Phoenix Rising

Seven: Wild Card

- x -

Minnesota's over a thousand miles from the ocean, but the Scoutmaster who taught me to tie knots musta been the world's most frustrated sailor. If he could make us learn to tie a knot left-handed, one-handed, upside-down and backwards, behind our backs in the dark with our eyes shut, he did. He said it would come in handy for sailing at night or in storms, or caving, or any other emergency situation.

I don't think he ever imagined anything quite like this.

MacGyver squirmed farther into the corner where he had fallen until he could brace his knees against the wall and push. With his shoulders aching and his legs doubled up behind him, it was hard to have to push himself into an even more cramped position – but the effort paid off when he won enough slack to be able to grab the rope joining his wrists and ankles. His fingers found the knot in that rope, and the dizzying temptation to untie it and release the immediate strain was almost irresistible – but that wouldn't get him free, and he couldn't hold his breath for much longer.

With his fingers already half numb from the bite of the ropes, he had to work fast before he lost any more sensation – or the gas began to take its insidious toll on him – or Arvil resolved whatever problem had triggered the alarms, and came back. MacGyver pulled against the rope, reeling his own ankles in closer to his bound hands, running his fingers along the rough cord until he could reach the knots and free his feet.

If you can tie knots that way, you can untie 'em too. Although it's still tough to untie knots behind your back at a bad angle when your fingers are going numb.

First one foot and then the other came loose, and he kicked himself free of the cords and scrambled to his feet, his hands still tied behind his back. He leaned back against the wall, his eyes half closed, breathing in deep ragged gasps of the air that he knew was still pure and untainted. For now. The aerosolized mist was heavier than air, but the level had to be rising.

One more round.

Mac hiked his jacket up above his waist, took several more deep breaths, then dropped to the floor again, tucking himself into the corner so he could brace his hands against one wall and his feet against the other, pushing his own hips backwards through the loop of his bound arms. It would have been difficult even without holding his breath; but after a few terrifying moments when it seemed he couldn't make it, his fingers caught hold of a bracket in the wall and found some purchase, and suddenly his bound hands were clear of his hips, looped awkwardly behind his knees, and he was able to pull each leg clear in turn.

The struggle not to breathe had become almost unbearable by the time he stood up again, his hands in front of him. He leaned against the wall again, gasping, for another long precious moment before he set to work on the knots with his teeth. The tight ropes finally slackened and fell away, and his hands were suddenly full of pins and needles as the blood rushed back into them.

MacGyver couldn't see the gas, but he swore he could feel it, a foul clammy mist pooling around his ankles and lapping up his legs. The test chamber hadn't been made to hold prisoners captive, but it had been designed to keep gasses from escaping; the hatch dog on the outside of the sealed door wasn't likely to break easily.

That left the window . . . Mac hurried over to the observation port. He might be able to bust out that way. As he ran exploratory fingers around the seal at its edges, he saw the door to the main corridor flung open and Samarin, looking hangdog and miserable, hurried into the lab. The lab director stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of MacGyver, but when Mac pounded on the inside of the window, pantomimed yelling for help and gestured frantically at the test chamber door, he glanced nervously over his shoulder and ran to open the hatch. The sound of the alarms suddenly blared out as the door was thrown open.

Samarin was literally wringing his hands. "Are you all right? I couldn't – Arvil never mentioned anything about killing – "

Mac gave the man's shoulders a warm squeeze. "Way to go, Paul! But we've gotta get that gas turned off – where's the controls?" He followed the man's unsteady gesture and shut the pumps down. "How long will it take before Junior figures out that you set the alarms as a decoy?"

"What?" Samarin looked even more frightened. "I – I didn't set the alarms off."

"What?"

"They just – went off – a few minutes ago. I have no idea why."

"Oh, man." Mac ran his fingers through his hair. "Then who did?"

The jangling of the fire alarm was suddenly cut off inside the lab, although MacGyver and Samarin could hear it continuing, muffled, outside in the corridor and throughout the building. In its place, the lab intercom crackled and spat, and a voice came on – also muffled and disguised, although vaguely familiar.

"Phoenix, is that you? Are you all right?"

