On padded knees and elbows Chagall crawls through the inky dark, his cyclopean light casting shadows that swing in wheeling wedges through the ranks of floor supports. He inches forward deliberately, sliding a nylon kit bag before him. There isn’t much room. From his entry point beneath the access panel, he turtles along a wall above the auditorium’s northern edge. The tight quarters induce a mild claustrophobia, and when he reaches the ventilation duct Chagall is sweating heavily.
He pulls a smartphone, sister to the one procured for Romulus, from a zippered pocket. Images relayed at twenty-second intervals show the guard at his post on the grainy screen.
After a short rest he lays out tools, sets the kit bag aside, and hikes himself into position. He exchanges latex gloves for a heavier cotton pair, with leather finger pads to protect against roughly cut sheet metal.
Chagall decouples the ventilation riser from a network of horizontal ducts that spider through the plenum. Turning, he extracts another set of screws from the vertical end of the elbow, removes the piece, and sets it aside. Tapping lightly along the inside of the riser, he sounds out the concrete slab’s thickness, then punches a starter hole with a short, sharp hunting dagger. Chagall takes tin snips to the sheet metal, cutting as wide as the space allows. He clips several inches down each side, and pulls back a thin strip of ducting. A moonscape is illuminated by his headlamp, gypsum fireproofing sprayed directly onto the girder. Chagall completes the cuts methodically, using pliers to fold the sheet metal back as far as he can reach.
To catch debris Chagall tapes a plastic bib in place. Then he begins to pry gypsum from the beam. Once a small section is exposed the going is easy.
He checks again on the guard. The figure on the smartphone screen is stationary in his chair. It’s impossible to tell for sure, but Chagall has a hunch it’s nap time.
Now he unzips the nylon case and arrays elements of the incendiary in easy reach, along with a digital multimeter to test the trigger’s hookup. He smears the ceramic coffin’s flanges with high temperature epoxy, then slathers more onto the I-beam itself. Dotting the tips of several bundled sparklers, the kind anyone can buy at any fireworks stand on the continent, he inserts the ready-made fuse through a hole drilled in the enclosure, deep into the thermite charge. Chagall maneuvers the assembly into place. Carefully mating epoxied flange to sticky steel, he holds it steady until the goop begins to set.
Silicon sealant fixes the triggering rig to the I-beam. Chagall wires up the fuse, checks the connections, and flips a switch. A flashing yellow LED goes steady and green, then blinks off.
His smartphone now shows the guard absent from the booth. Cycling through the surveillance cameras, Chagall sees only empty parking lot.
It’s just past three. The construction crews will start to report as early as five.
Chagall switches off his headlamp. He’ll lie low while the epoxy hardens.
—
Suspended in darkness, Chagall drifts through his punch list. There’s a roundabout drive immediately ahead. South into Kansas, west into Colorado, a backroads zigzag up into Wyoming. Past the outskirts of Cheyenne, then northeast into the Black Hills. He’ll park the quarter-ton he’s driving tonight, and pick up a box truck garaged outside Rapid City.
The plan is to deadhead across western Nebraska, carrying an almost-legit contract for hauling fertilizer out of Norfolk. In Meadow Grove, a hundred twenty miles from his target, Chagall will load the empty truck with eight tons of bagged and palleted ammonium nitrate.
He has set up a way station some fifteen miles from the research complex, in a barn on fallow property near Staplehurst. A motley collection of propane cylinders, acquired secondhand for cash, is cached in a grain bin there. Blasting caps and automobile batteries are buried near the rented property’s fence line. In the barn’s rafters he has concealed steering and accelerator motors, a GPS sensor, and a modified laptop to govern the bobtail’s last-quarter-mile approach.
A metallic thud interrupts Chagall’s reverie.
It sounded from nearby, perhaps the fire door at the floor’s northeast corner. Now there are footsteps.
Another door opens and shuts, this one not so massive. The guard is in the lab overhead. Chagall scarcely breathes. What did he leave showing? Why would the guard turn in from the corridor unless he has seen something amiss? Above him, heavy boots pace from the door to the windows beside the hinged panel Chagall used to access the plenum. A pause. Chagall silently counts off ten seconds. Twenty. He is unarmed, and can hardly move in the tight, underfloor space.
