Chapter 13 Breaching the Monolith #2
“Three, and this is the one.” He put his hand on the side of her neck, carefully, on the side that could hear.
“Ask me. That is the whole thing. That is all I have ever wanted out of any of this. When it is about me, ask me first, and then do whatever you were going to do anyway, because I know you and you will.”
Mina laughed, and it came out cracked, and Mang Rey looked studiously at the wet wells.
“And four?”
“Four is that there are thirty-one boats on the water,” Hal said, “and every single one of them came out for you, and Luz has been running the evacuation off her own whiteboard since half past nine, and your barangay is on the port road on high ground eating somebody’s mother’s cooking, and Divina counted every one of them in. ”
Mina put her forehead against his chest.
Nine seconds. That was what she permitted herself, and it was the longest she had taken in fifteen years, and she counted it.
“I am going to need help with the sticks,” she said.
They found Hansel Brand in the plant control room at twenty-four minutes to midnight, alone, doing exactly what Wolffe had said he would be doing.
He had two flight cases open on the floor and a workstation up and a cable run to a rack of drives, and he was, when the door opened, in the middle of a copy operation with forty-one minutes remaining on it.
He looked at the four of them.
He looked longest at Wolffe.
“Ah,” said Hansel Brand.
“Hello, Hansel.”
“You look terrible.”
“Yes.”
Nobody moved for a moment. Somewhere below, the pumps went on doing what they did.
“I want to be clear that there is nothing to fight about,” Hansel said.
“I want to say that first because there are four of you and one of me and I have never hit anybody in my life. What I am doing is copying model weights onto physical media and taking them out of a building that is going to be photographed a great deal next week. They are encrypted, they are useless, they are worth nothing to anybody without a signature from a man standing three meters away from me who will never provide one.” He spread his hands.
“So it is not a theft. It is an evacuation of an asset. And I am going to finish it and walk up to the roof, and none of you are going to shoot me, because none of you have brought anything to shoot me with.”
“Before anybody says anything else,” Hansel said, “I would like to know one thing, and then I will be quiet and you can do whatever this is.”
“Say it.”
“Did the boats work?”
Mina looked at him.
“You have thirty-one wooden boats sitting in front of my north face being filmed by their own passengers,” Hansel said, “which is, I want you to know, the single most effective operation anybody has run against me in seventeen years, and I did not see it coming, and it did not cost you anything, and I have spent the last three hours unable to move a launch.” He said it without any bitterness whatsoever, which was somehow worse.
“I would simply like to know whether it was yours.”
“It was not mine.”
“Whose was it?”
“His.” Mina did not take her eyes off him. “And Aurelio Ramos’s, and Luz Ramos’s, and about thirty other people whose names you have never once had to learn.”
Hansel Brand looked at Hal Rivera for a moment with an expression of genuine professional interest.
“Where do you work?”
“Cold chain logistics,” said Hal. “Forest Park, Georgia.”
“Of course you do,” said Hansel.
“Mr. Brand,” Mina said. “The discharge.”
“The discharge is a valve sequence on the building management system and it is timed and it has been timed since February and I could not stop it now if I wanted to, because I am not a plant engineer, I am a chief operating officer.” Hansel actually smiled.
“That is not evasion. It is the literal truth. There is a man in Singapore who could stop it and he is asleep.”
“There is an override station in this room,” said Dieter Wolffe.
Hansel looked at him.
“Yes,” he said. “There is.”
And that was the entire fight, right there, and it lasted eleven seconds and it was not about violence at all.
Because Hansel Brand moved, not toward any of them, but toward the override panel, to put his body in front of it.
And Mina had known he would, and had already started, and got there first with two feet of rattan in her good hand and her whole weight behind her shoulder, and put him into the wall beside the panel and pinned him there with a stick across his chest.
He was thirty-eight and fit and he had a gym in Frankfurt.
She had done four hundred provincial pageants and eleven films and had trained since she was twenty-three with a man in Caloocan who had made her cry twice, and she was deaf on one side and had one arm, and it took her nine seconds and he never once got a hand on her.
“Do not,” Mina said, “make me use the other one.”
Hansel Brand stood pinned to a wall by a piece of unfinished rattan cane off a prop cart in Studio 4 in Quezon City.
“What is that?” he said.
“It is from a television show.”
