Gino watched him walking away.Not everything, buddy.
MAGOZZI WALKED ACROSS what seemed like an endless expanse of concrete floor toward the desk, the computer, the bomb, and the entire Monkeewrench crew. All he saw was Grace-and Charlie, of course. Goddamnit, she was going to get the dog killed, too.
She felt him coming. "Get out of here, Magozzi," she said without looking at him when he moved up beside her. "Go with the others. You've only got eight minutes left to get out of range before Road-runner starts hitting those keys."
It was the first thing she'd said to him directly, and for reasons that defied logic, they made him ridiculously happy. He waited until she got tired of his infuriating disobedience and turned on him, glowering. Then, the second he had her eyes, he smiled and said, "Hello, Grace."
She jerked her head back coward the computer screen almost immediately, but the corner of her mouth twitched just a little. "Seven minutes."
"Okay. You want to make out?"
OUTSIDE, Gino, Bonar, Halloran, and Sharon had piled into Knudsen's bare-bones sedan. Knudsen hadn't started the car yet. Dying in the line of duty was one thing. You accepted that the minute you put on any kind of badge. Dying senselessly was another thing. No agency pretended there was glory in pointless self-sacrifice, not even the FBI. And this would be pointless. Living to fight another day was the ticket, and this was his case. Getting blown up and gassed right at the beginning wasn't going to do anybody any good, which was why he was driving out of here. So if the unthinkable happened, he'd be around to sort through the aftermath, find the bad guys, if there were any left, and uncover the things they'd know to look for the next time, so it never happened again.
Except he wasn't driving out of here. He was just sitting like a slug behind the wheel while the seconds ticked away, thinking of the civilians and the cop inside that building who happened to think that this particular self-sacrifice wasn't that pointless after all. He waited for one of the other four people in the car to start banging on the seats and screaming for him to get the hell out of there, but none of them said a thing.
"HOW MUCH LONGER?" Annie asked. Harley looked at his watch. "Five more minutes." The waiting was killing Magozzi. Grace hadn't exactly jumped on
the making-out idea, and the others were preoccupied with the programming language on the laptop screen, which left him with nothing to do but stand there and contemplate his own death. He could have been working on what he would do with the rest of his life if Roadrunner picked the right command line instead of the wrong one, but it seemed safer to go with the worst-case scenario. Grace had taught him that.
Suddenly Roadrunner slapped his forehead, said "Duh," of all things, then moved the mouse and clicked.
Magozzi sucked in a breath and watched numbers flying by on the screen, waiting to blow up and die and see the light at the end of the tunnel or whatever else was supposed to happen.
After a few seconds, the monitor blinked black, then a new screen came up. The rest of them released a collective exhale that sounded like the wind. Magozzi looked down at his body. He wasn't dead, and he hadn't blown up. Not even a little.
"What just happened?" His voice sounded squeaky, and his face colored.
"Harley said the guy was sloppy on this. I just didn't read far enough, the command sequence was so long." Roadrunner pulled the screen back up and pointed. "It's right at the end; see those four letters? B-O-O-M at the end of this sequence"-he paged down a little-"and M-O-O-B, that's boom backwards, at the end of this one. Christ. That's absolutely puerile."
Harley looked a little tense. "So which one did you punch in?"
"Moob, of course. Boom sets the bomb, boom backwards unsets it. I mean, how obvious can you get?"
Harley smacked him across the back of the head. "You dumbshit. What if the guy had set it the other way around so itwouldn't be obvious?"
Roadrunner rubbed his head. "Shit. I never thought of that."
Harley smacked him again, lightly. "That's the trouble with you linear thinkers. You have no imagination, no understanding of human psychology, and psychology rules the world, man. Magozzi, you want to get out there and call the others-tell 'em it's safe to come back?"
Magozzi looked down at his shoes. Sure, he could do that. Just as soon as he could get one of his legs to move. "So the bomb's disabled?"
Annie gave him one of her slow, signature smiles. "Of course it's disabled, sugar. That's why it says 'Bomb Disabled' on that screen."
AGENT KNUDSEN'S car was still outside when Magozzi walked out of the shed. Knudsen was standing next to it with his phone pressed to his head; everybody else was inside the sedan.
Magozzi was furious. He stormed up to the passenger side and jerked open the door where Gino sat. "What the hell are you still doing here?"
Gino glanced at his watch. "We've still got three, four minutes."
"The hell you do. And what the/"c^ is he doing on the phone?"
"Calling off all the people coming in, keeping them away from this place."
"He couldn't do that when the goddamned car was moving?" Magozzi was nearly spitting.
"Well, it's a bumpy road. Makes it hard to dial."
"Goddamnit,Gino . .."
"Take it easy, buddy. You're going to stroke out. Glad you changed your mind about leaving, though. Hang on. I'll move over and make room."
"I didn't change my mind about leaving, goddamnit, I came out to call you and tell you it was safe to come back!"
"No fooling?" Bonar said from the backseat. "They deactivated the bomb?"
"Yeah."
Halloran and Sharon both closed their eyes at the same time. They looked like a couple of Kewpie dolls going to sleep.
Gino looked down at his knees for a minute and just breathed. When he looked up again, he was grinning. "Knudsen's going to be pissed. Now he'll have to call back all those people he just told to stay away and tell them to come back, and I wouldn't blame one of them for not believing him. What about the trucks in there? Any chance they'll blow when the two on the road go?"
Magozzi dropped to a crouch in the grass by the car, arms across his thighs. "Grace says no. There are only the two trucks online. The computers in the trucks in there aren't even linked up, which probably explains why they aren't on the road with the others."
"So we don't have to worry about dying in the next couple hours."
"No. Just about a lot of other people out there somewhere dying. Roadrunner thinks there has to be a fail-safe in the program-some kind of an abort command. They're trying to find it now."
Gino stared out the windshield and shook his head. "Godspeed.'
They waited outside as the minutes ticked by. Their guns, badges, and law-enforcement expertise-even the hotline to D.C.-were utterly useless. Everything depended on one skinny guy inside that machine shed finding one single circuit in a dizzying maze of computer language.
Halloran, Sharon, Magozzi, and Gino paced in mindless patterns close to the shed door while Halloran smoked one cigarette after another. Knudsen continued to walk his own private circles around his car, phone pressed to his ear, putting on the miles.
"You sure they don't want us in there?" Sharon asked Magozzi for the tenth time.
"They were pretty specific aboutnot wanting us in there. This is their thing. There's no way we could help them. We'd just get in the way."
"This is driving me crazy, not doing something. Anything."
Magozzi saw the hollows under her haunted eyes and thought it was all getting lost. Everything the women had been through in the last eighteen hours-things the rest of them would never be able toimagine, no matter how many times they heard the story-was getting lost in what was happening right now, and what was going to happen if they couldn't find a way to stop it. And yet there were Grace and Annie in that building, right in the thick of it, and here was Sharon, pacing around like a caged animal because she wasn't in there with them. She reminded Magozzi of a combat vet who signed up for another tour through hell because he couldn't stand the thought of his comrades fighting without him.