Wait.
The guard is stepping back toward the door. Was it just a routine walkthrough? As the laboratory door shuts, Chagall resumes breathing; the guard’s footsteps recede. Now the fire door, echoing heavily as it slams shut. Time passes. Taking care not to make the least sound, he checks the smartphone. The booth is still unmanned.
He waits ten minutes by his watch, and checks again. Still empty.
Seven minutes more.
Now the guard stands outside, having a smoke.
Chagall’s heart pounds with release and relief. He stretches in the confined space, then pokes at the silicon ooze with a screwdriver, at the epoxy that bonds thermite to steel. Neither is fully set, but each seal is stable enough.
He wrestles the cut sheet metal straight. Duct tape is enough to mask the incisions. So long as light doesn’t shine through, there’s no need for cosmetics. He screws the elbow joint back into place.
Chagall packs and pockets his tools, then begins a retreat toward the access hatch.
THIRTY
The drivers killed their headlights as they rolled through the predawn darkness and turned into a little-used parking lot, some two miles south of the Berkeley campus. Eddie’s junkers idled wheezily along the east side of the staging point, overlooking Highway 24. The chatter-valved wrecks had survived their second trek from Sebastopol—they’d caravanned in for the rehearsal too—but it seemed a better bet to squander gasoline than to risk a balky ignition on the morning it mattered.
The lot boiled with muted activity. Zac stood with a clipboard at the curb cut’s edge, directing drivers as they arrived. Others worked the crowd, making sure everybody found their assigned vehicle. Eddie and some of his Mendocino County pals divvied up leaflets to be distributed on the bridge. There were freshly minted “I Sat in Traffic to Stop Frankenfood” buttons too, meant to mollify trapped drivers by suggesting they were part of a Historic Occasion.
Christopher stood in a faux-commuter’s suit and tie with Allison and the tower crew. They’d clustered by the cargo vans that would transport the banner, and, optimistically, getaway bikes for the climbers. “Everybody’s set to channel three?” he asked, checking his own walkie-talkie in light spilling off an adjacent overpass.
Marty was nervously fingering carabiners clipped to his harness. “Sure we are, Chris. But say again how we’re supposed to remember the sequence when we’re swingin’ in the wind?”
Allison chided Marty with a wink. “Three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. If a math retard like me can do Fibonacci numbers …”
“That’s it,” Christopher said. “And the code to switch up is ‘boost the volume.’”
“You’ve got spare batteries?” Phil asked.
Christopher patted his jacket pocket. “Somebody made sure about the color codes, right?”
Phil nodded. “I triple-checked. Orange rope for the Golden Gate side of the banner, blue for San Jose.”
“Please God,” Allison said, “don’t let us pull it up backwards.”
“What do we hear from the coalition?” Marty asked.
“Too early for the phone net to go live,” Christopher said. He shivered, only partly from the cold. “Nora checked in a few minutes ago and said there’s nothing since Meg’s e-mail to Tactical.”
Zac broke into their circle. “Everybody’s here, everything’s loaded,” he said. “Eleven minute warning.”
“All for o
ne,” Phil said.
“Jayzus.” Marty clasped his fellow climber’s hand. “We’re really gonna do it.”
Allison took Christopher’s arm as he turned to find his place. “Did Nora say whether the boys are awake?”
“She didn’t,” Christopher said. “They’re going to be okay, Al. We’ve got your back.”
“I know. I know that. You look sharp. Like somebody’s lawyer.”
“Sheesh.” He shook his head, momentarily tongue-tied.
“I’m not saying you should make a habit of it.”
“Not to worry,” Christopher said. “Good luck out there.”
“To all of us.”
—
When Nora and Brendan took their posts at half past five, the thermometer by the bay windows read fifty degrees. They shut the library’s pocket doors and ran space heaters at full throttle. Nora wore fingerless gloves as she worked the phone. Brendan sat beside her in a watch cap, keeping an eye on webcams run by a local network affiliate. Light glimmered up on the westbound deck, silhouetting sparse traffic.
