“But he’s not home,” Lauren said to the telephone.
Whoa! That was a major break from the script. How many times had they discussed this? Lauren was never to tell anyone that people weren’t home. Melissa stood, and turned the water on full with her elbow. The correct answer was always…
“He went to Noah’s Ark,” Lauren said.
What the… “Lauren! Who is that on the phone?”
“No!” Lauren said emphatically. “That’s where he went! To Noah’s Ark!”
Melissa turned off the water and grabbed a towel. “Lauren, answer me, young lady! Who is on the telephone?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Lauren announced proudly. “Newah… Whatever you said. That’s it.”
Melissa closed the distance quickly, but not quickly enough.
“Okay, you’re welcome. Bye-bye.” Lauren hung up the receiver.
“Who was that?” Melissa demanded.
Lauren shrugged. “I dunno,” she said uneasily, clearly aware that she’d violated a rule. “Somebody who wanted to know where Daddy went.”
Melissa sighed disapprovingly, then planted her fists on her hips. “Young lady,” she said, “you and I are going to have a long talk about telephone behavior.”
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Jake said, cringing in the dull light of the hotel room.
Travis was more succinct. “God, it stinks in here!”
“Is this the same room we had last time?” Carolyn asked.
Jake brought his eyebrows together, and he turned to get his bearings out the front window. “Maybe,” he said, pulling on his lip. “Though I’d have guessed a little bit further down the row. It was close to here, though.”
Nick led them to the card table, where he’d already prioritized everything they needed to talk about. As everyone settled into a chair, Nick touched Travis on the shoulder. “Hey, buddy, want to do me a favor?”
Travis looked to his mom and got a nod. “I guess,” he said.
Nick brought a penknife out of his pants pocket. “Great. Take this knife here and open up those boxes, okay? Be careful, though. Use the blade to break the tape only. I don’t want you to tear anything.”
Travis’s eyes grew inadvertently wider, showing a youngster’s instinctive fascination with all things shiny and sharp. “Cool,” he said. “You want me just to open them, or do you want me to take stuff out, too?”
“Just open them for now. I need to do an inventory.”
Carolyn’s head tilted curiously as she took in the pile of junk. “Is that the gear?”
Nick smiled proudly. “Yep. We should have enough Level A entry stuff for three people. Suits, air packs, and tools.”
Jake shook his head in wonderment. “Where’d you get it?”
Nick frowned playfully. “Well, I can’t say for sure. But I did happen to mention to your uncle that there’s an EPA training school in Edison, New Jersey, that has a ton of this kind of crap. If a few sets disappeared, they probably wouldn’t even know they… were missing.”
Jake smiled. “And I’m sure that Harry has lots of friends in New Jersey, huh, Carolyn?”
Carolyn blushed and set her jaw. “He has business acquaintances all over,” she said defensively.
“And I know for a fact he can be very persuasive,” Nick added.
It was like old times, mining each other’s comments for maximum sarcasm. A playful enmity naturally existed between entry types, who tended to be rowdy, and toe-the-line administrative personnel like Nick, but Carolyn had always been the exception. Little Miss Safety, as the guys used to call her. Whereas the Silverados would forever ignore Nick’s daily safety briefings-belching, farting, and grab-assing through every session-Carolyn was always the one to stand and tell everyone to shut up. There’d be groaning and smart-ass remarks, but Nick always figured them to be grateful to her in the end. They still got to be macho pigs, even as they absorbed the information that would ultimately keep them alive. Not because they wanted to hear that crap, you understand-real men breathed smoke and ate nails, don’t you know-but because the wimpy lady said they had to. Everyone saved face.
God, that had been a good group of people. They’d worked hard, partied hard, and accomplished some pretty impressive feats together. What a waste.
As Travis set to work across the room on the boxes, the adults sat down in their impossibly uncomfortable chairs. Nick said, “Let’s begin.”
“Thanks for doing this, Nick,” Carolyn said, straight from the heart. “I can’t begin to guess why you’d put yourself on the line like this, but many, many thanks.”
Nick’s eyes softened, clearly moved. “I should have made this happen a long time ago,” he said. “I can’t compete with the hell you two must have been living, but that day ruined my life, too.”
“We didn’t do it, you know,” Jake said abruptly. Then he looked embarrassed. “You never asked, but I thought I should tell you, anyway.”
Nick smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. Actually, I never thought otherwise.” The comment hung in the air for a moment. Clearly, there was more, but it would remain unsaid.
Nick smiled. “Well, whoever’s setting you up for this has done one hell of a job.” He turned to Jake. “Tell me about this body in the magazine.”
Jake explained.
“You heard him mention the body, too?” Nick asked Carolyn.
She nodded. “Absolutely. You mean you didn’t?”
Nick shook his head. “We weren’t allowed on the ops channel, remember? Sean Foley was project manager, and he didn’t want me interfering. Said if he wanted my input, he’d ask for it.” The story stirred some old emotions, but Nick still found his way back to the task at hand.
“So do you think someone was monitoring the radio?” he went on. “That he heard you find the skeleton, and he just started shooting?”
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he planned from the very beginning to kill everyone there.”
Carolyn cut the chat session short. “Okay, guys, speculate on your own time. We’ve got a job here. Nick, you’re the techno wizard. How likely are we to live till tomorrow if we go through with this?”
Jake shot her a disapproving look, then nodded toward Travis, who seemed oblivious to it all, lost in a sea of cardboard. The kid had enough to worry about without her posing questions in those terms.
“Actually, I think this’ll be a fairly safe entry,” Nick said cheerily. “But then again, I thought it could be done safely back in ’83, too. We’ve got Level A gear just for the hell of it, but the real hazard this time is particulate, I think. No gas hangs around intact for fourteen years, and whatever liquids might have survived have long since evaporated; maybe even biodegraded. But that still leaves a shitload of really nasty dust, dirt, and soot. We sure as hell don’t want to breathe any of that.”
“Why?” Travis asked, looking up from his boxes. “What’ll happen?”
So much for being oblivious, Jake thought.
Nick caught the look and smiled. “Well, Travis, we don’t know for sure. Depends on what was in there to begin with and how it mixed during the fire. I’d expect some pretty severe respiratory distress. Maybe some systemic problems, too. Liver and kidneys, probably. Virtually everything affects them.”
“That means you’d have trouble breathing and get really sick,” Carolyn translated, earning herself a look that said, I’m not stupid.
“What about security?” Jake asked. “How big a problem will that be?”
Nick ruffled through his papers until he came up with the one he needed: an aerial photograph of the magazine and the surrounding area. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too big a deal,” he explained. “There’s a general philosophy within the agency that people are not inherently suicidal. By putting up two concentric fences, here and here”-he pointed with the tip of his pencil-“and by posting signs every ten feet that say something like, ‘Extremely Hazardous Area, You’ll Die if You Go in Here,’ we thought we’d pretty much discourage people from entering.”