Chapter 13 Breaching the Monolith
Three hours and forty minutes before high water, Mina Hermosa came out of a plant room into a corridor she had specified.
Not her. Wolffe had specified it, in a document, in Heidelberg, and had been proud of it, and had told her about it three days later while lying on his back on top of a ventilation duct: gray two-part epoxy, chemical resistant, six euros a square meter more than the alternative, with a yellow line down the middle and stenciled numbers at intervals.
She went along it at a limping half-run with a torch off and one arm dead and found, at the fourth number, a stairwell.
Below-grade, per Simone. Nine meters, per a medical alert band answering a query nobody had thought about.
The stairwell had a camera at the half-landing and Mina looked directly into it as she went past, because there was no point in anything else and because she had spent eight years learning what a lens does to a face and she wanted whoever was watching to have to look at hers.
Nobody came.
That was the thing she could not fit anywhere. Nobody came, for four minutes, on a floor of a building that had put thirteen hundred kilos of halon into a hall to catch her at four in the afternoon.
She found out why at the bottom of the stairs, where a fire door stood open on its magnetic hold and a fluorescent fitting was flickering and there was, on the wall opposite, a mounted evacuation plan with a red YOU ARE HERE and, beneath it, taped up with electrical tape, a printed sheet.
MUSTER: ALL NON-ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL TO WEST GATE 2200H.
Mina read it twice.
Twenty-two hundred. Ten o’clock at night. Two hours before high water and eleven minutes ago.
They had emptied the building.
Eighty-two men on a roster lodged to be found, and the roster had never been a work party or a security posture, and it had never been about her at all.
It was a shift. It had a start and it had an end, and the end was ten o’clock, because whatever was going to happen at one in the morning was not something HelixCompute APAC wanted eighty-two witnesses standing in.
She stood in a flickering corridor nine meters underground and understood that she was, at that moment, one of about four people left inside eighty hectares.
Then she went and found the door.
The door had no handle on the inside and a card reader on the outside, and Mina Hermosa did not have a card.
She had a fire door, a plant room, one working arm, and three hours and sixteen minutes.
She put her good ear against the steel again and listened to a man counting.
He was doing it in German, which she had not expected, and under his breath, and he had gotten to something in the eight hundreds when he stopped, and then started again from one, and Mina understood what she was listening to and had to put her forehead against the door for a second.
He was counting the ventilation.
Eleven minutes on, four minutes off. He had been doing it for three days, and he had run out of cycles somewhere around four thousand and had started counting seconds instead, and had gotten to eight hundred-something and lost it and gone back to the beginning.
Mina knocked on the door twice.
The counting stopped.
She waited. Then, from the other side, in accented English, from a man who had not spoken to another human being since Tuesday night:
“That is a very strange thing for a wall to do.”
She got him out through the ceiling, which was the only way, and it took forty minutes she did not have.
The vault door was a card reader on a door controller and there was nothing she could do about it with one arm and no tools.
But the vault was a room, and a room built nine meters underground with a fire rating still has to breathe, and it had been breathing at her for six hours in a rhythm she had been counting since the cable tray.
The duct came in at the corner. It was four hundred by four hundred, which was smaller than the void she had crossed and considerably smaller than a person, and Mina lay on top of it in the plant room ceiling with a rattan stick and worked the flange bolts one at a time, and got the transition piece off, and looked down through a square hole at the top of a fluorescent fitting in a wire cage.
“Doctor Wolffe.”
“You are in the ceiling.”
“I am in the ceiling. Please move the bench.”
“There is a bench and there is a blanket and there is a bottle. That is the inventory.” Sounds of a bench moving on concrete. “May I ask a question.”
“Quickly.”
“Are you from Heidelberg?”
Mina stopped with her hand on the duct.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“Because my colleague at the institute has been telling me for two days that somebody would come, and I have been telling him that this is not a thing that happens, and he is not here, and I have been having both sides of the conversation.” A pause.
“I am aware of how that sounds. I have been in this room since Tuesday.”
“Sir,” Mina said, “I am from Quezon City and I host a television programme, and I need you to stand on the bench.”
