“Who the hell was it, Laura?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the center,” she stammered. “There’s some kind of trouble down there. They want you.”
“The elevator center?” He came fully awake. “How the hell did they know where I was? Who was it on the phone?”
Laura started to get out of the bed, but Peter reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back.
“Who the hell was on the phone?” he shouted.
“Your wife,” she said, hanging her head, the tears coming to her eyes.
“Jesus,” Rossiter swore, half under his breath. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He let go of Laura, grabbed the telephone, and dialed, speaking to Laura over his shoulder. “Get dressed. You’re going to have to drive me down there.”
She padded across the bedroom and went into the bathroom, softly closing the door.
“Cargill,” said the phone at Peter’s ear.
“Stan? This is Pete.”
“Am I glad to hear from you,” the night manager said. “You’d better get down here right away.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. What the hell is going on?”
“I tried to get you at home, but Liz said you were in Minneapolis. I called up there. and they told me you hadn’t arrived, but to get ahold of you somehow and keep the cops out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“We’ve got a guy here with a bomb. Carl found him down in L tunnel getting ready to set it.”
“A bomb!” Rossiter shouted. “He hadn’t set it yet?”
“No. Carl said he was just taping it up to one of the overhead conveyors.”
“Was that the only one?”
The night manager sucked his breath, the sound clear over the phone. “Christ, Pete, we never even thought of that. We just assumed…”
Rossiter cut him off. “Get the night crew down there immediately. I want every tunnel searched, inch by inch.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And call the New Orleans P.D. bomb squad.”
“But Minneapolis said no cops.”
“I don’t give a shit what they said! It’s my elevator. Now get on it, Carl. I’ll be down there within fifteen minutes.”
As Rossiter hung up, Laura came out of the bathroom. She was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
He jumped up, grabbed his clothes, and started to get dressed. “Get your car out and bring it around to the front. I’ll be taking it.”
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“No way. Some nut has planted at least one bomb down at the center. There may be more.”
“I’m coming with you,” Laura said defiantly, and before he could object again, she grabbed her purse and left the apartment.
Within a couple of minutes, Rossiter was at the front door of the building, where Laura waited for him in her Chevy Camaro, the engine running, the headlights on. The dense fog of the night had gotten worse, if anything, and as he jumped in the car he realized with a sinking feeling that it would take a hell of a lot longer than fifteen or twenty minutes to get across town.
“Let’s go,” he said, “but for God’s sake, be careful in this shit. I don’t want to be in an accident.”
She pulled out of the driveway and headed at a crawl toward the freeway, the low beams barely illuminating the road one car length ahead of them. They didn’t speak, both of them staring intently out the windshield, the wipers slapping back and forth, until they had made it to the freeway, and she was able to speed up to twenty miles per hour.
“What did my wife say to you?” Rossiter asked gently.
Laura glanced at him, her eyes red rimmed. “She knew you were there.”
“What’d you tell her?”
Laura shook her head. “Nothing. I was frightened.”
“Then she doesn’t know for sure.”
“She knows, Peter! Goddamn it, she called Minneapolis and they told her you weren’t up there. If she didn’t know about us, then why would she have called my number?”
One more piece of shit in an already overloaded pot. “Laura…”
“Don’t say it,” she said. “You’ve got your hands full now, so don’t lie to me just to keep me quiet. When everything is settled at work, and you’ve had time to think this all out, then talk to me. But no lies, Peter. No false promises. I’m thirty years old, you’re forty. We’re old enough now for the truth.”
He reached out to touch her cheek, but she brushed his hand away. They continued in silence.
It was fifteen minutes before eight when they finally made it to the elevator complex, where they were stopped by the police.
Rossiter jumped out of the car. “Get out of here now, Laura, or I’ll have the cops take you away. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
She looked at him and smiled wanly. “Good luck,” she said. She turned around and headed back into the city.
Rossiter jumped into the back seat of one of the waiting cruisers, and they headed across the staging area toward the main office. There were fire engines, ambulances, police cars, and people everywhere.
“What’s the status?” he asked.
“They’ve found two other bombs, and they’re looking for more.”
“When were they set to go off?”
“No way of telling for sure, Mr. Rossiter, but soon,” one of the cops said.
“There’s too many people here. If this thing blows, it’ll go sky high. I want you to get everyone nonessential the hell out of here. Immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said.
They pulled up at the main office, which faced the dock itself. The gigantic grain ship Akai Maru was lit up like a Christmas tree in the fog.
Rossiter jumped out of the cruiser and raced inside the building. It was jammed with policemen and elevator personnel. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Telephones were ringing, and near the front window two police officers were tending portable radios, which hissed and blared with messages from the search teams below.
“Listen up, everyone!” Rossiter shbuted. The noise did not diminish.
He jumped up on a desk. “Listen up!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
Everyone turned his way now, and the noise began to subside.
“I want everyone not directly connected with the bomb search to get the hell out of here, and away from the elevator. Right now!”
“Pete! In here!” the night manager shouted from the doorway to Rossiter’s office.
Rossiter jumped down from the desk, and hurried across to his office, where Carl, the chief engineer, and two plainclothes detectives stood around a small, seedy-looking old man seated on a chair in the middle of the room. He was smiling.
“Who the hell are you?” Rossiter demanded.
“He won’t give us a thing…” one of the detectives started, but the little man smiled.
“Louie Benario,” he said in a soft voice.
The detectives looked at him in amazement.
“Who sent you to sabotage my elevator, and why?”
Benario laughed out loud, and he pointed up to the clock, which showed one minute until eight. “It’s too late!”
They all looked at the clock as the second hand swept up toward the hour, then at each other.
“Sound the siren!” Rossiter screamed. “Get everyone out of here!”
“Too late, too late,” Benario sang. “My pretty, my pretty fire.”
A dull explosion sounded from somewhere below them. Then something shook the building, and another, much larger explosion sent a part of the ceiling down.
“Jesus,” someone swore as the lights went out, and then all hell broke loose as the entire elevator complex burst apart in a gigantic explosion that sent flames and debris nearly one thousand feet into the air, breaking windows over a two-mile radius and burrying the office area beneath thousands of tons of concrete, steel, and burning grain.