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Synopsis
FBI handler Meg Jennings and her search-and-rescue K-9 partner, Hawk, race to find survivors after a building collapses, and find that the stakes are higher than ever before.
There are situations that fill even the most seasoned FBI K-9 handlers with shock and horror. Meg Jennings is preparing for another work day when she gets words of a catastrophic scene in downtown Washington, D.C. Part of a twelve-story condo building has collapsed, and the rest of the structure could soon follow. Every search-and-rescue worker and K-9 team is needed on-site immediately to find survivors—and assess the casualties.
Putting aside her fears for her firefighter fiancé, who's already inside the unstable building, Meg turns to the task at hand. If anyone is still alive within the rubble, she and Hawk, working alongside other K-9 teams, must find them. Every hour, every moment counts—and a wrong move could trigger a deadly chain reaction for those buried beneath. But beyond the present danger is a deeper threat, as evidence indicates that this wasn't a random tragedy, but an act of domestic terrorism. And identifying the culprit and motivation, in time to stop another attack, means taking on an enemy with terrifying skills—and nothing left to lose.
Release date: November 28, 2023
Publisher: Kensington Books
Print pages: 352
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That Others May Live
Sara Driscoll
Schematic Design: The first phase of the structural design process, involving conceptual drawings of both the interior and exterior of the proposed building.
Meg Jennings finished the last of her coffee and set her mug down next to her empty plate. A glance at her fitness tracker told her she had only a few more minutes to linger, and then the team needed to get moving.
The other half of the team rolled over in his bed near the fireplace, stretched, and then relaxed back into the fuzzy cushion with a gusty sigh, his favorite red dragon tucked close, one yellow wing poking out from under his foreleg.
“Hawk, nearly time for work.”
The black Lab opened one eye in response to her words and then closed it again.
Meg chuckled. She had no concerns that the moment she picked up her go bag—the search-and-rescue backpack she carried everywhere in case she and Hawk were deployed to an incident—and gave a real command, he wouldn’t be raring to get to work. This was part of their job in the FBI’s Forensic Canine Unit—to be ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to wherever they were most needed. Minutes could mean lives, and Hawk had learned three years ago, when they’d joined the Human Scent Evidence Team, to take his rest when he could, because once they walked out the door, it might be a long time before he would find himself at his ease again.
They’d been up for nearly two hours by this time, and Hawk had eaten a hearty breakfast before heading out to their large shared backyard.
Meg had lived in the Cookes Park brownstone with her partner, DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services firefighter /paramedic Todd Webb, for almost six months now, with her sister Cara and her partner, Washington Post investigative reporter Clay McCord, moving in next door the month after Meg and Todd. One of the first things they’d done was remove the fence dividing their respective backyards, giving their dogs—Hawk, along with Cara’s two dogs, Saki, a mini blue pit bull, and Blink, a brindle greyhound, and McCord’s energetic golden retriever, Cody—space to run.
This morning, the dogs had enjoyed a romp over grass stiff and sparkling with the season’s first heavy frost. Cara had leaned out her back door far enough to wave at her sister before shivering and disappearing inside. Meg had retreated inside, as well, and had enjoyed the warmth with a second cup of coffee while the dogs frolicked together, easily visible through the sliding glass door.
As far as Hawk was concerned, nothing was better after a good breakfast and a run with friends than a nap with his dragon, and he’d been happily dozing since he’d come back in.
Meg’s gaze was drawn to the other side of the fireplace in their open-concept kitchen and family room, where a tall, fully decorated tree stood, its multicolored lights throwing a warm glow over the space and sparkling off reflective balls and through glass ornaments. Adding to the festive flavor, lights twined and twinkled through an evergreen garland draping the mantel; stockings labeled MEG, TODD, and HAWK hung below, flanking the fireplace; a stuffed elf lay in the dog bed behind Hawk; and an evergreen-scented candle burned on the stove.
The entire setting made her think of peace and family. This was both couples’ first Christmas living together, and Meg and Cara were looking forward to jointly hosting the family for the seasonal celebration. Meg had booked some vacation days over Christmas and was eagerly anticipating a little time off to relax and revel in the season. To rest and recharge, to enjoy family, as well as the holiday treats.
