CENTER OF A SPIDER’S WEB
The intersection—Decatur and Main—seemed to be right in front of a small federal courthouse.
It was closing on 10 p.m., and Gaia was finally getting somewhere. At least she was off the highway and away from the almost dreamlike series of lane changes, roadside stops, gas stations, and motels that had taken over her life for the past forty-eight hours. She was in the middle of a major city now.
She had driven three slow laps around the block, looking in vain for a parking place. It was a ridiculous problem to be having, but she couldn’t think of a way around it. Finally she had decided to just forget it, to double-park and let her car get towed. She’d already given up so much on this journey, she was getting fatalistic about what little else she had to give.
And it’s not my car anyway, she thought absently. It’s Catherine’s.
And right then she saw a spot. A couple in a Volvo were pulling out of a parking space right in front of the courthouse’s stone front steps. Gaia swerved over, took the spot, shut off the engine, and then sat there, taking a deep breath.
Well, I’m here.
Looking around, Gaia didn’t see anything unusual. The intersection was in a fairly lively neighborhood, surrounded by storefront shops and office buildings. The city felt different from New York and Stanford; Gaia had noticed this while driving in.
After climbing out of the car and locking it, Gaia walked onto the sidewalk, looking up at the small colonial building in front of her. Philadelphia County Courthouse, the carved letters spelled out. For the third time she looked up at the street signs, confirming that this was indeed Decatur and Main.
Casting her eyes down to the street, she noticed an iron manhole cover.
Down there, she thought, is the magic spot. The point in the water network where pipes converged like the center of a spider’s web.
There were many passersby on the sidewalk, mostly businesspeople. It was late, but Gaia could see that the courthouse was still open—probably because night court was in session. Its windows glowed yellow, and people were moving up and down the stone steps, carrying briefcases.
I should be hiding, Gaia thought wearily. Out in the open like this, I’ll get caught. She remembered the agents in the motel that morning back in Maryland, the agents in the roadside rest area who had almost gotten her later in the day. And it wasn’t just the FBI—there was Socorro and James Rossiter (whose hands around her neck were a vivid memory). Gaia was tired of hiding, tired of running and chasing. At some point, she told herself, standing on the sidewalk with her hands in her pockets, they’ll get me. There’s no way around it.
And amazingly, at the very moment she was thinking those words, a pair of hands landed heavily on her shoulders, gripping them tightly.
There were so many martial arts moves she could make from this position, so many ways to turn the tables on whoever was trying to grab her. She could have propelled her would-be assailant vertically over her head by grabbing his forearms the right way.
But somehow, oddly, the fatalistic mood she was in prevented all of that—which, as it turned out, was a very good thing. Instead of fighting, which in nearly any other circumstance she would have done without even thinking about it, Gaia just turned her head and looked behind her.
Will Taylor was standing there.
Gaia blinked. Have I finally lost it? she thought weakly. Am I hallucinating?
But it was really him. He stood there with his hands still resting lightly on her shoulders, the Philadelphia streetlights shining on his blond hair and the shoulders of his blue sweatshirt. The look on his face was indescribable—there wasn’t the slightest trace of swagger or smirk about him. He looked at her face as if he was having the same reaction she was—as if he simply couldn’t believe it was really her.
Without a word, Will pulled Gaia close and hugged her.
They held each other so tightly that Gaia almost worried she was making it hard for Will to breathe. Her face was pressed against his shoulder, and the smell, the familiar smell of Will Taylor, soaked into her nostrils like perfume. She could feel the stubble of his cheek and chin pressing into the side of her head and his wide hands flat across her back.
Finally they pulled apart. They stood facing each other, less than a foot away, with her face turned up toward his. Then, at nearly the same moment, they each took a step backward.
“Will,” Gaia began awkwardly. “How did you—”
Will grabbed her wrist, pulling her toward the courthouse steps. “Later,” he insisted. “We have to move now. Fast. There’s a bomb.”
A ZEN CALM
Will and Gaia came through the heavy iron-framed doors into the Philadelphia County Courthouse. They arrived in a large, well-lit lobby with marble walls. The lobby was full of businesspeople—attorneys and clients, Will figured—but most of them had their coats on and were carrying briefcases. It was just ten o’clock, according to the old-fashioned wall clock with the roman numerals.
Night court’s ending, Will thought. The place is closing down for the night.
Which was good, he figured. If the building was empty, a bomb would be less dangerous—and potentially would harm fewer people.
Just us.
“How do you know there’s a bomb?” Gaia was asking. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain later,” Will said impatiently. “But it’s here—in the courthouse.”
“Why here?”
Will had to firmly shove aside all his excitement at seeing her again. “Because Ramon Nino’s going to be in this building tomorrow,” he explained. “It’s his parole hearing. And James Rossiter’s going to blow the place up. Martyring Nino, I guess—for their cause.”
“The snips of wire,” Gaia said, seemingly to herself. “The colored wires on the Ping Pong table. Of course—he builds bombs.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Gaia snapped impatiently. “We’ve got to evacuate the building.”
“There’s no time for that,” Will said impatiently, scanning his eyes along the rows of marble-framed doors that faced the lobby. “We’ve got to find it—let’s get moving.”
“Where do we look first?”
Will cast his mind back to Agent Baxter’s lectures in Quantico. Your experienced bomber is going to use the rules of physics to help him plant explosives, Baxter had told them. It had all sounded very intellectual and exciting back then—it was very different when you were actually standing in a building that had been primed to blow up.
“We need to use logic,” Will said uncertainly. “Where would you put a bomb in this building in order to do maximum damage?”
