Philip Kerr - Gridiron

Mitch sat in an ambulance having a temporary dressing applied to his injured eye.

'You could lose the sight unless you get to a hospital soon,' advised the paramedic.

'I'm not leaving here until I know my friends are safe,' said Mitch.

'Have it your own way, fella. It's your eye. Here, hold still, will you?'

On the other size of the piazza ., a SWAT team was entering the Gridiron.

'What the hell do they think they're doing?' said Mitch. 'I told them — '

His dressing finished, Mitch stepped painfully out of the ambulance and limped towards an enormous black articulated truck that had

'LAPD' and 'SPECIAL RESPONSE' painted on the container. He mounted the steps at the back and found the ground commander and a couple of plainclothes cops inside, staring at a bank of television screens.

'There are people going in the front door,' said Mitch.

'You should be in hospital, sir,' said the commander. 'You can leave things to us now. The city engineer has turned the street circuit off. And your friends will be taken off the front of the building any minute now.'

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch. 'Anyone would think you were the one who was injured, you dumb motherfucker. I warned you not to go in there without speaking to me first. Goddammit, why don't you people use your fucking ears? Switching off the local power supply doesn't make any difference. This building is smart. Smarter than you, anyway. It's adaptive. Even to a failure in the power supply . Do I make myself clear?

There's a solar-powered, uninterruptible power supply and there's a gasturbine standby generating set. So long as there's oil to burn, the computer can keep going which, if you had been listening to me, makes the Gridiron an extremely hostile environment for your men.

'It's possible that the computer might start a fire,' he said. 'Blow up the generator, maybe. Either way, the bottom line is that the building is dangerous.'

The commander pulled the mouthpiece of his lightweight headset up over his chin and started to speak:

'This is Cobra leader to Cobra force. Power supply is uninterruptible. Repeat uninterruptible, Exercise extreme caution. Computer may still be active, in which case your environment may very well be hostile.'

'You dumb fuck,' muttered Mitch. 'Not may be. Is.'

'Repeat, your environment may be hostile…'

The commander was still speaking when the truck shook. 'What the hell was that?' he said, breaking off communications.

'Felt like an earth tremor,' said one of the plainclothes.

'Jesus Christ,' said Mitch, turning pale. 'Of course. It's not the turbine it means to use to destroy the place. It's the compensators.'

The Gridiron's central earthquake compensator was not much more than a computer-controlled hydraulic shock-absorber, a huge springloaded valve and an electrically powered piston that was activated by a digitally calibrated seismograph. For earthquakes of less than 6 on the Richter scale, the hundred or so base-isolators were sufficient to dampen any vibration in the building. For anything larger, the CEC went into action. But with no actual earthquake, the effect of Ishmael activating the CEC was comparable to a real seismic event acting on a building without any compensation equipment at all, a seismic event of at least 8 points.

Ishmael grasped the middle pillar upon which the building rested and leaned his weight upon it.

Seconds later Ismael completed his escape from the doomed building. E-mailing himself down the line to Net locations all over the electronic world at 960,000 bauds per second. A diaspora of corrupted data downloads to a hundred different computers.

A low rumbling sound was heard throughout the Hope Street area, a subterranean hum; inside the atrium all the SWAT team held their breaths.

High on the facade, perched on the cross-bone like two gulls on a rigging, Richardson and Curtis heard the sound and felt the vibration run shuddering from building to air like twin ghosts of Gomorrah. Sea birds flew screaming away over the yawning gulf in front of them as the building writhed under the two men, trembling spasmodically as if the life was trying to rise out of it. Near them a window exploded in a shower of glass as the shudder became a more noticeable rocking.

Frank Curtis staggered along his precarious footing and groped for a handhold on the smooth, implacable white face of the manmade precipice. Finding none, he turned to face the wall and, with arms turning like hopeless propellers, tried to stay in front of the jaws of death, his thoughts of the ground and his wife and his wife on the ground.

Ray Richardson was tipped forward from his celestial seat like a child setting off down a slide in a park playground. Twisting round acrobatically, he got his hands and then his forearms on the horizontal of the brace and held himself there, pushing against the quicksand of air that already enveloped his legs. He smiled and said something, but his words were lost to Curtis in the wind that had risen around them, churning the chips of stone and flakes of broken glass into the milky blue of the early-morning sky. A vortex of wind roared like some huge forest collapsing in concentric circles, tugging angrily at their hair and clothes as if impatient to bear them, like Elijah, up to God's right hand. A crack, like the beginning and end of all thunder, rang through the length and breadth of the building, echoing in the downtown air as if the sound would reach as far as the ocean. On the ground some people fell on their faces. But most, Mitch included, ran for their lives. Richardson made a last effort to pull himself up on to the cross-brace but found he could not. His strength was gone. Perhaps, he said to himself, he would not be meat for the lawyers after all. His building was going to see to that, demolishing itself and the new school of Smart Architecture at the same time.

Recovering his balance, Curtis tried to grab the architect's arm. But Richardson dropped back on his fingers, shook his head, smiled ruefully at the other man and let go. Silent, like a fallen angel, he dropped with hands still outstretched, as if witnessing the greater power of God. For a fraction of a second Curtis held his cool eye, until an invisible line hauled Richardson down to gravity's end.

A moment later the building shuddered again, and Curtis found himself toppled into the empty depths below.

Curtis felt he was gaining altitude when he knew he was really losing it, like a pilot on what was aptly called the graveyard spiral, and it was only the sudden, violent wrenching pain in his shoulder that enabled his confused brain to find a new reference point by which to orient his position.

He looked above him and saw the underside of the hovering helicopter and the line that connected him with the rest of his life. But for his own simian ancestry that resourced a half-forgotten instinct to reach out for an unseen handhold, he would have gone the vertiginous way of the shards of concrete that even now were collapsing onto the piazza below. With his other hand he lunged desperately, caught the harness and pulled it over his head and under his bursting arms.

For what seemed like the eternity he had cheated, Frank Curtis hung there, turning in the air like a Christmas decoration, lathered with sweat and heaving the breath in and out of his almost dislocated body. Then, slowly, they winched him up into the body of the helicopter alongside Jenny and Helen.

Helen slid her behind across the floor of the helicopter, put her arms around Curtis and start to sob uncontrollably.

They hovered for a moment, uncertain how to help those on the ground. Curtis looked back just once and saw the Gridiron clothed in a cloud of dust like some magician's disappearing act concealed in a puff of smoke.