David Morrell - The naked edge

About to follow, he balked and stared back at the closed office door. The gray haze was seeping under it.

Unable to subdue his protector's instincts, he lunged for the desk, grabbing the phone.

"What are you doing?" Eddie shouted from the staircase.

The building's security guards, Cavanaugh thought. The police. The explosions put them on heightened alert. The alarm will bring them to this office. They'll burst in.

They'll breathe the gas and die.

William's phone system had an emergency button that directed a call to the lobby's security desk.

"What?" a voice asked quickly, sounding harried.

Pressing the phone hard against his ear, holding a hand over his other ear, Cavanaugh thought he heard sirens and urgent voices in the background. "There's an alarm on the thirtieth floor!"

"We know! A team's going up there!"

Cavanaugh stared again at the crack beneath the closed door. More of the gray haze seeped under it. "Don't go into the office! It's filled with poison gas!"

He slammed down the phone and charged through the opening in the wall. The metal staircase echoed as he pulled at the section of shelves. Closing the barrier, he heard a latch click shut. Then he ran down the circular stairs, turning repeatedly, the echo rumbling.

Jamie and Eddie waited at the bottom.

A dead end.

"How do we-"

"That latch on the right!"

Eddie yanked it and pulled.

A section of the wall moved toward him. The light in the stairwell revealed a janitor's closet.

They closed the wall, unlocked the closet door, and peered out, checking the corridor.

After the dim light in the stairwell, the overhead fluorescents seemed bright when they emerged from the closet.

"The police will search the building," Jamie said.

"And emergency-response teams," Cavanaugh agreed. "Assuming they're all genuine."

He eased a stairwell door open. From below, footsteps and voices rumbled upward.

"We can't go that way."

I always get the shit duty, the fireman thought. His name was Ben Gutowski. Laboring up the stairs in complete firefighting gear, he felt sweat soaking his clothes. His legs ached.

Would you rather be in an elevator? he asked himself. Suppose this is another World Trade Center attack. Suppose more bombs go off or rockets or whatever caused the explosion. Suppose the building collapses. How'd you like to be in a friggin' elevator then? And what's this alert about poison gas? You want to be trapped in an elevator with that? Maybe the captain did you a favor.

Breathing hard, Ben reached another stairwell door. Twenty-ninth floor. Below him, other firemen in full gear struggled upward, checking other floors. He pressed his hand against the door, feeling for heat. He did the same to the doorknob. Normal. He put his oxygen mask over his face, breathed, and opened the door. Assuming he didn't encounter a fire and his air-testing meter didn't detect any gas, he would then take off his oxygen mask and lumber along the corridor, making sure nobody was in danger.

Bang! Crash! Clatter!

Elvis Presley sang "Blue Hawaii."

Surprise made Ben almost drop his ax. Ahead, a janitor took a wet mop from a pail and swabbed the corridor while a radio played music through the partially open door of a maintenance closet.

"What are you doing here?" Ben demanded.

While Elvis crooned, Cavanaugh peered up from mopping the floor. His gray janitor's coveralls covered the blood on his clothes and gave him the rumpled look of somebody who'd worked too many years on the night shift. The small radio was a bonus.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Cavanaugh answered, annoyed. The fireman appeared genuine, but after the night's threats, it was foolish to make assumptions. "And what are you doing here?" He almost let go of his mop in apparent sudden realization. "Wait a minute, is there a fire?"

"Didn't you hear the explosion?"

"Explosion?"

"On the fortieth floor."

"What?"

"And poison gas," the exhausted fireman said.

"Poison… Jesus, don't tell me it's terrorists!"

"We don't know what it is. You need to get out of here."

"Buddy, I don't need convincing."

"Anybody else on this floor?"

"Nobody."

"You're positive."

"I've been up and down this corridor for the past hour. The place is deserted."

A bell sounded. Down the corridor, an elevator opened. A policeman charged out.

"This floor's clear!" the fireman shouted to be heard above the music. "I'm getting this janitor out of here."

"On the double! We don't know what else might happen!" The policeman ducked back into the elevator. Its doors closed.

"You heard him," the fireman said. "Go!"

"I'm outta here," Cavanaugh said.

He and the fireman hurried toward the stairwell door.

"Hold it, I forgot my coat," Cavanaugh said.

"Hurry!" The fireman turned and yelled down the stairs toward where footsteps and voices struggled upward, "Evacuee coming down!"

"I'm right behind you!" Cavanaugh yelled. "Check the other floors. Poison gas? God help anybody who's in the building."

Breathing hard, the fireman climbed to the next level. Simultaneously, Cavanaugh opened the maintenance room's door all the way. There, amid boxes of cleaning supplies, Jamie and Eddie waited. Only one other set of coveralls had been in the room. They'd been too big for Jamie, so Eddie wore them.

Jamie grabbed a box, holding it as if it contained something important.

Clutching his mop as if he was too startled to realize it was in his hand, Cavanaugh led the way through the stairwell door. Lights glared. Above, the door to the thirtieth floor banged shut as the fireman went in. Below, other firemen climbed and opened doors.

Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurried down.

"One of your men ordered us out of here," he told the next fireman, four floors down. "I don't understand what's happening."

"Just do what he told you." The fireman breathed hard from the climb and the weight of his equipment. "Get out of the building. Evacuees coming down!" he yelled to his team farther below.

As Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurriedly descended, the clatter of their footsteps added to those of the emergency team.

"Evacuees!" a fireman yelled to other men below him. "Are you hurt?" he asked Cavanaugh.

"No. Just scared."

"I hear you," the fireman said. Putting his oxygen mask on, he braced himself and opened a door.

They hurried lower. Passing emergency workers, breathing hoarsely, they reached the fifth floor, the fourth…

A few seconds after they passed the lobby door, it banged open. A fireman charged up the stairs, shouting into his two-way radio, "Affirmative! Poison gas! The thirtieth floor! Make sure the building's empty!"

With his attention focused on the upper floors, the fireman failed to see them below.

GARAGE LEVEL TWO, the sign said. Cavanaugh cracked the door open and listened. Hearing only stillness, he opened the door farther and studied the few cars. In an emergency that required a building to be evacuated, it was standard procedure for the teams to start at the bottom, moving upward. Subsequently, they assumed areas they'd checked didn't need to be revisited.

As he stepped into the parking garage, the overhead lights made everything a sickly yellow.

"Over there." Eddie pointed past three drab-colored Tauruses that Global Protective Services used.

Eddie's car was equally anonymous.

"Let's see if it explodes."

They crouched behind the farthest car and put their hands over their ears-except for Eddie who could protect only one ear while he pressed an ignition button on his car's remote control. When the car started, Eddie relaxed. "Well, at least we don't need to worry about that."