Chapter 27

Ala Moana Center, Honolulu, Hawai‘i

One minute and counting, Becky."

Rebecca Cruz sighed and shook her head as she spoke into her microphone to her brother David.

"You know better than anyone, because I've punched you out over this more than a few times, that I hate being called Becky," she said.

"Why do you think I do it?" he asked.

"I'd like to be even closer," Becky said.

"You always want to be as close to the action as possible," he said. "But any closer than this and it's not safe."

"Safe is no fun," Becky said.

"Shut up," David Cruz said.

It was pounding rain in Honolulu; water was running in a continuous stream off her baseball cap. She felt as if she were standing underneath a waterfall. And Rebecca Cruz didn't like this one little bit.

She was standing in the huge upper parking lot of Ala Moana, staring up at the building they were about to blow. Ordinarily she liked rain on these jobs. Kept the dust down and the crowds small. But at the moment, there was no crowd at all, so the rain that had been falling for the past fifteen minutes could just freaking stop now.

She felt completely alone, a slender young woman wearing an orange construction slicker. With her pretty face and dark ponytail, she would have looked like a high-school cheerleader if it weren't for her wire-frame glasses, which she wore more for effect than for the slight improvement in her distance vision. She thought they made her look older and more serious. More like the boss that she was.

The glasses were spattered with water now, and she didn't even bother trying to clean them. She just lowered her plastic safety goggles over the glasses.

Ala Moana was the biggest outdoor shopping mall in the United States and now—Stop me if you've heard this one before, Rebecca thought—it needed room to grow. That was why Cruz Demolition was about to take down the Kama Kai office tower next to the mall. The fifteen-story structure had been built in the 1990s, a quick-and-dirty job by a local contractor who'd bribed officials liberally, enabling him to use construction techniques that David said he wouldn't even call substandard because that would be insulting to substandard techniques.

They had hardwired this job, mostly because they'd had no choice with so many radio taxis around. But that meant using about six miles of electrical cables held together by a lot of screw connectors. And if just one cable lying in a rain puddle shorted out—

Her radio headset clicked. David again.

"Sis, we have a problem here." David was all business now.

"What is it?"

"It's the water weight."

"I know. We're still going."

Another voice said, "I think we need to hold, Rebecca."

The voice belonged to their cousin Leo, who ran the computers. It always worked the same way with those two: When David got nervous, so did Leo. If David sneezed, Rebecca half expected Leo to reach for his handkerchief.

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm worried about connections."

"We're not holding."

Leo said, "But if the computers—"

That was as far as he got before Rebecca snapped, "Will you shut up!" She took a breath. "Pretty soon there'll be more people around here, more traffic, more problems. More risk."

David said, "That's true, but—"

She cut him off. "And the rain's hitting the east side of the building more than the other sides," she continued. "We know that that concrete is porous crap."

"More like an old sponge than concrete," David said.

"Right. So the longer we hold, the more weight the rain adds to one side. Right now the computers can handle the change. Later, maybe they can't."

"Let the rain stop," David said. "Let the building dry."

"David."She hit his name hard. "It may do this for days."

Her brother wasn't thinking straight, but she couldn't tell him that. Once they had the building completely wired, they had to go. They ordinarily took buildings down on Sunday mornings, since that was when cities were least crowded. That was their routine, and they finished up their prep work the day before.

Just not this time.

This time they weren't able to wait until Sunday; they had to go on Friday. Every building had its surprises, but the Kama Kai was so shoddy, it seemed ready to fall down on its own. And that was a problem. A big-ass problem. It was much easier to take down a well-engineered and well-constructed building because you could predict what would happen. With a heap of Legos like the Kama Kai, there was always uncertainty.

Too much, in this case. And pushing things back added more.

"Give me the count," she said.

"We're at fifteen seconds, Rebecca." Leo again. He sounded unhappy, like Rebecca was punishing him by making them go ahead. But when they got this close to detonation, Rebecca knew, unhappiness was her cousin's natural state.

