Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski Read Free Book Online Page A

into two separate offices; their company dominated the floor in a U shape. The remaining sliver was occupied by a local magazine called
Philadelphia Living—
shopping, restaurants, parties, and all of that good stuff. Amy was a subscriber, even though she didn’t know anybody who could afford the getaways, clothes, and jewelry highlighted in the magazine every month. It was lifestyle porn: You’ll neverhave it as good as this. Masturbate to the pages, if it makes you feel better.
    She walked halfway down the hall that connected the conference room with David’s office, then turned left. A security door opened up directly onto a short corridor. Make a left again, and you’d be staring at the north fire escape door.
    Which Amy was doing now.
    Staring at it.
    Should she chance it?
    David had told them some wild things this morning. There was not much she could prove right now, except for one thing: that the orange juice and champagne contained some kind of poison, which had killed poor Stuart. Why would David lie about something like putting sarin in the fire towers?
    Because it was silly, that’s why. Poison’s one thing; rigging a chemical bomb is another. This building has security up the wa-zoo. Like somebody wouldn’t notice a bomb rigged to a fire escape door? Somebody leaves a brown-bag lunch on a step in the fire tower and hazmat-suited Homeland Security folks would probably be descending on the scene within twenty minutes.
    So if the very idea was ridiculous, why was she nervous about opening the door?
    Go ahead, Amy.
    Go ahead and do it.
    She put her hand on the cool steel, as if she could sense by touch.
Oh yeah, clearly there’s a sarin bomb behind this door.
    The problem was, Ethan recognized the sensation.
    His throat had closed up once before, halfway around the world.
    Before coming to work for David’s company, he’d been in the military. Special Forces. Most recently Afghanistan, November2001, as part of Operation We Think Bin Laden’s Here So We’re Going to Bomb You Back to the Stone Age, and he and his crew had been duking it out with some obscure Afghan warlord in the desert south of Kandahar. A warlord who just so happened to have a few canisters of ricin lying around. A skirmish went wrong; Ethan and his fellow gunmen found themselves tumbling into a medieval-era sandpit, and the warlord—some screw-head named Muhammad Gur—danced around the edge of the pit, throwing in his precious canisters of ricin, cackling.
    Ricin, Ethan later read, was manufactured from the waste of castor beans. In weaponized mist form, ricin asks your body to stop making certain important proteins.
    Okay, it’s not really
asking.
Ricin pretty much demands it. As a result, cells die. If not treated, the victim follows suit.
    All Ethan knew was that his throat was closing up.
    He’d been hit the worst out of anybody. He could have sworn that Muhammad Gur jerk had been aiming for him personally. Luckily, Ethan’s colleagues blasted their way out of the pit and dragged Ethan across the desert, looking for help. But when somebody looked down and saw Ethan frantically pointing at his throat, it quickly became clear that he might not make it to the medical supply tent.
    A tracheotomy is a quick but complex procedure. In an emergency situation, you find the Adam’s apple, slide down a bit until you feel the next bump—the cricoid cartilage—then find the little valley between the two. Congrats, you’ve found the cricothyroid membrane. That is where you cut: half inch horizontally, half inch deep. Pinch the sides so that the incision opens like a fish mouth, then insert the tube. Don’t have a tube? Use a straw. Or the plastic tube of a ballpoint pen (with the ink stem removed, of course).
    Out in the desert south of Kanadhar, Ethan’s savior had a Swiss Army pocketknife and a plastic straw. Saved his life.
    But here, inside the fire tower at 1919 Market Street … Ethan was pretty much screwed.
    Suffering from a