Gaia was looking around at the walls. “Low,” she said. “It’s an old stone building, without any steel structure. You want the bomb low to the ground to guarantee a structural collapse.”
“I agree,” Will said hesitantly. He couldn’t stop himself from darting his head around, looking at all the courtroom doors. He was trying to appear cool, like he wasn’t frightened, but it was very difficult. His overwhelming instinct was to get out of there, to run out of the front door and keep running until the courthouse was miles behind him. Instead Gaia was talking about getting closer to the bomb.
She didn’t seem frightened at all, Will noticed. It was strange—impressive, but strange.
“Let’s not waste time with these courtrooms,” Gaia argued. “They all have metal detectors and high security. No way to get explosives in there.”
“Fine,” Will said. They were both keeping their voices low to avoid alarming the people around them.
“Basement,” Gaia said, reaching to grab Will’s wrist. “Come on.”
Moving against the tide of people who were leaving the building, Will and Gaia found their way to the back of the ornate marble lobby to a stairwell that led down. Their footsteps clattered loudly as they galloped down the stone steps, pushing through a swinging door with a pebbled-glass inlay.
The basement was warmer and quieter than the lobby above it. The walls were painted an industrial gray, and the floor was gray cement. The low ceiling was lined with rows of naked fluorescent bulbs.
“We have to go room to room,” Will said. He was trying to keep his voice steady, but it was hard to do. He had never in his life felt his “flight mechanism” raging as strong as it was right now. He had to concentrate on forcing his legs not to run away. His body was trembling with the exertion it took just to stay motionless.
“Start there,” Gaia said, pointing at a wood-framed door. She seemed to be having none of these problems. Striding over, she pulled open the door and flipped the light on inside. Following her, Will saw that they’d entered a small storage room—metal chairs were stacked against the wall. Looking around, he saw that the room was basically a featureless box—no closets or cabinets, no place to hide anything.
“This isn’t it,” Will said. He was struggling to remember more details from Agent Baxter’s lectures, but he was so agitated that it was difficult to do. “Wouldn’t a bomb be close to the center of a stone building? Not near its edge?”
“Right,” Gaia said, pointing at another door with a pebbled-glass window on the other side of the hallway. It looked different from the other doors—Will wasn’t sure why until he realized that, like the storage room they had just left, it had no lock. “Try here,” Gaia said.
Will pulled open the door as Gaia flicked on the lights. This was a slightly larger utility room, with cabinets built into one wall. Will immediately began opening the cabinets and pulling out the contents—bottles of cleanser, boxes of lightbulbs that exploded on the cement floor as he dropped them, cellophane rolls of paper towels.
Gaia had started at the other end, pulling rubber gloves and plastic buckets out of the opposite cabinet. Will noticed the sudden quiet—he had to figure that the building had just about finished emptying out. The only sound was the hum of the basement’s air circulation vents and the clatter of the supplies that they were tossing onto the floor.
“Found it!” Gaia yelled. She was on her hands and knees, facing the bottom of the cabinet—she pulled back, letting him get down beside her and look.
It was a bomb, all right. Not a model, not a practice mechanism. The real thing.
Will tried to clear his head and find a Zen calm like Gaia seemed able to do. He didn’t even come close. Sweat was pouring down his face, and his heart was pounding so loud that he was sure Gaia could hear it.
There was an electronic timing mechanism with a fuse, a trigger, a large nine-volt dry-cell battery, and a mass of wires connecting it all. Will couldn’t see the detonating mass, but a pair of black wires led from the back of the bomb to holes drilled in the cabinet’s back wall.
Where do those wires go? Will thought fleetingly. Did the bomb have an additional power source somewhere?
He shrugged it off—there wasn’t time. The bomb had a digital clock mechanism, and its motionless display read 01:02.
“We’ve got two minutes,” Will said breathlessly.
“That’s not minutes,” Gaia argued, crouching next to him. “Are you crazy?”
“The two? It has to be minutes,” Will disagreed. “I mean, what else can it be, seconds? It’s not moving.”
“Obviously it’s not two seconds,” Gaia said patiently, “or we’d already be dead.”
“Well, if it’s not minutes, then what is it?” Will demanded, wiping sweat from his face. “I don’t understand what you—”
“Hours,” Gaia nearly shouted. “We’ve got two hours. Now will you pay attention to the wires?”
“So the one is what—days?”
“I don’t know. Yes, days. Whatever. Will, damn it, will you just—”
With a beep the display changed to 01:03.
“What the hell?” Will said. “What does that mean? Now it’s going backward”
“Defuse it!” Gaia yelled. “Will, you’re driving me crazy.”
“Why should I do it?”
“Because you’re better at it,” Gaia said, shaking his shoulder furiously. “Now will you just—”
“You’re admitting I’m better at defusing bombs?” Will asked, curious. “You’re not just psyching me up, are you? Because—”
“Will!”
The talk was doing its job—it was siphoning off the fear. Will had been staring at the wires as if in a trance, remembering how he had been able to do this before. Reaching out with a calm, almost delicate motion, he plucked a white wire away from the bomb’s network of contacts.
With a loud click the bomb’s digital display went dead. The bomb was defused. Will breathed a tremendous sigh and collapsed against the floor. His entire body was coated in sweat. “That’s over,” he murmured weakly.
But he was wrong.
A distant, echoing thump sounded through the basement—as if the same automatic mechanism was activating simultaneously everywhere in the building.
“What the hell is that?” Gaia asked. But he could tell from her voice—she knew as well as he did.
The security system, Will thought dismally. The building’s automatic locks.
He looked at his watch. Sure enough, it was ten exactly. The Philadelphia County Courthouse was closed for the night—and all its doors had automatically shut and their locks engaged, sealing them inside.