A break would also allow time to fit in a little wedding planning. Their summer ceremony was coming up fast, and there was still so much to do.
After pulling the elastic off her wrist, she gathered up her long dark hair—a gift from her paternal black Irish grandmother, along with her fair skin and ice-blue eyes—and tied it back into a ponytail. Pushing back from the table, she stood, then snagged the zip-up hoodie she’d tossed over the back of her chair and shrugged into it. Casual wear—her usual outfit of an athletic long-sleeved tee, yoga pants, and a hoodie—was a perk of life in search and rescue. You had to be ready to deploy at any moment, so you dressed in the morning for the ten-mile wilderness trail you might have to run with your dog later in the day.
She worked out of a building full of male and female FBI agents of various ranks, and every one of them wore some variety of business suit. She was happy to be in the active minority that got a pass on formal office wear.
Meg was just latching the dishwasher after loading in her breakfast dishes when she heard the sound of a key in the front door lock. With trepidation, she stepped toward the kitchen doorway leading out to the hallway and the front foyer. Todd had left for his eight o’clock shift almost an hour before, and there was no good reason for him to be home from the firehouse so soon.
The front door opened, and McCord stepped into her foyer on a chill gust of wind that ruffled his blond hair and wrapped around Meg’s ankles fifteen feet away. He was clearly in a rush, having not taken the time to put on his winter jacket but simply looping it over his arm. His intent, strained expression, and the way his gaze sharply locked on her, then shot to Hawk behind her, had the bottom dropping out of her stomach.
Normally, McCord would knock on the locked door and wait for Meg to open it instead of letting himself in with the spare key he and Cara kept for emergencies.
Something was wrong. Something so wrong he deemed the time it would take for Meg to answer the door was simply too much to lose.
“Hawk, come.” Meg’s voice was quiet, but the command in her tone had him scrambling upright. In a moment, her dog was sitting obediently at her knee as McCord strode toward them, his cell phone pressed to his ear.
“That’s all you know so far?” McCord’s words were rushed and insistent. “Yeah, I get it. It’s early. I’m with Meg now. Can you run over it again for her? That will give me a chance to make notes.” McCord jabbed an icon on-screen before setting the phone down on the table. “You’re on speaker.” He dug in his back pocket, and pulled out the battered notepad he always carried, a pen jammed down its spiral ring. He met Meg’s eyes and cut right to the chase. “We have a major incident. Sykes just called me with it.”
Meg’s gaze shot to McCord’s phone, where the words “Martin Sykes” glowed in white block letters against the black screen. Sykes was McCord’s editor at the Post, and a call from him, especially outside regular work hours, meant a story. She sank down into a kitchen chair beside the phone. “Martin, good morning. What’s going on?”
“Have you been deployed yet?” Sykes’s words carried the same stress and rushed cadence as McCord’s.
Meg looked up to meet McCord’s wary blue eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. “No. Should we be?”
“Maybe Beaumont doesn’t know yet,” Sykes said, referring to Meg’s boss, Special-Agent-in-Charge Craig Beaumont, who ran the FBI’s Human Scent Evidence Team. “A building collapsed downtown.”
“What? Where?”
“Talbot Terraces on I Street NW.”
Meg closed her eyes, conjuring a map in her mind. Instead of running in a neat line, I Street NW ran in a series of jagged disconnects from just short of Union Station in the east to nearly all the way to the Potomac River in the west. The building’s location could be anywhere from the city’s main transportation hub to the heart of the nation’s political capital to one of the country’s most prestigious universities.
Correctly reading her silence, Sykes said, “The corner of I and 9th Streets NW.”
Meg’s eyes flew open to find McCord beside her, head bent, pen flying over the notepad. “That’s not even three-quarters of a mile from the White House.”
“I know.”
“Is there—”
“We have no idea,” Sykes interrupted, clearly reading her question about national security and the safety of the president simply from her tone.
“Sykes, give her the rundown of what you know.” McCord was still head down, writing, not willing to waste a second. “We need to be out the door in two minutes.”
