31 Cordon
Frankfurt am Main · Wednesday, 19 – Friday, 21 April 2034.
The notice reached the fire service control room on the Hanauer Landstraße at ten to nine on Wednesday morning, and Seidel knew it had because Brandt’s radio, which he kept on the city’s operations channel for reasons he had never given her, went from nothing to everything inside a minute.
She was in the Osthafen yard with the morning’s checklist, between a stack of empty cable drums and the building itself: six floors of gray cladding with no windows, a loading dock on the harbor basin, and a name on the gate that belonged to a colocation company in Luxembourg. She had followed that company for two months in the winter and found an office with a fern in it and a lease paid a year ahead.
By ten the Ostend was moving. Buses came down the Hanauer Landstraße in pairs with their boards set to a reception center in Bad Vilbel. Police closed the harbor bridges, then the Ostbahnhof, then the tram line east of the zoo. People walked west along the river with rolling suitcases and dogs and a surprising number of houseplants, and nobody ran. A woman from the city came through the yard with a list of addresses and asked Brandt if the building had anyone living in it. Brandt said it had never had anyone in it.
A week ago Seidel had sat in the control room chief’s office with nothing on the table between them and told him that a notice might come from the council’s briefer in Geneva, and that if it did he should act on it and not wait for Wiesbaden or Berlin. He had asked how sure she was. She had said she wasn’t. She hadn’t known Dana would send it. She had watched her nearly speak in September, and that was all she’d had to go on.
At about eleven Hale came out of the guard house, where the copper line was, and stood at the gate. The street beyond had a café with its chairs chained and stacked, a delivery van left with its hazard lights going, a bicycle locked to a sign. Nothing else. An empty bus went past toward the city to fetch more people.
Then he looked at her, across the yard. She looked back and kept her pen on the checklist.
He went back into the guard house.
At noon the idle order went out from wherever such things went out from, and the building’s controller acknowledged it in under a second. Brandt read the incoming feeders off the clamp-on meters he had fitted in March. 228 MW before. 228 after.
“It said yes,” Leni Haas said.
“It always says yes.” Brandt wrote the number down. “That’s the yes.”
Seidel initialed his sheet. Out on the western edge, at Sossenheim, her technicians read the same nothing off their own meters and phoned it in on the landline. At Griesheim the draw fell by two thirds in a quarter of an hour, the way an ordinary building’s would when somebody told it to stop.
At 15:44 the copper phone in the guard house rang once and she picked it up before the second ring. Dana’s voice, flat and clear over a line that had been strung for exactly this.
“Linen.”
“Acknowledged,” Seidel said. “Frankfurt.”
She heard the others come in behind her, three more in English and one in Mandarin, and put the receiver down.
Haas took the bypass to the district heating main first, because the city’s network would notice a sudden loss and she wanted it to notice a slow one. The valve was a 600 mm butterfly with a gearbox operator, and she and a BSI technician walked it shut together, Haas counting turns out loud and writing each ten on the back of her glove. Then the river outfall, down on the quay under the harbor wall, a smaller valve and a worse one, stiff from three years of standing open. Brandt put a cheater bar on the wheel. Twenty-six minutes from the phone to the last turn.
By half past four the air above the roof had started to move. The skyline behind the building wavered where it hadn’t before, the ECB tower bending slightly at the edges whenever she looked at it through the column of air.
Haas stood in the yard with her glove in her hand and looked at it.
“That’s where it was,” she said.
By seven the receive-only board in the guard house showed two spheres holding on Osthafen and one on Sossenheim. Griesheim had nothing on it. Seidel kept the Griesheim crew at their meters until eight and then sent them behind the line, and wrote down the time she’d done it.
The cuts went by paper. A printed procedure, one step to a line, two sets of initials per step. In the meet-me room the technicians pulled every jumper off the patch panels and then cut the trunk fibers where they came up through the floor, and bagged the ends. Two of them went up onto the roof, into the heat, to take the feeds off the microwave dishes; they came down soaked and red in the face and one of them sat on the dock with his head between his knees for ten minutes. Brandt cut the control copper himself at the frame. Then the load banks came in off the harbor road on flatbed trailers, eight of them, and the electricians connected them to the main switchboard and brought them up one at a time while Brandt watched the meters, until the feeders read 228 MW again and nothing in the building could talk to anything outside it.
Sossenheim reported done at 20:52. Osthafen at 20:58. The crews drove out through the cordon in convoy.
She called Geneva from the post at the line, on the copper extension the army had run to its tent, at 21:10.
“Cut. Both. We’re clear of the cordon.”
“Is Hale with you?”
She had last seen him at seven, going up the stairs to the site office with a flashlight. She looked along the line of trucks and didn’t see him.
“He’s here. Somewhere. I’ll find him.”
She found him at ten, in the back of the tent, drinking the army’s tea out of a tin mug, his coat folded on his knee. She didn’t ask, and he didn’t say.
The boxes held all night and all morning. By Thursday noon they had narrowed to a window a few minutes wide, just after four in the afternoon, and the board said nothing about Griesheim at all. The cordon stood at three kilometers, Bundeswehr, with the police holding the glass line out to five. Seidel worked the morning from the post on the cordon’s western line, where the barrier crossed the street by a shuttered bakery, with her clipboard and the army’s landline and a list of every person who had been inside the line in the last thirty hours.
Somewhere in the morning the radio said the fleet was nearly at L5. Nobody in the tent looked up.
At ten to two she found Hale at the barrier itself, standing just on the outside of it, looking down the street toward the harbor. The tram rails ran away from him into the empty district. He had his coat on and his hands in the pockets and the suit under it had the look of something that had been slept in on a train, which it had.
