Richard Doetsch - The 13th Hour

Sadly, tragedy is the great equalizer, Nick thought. It knows no ZIP code, has no country club membership or two-room cold-water flat. It strikes without prejudice, reminding us of the fragility of life, of what truly is important when all things are stripped away. For sorrow and loss, pain and suffering are innate in our hearts, and while they may lie dormant they are quickly remembered when death fills the air.

And with an event of the magnitude of a plane crash, when 212 people are collectively ripped from this world, from your own backyard, life is reset, priorities falling back into their proper order.

Within moments of the crash, stores and businesses closed, summer camps were shuttered. Families came together. Churches and synagogues opened their doors for prayer. Volunteers arrived by the busful in the open fields less than a mile outside town where friends and strangers had departed this earth.

Julia rode in the seat beside Nick, her eyes fixed on the smoke on the horizon, unable to shake the thought of death and how it had passed her by today.

“You sure we can get a computer in your office to work?” Nick asked.

“Why do you need to see the security files? Let’s just turn my PDA over to the police. This is none of our-and particularly none of your-business, Nick.”

“When it concerns you, Julia, it is my business.”

“Nobody is after me; you’re being ridiculous.”

“No, trust me, I’m not.”

“You’re not telling me something.” Julia was getting upset.

Nick didn’t respond.

“What aren’t you telling me?” She grilled him as if she were in court.

“Julia,” Nick said, losing patience. “Just answer the question.”

“We don’t have a generator,” Julia snapped. “But we do have battery backups for the computers, they’re good for a half hour.”

“And we’ll be able to view the files on your PDA?”

Julia nodded, suddenly distracted by the sight of the town as they drove down Main Street.

The village was eerily empty, stores closed, gas stations shuttered, a virtual ghost town. Not a soul on the sidewalks, not a car in the streets. Shop windows were dark without electricity to light their window displays. The pizza parlor, the barber shop, even the banks and post office, locked tight on a Friday afternoon in the middle of summer for the first time in their history.

The National Guard, the usual responders to disasters, were at a quarter capacity as a result of the war, so volunteers were needed. It didn’t matter if you were a grandmother or an eighteen-year-old college student. You were put to work either directing traffic, filling out paperwork, or if you were a hardy soul, sifting through the crash site.

Julia’s eyes returned to the smoky plume rising over the hill at the far side of town. Nick couldn’t imagine what was going on inside her head, looking at a funeral pyre that she had escaped through a twist of fate.

But Nick had witnessed his own horror. He had watched Julia die, mourned her once, and he refused to do it for a second time. He would somehow find the man who pulled the trigger and would stop him. He felt the lump of the Sig-Sauer at the small of his back, fully aware that he would, in all likelihood, have to use it. No matter the consequence of his actions, even though he might lose his own life in the process, he would save his wife.

He made no mention of the gun he was carrying and was sure to keep the bulge of the weapon out of Julia’s sight. She hated guns with a passion, an irony that was not lost on Nick. He rarely removed the gun from the safe and had never carried it. He was actually finding it awkward now as it rubbed against his skin under his hastily put on sport coat.

AITKENS, LERNER, & Isles was considered one of the top firms in the country, specializing in finance and tax law. The sixty-partner firm had the luxury of locating wherever they saw fit, which was naturally at the nexus of its three senior partners.

The firm had a three-building campus on North Castle Hill, its three hundred employees swelling the town of Byram Hills during the week, but that couldn’t have been farther from the case today.

The four parking lots were entirely empty as Nick pulled his Audi up to the circular drive in front of the central building.

He and Julia hustled up the fire stairs two steps at a time to the darkened second floor, the emergency light’s batteries already depleted. They raced to Julia’s office in the rear. It was a typical senior associate suite, a large desk and a seating area with a couch and armchairs. But her usually fastidious work area had been destroyed: her desk tipped over, her computer missing, wires torn from the walls, the monitor shattered on the floor.

“My God! When I find the son of a bitch who did this…” Julia’s temper was approaching its boiling point.

“Where’s your server?” Nick said, without acknowledging her raging mood.

“You knew this was going to be like this, didn’t you?” Julia said with a mix of anger and confusion.

“Where’s the server?”

“End of the hall,” Julia said, leading the way. “This is all about the robbery. What the hell?”

They arrived at a nondescript door that sat between the auxiliary kitchen and the office of the managing partner, Sherman Peabody. Julia punched the code into the keypad, tore open the door, and immediately saw what they both dreaded. The server towers within the computer room had been stripped of their hard drives; wires hung useless from the racks, looking like dead snakes.

“Midnight backups?” Nick asked

“Everyone’s computer and all the servers back up on three separate nodes once a day at 2:00 A.M.”

They both looked at the large computer room, now rendered useless, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage inflicted, all in an effort to erase what had occurred earlier in the day at Shamus Hennicot’s large white house on Maple Avenue.

“Now do you believe me?” Nick looked at the Palm Pilot in Julia’s hand. “That’s the only thing pointing at whoever ripped off your client.”

“We’ve got to get this to the police-”

“There are no police to give it to.”

“Let’s just bring it to the crash site, give it to someone there.”

Nick knew that would only serve to delay his finding Julia’s killer, and the only way he was going to do that was to see the face on that PDA.

“How did you know this was going to happen, Nick?”

Nick took the Palm Pilot out of her hand.

“Answer me, dammit, what’s going on?”

Nick pulled the pocket watch and looked at the time: 5:40.

“You’ve got to trust me, I’ll explain later, but right now we don’t have the luxury of time,” Nick said as he stepped back into the hallway. “You said every computer here has a battery backup module.”

Julia pointed them out under the assistants’ desks in the corral area, a little larger than a bread box, configured like an enormous power strip.

“How long do they last?”

“Half hour, give or take a few minutes.”

Nick headed back to Julia’s assistant’s desk. “Do you think Jo used it up?”

“She left right after the crash, I told her to go home.”

Nick sat down at Jo Whalen’s desk. She had been Julia’s assistant for three years now, and if Julia was organized, Jo was supremely anal: pencils and paper clips perfectly aligned north to south in their respective holders, not a stitch of paper or a fleck of dust upon her work station. Nick fired up Jo’s computer, the light wash of the monitor casting an eerie glow about the darkened office. He turned to Julia as the screen asked for the password.

Julia leaned over him, typed it in, and the computer sang to life. The reserve battery began beeping, calling attention to its limited operating capacity.