Virus: The classic unputdownable techno thriller by William Harrington

Author:William Harrington [Harrington, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2018-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Nancy began every day with three or four cups of strong black coffee. She ate no breakfast, but she affirmed that she could not begin the day without her coffee. Her caffeine fix, she called it.

Scott had heard her say to a waitress one morning, “If she’s having decaf, bring me the caffeine you leave out of hers.”

Their morning habits did not clash. He began the day with a large glass of orange juice, with the Washington Post in front of him on the kitchen table. The coffee brewed while he drank his juice and scanned the paper. He drank coffee while he shaved, and by this time she was at the table with the paper.

Routine. Habit. On this Monday morning in May it saved their lives.

Scott hurried into the kitchen from the bathroom, carrying his cup. “Here come the guys,” he said, and he picked up from the counter the little transmitter for the garage-door opener and pressed the button.

Three seconds later a fiery explosion blew out the walls of the garage, flung off the roof, threw his Porsche across the garage and half over his neighbor’s Buick, and shot glass and window framing into six condominiums. A turbulent, smoky fire erupted as the gasoline from two burst tanks ignited and burned.

*

No one was killed. A child from one of the condominiums was taken to the hospital for treatment of cuts, but the paramedics said they would have cleaned and bandaged her cuts at home if she had been an adult. Scott was cut on his left arm. His blood ruined his suit, but the cuts were not deep and would not be the source of any permanent damage. A torrent of glass shards had swept across the table where Nancy sat, but none of them had touched her.

Nancy had begun to make telephone calls even before the medics attended to Scott’s cuts. A pair of FBI agents were in the kitchen by the time the local police and Maryland state police began to ask questions.

“The garage-door opener?” a fire marshal asked. “You feel certain about that?”

Scott nodded. “When you sift the mess out there, I’m sure that’s what you’ll find. The detonator was triggered by the door going up.”

“Not by the radio signal from the opener transmitter?” asked a Bethesda detective.

“No, because ordinarily I would have raised the door by pressing the button on the garage wall.”

“Why’d you open the door from here in the kitchen this morning?” asked the detective.

Scott stood at the window, looking at the collapsed garage, which had fallen on the burned wreckage of his Porsche and his neighbor’s Buick. The two hulks were smothered in white foam. Rubble was scattered across driveways and lawns; bricks had been tossed onto the roofs of nearby homes; and bricks had shattered the windshields and dented the bodies of cars. A packer truck from the city’s refuse department sat at the end of the driveway, blocked in by a score of fire trucks, police cars, squadwagons, and vans from the local television and radio stations.

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