Chapter 14 The Current and the Truth
There were eleven flights of stairs between the plant control room and the roof and Mina Hermosa did nine of them before she had to stop.
She stopped on a half-landing with her good hand on the rail and her head down and did not say anything, and Hal did not say anything either, which was the correct thing and which cost him visibly.
“Twenty seconds,” she said.
“Take thirty.”
“Twenty.” She counted them. Then: “Hal. Before we go out there.”
“Yeah.”
“If it goes wrong on that roof, you do not come after me. You go down and you find Rey at the ramp and you get on that boat.” She lifted her head.
“And before you say anything, I am asking you. I am not routing you. I am standing here at ten to one in the morning with one arm asking you to agree to something, which is what you told me on the catwalk you wanted, and I am doing it properly, and Hal, it is much harder than the other way and I want that acknowledged.”
Hal looked at her for a second.
“It is acknowledged,” he said. “And no.”
“No?”
“That is how asking works, mi reina. Sometimes you get a no.” He took her good arm and got her up the last two flights. “Now come on, because you are going to want your hands free and I am going to want mine.”
The pilot was refusing.
That was the first thing Mina understood, coming out of the roof access door into eighty knots of wind at twenty-two minutes to one, and it reorganized the entire situation.
The helicopter sat on the pad with its rotors turning at flight idle and its lights on and both cockpit doors open, which no pilot does in weather, and the reason both doors were open was that the pilot was standing on the skid on the far side shouting across the cabin at Hansel Brand.
He was shouting in English because Hansel had no Tagalog.
“Sir, I am telling you no. I have told you no four times.”
“You have a contract.”
“I have a licence!” The pilot was maybe forty-five, in a company polo shirt soaked to black, holding on to the doorframe with both hands because the wind was trying to take him off the skid.
“Sir, my limit for rotor start is fifty knots. Fifty. It is sixty-eight on that mast right now and it was eighty-one in the gust two minutes ago, and I have got no visibility, no horizon, and a ceiling I cannot see, and the nearest alternate that is open is Clark and Clark is four hundred kilometers of that.”
“Then we go to Clark.”
“We do not get off the roof!”
Mina came across the pad with Hal behind her, into the rotor wash and the rain.
She went hunched, with the left forearm held in against her ribs, because Wolffe had looked at it under a torch two hours ago and had told her, in the voice physicians use when they have stopped negotiating, that she would keep the arm and would not keep the use of it without a surgeon inside a day.
It had gone past hurting somewhere in the stairwell.
It was now a thing she was carrying rather than a thing that was part of her, and she had made a decision about it at the bottom of the stairs and did not intend to revisit it before Saturday.
Neither man saw her until she was six meters away.
Hansel Brand had a flight case in each hand.
He looked at her for a moment across the pad, in the strobing red of the anti-collision light, with the storm going over the top of the building in a way that made the whole roof feel like the deck of something at sea.
“Ms. Hermosa,” he shouted. “I want to be clear that I am not doing anything to you.”
“Sir!” Mina turned to the pilot. “Kuya! What is your name?”
“Ma’am?”
“Your name po!”
“Edwin!”
“Kuya Edwin, get off the aircraft.”
The pilot looked between them for about a second and a half. Then he made the decision that every professional in that situation eventually makes, which is that the money is not enough, and he came down off the skid and walked away across the pad with his hands up and did not look back.
Which left Hansel Brand, on a roof, in a typhoon, beside a running helicopter, with two flight cases and no pilot.
“Do you know how to fly it?” Mina shouted.
“No!”
“Then what are you doing?”
And Hansel Brand, thirty-eight, COO of DeepKite Therapeutics, secret director of HelixCompute APAC, stood in eighty knots of wind holding two flight cases and shouted back the truest thing he had said all week.
“I do not know!”
He was not a monster. Mina had thought about this on and off for six hours in a ceiling void and she thought it again now, watching a man in a five-thousand-euro technical suit stand next to an aircraft he could not operate because he had run out of moves an hour ago and had kept walking anyway.
“Mr. Brand.” She came closer. “The models are on eleven public mirrors. Doctor Wolffe signed them and pushed them at ten past midnight and they are on servers in three countries, and there is nothing in those cases that anybody wants.”
“I know.”
