The Pyongyang Assignment (38th Parallel #5)
1. Blast Mitigation
BLAST MITIGATION
MARINA LAMBERT
Brussels, Belgium
The wind found her first — a breeze off the roundabout, a hundred meters of Brussels breathing up at her. Marina felt a lock of her hair brush her cheek for one moment, closing her eyes, before tucking the stray hair under her hardhat.
She leaned over the edge.
Brussels opened beneath her. It was not yet eight in the morning and Roundpoint Schuman’s traffic circle was full of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.
Across the roundabout, dozens of flags stood in front of the European Council, its dark windows glinting in the midday sun.
A dozen black cars idled out front, diplomatic plates on each.
There were enough bulletproof black sedans, police escorts and security details to tell her that the Council was hosting an emergency meeting with some European prime ministers today.
Marina’s eyes jumped from the Council building to the British Embassy on the left, and the European Commission’s massive Berlaymont Building to her right.
Snipers were stationed on the rooftops, but she didn’t see them, which was for the best. If it had been a full session of prime ministers, they would have shut down the traffic circle, and no one would have been out.
“We should have rescheduled this,” Charles said, watching her eyes.
“We’ve already rescheduled three times due to wind. We can’t let a government meeting stop us, or we’d never get anything done in this town.”
He snorted. “Still, you have to have to inspect their work by eleven, before they shut us down.”
“I’ll be done by eleven.”
Charles tugged each line in turn, whistling something tuneless through his teeth the way he always did before a job, like the roof itself needed warming up.
“Primary.”
She pointed. “Primary.”
“Lifeline.”
“Lifeline.”
“Parapet beam.”
“Parapet beam.”
Point and call. Japanese railway engineers had discovered last century that saying each step aloud and pointing dramatically reduced mistakes. Marina had taken on the habit years earlier and never stopped.
She stepped into the cage and closed the steel half-door, then snapped her industrial carabiner to the railing. Charles attached her back harness to the lifeline that dangled off the edge of the building straight down to the ground.
He grinned at her. “You’re ready.”
“I love this job,” she said. But she never meant it at that moment.
She flicked on the gears, and lowered herself over the edge of the Triangle Building.
The cage swayed with the first gust, a small sickening give before the cable caught its own weight.
For a half-second her stomach was somewhere up on the roof without her.
Snatches of conversation drifted up from below.
A loud noise—she steadied herself, it was an obnoxious bike horn—and then someone swearing floridly in Dutch.
“Move me over to the right,” she called up.
Charles unspooled and directed the cage just far enough to the edge of the building, where she latched a cable to the steel anchor. Now, if the wind picked up, the cage wouldn’t swerve out and bash into the building.
She knelt, but didn’t look down. That was the trick. Nevertheless, her feet were already tingling.
In the cage beside her, the contractors had left a sample of the product.
The transparent polyester film looked impossibly thin.
Properly installed, blast mitigation film kept shattered glass attached to the window during an explosion, turning what could have been thousands of flying shards into one cracked sheet.
Three floors down, she stopped. She pulled off her glove, which dangled obediently from the glove leash. She ran her thumb along the edge of the glass, then pressed the radio clipped to her lapel.
“Charles, the glass wasn’t cleaned properly.”
She heard static.
“Marina, they’re saying we have to get this done by ten-thirty now, they’re locking down Roundpoint Schuman early.”
She checked her watch and muttered under her breath. “Understood. But there’s no point rushing and the film not curing on the window properly.” He couldn’t see her speaking into her radio, so she rolled her eyes. There was no sense in applying blast mitigation film if it wasn’t going to work.
She saw movement behind the darkened glass, and realized she was in front of someone’s cube. The person had just turned around in their roller chair to look at Marina working.
She gave the woman a thumbs up and hoped she hadn’t seen her roll her eyes.
“The window’s clean. It looked fine to me from the inside,” Charles said finally.
“On the outside, you can see silicone residue at the joints.”
“I’ll send Didier.”
She shook her head. “Fine.” Actually, anyone but Didier would have been better.
Moments later, she saw Didier Vanhouten materialize behind the tinted glass. He wove his way through the maze of cubicles inside the European External Action Service building. He was holding a cleaning bucket in one hand, and carefully propped the window open with the other.
“I hate when you do this,” he said.
He probably did.
Didier was handsome, to be sure, but in the self-conscious way of someone who checked a mirror before leaving any room. He had never understood why anyone would take any chances in life.
That was why he was inside an office building, and she was dangling midair off of one.
She had not always seen things so clearly, though.
There was an incident last year. They'd been testing the panic room when the doors jammed shut for two hours. What followed was one spectacular lapse in workplace judgement—Didier wanted white picket fences but she was not ready to get tied down to anything that wasn't a building.
“Just hand me the bucket, Vanhouten. I’ve got work to do.”
He tightened his jaw at the use of his last name, and watched her in silence.
“Are you done?” he asked, when she stopped.
She arched an eyebrow. “Very. Here you go.”
She handed him the bucket back through the window.
He didn’t let go of her hand when he took it from her. “Marina, they’re saying to get inside.”
She scoffed. “Who’s saying that?”
But hovering off the outside of a building, she straightened suddenly.
Didier showed her his phone: it was a special message blasted out to everyone in the vicinity to clear Roundpoint Schuman.
“Can you come inside, through the window?” he asked gently.
“It won’t open that far,” she replied back, her voice hoarse.
He dialed his phone, frowning. “Okay, they’re saying just put your hands up on the building and keep them visible. Just for a few minutes.”
“Seriously? They know I’m dangling off a building, right?”
He just looked at her, his face telling her that they knew and they didn’t care.
She looked on each side of her: police had barricaded the entry into the traffic circle. All of the cyclists and pedestrians from minutes before were gone, and vehicle traffic had emptied out. Only the sedans with diplomatic plates were left idling in front of the European Council.
The wind rattled the steel cage again. She let it settle for a moment before checking her security lines, then putting her hands carefully, visibly on the windows. The glass had not yet warmed in the sun, the early morning chill seeped through her gloves to her fingertips.
She wondered for a moment if Didier would put his hands on the other side of the glass, but he just stepped back and watched her.
She looked up at the glass face of the EEAS. Across Roundpoint Schuman, the European Council’s grey columns glinting gold in the sunlight.
Movement caught her eye. A handful of the black cars pulled off from the curb in front, and wound around the roundabout.
She heard a flurry of security guards below her, and the cars pulled up to the side entrance.
She glanced down—three prime ministers stepped out of the cars, their assistants and security surrounding them, and walked into the VIP entrance of the building.
“You can take your hands down,” Didier said, hanging up on his call.
She did so, exhaling. “Whoever told me to put my hands on a building has seen too many episodes of Cops. That was ridiculous.”
“It was Tobias who made the call.”
“Whatever.”
They really needed to pay her more, or at least give her a full-time permanent contract.
“Is everything okay?”
It was Charles’ voice on the radio.
“Right as rain. I’m ready to go down to the next floor.”
He lowered her, Didier watching her through the window.
She was almost to the ground when she heard a voice below her.
“Marina.”
She looked down—she was only two stories off the ground now.
Her boss was shading his eyes with one hand, looking up at her, and smoking a cigarette with the other hand.
“Tobias.”
“We have a little situation here. You’re not busy, are you?”