“I just started that Kerouac novel,” Nora was saying to a longtime antinuke activist with a downtown day job. The woman on the other end of the line—they were careful not to call each other by name—was standing by to blast-fax press releases as soon as blockaders controlled the bridge.
“You’re going to love it,” the downtown conspirator read off her code sheet.
“I know I will,” Nora replied. “I’ll call as soon as I can get away for coffee.”
“I’ll be ready when you are.”
Nora disconnected the call. “That’s it,” she said to Brendan. “Now we wait.”
“If this thing comes off, it’ll top ripping up the railroad tracks in Concord.”
She smiled. Trains carrying weapons bound for Central American dictatorships took them back a lot of years. “It’s good to have you around,” she told her compadre. It was true, despite his caginess. The warmth she felt wasn’t just nostalgia. There was something immutable about being on the barricades together at a tender age.
“I’m glad to be someplace folks’ll put up with me.”
“For a while, anyway.” The Embarcadero webcam refreshed its image. More of the same. “Seriously, though,” she said after a silence. “Are you going to stick around this time?”
Brendan looked up, then away again. “I can’t say.”
“Nobody’s caught you nosing around Allison,” Nora said. “And she hasn’t been complaining either. A girl’s got to figure … maybe something’s up?”
“Christ.”
Nora was amused to see him blush.
“Nothing’s—it’s just—I’m not there yet,” he said. “That’s all. Not Al so much as the whole of humankind.”
She nodded. “I know. I can’t even imagine.” She couldn’t. None of them had ever been dumped the way his Chiapas comrades had dumped Brendan. “Leaving Allison aside,” she said. “If Buzz ends up adopting us, he could use a role model with your—what? Your chops. Your cred.”
“An ex-con who’s not a wife beater, you mean?”
“Well, yeah, you can put it like that.”
Brendan took a pull of coffee from his mug. “Y’all are the stable influence around here. I never was. Anyway, the kid detests me.”
“That’s where you’ve got an advantage.” The cell phone’s ring cut Nora short. She snatched it off the table and thumbed the device open in a single move. “Headquarters.”
As Nora spoke into the phone the hallway door swung wide. Brendan jumped out of his chair.
“What’s going on?” Jonah asked. Buzz’s skunk-striped head gleamed in the hallway behind him; on Sunday he’d gotten Zac to shave off his mohawk.
“Roger that,” Nora was saying into the cell phone. “Everything’s a go on this side.”
Brendan held up a hand, silencing the boys. “Give us just a second.”
“Roger. Waiting for your signal from Isengard.”
“Ice and guard?” Buzz was rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What the fuck’s that?”
“Lord of the Rings, dude.”
“Good morning, fellas.” Nora snapped the cell shut. “You’re up just in time for today’s top story.”
—
Accelerating out of the toll plaza, the drivers merged to form two single-file columns with three lanes of traffic between them. Speed and density were building gradually toward the clog of a weekday commute. There were no highway patrol on the road, ahead or behind.
Mount Tamalpais stood crisp against the sky’s rising backlight. Approaching Yerba Buena Island, Christopher glanced at a banner over the entrance to the tunnel, touting electronic bridge toll devices. During the first Gulf War, he and Marty hung a hand-painted sign in exactly the same place. It didn’t last an hour. Caltrans had rolled up, workers tromped down the steep slope, and the plea for peace was history. Traffic hadn’t even slowed. It’ll be a different story this morning, he thought as they emerged onto the western span.
With choreographed lane changes, the caravan converged into formation. A Vanagon, the one that was running rough when they were up at Eddie’s place, kept enough ahead of the pack to allow straggling commuters an escape flue up the middle lane. With innocents purged from the wedge of activist vehicles, Eddie’s wrecks maneuvered five abreast behind the cargo vans. The Vanagon remained slightly ahead, positioned to fall back into the front row at the last moment. As they crossed the center anchorage, the buffer vehicles aligned.
