“ — Apparently born dead,” the TV announcer continued. “We’re trying to get an update from—”
Her phone rang again. She pulled the receiver from its cradle and stretched the cord to reach the window. She could not stop watching the living river below her window. She saw cars being rocked, flipped on their backs as the crowd surged, heard more sounds of glass breaking.
“Ms. Lang, this is StanThorne, Marge Cross’s chief of security. We want you up here on the twentieth, in the penthouse.”
The writhing mass below cheered with one animal voice.
“Take the express elevator,” Thorne said. “If that’s blocked, take the stairs. Just get up here now.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said.
She put on her shoes.
“This morning, in Mexico City—”
Even before she boarded the elevator, the bottom seemed to fall out of Kaye’s stomach.
Mitch stood across the street from the convention center, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, trying to look as unin-volved and anonymous as possible.
The crowd sought out scientists, official representatives, anyone involved in the convention, flowing toward them, waving signs, shouting at them.
He had removed the badge Dicken had provided him, and with his faded denims, suntanned face, and windblown, sandy hair, did not at all resemble the hapless pasty-skinned scientists and pharmaceutical representatives.
The demonstrators were mostly women, all colors, all sizes, but nearly all young, between the ages of eighteen and forty. They seemed to have lost all sense of discipline. Anger was quickly taking over.
Mitch was terrified, but for the moment, the crowd was moving south, and he was free. He walked with quick, stiff steps away from Harbor Drive and ran down a parking ramp, jumped a wall, and found himself in a planter strip between high-rise hotels.
Out of breath, more from alarm than exertion — he had always hated crowds — he trudged through the ice plant, climbed another wall, and lowered himself onto the concrete floor of a parking garage. A few women with stunned expressions ran awkwardly to their cars. One of them carried a drooping and battered placard. Mitch read the words as they swept by: OUR DESTINY OUR BODIES.
The aching sound of sirens echoed through the garage. Mitch pushed through a door to the elevator cubicle just as three uniformed security guards came thumping down the stairs. They rounded the corner, guns drawn, and glared at him.
Mitch held up his hands and hoped he looked innocent. They swore and locked the double glass doors. “Get up there!” one shouted at him.
He climbed the stairs with the guards close behind.
From the lobby, looking out upon West Harbor Drive, he saw small riot trucks skirt the crowd, pushing slowly and steadily into the women. The women cried out in chorus, compressed and angry voices like a crashing wave. Water cannons twisted on top of a truck like antennae on a bug’s head.
The lobby’s glass doors opened and closed as guests waggled keys at staff and were allowed in. Mitch walked to the middle of the lobby, standing in an atrium, feeling the air from outside brush past. A sharp tang caught his attention: odors of fear and rage and something else, acrid, like dog piss on a hot sidewalk.
It made his hair stand on end.
The smell of the mob.
Dicken met Kaye on the penthouse floor. A man in a dark blue suit held open the door to the penthouse level and checked their badges. Tiny voices chattered in his earplug.
“They’re already in the lobby downstairs,” Dicken told her. “They’re going nuts out there.”
“Why? “ Kaye asked, baffled.
“Mexico City,” Dicken said.
“But why riot?”
“Where’s Kaye Lang?” a man shouted.
“Here!” Kaye held up her hand.
They pushed through a line of confused and chattering men and women. Kaye saw a woman in a swimsuit laughing, shaking her head, clutching a large white terry cloth towel. A man in a hotel bathrobe sat in a chair with his legs drawn up, eyes wild. Behind them, the guard yelled, “Is she the last one?”
“Check,” another answered. Kaye had never known there were so many of Marge’s security people in the hotel — she guessed twenty. Some wore sidearms.
Then she heard Cross’s high-pitched bellow.
“For Christ’s sake, it’s just a bunch of women! Just a bunch of frightened women!”
Dicken took Kaye’s arm. Cross’s personal secretary, Bob Cavanaugh, a slender man of thirty-five or forty with thinning blond hair, grabbed both of them and ushered them through the last cordon into Cross’s bedroom. She was sprawled across a king-size bed, still in her silk pajamas, watching closed circuit television. Cavanaugh draped a fringed cotton wrap over her shoulders. The view on the screen swayed back and forth. Kaye guessed the camera was on the third or fourth floor.
Riot control vehicles sprayed selective shots from water cannons and forced the mass of women farther down the street, away from the convention center entrance. “They’re mowing ‘em down!” Cross shouted angrily.
“They trashed the convention floor,” the secretary said.
“We never expected this kind of reaction,” Stan Thorne said, thick arms folded across a substantial belly.
“No,” Cross said, her voice like a low flute. “And why in hell not? I always said it was a gut issue. Well, here’s the gut response! It’s a goddamned disaster!”
“They didn’t even present their demands,” said a slender woman in a green suit.
“What in hell do they hope to accomplish?” someone else said, not visible to Kaye.
“Dropping a big fat message on our doorstep,” Cross grumbled. “Something’s kicked the body politic in the groin. They want fast, fast relief, and screw the process.”
“This could be just what we needed,” said a small, thin man whom Kaye recognized: Lewis Jansen, the marketing director for Americol’s pharmaceutical division.
“The hell you say.” Cross cried out, “Kaye Lang, I want you!”
“Here,” Kaye said, stepping forward.
“Good! Frank, Sandra, get Kaye on the tube as soon as they clear the streets. Who’s the talent here?”
An older woman in a bathrobe, carrying an aluminum briefcase, named from memory the local television commentators and affiliates.
“Lewis, have your folks work up some talking points.”
“My folks are at another hotel.”
“Then call them! Tell the people we’re working as fast as we can, don’t want to move too fast on a vaccine or we’ll harm folks — shit, tell them all the stuff we were saying down on the convention floor. When in hell will people ever learn to sit back and listen? Are the phones out of order?”
Kaye wondered whether Mitch had been caught in the riot, if he was okay.
Mark Augustine entered the bedroom. It was getting crowded. The air was thick and hot. Augustine nodded to Dicken, smiled genially at Kaye. He seemed cool and collected, but there was something about his eyes that betrayed this camouflage.
“Good!” Cross roared. “The gang’s all here. Mark, what’s up?”
“Richard Bragg was shot to death in Berkeley two hours ago,” Augustine said. “He was out walking his dog.” Augustine tilted his head to one side and drew his lips together into a wry expression for Kaye’s benefit.