Chapter 9 - Nine Minutes to Dust

"Martin, stop the demolition!" I shouted into the phone.

The line went quiet. Then Martin answered, softly, "You should have learned not to dig."

I put him on speaker. Reed heard every word. He was already waving officers into motion.

"Martin Hale, you are being recorded," Reed said. "Move away from the equipment and put your hands where we can see them."

Martin laughed. "You're nine minutes late."

The call ended.

We watched through a secure video feed from officers racing toward Riverside. Yellow machines loomed beside the abandoned brick medical building. Workers clustered near the front gate. A foreman argued with a uniformed officer.

"Clear the site!" somebody yelled.

Reed's team reached the control trailer with four minutes to spare. They detained the foreman, killed power to the ignition system, and ordered an explosives crew to inspect the building. There was no cinematic explosion. There were just men and women doing difficult work while a countdown lived in my chest.

A technician found charges rigged along the old foundation. The firing receiver had been disguised inside a utility box. Someone had planned to destroy the sealed wing whether or not the official demolition proceeded.

"We stopped it," Vega told us over the phone.

I exhaled for the first time in several minutes.

Then a new problem emerged. Martin's car was parked beside the trailer, but he wasn't there. Security footage showed him leaving in a dark SUV ten minutes before Reed's team arrived.

"He knew," I said. "He knew you'd come."

"Which means he's getting information," Reed replied.

The officers searched the basement and found the hollow wall. Behind it stood a heavy steel door secured by two dead bolts and a keypad. No one had power, and no one had the code.

Reed sent a photograph to Claire.

She stared at the worn brass plate beneath the keypad. There was a carved bird, its wings spread.

"My mom designed that," she whispered.

"How can you be sure?" I asked.

"Because it's the same bird she used to draw on my lunch bags."

She reached for the microfilm inventory Vega had returned in a sealed photo packet. One sequence stood alone, uncoded: 0217.

At Riverside, Reed entered those four digits.

The steel door clicked open.

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Inside, a motion sensor lit up.

Someone was already waiting.