Several tons of concussion pressure shattered the upper windows, spraying glass and debris far enough to hit the surrounding buildings in a half-block radius, followed a half second later by the sound of the explosion itself. First sight then sound—which is surreal, the lag time, like an old film playing out of sync—as the top corner of the place became its own gargantuan hole.
I sprinted toward it, right toward the Markermeer Condo tower, with Jenn pursuing me stride for stride, calling out to stop me.
“Adam . . .! Don’t!”
My fever became irrelevant—the human body is quite capable of muting its inadequacies—as I ran past a dozen people who heard what we heard but had no idea it emanated fifteen floors directly above them. It was a massive condo complex with a massive lobby, which meant by the time I’d crossed through the interior of the ground floor to get to the elevator, Jenn had caught up to me with a hand outstretched to keep my elevator door from closing.
“I’m . . . I’m . . . going up,” I said, panting.
“No.” She got right in my face. She wasn’t forceful now. She was desperate. “No . . . Right now . . . we leave. We leave the city.”
“She could be up there.”
“Then she’s up there! Where she chose to be! And you!” She had to catch her breath too. “Listen . . . And you . . . you still have a choice.” She gestured to the front door, our way back out of the lobby, as in the roof was not an option. “Don’t be part of this.”
I pressed the button again. Fifteenth floor.
She spoke faster, with more conviction. “There are other ways to handle this. There is a system and we believe in the system. We have friends who participate at the higher levels—lawyers, journalists—Listen—Listen! God—You know it works. Don’t be irrational. Trust that I care about you and let’s fucking go.”
I had no intention of her winning this particular debate, but technology was about to win it for her. Right at that moment, the elevator override kicked in, the fluorescent lobby lights went dead, the emergency lights went on, the alarm sounded, and my lift was no longer functional. Its control panel blinked off and on, then went bright red. I pressed my button another twenty times in desperation. I could hear my father’s laugh—the guy shaking his head in disdain—with a forecast that his son could never be counted on for anything, at any time, not even for a job as simple as going up an elevator. I punched the thing with my fist, then exited the car, brushing past Jenn, looking up to notice something much worse than any mechanical issue. Behind her on the far side of the lobby, a crowd had started to gather just outside the glass doors—everyone gawking upward as expected, but standing in that crowd, consulting with one of the police officers, and doing so with a disturbing amount of familiarity, was Hugo. The guy from the sedan. The cop was giving him information and in return he—Hugo—was pointing at details and giving the cop information. You could see firemen evacuating the lobby and herding people outside. It’d be a matter of seconds before Jenn and I were flushed out the front door into his view.
“Walk through the café,” I said to her quietly.
“What?”
“Don’t make eye contact with anyone. Don’t look around. Just walk like everyone else is walking except we’re gonna walk through the café.”
“Why?”
“You win, okay? We leave. We leave very fast.”
She saw my face, the seriousness in it. She obviously wouldn’t know who Hugo was—never having seen him before—but she sensed a shift in me and immediately cooperated in full. Best friends can sense it—when your internal clock strikes a certain type of midnight. We both walked as inconspicuously as possible toward the café’s interior doorway to pass through and exit through the opposite door out to the sidewalk. Hugo had his partner with him. There were two of them. We walked outside. There was a tram that’d stopped a half block away in the midst of unloading and loading passengers. We’d have a chance to catch it if we ran now, right now. I looked back at Hugo without being obvious about it.
These guys would have weapons, that much was guaranteed.
“Jenn?” I said.
He was looking right at us.
“Can you trust me on something?” I said.
Scared, alert, loyal, she nodded yes.
“Okay, this is gonna be hard.”