Christopher’s dashboard clock read 6:38. A pearly light suffused the air and the sun had nearly cleared the East Bay hills. Alone in a borrowed Subaru, acutely conscious of his surrounding comrades, Christopher gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white against its pleather cover. His eyes were glued to the rusty Monte Carlo directly ahead. Its shocks sagged under the weight of a half-dozen activists and a trunk full of agitprop. A woman from the Friends Committee to Stop the War had the wheel of a red Accord to his right; Dennis Chu from Agritech Watch drove a black Toyota quarter-ton in lane one. A fellow he’d met that morning—Roy? Randy?—one of Eddie’s recruits—followed in a late model Acura.
The Monte Carlo drifted toward Christopher’s left lane line. The Vanagon slowed and slipped into the space straddling lanes two and three. Christopher held his breath and edged slightly rightward, as if preparing to scoot around a slow driver, corking the gap between the vehicles in front of him. They coasted to a halt in sixteen-part harmony. An apparently random, fully premeditated stagger across the bridge formed a three-layer dam against the commuter onslaught. Traffic silted unhappily behind them.
Christopher looked to either side, and back in the Subaru’s mirrors. Marty had been right. If the blockade were left to the front rank alone, even six cars across five lanes, somebody would have tried to slip by. A thick blare of car horns blanketed the bridge. Christopher leaned on the Subaru’s horn, joining in. He’d forgotten to count down, but the front row hadn’t. Fifteen seconds after Eddie’s junkers came to a stop, their doors burst open and blockaders spilled onto the deck.
Heart in his throat, Christopher tried to see the action with fresh eyes, as a stranger might, or a news camera. Purple-dreadlocked college students, gleeful and resolved; back-to-the-land veterans of movements past; hipsters wearing flesh plugs in their ears and caps to keep their shaved heads warm; a startlingly tall woman, six months pregnant, majestic in a bulky down jacket; an old fellow, white hair glowing in the light from the east—all of them scrambling in disciplined disorder.
Melissa Khachaturian, the pregnant woman, carried a mesh sack of short, fat PVC tubes to the south side of the bridge; the old guy, Freddie Millman, was her mirror on the north. As Melissa and the retired longshoreman took their places, the rest of the blockaders chained adjacent wrecks together by their window frames, ran webs of bright yellow tape across the span, and set oversized stop signs atop the vehicle roofs. The cardboard hexagons were the first explicit notice of what was up
. “Frankenfood Kills,” the signs proclaimed.
Through the bedlam, Christopher caught glimpses of the banner team under the tower. The gate to the ladder on the north side of the structure swung open a few seconds ahead of the one on the south. Becca and Mickey would be tearing across the tarmac to stash borrowed bolt cutters back in the vans while Allison and the drivers unloaded banner and bikes. Christopher couldn’t see the climbers themselves, on the far side of the monumental beams, but Marty and Phil were probably getting underway. Keith and Laura would wait until the leads ascended twenty rungs up, then follow.
Now Allison stood on the running board of the lane-four Econoline, holding a pair of binoculars. She hung insouciantly off the van, glassing the stopped traffic as she spoke on a cell phone. It looked like she was arguing with the other end of her call.
His walkie-talkie crackled into life. Keith’s voice, barely recognizable. “South support reporting all climbers are on the tower. Repeat. All climbers on the tower.”
Christopher depressed the talk button on the device beside him, and spoke into a headset. “Groundside lookout acknowledges, all climbers on the tower.”
Clipping the headset into his rented phone, Christopher speed-dialed Brendan and Nora back at the Triangle.
—
“There are exactly zero cars moving west into the city,” Allison said into her cell as she surveyed what amounted to a long, absurdly narrow parking lot. She clung to the Econoline’s frame, alert and relaxed, lent a martial air by a faded corporal’s jacket bought out of a surplus shop. A matter-of-fact ponytail snatched bright gold out of the morning sun. “Yep … that’s right… . The blockaders are safe because there’s a solid wall of friendly vehicles between them and the commute… . Leona, the point is not about tactics. That discussion has been preempted… . No… . Hell no! Look at where we are right now, in this moment. You can bet the farm that a battalion of SFPD are going to be diverted out here to deal with us.”
Consequence Page 23