“Don’t go in any farther,” I said. “When Benoit Skyped us, the block of C4 he held up had a timer. The one I disabled doesn’t. There’s got to be another bomb somewhere.”
“We don’t have time to look for it,” Kylie said. “Let’s just get Spence out of here.”
“You can’t,” Spence said.
“Yes, we can,” Kylie said. “We’ve got six minutes and twelve seconds, and we’re getting you out of this building if we have to carry you out stark naked, chair and all.”
Spence’s body started to tremble. “You can’t get me out,” he repeated.
“Why?”
His eyes stared straight down at his feet. “That’s why.”
I followed his gaze. I hadn’t seen it before. Probably because there was almost no blood—just small dark stains where Spence’s feet had been nailed to the floor.
Chapter 78
“OH MY GOD,” Kylie said, kneeling down at Spence’s feet.
“He had a nail gun,” Spence said.
“We have to pry you loose,” she said, putting a hand on his left foot.
Spence’s head and shoulders jerked back hard, and he let out a gut-wrenching scream. “Don’t—don’t touch. Please.”
“Spence, we have to get the nails out.”
“No time,” he said, breathing rapidly through the fog of fear and pain. “Just get yourself out.”
The reality of what was happening was incomprehensible, yet Spence seemed ready to accept it.
Kylie and I weren’t.
“Spence,” I said. “Where did Benoit go after he started the timer?”
“Kitch-en,” he said, forcing the word out in two syllables separated by a gasp for air.
Kylie and I both ran to the kitchen.
It felt like déjà vu. Only a few minutes ago I had been flinging the cabinet doors open in Dino’s apartment. Now Kylie and I were doing the same thing in hers.
“I’ll do the top. You get the ones on the bottom,” she said.
I dropped to a squat and started opening the lower cabinets.
“Clear, clear, clear, clear,” Kylie said every time she opened another door and found nothing.
And then I saw it. The top of my head was just at countertop level, and I caught a flicker of red. It was the same glowing red light I had seen when Benoit started the countdown timer. It was coming through the glass door of a sleek, stainless-steel Breville toaster oven.
“Kylie, I got it,” I said, standing up.
“We only have two minutes. Can you disarm it?”
“Maybe if I had two days. I might have exaggerated my bomb experience,” I said. “I can’t even take a chance on opening the oven door. It could be rigged to blow. We have to ditch it—the whole thing.”
“Well, we can’t throw it out the window,” Kylie said. “God knows how many people we’d kill.”
“Do you have a safe?” I said. “That would contain some of the explosion.”
She shook her head. “What about the basement?” she said. “It’s like a bunker down there.”
“Not enough time. Even if your elevator managed to get us down there, we’d never get out.”
“We don’t need the elevator,” she said. “Grab it and follow me.”
The toaster oven was freestanding, about the size of a small microwave, and unplugged. I picked it up and followed Kylie.
“Garbage chute,” she said, bolting out the front door.
The incinerator room was just past the elevator. We went in, and Kylie pulled the chute door open.
As soon as she did, we both realized her mistake. The door was hinged at the bottom, and the hopper was designed to drop down only about sixty degrees. Plastic garbage bags could be squished and squeezed to cram down the chute. Stainless-steel toaster ovens couldn’t.
“Pull hard on the door,” I said. “Rip it right out of the wall.”
Kylie sat on the floor, grabbed the handle, and put all her weight on it.
“It won’t budge,” she said. “The bomb is too damn big to shove through the door.”
I stared at the red glow. We had ninety seconds.
Chapter 79
“GET ME A sledgehammer,” I said.
“I don’t have a sledge—no, I have something. Give me a second,” she said, running back to her apartment.
“I can give you seventy-two seconds,” I yelled back after her. “And then we’re toast.”
I watched the timer count down to 1:00, 0:59, 0:58, and I wondered how much C4 Benoit could stuff into the guts of a toaster oven. From what I knew about his style, he wouldn’t skimp on the ingredients.