'Phoenix'? "Who's that?" Mac answered.

"It doesn't matter who I am. But you have to get out. Now. Please." The voice quavered on the edge of hysteria. "You don't have to die. I don't want you to die."

"Who are you?"

"Please. Get out. There isn't much time."

Oh, jeez. "What have you done?"

"This place is evil – it has to die, but you don't. The fire will purify it, Phoenix. Get out, please!"

"Fire?" Mac felt the blood drain out of his body as he thought of the number of volatile and reactive compounds the building held – not to mention oxidisers, accelerants and explosives. Oh, man, no. He fought to speak calmly; it might help him stay calmer himself. "Listen, it won't work – this building has a fire suppression system."

"Do you think I'm stupid?" The voice sounded almost childishly sulky and enraged. "I turned it off. Why are men so stupid? Get out now or you'll die too!"

"Wait, hang on a moment – why are you doing this?" Mac's memory stumbled, reaching for the identity of the speaker; he almost had it, if only the muffled voice would talk a little longer. But the buzz of static had cut off. The anonymous speaker had fled.

High time we did too.

But if we just run . . . even if we can get out in time . . . the whole place goes up. And what then? Mac thought of Arvil's file room up on the ground floor – a roomful of evidence of incalculable value, located on US soil – in the hands of the DXS, it could be priceless. In the hands of the Phoenix Foundation – hey, for once the whole mess might not get swept under a government-issue rug.

"Paul, is there anyone else here tonight? Anyone working late?"

Samarin stared. "I don't know – but there usually is . . . "

"Oh, great. C'mon. We've got to find out where she set that fire."

" 'She'? You know who that was?"

"No!" I've gotta figure it out, though – later . . . "C'mon!"

Mac looked out into the hallway. The gas testing lab was most of the way down the main corridor, close to the emergency stairs; he ran back towards the elevator shaft, guessing that the arsonist hadn't gone any farther than necessary before starting the fire. No shortage of flammables. No shortage of fuel . . . oh, man.

Smoke was beginning to billow out into the corridor from an open door next to the elevator bank. Mac took one quick look inside, slammed the door, and stepped back. Samarin almost skidded into him.

MacGyver ran a hand through his hair, trying to recall details of the labs from his tour the previous week. "Paul, which lab is that?"

"Gas chromatography."

"Right." Mac's mind buzzed, running through a mental index of what the lab must contain, trying to recall its exact layout. His imagination seemed to split and began to run in parallel. Down one list, his mind was sifting through the possibilities of the equipment and supplies in the room; but racing along the same list, side by side, was a horrific catalogue of just what could happen with each of those items in a fire.

Organic solvents. Alcohols and acetone – methylene chloride – toluene – oxidisers – how the heck could anyone be crazy enough to deliberately set a fire in a chemical laboratory?

Fires start and grow on a triangle: heat, fuel, and oxygen. In a forest fire, they sometimes use a small backfire to clear out fuel before the main burn can reach it.

Of course, most forests don't have explosive trees.

Samarin was looking around in confusion. "I don't understand – the alarms are going off, but why hasn't the halon system engaged?"

"Didn't you hear her? She said she turned it off. She musta messed up the main fire control panel, and then came down here and started the fire. And then turned on the building alarms and warned us."

"Why would she do that?"

"You think she sounded like she's playin' with a full deck? I don't!" Gotta get up to the main fire control panel – how much damage did she do? "I think we got a communications problem."

"What?"

"I think the different parts of your system aren't listening to each other. She probably yanked the connections between the detection system and the suppression system. It can't turn on if it doesn't know there's a problem." Arvil musta made it to fire control, but he doesn't seem to have fixed anything.

"Then what are we doing here? We've got to get the fire suppression system working!" Samarin glanced down the hall towards the emergency stairs. "There's a manual override in the mechanical engineering room."

"Where's that?" It hadn't been on the tour.

"Ground floor."

