Dodge retreated a step, then half turned to locate the exit. "How many people were on that flight?"
"Passengers and crew?" Fuller knelt and groped for his pistol. "Thirty altogether. Why?"
"Looks like we’re missing a couple."
The FBI agent looked over his shoulder and saw what had prompted Dodge's comment. In addition to the crowd materializing from the recesses of the exhibition hall, more than a dozen dull-eyed vacationers stood between them and freedom. And then, as if driven by a single mind, they began advancing.
CHAPTER 5 — LEAP OF FAITH
As a man of faith, Father Nathan Hobbs did not require even a split second to question the wisdom of leaping out the window in pursuit of the straw-haired burglar. Yet, it was not his trust in God or the power of miracles that emboldened him to jump from more than seventy floors up, but rather his implicit faith in the perpetrator; in his previous dealings with this woman, he had come to appreciate that she left nothing to chance. He did not know exactly what means of escape she had waiting beyond the shattered window, but he knew it was there and knew with equal certainty that this would be his only chance to capture both the woman and her prize.
The only thing he could clearly see through the rush of air against his eyes was a smear of gold — the woman’s hair — only a few yards away and falling at an angle. He focused on this whipping streamer, pulling his extremities in against his body to reduce resistance and shot forward like an arrow. As the gap between them closed, he fell into a pocket of null air created by her passage through the atmosphere that sucked him in like a vacuum. The pressure against his eyeballs diminished and he opened his eyes wide just in time to see the woman pull something from her bulky backpack. The object immediately swelled into a small white balloon that was caught in the wind and pulled both up and ahead of her.
A pilot chute, thought Hobbs and he knew what would happen next. He tucked his chin down to eke out a little bit more speed and in the split second that it took for the drogue to yank the main parachute from the pack, Hobbs reached his target. He had braced himself for the impact, but the actual force of the collision was lessened by their freefall. Nevertheless, the woman’s head snapped back violently as he hit and for a moment he feared that he had killed her. The notion prompted no particular reaction; horrible though the thought was, Hobbs imagined the world would be no poorer without her. It was a fleeting thought, overridden by the imperative of survival. Like an octopus pouncing on its prey, Hobbs wrapped his arms and legs around the woman. One hand snaked over her shoulder and the other threaded under her armpit, tight against her ribcage and the two came together in a ferocious handclasp over her bosom. It was all he had time for.
The main parachute blossomed overhead with a loud pop and Hobbs felt the woman’s inert form jerk violently in his grasp. Had his hold been any less fierce, he would have been shaken loose and left to plummet to his death. Yet the parachute alone in no way guaranteed his survival.
The hurricane winds instantly caught the canopy; an eighty-knot blast that tore into the chute, pulling the lines taut against its human anchors and stretching the silk at its seams. For just a moment, Hobbs wondered if his trust in the burglar's foresight was not wholly misplaced. Parachute jumping was inherently dangerous, but from the relatively low altitude of a man-made structure — even the tallest one ever built — that risk was amplified almost out of all proportion. Add to that virtually suicidal combination the violent unpredictability of a hurricane and it was a recipe for certain doom. The thief must surely have known this; she was bold, but not suicidal. How then, Hobbs wondered in some faintly lit corner of his adrenaline-charged brain, had she planned to pull this one out of the fire? He reckoned he had only a few seconds to find the answer to that question before all hope was lost.
The parachute canopy was unlike anything he had ever seen; instead of the typical, capacious round dome, the chute was a small square of silk anchored at the corners. He followed the lines to their source, not the small pack attached to the small of the thief’s back, but rather to the suspender-like harness straps that ran over her shoulders. That was when he saw the handles and knew intuitively what their function was. But before he could even think about how to make use of the complicated control system, everything changed.
The chute abruptly folded in half, snagged on something protruding from one of the Empire State Building’s shorter siblings and its function altered from aerial braking device to something more akin to a grappling hook. Hobbs and his senseless captive suddenly became a pendulum weight at the end of a fixed line and were whipped around at breakneck speed into the side of the skyscraper.
Hobbs had one desperate thought in the instant before impact: The Staff!
His hand dropped to the burglar’s leg, to the deep pocket where he had seen her stow the relic after liberating it from the secure display case. There was no time to extract it from the folds of her garment, barely even time to grip it through the fabric and form a single, mental image….
The crash was equivalent to being hit by a speeding bus. There was a crunch, barely audible over the howling wind, of glass and concrete crumbling beneath the force of the collision and then the two figures at the end of the line bounced away only to be slammed back again and again. It was an impact that no living creature could have survived.
Hobbs opened his eyes warily, wondering if his first glimpse would be the kingdom of Heaven. The noise of the wind had abated and he could no longer feel the driving rain on his face, but the tactile sensations — the damp, rough feel of his clothes against his skin and the ache in his extremities from the battle with the thief — were still traveling between his nerves and brain. His eyes verified the reality.
Still alive, he thought. I guess it worked.
Although research on the artifact had only just begun, Hobbs and his companions had learned a few of the Staff’s remarkable properties, one of which was a unique and as yet incomprehensible ability to tap into the Earth’s electromagnetic field and transform it into a bubble of protective energy — what the science fiction pulp writers liked to call a ‘force field.’ The shield was normally nothing more dramatic that a faint crackle of static electricity around a body, but when exposed to the energy of another object, in this case the kinetic energy of their impact with the building, it became all but impervious, absorbing the bone-breaking impact and cushioning the figures within. The Staff and the technology that empowered it were subject to only one minor weakness: water.
Because it was essentially an electrical phenomenon, the force field generated by the relic shorted out in the presence of water. A mere splash of water could cause the shield to fail and deliver a nasty jolt to anyone inside; total immersion would almost certainly prove fatal.
Hobbs' euphoria at having survived the initial crash evaporated as quickly as the droplets of rain that now sizzled against the thin corona of energy mere inches from his body. Thus far, he had not felt the sting of electrical shocks on his skin, but how long that would last was anyone’s guess. As long as he was exposed to the elements, Hobbs was in constant peril; he had to get out of the storm and fast.