“If not right now.” Sykes blew out a breath. “What I know so far: A twelve-story building collapsed minutes ago in the heart of downtown DC. It’s too early to know why, whether it was a structural failure or a malicious attack. Early reports say it just folded in on itself with no warning.”
“Twelve stories,” Meg breathed, already calculating the difficulty of a search at such a complex and massive site. “It’s a residential building?”
“Partly. Ten stories of high-priced condos, with a fancy pool and terraces on the roof. Shops and restaurants took up the extended first floor, so there was no true second floor.”
“And the whole thing collapsed?”
“I don’t think so. Early reports are chaotic, and the scene is mostly hidden in a massive cloud of concrete dust, but it sounds like part of the building is still standing. If it is, they’re going to mount a rescue for anyone trapped inside.”
Mount a rescue. And the first responders will come from DC Fire and EMS.
Meg’s hand locked around McCord’s wrist, and he stopped making notes long enough to look up, the tightness of his expression and the set of his jaw telegraphing he was already two steps in front of her.
“I know Webb’s on shift today,” he said. “Which means they’ll send him in.”
“If it’s as bad as it sounds, DCFEMS will send in everyone on shift and call for anyone off shift as well. And will already be calling in mutual aid,” Meg said, referring to the agreement fire departments had with their neighboring departments to help each other out in times of crisis, no questions asked. If so, Todd’s two brothers, Luke and Josh, both of whom had followed their father into the Baltimore Fire Department, might be on their way to DC shortly.
Meg stuffed her concern for Todd down in the face of her own challenges. If this scenario was as bad as she feared, she needed to be on point. Fretting about her partner could cost lives. He was smart, strong, and capable. Additionally, he would have his company with him. As always, they looked out for each other. She would have to depend on that to ease her fears so she could concentrate on what she and Hawk could do. “At this time in the morning, some of the residents would have left for work or school, but surely some would still be in their apartments. And if the entire height of the building has collapsed, even for just a portion of the building, they’re going to need the dogs to search for survivors in the rubble.”
“That’s why I wanted you to know right away,” McCord said. “Craig needs to mobilize the teams.”
“He’s my next call, but it’s going to be from the SUV. Can you give me the exact address?” Meg stood to retrieve her go bag and the extra equipment she knew this kind of site would require.
“Once we’re in the SUV, sure.”
She noted his use of the plural. “McCord, this is a rescue operation. You’re not rescue personnel.”
“It’s the only story in town today, and likely for the next few weeks. I’m coming no matter what. If I come with you, it saves clogging the streets with one more vehicle when every emergency person in the city is headed there. Do a guy a solid. I brought you the story after all.”
She knew she didn’t have time to argue with him. “Fine.” She turned back to the phone. “Thanks for the heads-up, Martin.” Meg pushed McCord’s phone toward him and jogged to the mudroom to get her bag and the gear she’d need for this kind of search.
Within a few minutes, they were speeding toward downtown in Meg’s SUV, with Hawk lying in his canine compartment behind them, visible through the mesh separating the front passenger seats from the large area that took up the space where a back seat would normally be. He’d been trained to rest in that compartment, as once they arrived at any search site, he’d have to hit the ground running.
They’d just made the turn onto P Street NW when Meg’s phone rang. One quick glance at her handset, securely mounted on the dash, told her Craig had saved her making the call herself. Answering the call from her steering wheel, she skipped unnecessary salutations. “Craig, I know about the collapse. McCord and I are already on the way. You’ve deployed the teams?”
“You were my first call. McCord alerted you?”
“Yes. Calls came into the Post, and Sykes looped in McCord, who came to find me. We’re about fifteen minutes out under normal circumstances.”
“Going to be hard to get there, as they’re already locking the area down. Flash your badge to get through. I’m coming too. Can you call Brian? I’ll take care of Lauren and Scott.”
“Can do. I’ll call you when I’m on-site, and we can figure out where incident command is.”
Meg hung up and immediately called Brian Foster, her partner on the Human Scent Evidence Team. Her fingers tapped the steering wheel impatiently as his phone rang three times before Brian picked up.