"Not enough time." Seared into Mac's brain was the image of that brief glimpse into the lab where the fire was burning. It had been started at one end of the room, and was blazing in a pile of cardboard boxes that probably contained mostly paper: manila folders, instrument analysis reports, rolls of paper for the strip chart recorders. It was already well past the size where any sane person would try to tackle it with an ordinary fire extinguisher, the fingers of flame reaching out with the insatiable, mindless greed of all fires, eager to consume the world. By the time we get to fire control, it'll have gotten out of the paper and into the juicy stuff . . .

He visualised the twin gas chromatographs, each with its set of gas cylinders: nitrogen, hydrogen, air.

Hydrogen.

Oh, no.

Or . . . wait.

MacGyver grabbed Samarin by the shoulders. "Paul, where's the mass spectrometry lab?"

Samarin stared. "Right here." He pointed at the next door down the hallway.

"Good." MacGyver yanked the door open, slapped the light switch as he dashed into the room, threw open the doors of the chemical storage cabinets and started to rummage through the contents. After a moment, he emerged holding a one-liter amber glass bottle. "That'll do." He pulled off his leather jacket, skinned out of his long-sleeved shirt, and hurriedly shrugged the jacket back on over the black tank-top he wore underneath.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Fightin' fire with fire."

One nightmare you don't find in the woods is fuel that releases more oxygen as it burns – oxidisers – where one leg of the triangle feeds another. You get enough oxidisers into the mix and nothing will stop or slow the burn till the fuel's completely consumed, along with everything else around.

I figured about every third chemical in that wing of the labs was an oxidiser.

Mac reached into his pocket and suppressed the urge to swear when he remembered he didn't even have his backup knife any more. Instead, he grabbed the nearest beaker and rapped it sharply against the lab bench. It fractured into jagged shards, and he used the handiest to slice into the edge of the fabric of his shirt so he could tear off a strip of the cotton cloth. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle he held, dropped the long end of the strip of fabric into it, and tilted the bottle so that the volatile liquid would saturate the cloth fuse. The chemical smell of the solvent, sweet and sharp at the same time, filled the room.

"Listen, Paul. If that fire gets a firm hold, it could spread through this entire level while we're still tryin' to get the firefighting system back on line. You know what the fire department will do – they'll pull back and wait till all the chemicals have finished blowing up, and then they'll move in and clean up the ashes. You won't have anything left but a big contaminated hole in the ground."

Samarin was staring at MacGyver's handiwork. "That's xylene! What the hell are you doing? You're going to throw a Molotov cocktail into a fire?"

"I'm tryin' to buy us time." Kinda expensive, though.

"Are you completely insane?"

Mac grinned momentarily. "You know, I get asked that a lot." He gripped Samarin's shoulders. "Paul, get outta here! Run for the stairs and try to get to the manual override. Trigger the halon system if you can, and get the heck out of the building. You understand?"

"What about you?"

"Don't worry! I'll be right behind you!" I hope.

When my grandpa told me to 'fight fire with fire', he wasn't speaking literally. But sometimes you do just that.

The great square bulk of the two gas chromatographs occupied most of the space in the centre of that lab; MacGyver could see them clearly in his mind's eye as he stopped outside the door of the gas chromatography lab, set his bottle on the floor, and worked the manual override for the elevator doors. His knotted rope was still dangling in the shaft, and he pulled the end into the corridor and weighted it down with a wrench from the spectrometry lab. He glanced down the hallway; Samarin had made it to the stairwell and was clear of the immediate fire zone.

He took a deep breath as he picked up the bottle of xylene, and regretted it: even outside the closed door, the smoke was growing thick and beginning to take on the particular stench of the wrong kind of fire. He coughed, wiped at his streaming eyes with the remains of his overshirt, pulled out his box of matches and lit the fuse that dangled from the bottle. One moment to brace himself while it caught soundly, and picture his target clearly before he slammed open the lab door.

The smoke came billowing out, but he was prepared for that. All he could focus on was the closer of the two gas chromatographs, with its rack of gas cylinders. He had one chance, and he put every ounce of arm and shoulder power into one hard throw at the hydrogen cylinder.

He couldn't spare the time even to see if the aim was true, if the bottle of flaming solvent had hit the regulator valve hard enough to crack it or break the copper tubing that linked the tank to the equipment; he'd know soon enough. It wouldn't take much to start the leak he wanted. He dived for his climbing rope, swung into the shaft and started climbing faster than he had ever done in his life.

