end of the building. Air was rushing through them off the river, passing a viewing platform in the corridor. At the base of the viewing platform were the storage tanks—and the spill of butadiene. The entire mixture of air and petroleum fuel was being sucked in and funneled toward the small fire in the manufacturing end of the plant—the same area where firefighters were set to break down the emergency doors to put out the fire and rescue Lauren Krause. Georgia froze in realization of what was to come. By breaking the doors, firefighters would be unleashing a monster chain reaction of fuel, air and heat. And it would all be heading straight for them, just as it had for Jamie Sullivan.

  “It’s the same scenario,” Georgia muttered. “It’s the same goddamned scenario.”

  “What is?” asked Reese.

  “Do you know about something called the Venturi effect?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s a basic physics
principle.” He stared at the building for a moment, then caught her drift. “Shit. You think it’s going to happen here?”

  “I’ve got to stop Ladder Seventeen from taking those doors.” Georgia got on her handy talkie to Brennan. “Chief. It’s Skeehan. You’ve got to speak to Chief Broward. Tell him his men can’t take those front doors. If they do, the fire will explode on them.” Georgia started to explain, but Brennan cut her off.

  “Are you kidding, Skeehan? You want me to tell a man with thirty years in fire operations that a rookie marshal is overriding his judgment? Stay out of this. It’s not your call.” Brennan clicked off.

  “Can we close the back doors?” asked Reese.

  “Negative,” said Georgia. “They’re mechanically activated. If the chiefs won’t listen to me, then I’ve got to warn the men.” As a fire marshal, she had no direct handy talkie contact with firefighters. The only way she could warn them was to physically put herself in front of them. She ran up the driveway to the front of the building, jumping over hose lines and past barricades to get to the men of Ladder Seventeen. Jack O’Dwyer was the first firefighter she saw. He was carrying a halligan, and when he spotted her, his expression turned grim. Obviously, Chief Brennan had already warned Broward and the men that Georgia might cause trouble.

  “Get out of the way, girlie,” growled O’Dwyer. “We’ve got a job to do. I’m old school and I don’t want to hurt a woman, but if I have to physically push you aside, I will.”

  “Jack, listen to me, please. You open that door, there’s gonna be a fireball behind it. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “We have our orders. Now be a good girl and get out of the way.”

  The younger men in Ladder Seventeen threw themselves behind O’Dwyer while the lieutenant radioed the chief about the situation.