Getting a fifty-eight-year-old man up through a four-hundred-millimeter hole with one arm took nineteen minutes and cost her the last of the arm entirely.
She felt it go. Not the wound. Something structural in the forearm that had been holding on since the rubble bund, and it let go while she had Dieter Wolffe’s wrists in both hands and eighty kilos of computational oncologist hanging under a ceiling, and Mina made a sound she was not proud of and did not let go, and got him onto the duct, and then lay on her back on top of the ductwork in the dark breathing.
Wolffe lay beside her. He was filthy and he had lost weight and his glasses were bent.
“You are injured,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“Sir.”
“I am a physician,” said Dieter Wolffe, “which everyone forgets, including me,” and took her arm without asking, and turned it under her own torch, and was quiet.
They lay on the ductwork for ninety seconds because neither of them could do anything else.
“Three days,” Wolffe said, to the ceiling.
“Yes.”
“I lost the second one entirely. I have thought about that a great deal. There was a Tuesday night and then there was a Thursday, and the Wednesday is simply not there, and I am a man who has kept a laboratory notebook since 1989.” He shifted.
“I have decided it was the sedative and not my brain. I would like that to be true.”
“It was the sedative.”
“You do not know that.”
“No,” Mina agreed. “But I have been awake for three days as well, sir, and I lost Wednesday afternoon, and nobody sedated me.”
Wolffe made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
“How bad,” Mina said.
“You have twenty sutures of which perhaps six are still doing anything, the wound has been wet for eight hours, and there is tissue in there that should not be exposed to air, let alone to whatever is in that water.” He set it down with a gentleness that undid her more than anything had all week.
“You will keep the arm. You will not keep full use of it without a surgeon in the next day. Do not lift anything with it again tonight.”
“I am going to have to.”
“Yes,” said Wolffe. “I assumed.”
They came out into the pump hall at five twenty, and Mina stopped at the rail, because even now, even like this, it was worth stopping for.
The hall went down four levels. Below them the seawater came in through trash racks and travelling band screens into four wet wells, and out of the wet wells the vertical pumps went up through the deck in columns a meter and a half across, and the whole thing moved with a slow enormous certainty.
The heat exchangers were on the far side, a bank of titanium plates the size of a house, and the water going into them was the bay and the water coming out of them was what Dieter Wolffe had put his hand into on Tuesday afternoon.
The catwalk ran the length of it at level three, grating, handrails both sides, above the wells.
“Forty million liters a day,” Wolffe said.
“I know.”
“I signed for it.” He was looking down. “In March, in Zurich. It was on a slide.”
“Doctor Wolffe.”
“I am aware that this is not the moment.” He turned. “What do you need from me?”
“Two things. Where is the plant control room, and where is the discharge?”
“The same place. Level one, north end, behind the exchanger bank.” Wolffe pointed with a filthy hand and did it precisely, because he was who he was.
“The culverts to the estero and the culverts to the sea are both on that panel. They are motorized isolation valves and they are on the building management system and they will have an override station in the room, because you cannot commission a plant like this without a manual override, it would not pass.”
“Can you work it?”
“I can read it,” said Wolffe. “I could not tell you which valve. I have never stood in that room.”
And then a voice behind them said, “I can tell you which valve.”
Hal was standing at the end of the catwalk, soaked through, with a coil of rope over one shoulder and a fifty-six-year-old boatman beside him, and blood on his knuckles that Mina spent the rest of her life not asking about.
Nobody said anything for a second and a half.
“Your arm is bleeding,” Hal said.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He came down the catwalk. “Okay. I want to say four things and then we are going to go and do the valves, and I want them said now in case one of us does not get to Saturday.”
“Hal.”
“One. I am not sorry about Thursday.” He stopped in front of her.
“I have thought about it for twenty-six hours and I have talked to Luz about it and I am not sorry, because I was right, and you know I was right, and if I say I am sorry now to make this easier then in six months it comes back and it comes back worse.”
Mina looked up at him.
“Two,” Hal said. “You were also right. There was a plane and I should have been on it and I would not have gone, and both of those are true, and I have decided that I can hold both of them, and mi reina, I am going to need you to hold both of them too.”
“Hal.”