“Morning,” Brian said, a cheerful note in his voice. “Are you—”
Meg cut him off. “Grab your gear and get downtown. You’ll need coveralls, your hard hat, and steel toes. And winter gear for underneath. We could be outside for hours.”
“What happened?” Brian’s congenial tone was wiped clean away, replaced by pure business.
“Twelve-story building collapse at I Street NW and 9th Street NW. Mixed business and residential.”
Brian sucked in a sharp breath. “Any idea about casualties?”
“None. It literally just happened. Craig’s scrambling the teams and is meeting us downtown. Hawk and I are en route.”
“Lacey, come.”
Meg could picture Brian’s German shepherd, Lacey, morphing from relaxation to work mode at that single command.
“We’ll be out the door in sixty seconds,” Brian said, “and will get there as soon as we can fight our way through traffic. Call you when we’re there.” He hung up.
Meg white-knuckled the steering wheel a little tighter, cursing the single lane of traffic open to her as a row of parked cars filled the curb lane.
“Don’t strangle the steering wheel,” McCord said. “It’s not going to get us there any faster.”
Meg forced herself to loosen her hold slightly and gave McCord a sideways glance where he sat in the passenger seat, his own tension revealed in his stiffly upright posture rather than his normal casual slouch. “You know, you talk a good story about trying to keep the downtown core clear of traffic, but don’t think I missed your real angle here.”
“And what’s that?”
“Every Metro PD cop in the area is converging on the site, and they’re locking down the area for blocks. But I’ll get in because I can badge my way through the barricades. You’ll get carried along for the ride.”
“All it’s going to do is gain me some time. You know I’d get through one way or another on foot. This early on, there’s no way they’ll be able to block every access point.” McCord’s usual irreverence was entirely missing from his tone, replaced by a dogged insistence. “You’re saving me annoying a bunch of cops who will already have their hands full.” He stared out the windshield, his fingers rhythmically clasping and unclasping his knees. “This is going to be bad.”
“Yeah.” When silence stretched, Meg felt she owed it to McCord to give him more detail. She might give him a hard time for using her to angle for a story, but she didn’t blame him. Especially when she knew full well any story in his hands would be told fairly and truthfully. “Hawk and I, we’ve been deployed to earthquake sites several times, which is the closest experience I can draw from for this. It’s . . . hard.”
“Because you can’t reach people in time?”
“That, yes. But also because you find a lot of people died instantly. You’ll spend hours searching and often won’t find anyone alive. And time is a real factor. Often, you don’t find anyone after the first day of searching. But in a collapse site like this, sometimes you’re days away from tunneling down to anyone who might have survived the original collapse.” The car in front of them turned right; Meg hammered the gas, and they jumped forward into open road. “I just want to get there. I can’t imagine the terror of being trapped in the dark, waiting for someone—anyone—to find you. Hawk can do it. He can find them.”
McCord leaned forward, peering through the windscreen, as Meg approached Dupont Circle. “And here’s your way to speed things up. Right . . . there!”
As McCord pointed over the steering wheel, past the driver’s side mirror, the long wail of a siren sounded as a white SUV, with blue-and-red accents and lights flashing, sped toward them.
“There’s only one place he’s going,” McCord stated. “Get in behind him. He’s not going to take the time to stop to ticket you—”
“I’ve talked myself out of tickets and into a police escort before,” Meg interrupted. “But I agree, he’s not going to take the time to pull me over.”
The cruiser shot past, and Meg swung into the circle behind it, pushing the pedal to the floor so they slipped in before any other vehicle, and sped after it. As cars pulled off to the side to make way, she stayed behind the cruiser.
Traffic was no longer a problem. As McCord lapsed into silence, Meg took the time to get into the right headspace. Today was going to be a hard day, but miracles could happen.
Craig’s words from the Jamie L. Whitten Building bombing twenty months earlier rose in her mind. Bring home the ones you can.
She knew what it meant: Save every life possible, but leave the lost behind when you leave the site. Don’t carry them with you. Concentrate on life.
She had a bad feeling she was going to need that miracle to come out of today with any kind of win.
Foundation: The lowest structural element of a building, designed to support the entire structure and transfer the total gravity load to the ground beneath.
