Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

She gripped the side of the well to pull herself to her feet.

But the brick she was holding suddenly gave way, and she fell onto her back as an avalanche of dry earth from inside the well poured out into the foxhole. Stones and gravel and dirt flowed around her, pinning her bent, cramping legs and spreading fast toward her chest and face.

She screamed, trying desperately to climb to her feet. But she couldn’t; the flood had reached her arms.

“Sa -” She heard Rhyme’s voice as the headset cord was ripped from the radio.

More dirt cascaded over her body, helplessly frozen under the crushing weight that rose like flooding water.

Then Sachs screamed once more – as the sphere, carried by the current of dirt, dropped from the gaping hole in the brick wall and rolled against her immobilized body.

Jax was out of his area.

He’d left Harlem behind, both the place and the state of mind. Left behind the empty lots filled with malt liquor bottles, left behind the storefront tabernacles, the faded, weather-battered posters for Red Devil lye, which black men had used to conk their hair straight in the Malcolm X era, left behind the teenage rapper wannabees and bucket percussion ensembles in Marcus Garvey Park, the stands selling toys and sandals and bling and kente-cloth wall hangings. Left behind all the new redevelopment construction, left behind the tour buses.

He was now in one of the few places where he’d never bombed a Jax 157 , never painted a throw-up. The elegant part of Central Park West.

Staring at the building where Geneva Settle now was.

After the incident in the alley, near her house on 118th Street, with Geneva and the guy in the gray car, Jax had jumped in another cab and followed the police cars here. He didn’t know what to make of this place: the two police cars out front, and from the stairs to the sidewalk a ramp, like they make for people in wheelchairs.

Limping slowly through the park, scoping the building out. What was the girl doing inside? He tried to get a look. But the blinds were drawn.

Another car – a Crown Vic, the kind the police drive a lot – pulled up and two cops got out, carrying a cheap suitcase, taped together, and boxes of books. Probably Geneva ’s, he guessed. She was moving in.

Protecting her even steadier, he thought, discouraged.

He stepped into the bushes to get a better view when the door opened, but just then another squad car drove past, slow. It seemed that a cop inside was scanning the park as well as the sidewalk. Jax memorized the number of the building, then turned away and disappeared into the park. He headed north, walking back toward Harlem.

Feeling the gun in his sock, feeling the tug of his parole officer two hundred miles to the north, who might be thinking about a surprise visit to his Buffalo apartment at this very moment, Jax remembered a question that Ralph the leaning Egyptian prince had asked him: Was what he was doing worth all the risk?

He considered this now, as he returned home.

And he thought: Had it been worth the risk twenty years ago, perching on the six-inch iron ledge of the overpass on the Grand Central Parkway, to tag Jax 157 thirty feet above traffic streaming by at sixty miles an hour?

Had it been worth the risk six years ago, chambering a 12-gauge shell in the breakdown and shoving the muzzle into the face of the armored-truck driver, just to get that $50,000 or $60,000? Enough to help him get over, get his life back on track?

And he knew that, fuck, Ralph’s wasn’t a question that made any sense, because it suggested there was a choice. Then and now, right or wrong, didn’t matter. Alonzo “Jax” Jackson was going right ahead. If this worked out he’d get back his righteous life in Harlem, his home, the place that for good and bad had made him what he was – and the place that he himself had helped form, with his thousands of cans of spray paint. He was simply doing what he had to do.

Careful.

In his safe house in Queens, Thompson Boyd was wearing a gas mask/ respirator and thick gloves. He was slowly mixing acid and water, then checking the concentration.

Careful…

This was the tricky part. Certainly the potassium cyanide powder sitting nearby was dangerous – enough to kill thirty or forty people – but in its dried form it was relatively stable. Just like the bomb he’d planted in the police car, the white powder needed to be mixed with sulfuric acid to produce the deadly gas (the infamous Zyklon-B used by the Nazis in their extermination showers).

But the big “if” is the sulfuric acid. Too weak a concentration will produce the gas slowly, which could give the victims a chance to detect the odor and escape. But too strong an acid – over 20 percent concentration – will cause the cyanide to explode before it’s dissolved, dissipating much of the desired deadly effect.

Thompson needed the concentration to be as close to 20 percent as possible – for a simple reason: The place he was going to plant the device – that old Central Park West town house where Geneva Settle was staying – would hardly be airtight. After learning that this was where the girl was hiding, Thompson had conducted his own surveillance of the town house and had noted the unsealed windows and an antiquated heating and air-conditioning system. It would be a challenge to turn the large structure into a death chamber.

…you gotta understand ’bout what we’re doing here. It’s like everything else in life. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent. Nothing runs just the way it ought…

Yesterday he’d told his employer that the next attempt on Geneva ’s life would be successful. But now he wasn’t too sure about that. The police were far too good.

We’ll just re-rig and keep going. We can’t get emotional about it.

Well, he wasn’t emotional or concerned. But he needed to take drastic measures – on several fronts. If the poison gas in the town house now killed Geneva, fine. But that wasn’t his main goal. He had to take out at least some of the people inside – the investigators searching for him and his employer. Kill them, put them in a coma, cause brain damage – it didn’t matter. The important thing was to debilitate them.

Thompson checked the concentration once again, and altered it slightly, making up for how the air would alter the pH balance. His hands were a bit unsteady, so he stepped away for a moment to calm himself.

Wssst …

The song he’d been whistling became “Stairway to Heaven.”

Thompson leaned back and thought about how to get the gas bomb into the town house. A few ideas occurred to him – including one or two he was pretty sure would work quite well. He again tested the concentration of the acid, whistling absently through the mouthpiece of the respirator. The analyzer reported that the strength was 19.99394 percent.

Perfect.

Wssst …

The new tune that popped into his head was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Amelia Sachs had been neither crushed to death by clay and soil nor blown up by unstable nineteenth-century ordnance.

She was now standing, showered and in clean clothes, in Rhyme’s lab, looking over what had tumbled from the dry cistern into her lap an hour earlier.

It wasn’t an old bomb. But there was little doubt now that it’d been left in the well by Charles Singleton on the night of July 15, 1868.

Rhyme’s chair was parked in front of the examination table beside Sachs, as they peered into the cardboard evidence collection box. Cooper was with them, pulling on latex gloves.

“We’ll have to tell Geneva,” Rhyme said.

“Do we?” Sachs said reluctantly. “I don’t want to.”

“Tell me what?”