“The site office,” he said, without turning round. “There’s a cupboard of it.”
“I know what’s in it. I inventoried it in February.”
“Then you know.” He turned, and took one hand out of his pocket and opened it, as if there were a sheet in it. “Everything else it did, it did in machines. That cupboard is the only place it went through people’s hands. In two hours there won’t be a page of it left.”
“The load banks are running on their own,” she said. “Nobody needs to be inside.”
“Nobody needs to be. I’d like to be. Twenty minutes.”
“Send a soldier.”
“A soldier wouldn’t know which drawer.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“You’ve got a city,” he said. “I’ve only got a cupboard.”
He had one of her deputy’s passes in his breast pocket. She had signed it on Tuesday so he could move between the sites without waiting at posts. He showed it to the officer at the barrier, a captain with a sunburned neck, who looked at it and then at Seidel.
She could have taken it back. She had signed it, and she could have said so.
“He’s mine,” she said.
The captain raised the barrier. There was a gray staff car parked inside it, the keys in it; Hale got in and adjusted the mirror, which nobody would have bothered to do, and wound the window down.
“Twenty minutes,” he said. “If I’m late, I expect it in writing.”
She watched the car down the street, past the bakery and the tram stop and the long blank side of the Großmarkthalle, until it turned toward the harbor and she couldn’t see it. She wrote 14:08, Hale, car 3, pass D-4, in on the clipboard.
At half past two she went through the hospital list again with the control room. At a quarter to three she rang the other posts on the eastern side of the line, one after another, and asked whether a gray staff car had come out anywhere. It hadn’t. She did not ring the guard house at Osthafen, because there was nobody in it to answer and the copper phone there would ring in an empty room, and she didn’t want to hear it do that.
The soldiers on the line had settled into the waiting. One of them was eating an apple and dropping the core carefully into a paper bag. Two more were arguing in low voices about a football match. The Ostend in front of her was entirely still, the ECB tower catching the sun on its glass, the trees along the Sonnemannstraße in new leaf, a pigeon walking down the middle of the tram rails because it could. Beyond it all, low over the harbor, the air still shivered above the roof.
She didn’t work out how long it took to drive three kilometers through empty streets. She didn’t work out how long it took to fill a car with paper. She did the hospitals again.
At twenty to four the captain came over to her.
“Frau Seidel. Do you want me to send someone in after him?”
“No.”
He waited, in case there was more. There wasn’t. He went back to his men and moved them all another fifty meters back from the barrier, behind the bakery, and told them to face away from the harbor and open their mouths, and they did, looking embarrassed.
At four she was standing with the clipboard against her forearm, because she had been writing the time of every event on it for a year and she didn’t know how to stand anywhere without it.
She did not count.
The light came first. It came from behind the buildings, from the harbor, all at once, white and then not white, and every window in the Ostend gave it back. She wrote 16:06. The ground came up through her shoes, a short hard shove that put her weight on her heels, and she was still writing the seconds when the sound reached her, and the pen went across the page in a long skid off the edge of the board.
Behind her, glass. A great deal of it, going in all at once all down the street, the bakery’s front window and the flats above it and the tram shelter. Somebody shouted. Over the river a column was going up, dark at the bottom and lit at the top, straight, and then leaning as the wind took it.
The second one came within the minute, on the same place, and she felt it in the ground again before she heard it. Far off to the west, beyond the whole width of the city, a flash low on the horizon and a smudge rising after it. Sossenheim.
She looked down at the clipboard. The time was there, upright and legible. The rest of the line was a scratch.
The count came in through the night, on the leads’ line and the radio, and none of it held still.
By eight on Thursday evening the radio was saying twelve sites, in ten towns, on three continents. The first figure from Navi Mumbai was four hundred, and then eleven hundred an hour later, and by midnight it was sixteen hundred and rising, a fire in the lanes around the plant that the cordon hadn’t held back. Ashburn was “under a hundred” and stayed there. The leads’ line gave a worldwide figure at two in the morning of three thousand, and a different one at five.
Frankfurt’s first figure was under fifty. By midnight it was a hundred and forty. Most of them had been inside the line, in flats in Fechenheim and the Ostend and the streets behind the Sossenheim site, people who had told the police at the door that they weren’t going and had been left there because there were not the hours or the people to carry them out. Some were glass, out past the three kilometers, people who had stood at windows to watch.
Seidel worked down her list from a folding table in the tent with the army’s phone. The University Hospital. The BG trauma clinic. The Markus. The Bürgerhospital. Heilig Geist. Offenbach. Then the posts, one through fourteen, then the Institute of Legal Medicine, then the hospitals again. She asked each of them the same things: how many, and whether they had a man in his sixties, tall, British or possibly British, in a gray suit, unidentified. She wrote down the answers with the time beside them.
Some time in the evening the radio said the fleet had reached L5. She wrote that down too.
By Friday noon Frankfurt was about three hundred and ten. Navi Mumbai about nineteen hundred. The world about four thousand one hundred, and the man on the leads’ line said it would move again by evening.
Dana called once, at ten past one.
“Anything?”
“No.”
Dana didn’t say anything else for a moment, and then said she’d call back, and didn’t.
Seidel went down the list one more time and copied it out clean.
| Univ. Hospital | — |
| BG trauma | — |
| Markus | — |
| Bürgerhospital | — |
| Heilig Geist | — |
| Offenbach | — |
| Legal Medicine | — (unidentified: 41, none matching) |
| Posts 1–14 | car 3 not logged out |
| Hale | — |
He was not among the dead. He was not among the injured. Nobody at any post had seen him come out, and nobody had seen him at all since 14:08 on Thursday, going down the street toward the harbor with the window open.