When the shock wave from the exploding hydrogen rocked through the building, Mac simply balled himself up on his rope like a traumatised spider and hung on until the world stopped shuddering. There was a double ripple in that hammer force – the hydrogen cylinder on the second gas chromatograph must have gone up in a chain reaction, probably rocketing itself off into a wall, or through it – but the twin blows passed, and he found himself still swinging in the elevator shaft, his eyes squeezed tight shut and his ears ringing, gripping the knotted rope so hard he thought his arms would crack. His side felt bruised – he dimly remembered slamming against one side of the shaft when the first shock wave hit him.

The world hadn't quite come to an end – the lab had been built with heavily reinforced walls and ceilings as a standard precaution. Not that there's anything standard about any of this . . . ! But he'd taken out the most immediate threat in the path of the fire, and the explosion would have sucked the oxygen out of the immediate area and should at least have dampened the blaze.

There was going to be an aftermath after all.

Pete is not gonna believe this when I tell him – using an elevator shaft to escape a fire? Way too much like trying to climb out of the fireplace by the chimney . . . maybe I'll leave that part out. He worries too much as it is.

It was too much to hope that the blast would have snuffed the fire – it was more likely to have spread it, by scattering burning material over a wider area. But with luck, we oughta have a window of just a few minutes when we'll have a whole lot of little fires instead of one big monster that can't be stopped.

- x -

There was plenty of smoke in the elevator shaft, and MacGyver was coughing and gasping by the time he made it up to ground level. Partway up, he'd felt a change in the air and smelled a new set of fumes; he was pretty sure Samarin had made it to the manual override and turned on the halon system. When he emerged from the elevator shaft into the corridor, he looked down the side hall that held the main fire control panel and saw Samarin standing in front of it, wringing his hands.

"Paul, what the heck are you doin' here? I told you to get out!"

Samarin jumped and stared at him. "You're alive! I didn't think – " He waved at the panel. "I think I got the halon turned on, but I can't tell – "

"You did. We might get this licked yet."

"But take a look . . . "

MacGyver surveyed the inside of the fire control panel: it looked as if the arsonist had simply grabbed at the wires by the handful and yanked. "Wow, what a mess. But it could be worse."

"Worse?"

"Well, we don't need all the systems back online right now. The building's divvied up into fire zones, isn't it? And we already know where the fire is. We just need to find the right set of eyes for the main lab and plug 'em back in." As he spoke, he was tracing wires, checking and testing connections. "Got a pair of pliers handy?"

Now that the immediate danger was lessened, his mind was beginning to wrestle with the problem of the Baranyevs. Who was on what side? Was Baranyev afraid of the KGB because he worked for them, or working for them because he was afraid?

And another fear was beginning to chew at Mac's gut – if the elder Baranyev had known MacGyver by name and reputation, Mac might have been identified when he'd accompanied Baba to Baranyev's house. He had to warn Baba – and he angrily suppressed the immediate thought that she would know if she was in danger, without needing any warning. That's crazy.

If I'm still around when the fire trucks show up, it'll be hours before I can get away – reports to make, forms to fill out – and what happens when they ask what I'm doing here? If Arvil was still anywhere around – and if he'd gone to summon the fire department, he'd return with them – Mac could end up facing much worse delays than a stack of reports. Real bad publicity for Phoenix if their shiny new freelance investigator gets thrown in jail on suspicion of arson.

A Christmas-tree display of lights was beginning to flower in the panel as he found more of the right connections to restore; not only was the system responding to its own sensors, it was bringing information back. Good enough for now. "Paul, it's way past time for you to go. The fire trucks oughta be here any minute."

Samarin started towards the front door, then looked back over his shoulder as MacGyver headed down the side corridor. "Where are you going?"

"I gotta go out the back way. You remember what your boss told you? I was never here."

"But – "

"Please." Mac met his irresolute gaze firmly. "Trust me, it's gonna be a lot better this way. You'll hear from me again – but right now, I've got another fire to put out."

- x -