The Watchmaker’s Hand

Looking up, “Can it be turned?” If the jib was rotated 90 degrees, it would face the street, which was cordoned off and a fall would cause little damage.

The battalion chief said, “The minute we got that call from Captain Rhyme, that this was the next one to go? I asked the foreman that. But it’s frozen in place. The turntable plates are already buckled.”

She looked over the building it was aimed at again. The hospital looked fragile. It had been constructed in the 1960s and was made of aluminum and glass and metal panels, blue in color and rusting around the edges. There’d be a steel superstructure, but little else to stop the massive knife of the jib.

Some patients, visitors and staff sprinted out. But many ambled, simply unable to move quickly. They limped, they wheeled in chairs. A few wheeled their IV units beside them, as if they were robotic companions from a science fiction movie.

“Evac progress?”

O’Reilly told her, “Well, we’ve got out a lot of the ambulatories, visitors and nonessential staff. Floors one through five. The problem is, above that, it’s aimed at rooms where there’re procedures going on. I mean, patients open, on tables in operations. Open heart. Brain surgery. Giving birth. You can’t just wheel them out. They’re closing up the patients they can and rigging lines and life support to the beds to move them. Some’re pretty, what’s the word? Fragile.”

“Can’t they just get them to lower floors? The thing’s not going to crash through the whole building.”

“No, we need everybody out entirely,” Williams said. “The thing is also aimed for the gas supply rooms. Hundreds of canisters and wall lines. Oxygen and flammable gases. Hospitals’re like grain elevators. A spark and that’s it.”

A groan sounded from the base of the tower as it tilted and the jib eased downward another few feet.

The battalion chief added, “I had some people rig tethers.” He pointed to cables attached to the mast about halfway up and connected to the girders on the addition that was being built. “I don’t know if they’ll do any good. Doesn’t look like it. They’re already bending the beams they’re attached to. Maybe bought some time.”

After a coughing fit, Sachs gazed up at the precarious structure. She asked, “Is the operator here?”

“The crane operator?” the IC asked. “No reason for him to be. The site’s shut down. Why?”

“Maybe he’d know some way to, I don’t know, shift the weight? Or to shore it up somehow we’re not thinking of?”

“Well, there’s nobody here.”

And a thought occurred.

She ripped her phone from her pocket and scrolled for a number. It was the mobile of the operator from the first collapse, Garry Helprin. She tapped it.

Buzzing, buzzing...

Thinking, Please answer.

Please...

But he didn’t.

Voice mail.

Hell.

She cleared her throat. “Garry, it’s Detective Sachs. There’s another crane coming down. It’s aimed at a hospital. We want any thoughts you have about slowing it. They’re rigging tether lines, but I don’t think they’ll last. Call me or Lincoln Rhyme.”

She gave both numbers, then turned to the incident commanders. “I’m going to help with the evac. I’ll call you if I hear back.”

Another glance at the crane. It had sagged another two degrees.

How much longer?

No point in speculating. She grabbed the oxygen tank from the Torino and a Motorola from the coms van, then ran toward the entrance.

Inside the dim, chaotic lobby, she saw the elevator doors open and the lights above them blinking. Of course, risk of fire. They’d been put in fire service mode. She looked at the stairway, people streaming down.

Stairs.

Steep stairs.

Eight flights.

Oh, man.

Three deep hits of sweet O, and she slung the green tank over her shoulder and started up.

Gasping for breath with every step.

39

The scenario upstairs was worse than she’d thought.

On the eighth floor, the top, thirty patients, visitors and staff remained, clustered at the east and west exits at the far end of the hallway. But then, wait — she had to supplement the count by doubling the number of patients; it was the ob-gyn and delivery ward.

These narrow fire exits were the only routes that could be used since the main exit — the elevators — was not available. The backlog was due to the number of patients who were not ambulatory. Mothers who had given birth minutes before, C-section patients, and several, she was told by a nurse, who were here not as ob-gyn, but had been moved to recovery rooms from downstairs, presumably because of space shortage. The latter two groups were confined to beds. Several were still unconscious.

Sachs joined the other rescue workers, wheeling to the exits chairs and beds of patients who couldn’t walk.

Out the window facing south, the tower was clearly visible, the tubes glowing in the morning sun. It was not very close, but that structure itself was only half of the risk. When the collapse came, the mast would cut through the side walls of the hospital, the jib the top.

As she looked, it eased forward another few feet.

Were the tether straps holding?

Not very well, apparently.