Go time,she told herself.

"Lock it and go off radio," she said. "Let's blow this puppy."

She started counting backward to herself. Seven… six… five… four…

Rebecca waited, staring through the rain coming sideways now at the building.

At four seconds, she heard the preliminary crack-crack-crack-crack of the small calibration charges, the ones that the computer used. Ordinarily, it took the computer three seconds to make its final calculations.

Out loud, she said, "Three… two… one."

She heard no detonation.

In fact, nothing happened.

The Kama Kai tower still stood in the slashing rain.

Rebecca began counting forward. "One… two… three…"

Still nothing.

Rebecca Cruz was thirty and she had been working in the family business—the formal name was Cruz Demolition and Trucking—ever since she'd graduated from Vassar. It was best to keep this kind of work in the family, her brothers had told her when she talked about various other careers. It demanded too much patience, too much attention to detail, too much trust for them to invite outsiders into the tent.

This job is like a marriage,her older brother, Peter, used to say, just a lot more stressful.

By now she had worked on some fifty buildings around the world and been the lead on at least half of them. Should have been the lead on all of them, she told herself, even when I was fresh out of college.

But in the past few years, she had seen the business change. Contracts were shorter. The pace was much faster. The days when they could take three weeks to study a building were over. Now clients expected a building to be taken down and carted away in a matter of days, not weeks, and this was true even when they were working hazardous sites.

But the faster pace suited Rebecca's personality. Her brothers were more cautious—too cautious, to her mind, and too timid sometimes for a dangerous business like theirs. Rebecca Cruz wanted to keep pushing forward and get the job done, wherever in the world the job was. She was able to push forward, and push back, in several languages; she spoke Japanese, German, some Italian, a little Korean, a little Mandarin.

But pushing so hard was one of the things about her that pissed her brothers off, and royally.

She didn't believe she was reckless; she just didn't hesitate. By now even her brothers knew enough to get out of her way.

David couldn't lead on a job. If she left things to him, nothing would get taken down. David worried things to death.

Rebecca wasn't a worrier. She was always too busy getting things done, basically.

But she was worrying now.

She had counted to twenty and still nothing had happened.

Of course the computer would take a certain amount of extra time to recalculate the blast timings because one side of the building was wet, and that changed the calibration impacts. But not twenty damn seconds. That could only mean one thing:

They had a short.

So Leo's fears were justified this time.

Damn it,she thought.

They would have to go back in. But she didn't want to be in that building again, with its scored I-beams, chopped floors, the possibility of live…

Forget about Legos. It was like a house of cards.

She heard a soft whump!

Sawdust burst outward from the lower floors' windows.

"All right!"she yelled, pumping her fist.

The walls of the upper stories gently folded inward. A perfect implosion; the building slid to the ground almost in slow motion. There was a final, much louder whump! as the roof crashed down.

And it was over.

Rebecca clicked her radio back on and waited for the congratulations from the others. Apparently, they hadn't turned their radios on yet.

No matter. They would celebrate with beers very soon; she didn't care how early it was.

As she turned to go find them, a dark brown van squealed to a stop in front of her, so close that it nearly clipped her.

Two men in dark raincoats jumped out. One of them said, "Rebecca Maria Cruz?" He held up some sort of badge.

"Yes."

"Come with us, please."

For one crazy moment she thought she was being arrested. Demolition without a license? But they didn't touch her; they just held open the door to the van.

"What is this?" she said.

"Please get out of the rain, ma'am," one of them said. "If you don't mind."

As she started to climb into the van, she saw that David and Leo were already inside. So were Don McNulty and Ben Russell. The whole team.

"Could somebody please tell me what's going on here?" Rebecca said.

Nobody answered.

She felt strong hands on her back, shoving her forward.

"Hey!"she yelled as she stumbled into a seat.

"Sorry, ma'am," one of the men said. "We have a schedule." The door slammed shut, and the van shot off into the rain, tires squealing.