few seconds later, sounds began to drift back in. Car horns and car alarms were going off everywhere. Storefront security systems were screaming. Sirens—lots and lots of sirens—were closing in.
A hand slipped beneath my arm and someone helped me stand up. Susan. She was lightly coated with dust. It filled the air so thickly that we couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet. I tried to walk and staggered.
Martin got underneath my other arm, and we started shambling away through the dust. After a little while, things stopped spinning so wildly. I realized that Martin and Susan were talking.
“—sure there’s not something left?” Susan was saying.
“I’ll have to examine it sector by sector,” Martin said tonelessly. “We might get a few crumbs. What the hell was he thinking, throwing that kind of power around when he knew we were after electronic data?”
“He was probably thinking that the information would be useless to the two of us if we were dead,” Susan said back, rather pointedly. “They had us. And you know it.”
Martin said nothing for a while. Then he said, “That. Or he didn’t want us to get the information. He was quite angry.”
“He isn’t that way,” she said. “It isn’t him.”
“It wasn’t him,” Martin corrected her. “Are you the same person you were eight years ago?”
She didn’t say anything for a while.
I remembered how to walk, and started doing it on my own. I shook my head to clear it a little and looked back over my shoulder.
There were buildings on fire. More and more sirens were on the way. The spot in the skyline where my office building usually sat from this angle was empty except for a spreading cloud of dust. Fires and emergency lights painted the dust orange and red and blue.
My files. My old coffee machine. My spare revolver. My favorite mug. My ratty, comfortable old desk and chair. My frosted-glass window with its painted lettering reading, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.
They were all gone.
“Dammit,” I said.
Susan looked up at me. “What was that?”
I answered in a weary mumble. “I mailed in the rent on my office this morning.”
5
We got a cab. We got out of the area before the cops had cordoned off a perimeter. It wasn’t all that hard. Chicago has a first-rate police department, but nobody can establish that big a cordon around a large area with a lot of people in the dead of night quickly or easily. They’d have to call and get people out of bed and onto the job, and pure confusion would slow everything down.
By morning, I knew, word of the explosion would be all over the news. There would be reporters and theories and eyewitness interviews with people who had sort of heard something happen and seen a cloud of dust. This hadn’t been a fire, like we’d seen a few times before. This had been an explosion, a deliberate act of destruction. They would be able to find out that much in the aftermath.
There would be search and rescue on the scene.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window. Odds were good that there was no one else in the building. All the tenants were businesses. None of them was prone to operating late at night. But all of them had keys to get in when they needed to, just like I did. There could have been janitors or maintenance people there—employees of the Red Court, sure, but they didn’t know that. You don’t explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.
There could very well be dead people in that building who wouldn’t have been there except for the fact that my office was on the fourth floor.
Jesus.
I felt Susan’s eyes on me. None of us had spoken in front of the cabbie. Nobody spoke now, until Martin said, “Here. Pull over here.”
I looked up. The cab was pulling up to a cheap motel.
“We should stay together,” Susan said.
“We can go over the disk here,” Martin said. “We can’t do that at his place. I need your help. He doesn’t.”
“Go on,” I said. “People”—by which I meant the police—“are going to be at my place soon anyway. Easier if they only have one person to talk to.”
Susan exhaled firmly through her nose. Then nodded. The two of them got out of the cab. Martin doled out some cash to the driver