Hansel Brand looked down at seven hundred grams of unfinished rattan cane pressed across his sternum by a woman with one working arm.
“You are serious.”
“There is a fight-choreography package for a teleserye tie-in,” Mina said.
“The prop cart has been sitting in a corridor at Sinag since Thursday because nobody came for it. Foam swords, a plastic bolo, breakaway bottles, and two of these, because the choreographer is seventy-one and does not believe in foam for anything you hold in one hand.”
“And you took them.”
“I took them on Tuesday afternoon,” she said, “twenty minutes after I cloned an undersecretary’s telephone, and I have carried them through two hundred meters of your intake pipe and six hours of your ceiling, and Mr. Brand, I want you to understand something, because you asked me a question about numbers in Hall 3 and I have had nine hours to think about it. ”
Hansel waited.
“You have spent two years being very careful that nothing you did was illegal in the country where you did it,” Mina said.
“And it was not. Almost none of it was. The change orders were signed, the risk register was signed, the economic zone designation was signed. You have a paper trail that would survive an audit in any jurisdiction on earth, and that is not an accident, that is the entire design.”
“That is correct.”
“And I am a woman who hosts a lunchtime programme.” She leaned on the stick. “So I have not been building a case. Simone builds cases. I have been building something else all week and you have not once asked me what it was, because you have been thinking about arithmetic.”
For the first time all night, Hansel Brand looked at her properly.
“What have you been building?”
“A broadcast,” said Mina Hermosa.
Hal and Wolffe did the valves.
It took twenty-two minutes and Mina, holding a man against a wall with a stick, could follow about half of it.
“They are sluice valves,” Wolffe said, before anything else, and Mina heard him say it and felt the whole week close like a hand. “That is the correct name for them. A motorized sluice valve on a discharge culvert. It is the same device as the thing on your floodway, at a different scale.”
“Say that again.”
“It is the same device.” Wolffe was already reading the panel.
“A gate, in a channel, that somebody sets to a position. Yours was jammed at thirty percent on Tuesday morning at a place called Manggahan. These are at twelve and a hundred. It is one machine, Ms. Hermosa. It has been one machine all week.”
Mina stood holding a stick against a man’s chest and did not say anything at all.
“Culvert three and four are the estero,” Wolffe said. “Those are the ones going into the channel behind the barangay. One and two are the sea outfall and they are shut.”
“Why are they shut?”
“Because sending forty million liters of forty-degree water into a marine environment is regulated,” said Wolffe, “and sending it into a canal in Tondo is not.”
Hal did not say anything to that. He was reading a panel.
“Okay, Doctor, talk me through it. That is a valve position indicator and that says twelve percent. Twelve percent of what?”
“Open. Culvert one is twelve percent open, which is a trickle line, it is what they run to keep the culvert from silting.”
“And it goes to?”
“The sea.”
“Right.” Hal put his hand on a control. “Then here is what we are going to do, and Doctor, tell me if I am about to break something. I am going to drive one and two to full open first, before I touch three and four, because if I close the estero culverts on a system that is discharging with nowhere else to go, I put the whole differential onto that pump hall and something in there lets go and it will be one of the things I cannot see.”
Wolffe looked at him.
“That is correct,” he said. “How do you know that?”
“Because I have got four hundred refrigeration units in nine facilities and every single one of them has a compressor that will eat itself if you close a valve in the wrong order,” said Hal. “Baby, everything is the same. That is the actual secret. Nobody wants to hear it.”
The motors ran. Culvert one went from twelve percent to forty to a hundred, and two came up behind it, and somewhere under their feet the note of the whole building changed as forty million liters a day found the sea.
Then Hal shut three and four, and it took four minutes, and when the indicator on four went to zero Dieter Wolffe put his hand flat on the panel and closed his eyes.
“Sir?”
“There is a boy,” said Wolffe. “On a walkway. He was fishing.”
At twelve minutes past midnight, with the copy operation at nine minutes remaining, Wolffe walked over to the workstation.
“Dieter.” Hansel, against the wall. “Dieter, do not.”
“Be quiet, Hansel.”
Wolffe stood looking at the screen for a moment. Then he reached into the small interior pocket sewn into the waistband of his trousers, where it had lived every day since 2021, and took out a thing the size of a car key.
“Doctor Wolffe,” Mina said. “What is that?”
“You know what it is.”