“Then put them down.”
“I know that, Ms. Hermosa, I was standing in the room.” He did not put them down. “I am aware that they are worthless. I have been aware for eight minutes. I am holding them because I have been holding something for two years and I have not worked out what I am supposed to do with my hands.”
The rain went across the pad sideways.
“Then that,” Mina said, “is the first sentence you have said to me that I believe.”
It ended in about nine seconds and it was not a fight.
Hansel moved for the cabin. Not to fly it. Mina understood afterward, and said so in a deposition eleven months later, that she did not think he had any plan at all beyond getting inside something and shutting a door.
And Mina Hermosa, who had one working arm and a dead ear and had been inside that building for ten hours, did the only thing available to a person in her condition on a wet roof, which was to use what the roof gave her.
What the roof gave her was rigging.
The building was still in commissioning, and beside the access housing, bolted to its base and left there by whoever had put the last chiller unit on that roof, was a davit arm with a hand winch on it and about nine meters of steel cable spooled off and lying in a coil under a tarpaulin.
Mina had spent eleven years being flown across television studios on wire by men who did this for a living, and she had asked them questions the entire time, because she was that sort of person, and one of the things she had learned in a rigging loft in Quezon City at twenty-four was that you never throw a winch cable at anything.
You put the hook on, and you let the load do the work.
She came off the access housing with the hook in her good hand and four meters of cable paid out behind her, and she did not go for the aircraft. She went for the skid.
The forward skid horn is a piece of tube the thickness of a wrist, and it is the single most convenient thing on any helicopter to put a hook on, and it is at ankle height, and she was already low.
She dropped the hook over it and rolled clear and let the winch cable come tight.
It took about a second and a half. The helicopter came light on the skids as the rotor loaded up and the airframe tried to rise and the port skid did not, and the whole machine rolled four degrees to the left and the pilot’s own low-rotor horn started screaming, and Hansel Brand fell out of the open cabin door onto wet concrete.
The rotor came down to idle and stayed there, because Edwin, forty meters away with his hands still up, had watched all of it and had known within a quarter of a second exactly what he was looking at, and had gone straight back to the cockpit and shut it down like the professional he was.
The wind kept going. Everything else stopped.
Hansel lay on the pad in the rain for a moment. Then he sat up, and looked at the two flight cases, which had gone over the edge of the pad and were lying against the parapet with their contents in a puddle.
“Ms. Hermosa,” he said.
“Sir.”
“Would you tell me the time?”
Mina looked at her watch.
“It is thirteen minutes to one,” she said.
Hansel Brand sat on the roof of the Monolith and put his head back and let the rain come onto his face, and Mina, who had spent a week hating him with a purity she had not felt since she was nineteen, found that she could not entirely manage it any more, and did not like that at all.
They did the broadcast from the plant control room at four minutes past one, in the dark, on generator power, at high water.
Not a seized uplink. Mina had listened to five minutes of a plan involving undersea fiber landing stations on Thursday night and had said, out loud, ay, why would I do that, and had called Tess instead.
Tess picked up on the second ring at one in the morning, which she would have done at any hour of any day for six years.
“Mina.”
“Tess. I need the newsroom and I need the show’s channels and I need them in nine minutes, and I need you to not ask me a single question until afterward.”
There was a pause of about a second.
“Nine minutes is not enough for the newsroom,” Tess said. “The desk will want a producer and legal and it is one in the morning and legal is asleep. The show’s channels I can do from my kitchen in four.”
“Then the show’s channels.”
“How bad is it?”
“Tess, I said no questions.”
“I am asking as your floor manager and not as a person.” Keys, fast. “Because if I put you live on nine million followers at one in the morning during a typhoon, I need to know whether to have the medic standing by, and I need to know if you are going to say something we cannot take back.”
Mina, standing in a plant control room with her arm in ruins and a nine-year-old’s number in her head, said, “Have the medic.”
“Ay, naku.” More keys. “Four minutes.”
It went out at eight minutes past one on Saturday morning, on the official channels of Tanghali Na, Pilipinas!, unbranded, unannounced, with no graphics and no theme, and it was the highest-viewed live stream in the history of Philippine television within ninety minutes.
It ran for fifty-one minutes and Mina Hermosa spoke for fifteen of them.