Brad Thor - State Of The Union

Her once stylish designer suit now hung in charred strips from her blistered torso. Her eyebrows were gone, as was much of her once beautiful mane of blond hair, but she was alive. Harvath did a quick assessment of her injuries and found her to be unresponsive. Most likely, she had gone into shock. “We need to get Nixie to a hospital, fast,” said Harvath, but neither DeWolfe nor Toffle was listening. They had exited the stairwell and leapt through the flames into the foyer of the King George.

Harvath yelled to them, but doubted he could be heard over the thunderous roar of the fire. Now that the door was open, his nostrils were filled with unmistakable tang of the accelerant that someone had used to deliberately set this fire. The sting of the noxious odor was so pungent it was like being slapped in the face. As the acrid smoke began to intensify, Harvath worried about how safe it was to be breathing such rapidly deteriorating air. He called out again and was answered to by two three-round bursts of semiautomatic weapons fire, which he assumed were from DeWolfe’s Beretta.

Making Nixie as comfortable as he could, he propped her against the railing and crept over toward the door where he aimed his H amp;K at the sea of blinding orange fire, just in time to see an enormous silhouette making its way toward him. Through the jagged blades of flame, he tried to make out who or what it was, but the scorching intensity of the fire made it impossible. As he stared into the inferno, Harvath’s brain tried to make out what he was seeing, but he couldn’t categorize it. The dimensions were all off. Reflexively, he raised his pistol, ready to fire.

Then, he heard a low, guttural roar and made a last minute decision to roll out of the way, just as Herman Toffle leapt through the wall of flames separating the foyer from the stairwell. He landed with an amazing crash, dropping the body of Kiefer, the security guard, whom he had fireman-carried all the way back through the blaze.

“Verner’s dead,” said Toffle, gasping for breath as he beat his hands around his body, making sure neither his hair nor his clothing were on fire.

“Where’s DeWolfe?” asked Harvath.

“He saw someone in the foyer and chased after him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“What about other people in the building?”

“From what I can see, the whole downstairs is on fire. There’s no getting out this way.”

“Why haven’t the sprinklers kicked in yet?”

“The building is pre-World War II. It probably doesn’t have them.”

“Okay, then,” said Harvath, thinking. “Then the only way we can go is up. Can you make it?”

Herman was coughing and obviously suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, but the resilient former terrorism expert flashed Harvath the thumbs up and tried to force a smile.

With Harvath helping Nixie and Herman carrying Kiefer, they struggled up the stairs to the next level, where the stairwell door was actually a false piece of richly engraved wood open to a long handsomely paneled hallway. Doors were spaced evenly along the corridor and it was readily apparent that this was where a good part of the King George’s business was conducted as customers and employees in various states of undress were running screaming up and down the hallway.

Getting his bearings, Harvath found the door to one of the bedrooms he assumed faced the front of the building and kicked it open. Three very attractive young women and one balding, overweight middle-aged man had shattered the window and were frantically trying to pry loose the decorative fleur-de-lis ironwork that stood between them and a one-story drop to freedom.

“Stand back,” ordered Harvath as he laid Nixie on the bed and took aim at the grating. He fired five shots in quick succession, sending sparks and chunks of masonry in all directions.

When Harvath lowered his pistol, the middle-aged client quickly moved back to the window and began shaking the ironwork for all he was worth. He was a man possessed, and when the grating failed to give way, he began crying, convinced he was going to die. Spent, the man fell to the floor and continued to sob.

“Passen Sie auf!” yelled Herman as he set Kiefer down on the floor and after picking up an antique bureau, ran at the ironwork-covered window with all his might.

There was the sound of splintering wood and groaning metal as the improvised battering ram struck its target head on and the fleur-de-lis grating tore from its moorings and fell with a crash onto the sidewalk below. Wheezing, Herman withdrew the dresser from the window and shoved it into the corner. Immediately, the sobbing man began scampering out the window.

“Hey,” yelled Harvath. “Get back here.”

Herman reached through the window, grabbed the man by his trousers and yanked him back in.

“Was?” implored the man.

“First of all, you’re welcome,” replied Harvath. “Secondly, do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” answered the man in a heavy German accent.

“Good. We’re going to need your help.”

“But this is the only way out. We already tried to go down the stairs. There is too much fire. Please, we must hurry.”

“We will hurry, but here’s what I want you to do. You and my friend,” said Scot as he nodded at Herman, “are going to gather up all of the mattresses you can from the rooms on this floor and throw them out the window so people have something to land on. Then I want you to let people in the hallway and the stairwells know they can get out this way. Tie the bedding together and use it to lower the injured.”

“What areyou going to do?” asked Herman.

“I’m going to find DeWolfe,”

“Be careful. All of this happening just after we arrived is a little too coincidental and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I,” replied Harvath, who inserted a fresh magazine into his H amp;K as he turned and left the room. “Neither do I.”

The hallway was quickly filling with more smoke and more screaming people as Harvath swung the red dot of his pistol’s laser sight into every room looking for DeWolfe. Aside from the fact that the rooms seemed to have unusually low ceilings, there was nothing else very remarkable about them.

As he passed the panicked throngs, he instructed them in his best German possible to stay low to the floor and make their way to the bedroom he had just come from at the right front of the building. With each face he looked into, the realization began to grow in him that any one of them could be the killer who had started the fire, and he would never know it. He had to find DeWolfe.

Harvath fought his way up one of the public stairwells and found that the third floor was laid out much the same as the second. He checked each room, but there was still no sign of DeWolfe.

Back on the stairs, he could hear people below him, but the terrified tide making their way down from above had stopped. Hopefully, they had all gotten the message and had headed for the second floor.

After climbing two more flights of stairs, Harvath carefully pulled open the door and crept into what he expected to be another long hallway similar to those he had searched on the previous two floors. Instead, he found himself in a large chamber with rough sawn hardwood floors. Harvath quickly swept the filtered red beam of his flashlight around the room and realized he was in a mockup of some sort of Medieval dungeon. Chains hung from the ceiling and there were assorted torture devices scattered around the room.

As Harvath made his way to the lone door on the far side of the chamber, he heard a sudden noise off to his right. Dropping to one knee, he spun and pointed his pistol in the direction from which the sound had come. Raising his flashlight and depressing the thumb switch, Harvath illuminated a long leather couch and, as he tilted it upwards, he found the helpless form of DeWolfe, gagged and shackled against the wall but still struggling against his restraints. The man’s eyes appeared to be bulging out of their sockets and Harvath had no idea if it was from abject fear or fury.