Tailing the police cruiser got them all the way to the historic Carnegie Library. After that, they stopped only long enough for Meg to show her ID and roll down the back window for the officer blocking traffic to see Hawk and wave them through.
She turned onto 9th Street NW. Then shock eased her foot off the accelerator, letting the SUV coast, as Talbot Terraces came into view.
Or what was left of it.
“Oh my God . . .”
McCord’s stunned murmur echoed her own thoughts as she struggled to piece together the downtown core she knew with the current reality. She’d driven these streets for three years, ever since she’d joined the FBI. Especially since moving to Cookes Park, she’d often use 9th Street NW as her conduit south to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. She regularly passed the luxury condo building, which took up over half the block, a towering structure of pale spears of concrete; wide, glass-fronted balconies, supported by lengths of decorative I-beams that ran the breadth of the building; and what had to be panoramic views of the nation’s capital from long stretches of unobstructed windows. And then there were the terraces for which the building was named—tiers of gardens stepping down to the rooftop pool. In summer, the terrace greenery tumbled over the railings, as if reaching for the streets below. As someone who loved classic architecture and who would lecture Brian during their crack-of-dawn jogs through old residential DC about her favorite aspects of the Federal or Beaux Arts houses around them, even Meg could see the appeal of Talbot Terraces for those who liked a clean, modern look.
Now an unnatural hole in the cityscape revealed the sky beyond as the backdrop to the crumbling wreck of the tower.
It took her breath away.
The building was partially masked in a haze of suspended concrete dust, but the scope of the disaster was undeniably clear, and Meg knew in that moment any kind of miracle might be out of reach. She had an impression of hazy height on the west end of the building, but she couldn’t tell how much of the structure was still standing. What she could see more clearly was the devastation at the east end of the building, which abutted 9th Street NW.
She’d never counted the floors, but Sykes had said there were twelve. Those twelve stories had crumbled, falling as if in a coordinated fashion on a slight angle, one floor at a time, each layer above pancaking down on the one below it. The stepped levels of the different floors were clear, but instead of occupying twelve stories, all that concrete, glass, and steel was only about three stories tall.
She couldn’t see the historic Gerrard Apartments behind Talbot Terraces. It was four stories itself, so it should have been visible. Was it also down, or was it still standing and hidden in the cloud of dust and behind stories of packed debris?
How many could still be alive in all that?
Meg’s foot hit the accelerator again, and the SUV jerked forward from her sudden need to get there, to get onto the pile. But they made it only about twenty feet farther before being stopped by a mass of emergency vehicles. Knowing this was as close as they were likely to get, and any time spent looking for parking could be counted in the last breaths of victims, Meg pulled off to the side of the road, ignoring the NO PARKING signs along 9th Street NW, and cut the engine. “We’ll go on foot from here.”
“Yeah.” McCord remained frozen, his gaze riveted on the devastated structure still visible through the windshield, over the open-air parking lot to their right. “How could . . .” He trailed off, as if trying to find a way to put his question delicately. “What are the chances . . . anyone survived that?”
Meg was already climbing out of the SUV to circle to the back and pop the hatch. “We’re going to be searching for voids or anyone close to the surface or the edges.” She paused, her hands fisted around the straps of her go bag, as her gaze drifted past McCord, still in the passenger seat, and through the windshield. “Otherwise, no one survived that.”
She slid her pack on and then closed the hatch as dread at the probable futility of what they were about to attempt roiled through her. She opened the compartment door to the sidewalk. “Hawk, down.” He jumped down in a single fluid leap, and she snapped the leash on his collar. Looking up, she found McCord beside her. “Stay with me. We’ll likely still have to badge our way into the site proper.”
She pulled out her phone as they started speed-walking down the sidewalk, and waited as the call connected to Craig. “We’re here.”
“Me too. Meet me at incident command. They’ve set up in the Park at CityCenter. You know it?”
