Michael Crichton - Binary

Graves walked back up the street slowly, trying to gather his thoughts. What did he do next?

Nordmann came up to him. `That's a damned shame,' he said.

`You bet it is,' Graves said.

Nordmann looked at the crowd clustered around the wrecked car. `One thing, though,' he said.

`What's that?'

`It proves he could make a mistake.'

`It was a big one,' Graves said.

`Yes,' Nordmann said, in a calm, logical voice. `But it was a mistake.'

Graves nodded and walked back towards the surveillance building. He thought about what Nordmann had said. The more he thought about it, the more encouraged he was. Because Nordmann was right.

Wright had erred. And that was encouraging.

One of the aides came running out of the building, waving Wright's ticket. `Mr Graves,' he said. `There's something very strange going on. We just checked this ticket. He cancelled that reservation yesterday.'

Protect me from fools, Graves thought. `Of course he did.'

`Of course?'

`Look,' Graves said. `He planned to let us catch him, and he planned his escape. But he couldn't get far if we knew his real aeroplane reservation, could he?'

`Well, I guess not…'

`Keep checking the airlines. Check Los Angeles, too. You'll find he had a reservation somewhere.'

Phelps came over. `The sniffer's arrived.'

`Has it? Good.' Graves walked across the street to Wright's apartment building. Phelps trailed behind him in silence.

Finally Phelps said, `I hope you know what you're doing.'

Graves didn't answer. Because the fact was that he didn't know what he was doing. He knew only in a general way what Wright intended. Wright had made Graves a part of the total mechanism, and therefore Graves would have to cancel himself out - inactivate himself - by not doing what was expected of him.

In order to do that, he had to decipher as many elements of the total staging mechanism as possible. Only then could he determine how he was intended to participate in the staging sequence that controlled the final release of the gas.

The sniffer was the first step in deciphering the sequence.

Graves stood outside the door to Wright's apartment. Next to him Lewis held a gunlike instrument in his hand. The gun was attached to a shoulder pack with a dial. Lewis pointed the instrument at the door and ran it along the cracks and seams.

Behind them at the far end of the hallway, six people, including Phelps, stood and watched. Graves wanted everyone away from the door so that they wouldn't accidentally trip the vibration sensors. He didn't know how sensitively they were tuned, but he wasn't taking any chances.

After a moment Lewis turned away with the instrument. `Wow,' he said.

`You get a reading?'

`Yeah,' he said. `High nitrogen and oxygen content, trace phosphorus.'

`Meaning?'

`Plastic explosive, very near.'

`Near the door?'

`Probably just on the other side,' he said.

Graves said, `Is there any chance you're wrong?'

`The sniffer is never wrong,' he said. `You've got oxide of nitrogen fumes, and that's explosives. You can count on it.'

`All right,' Graves said. He walked away from the door. He had to trust the sniffer. It had been developed for use in Vietnam and had been adapted for customs operations, smuggling, and so on. It was incredibly sensitive and incredibly accurate. If the sniffer said plastic explosive was behind the door, he had to believe it. He walked back to Phelps at the end of the hallway.

`Well?'

`There's explosive on the other side of the door.'

`Nice,' Phelps said. `What do we do now?'

`Try to get a better look inside the apartment,' Graves said. He glanced at his watch.

`It's four ten,' Phelps said. `When did your friend say it would go off?'

`Five,' Graves said.

`I hope you know what you're doing,' Phelps said again.

Graves sighed. He wondered if he could ever explain to Phelps that that wasn't the problem. The problem was figuring out what Wright expected him to do - and then not doing it.

Across the street in the surveillance room looking down on Wright's apartment, he talked to Nordmann. Nordmann had brought a cardboard box full of medical supplies - syringes, needles, bottles of liquid. He was frowning down at it. `This is the best I could manage on short notice,' he said.

`Will it work?' Graves said.

`It's the standard therapy,' Nordmann said. `But we haven't got much. This quantity will treat two or three people for exposure, that's all.'

`Then let's make sure it doesn't come to that.'

Nordmann smiled slightly. `It better not,' he said. `Because you need somebody alive and well to administer it.'

`Is it hard to administer?'

`Tricky,' Nordmann said. `There are two different chemicals, atropine and parladoxime. They have to be balanced.'

Graves sighed. `So the antidote is a binary, too.'

`In a sense. The two chemicals treat different effects of the gas. One treats the peripheral nervous system, the other the central. The chemicals are dangerous in themselves, which makes it all much harder.'

`Fighting fire with fire?'

`In a sense,' Nordmann said.

The two men stood staring out the window at the apartment opposite. Phelps was in a corner using a walkie-talkie. `You in position?'

A response crackled back. `In position, sir.'

`Very good.' Phelps clicked off the walkie-talkie. `We've got two cops stationed outside the door to that apartment,' he said.

`Fine,' Graves said. `Just so they don't get too close to the door.'

`I have them ten feet away.'

`That should be fine.'

In the hallway outside Wright's apartment, officers Martin and Jencks of the San Diego Police Department stared at the closed door and leaned against the wall.

`You understand any of this?' Jencks said.

`Nope,' Martin said.

`But they said not to get too close to the door.'

'That's right.'

`You know why?'

`I don't know nothing,' Martin said. He took out a cigarette. `You got a match?'

`Maybe we shouldn't smoke…'

`Who's going to know?' Martin said.

Jencks gave him a match.

Graves stood with Nordmann in the surveillance room across the street.

'Wright booby-trapped the apartment?'

`Elaborately,' Graves said. `He told me some of it. I'm sure he didn't tell me everything.'

`And it goes off at five?'

`Yes.'

`Forty-five minutes from now,' Nordmann said. `Is the Navy sending people with protective suits? Because protected people could just walk right in.'

`Nobody can walk right in,' Graves said. `He's wired the room with explosive. That's why we've got the guards over there.'

Nordmann grimaced. `Explosive?'

`Twenty pounds of it.'

The TV in the corner of the room showed the Convention. A monotonous voice was saying, `Mr Chairman… Mr Chairman, we request the floor… Mr Chairman…' There was the loud banging of a gavel.

`Turn that damned thing off,' Graves said. Someone turned it off.

At the window two men grunted as they lifted a huge lens onto a heavy-duty tripod. It was screwed into place and adjusted. `Ready, Mr Graves.'

`Thank you.' Graves went to the window.

`What's that?' Nordmann said.

`A fifteen-hundred-millimeter telephoto,' Graves said. `It's the best look we can get.'

He peered through the giant lens. The view was so enormously magnified that at first he didn't know what he was looking at. Using a fine-knurled knob, he moved the lens and saw he was focused on a crack in the floor. He moved across the floor to the boxes. He shifted the lens upward, examining each box in detail.

`Take a look at this,' he said, stepping away.

Nordmann squinted through the lens. `Three stacked boxes,' he said. `I can't make out much…'

`Neither can L' Graves folded his arms across his chest and stared out the window. He tried to think logically, but he was having trouble; Wright's death had unnerved him, whether he wanted to admit it or not.