“Yes. Todd and I were there a few weeks ago, when they held the annual tree lighting.” Her memory of that night was lit by a happy glow—surrounded by a large crowd, already well into the holiday spirit, she and Todd had stood holding hands, each with a hot chocolate, their faces illuminated by the white twinkle lights outlining the bare branches of every tree as the seventy-five-foot fir at the far end of the park transformed from darkness into brilliant, joyful light. Someone nearby had mentioned the tree held 150,000 lights and nearly 5,000 ornaments, and she believed it. It was magnificent and had made the night truly magical.
The thought of that location, a place of such joy only a few weeks ago, now the operations center for a scene of death and destruction was an extra kick to the gut.
“That’s the place,” Craig continued. “I don’t know where you’re parked, but you need to avoid I Street until we get started. When the building fell, part of it collapsed into the street.”
Cold horror rose in a wave. Meg knew what downtown DC was like in the morning—everyone trying to get somewhere as fast as possible. She herself had to build in extra time to get to the Hoover Building, because traffic in the city’s core could be stop and go at best. I Street NW would have been packed with traffic at that time of the morning. Not to mention the added pressure of holiday shoppers trying to get an early start to their day. “But . . . rush hour.”
“I know. We don’t know how many cars and pedestrians are under there. Hurry. We need to get started. DCFEMS is already on-site and is starting to mount rescues.”
Which means Todd is here somewhere. And since Engine Company 2 is physically closest, unless they were already out on a call, then he and his men were first on scene. That makes his chief the incident commander.
“Is Chief Koenig IC?”
“I think that’s what he said his name was. I quickly introduced myself so he knew our teams were incoming, but then I got out of his way. There needs to be three of him right now.”
“They’re lucky the closest house is staffed with one of the few battalion chiefs in town who also happened to be on duty. We’re in good hands. See you in a few.” She hung up.
“This way. Hawk, come.” Meg broke into a jog, and Hawk instantly matched her pace. She cut into the half-full parking lot, heading east, and jogged through lanes of parked cars to come out on the far side, onto the wide, tree-lined sidewalk of New York Avenue NW. A glance over her shoulder showed McCord behind her; then he closed the distance to run beside her. Beside them, the tall, mirrored facade of the Conrad hotel reflected both the bright blue morning sky and the postmodern granite and glass building opposite, an image that struck Meg as painfully normal on a day turned upside down. They barely paused at a red light at 10th Street NW, the mostly deserted streets giving them clear passage.
Across from them lay the Park at CityCenter. Part of the five-acre CityCenterDC area, which included both Talbot Terraces and the Conrad, the park was a small, triangular oasis bounded by New York Avenue NW, 10th and 11th Streets NW, and an eleven-story steel and glass office building to the south. Slate and granite pavers stretched throughout the park, broken only by a scatter of treed gardens, empty now with early winter’s chill, and a fountain, its water still gurgling and running down ridged, topographical spillways. At the far end of the park, the Christmas tree towered, magnificent even with its lights dulled in the brightness of morning.
Meg’s gaze was drawn to the emergency vehicles at the edge of the park, lights flashing in bursts of red, white, and blue. Fire engines and ladder trucks filled the street, interspersed with police patrol cars and SUVs. Uniformed officers and firemen in helmets and black turnout gear were everywhere, and the buzz of radio chatter filled the air. But it was the red-and-white SUV at the end of the park, where I Street NW took a jog to the right a block north, that caught her attention. The back hatch of the SUV was open, and even from there, Meg could see the incident command board: a long open case holding two white boards—one upright, one flat—and several smaller foldout boards. Todd had explained to her that this was how the incident commander at any fire scene kept track of who was where in the operation. It was a system designed to ensure every person was accounted for at all times, and it also laid out the incident action plan.
Meg’s gaze cut back down the street to the vehicles from what had to be at least five companies and every man available.
That board isn’t going to cut it for this.
She scanned the crowd for. . .
Meg Jennings finished the last of her coffee and set her mug down next to her empty plate. A glance at her fitness tracker told her she had only a few more minutes to linger, and then the team needed to get moving.
The other half of the team rolled over in his bed near the fireplace, stretched, and then relaxed back into the fuzzy cushion with a gusty sigh, his favorite red dragon tucked close, one yellow wing poking out from under his foreleg.
“Hawk, nearly time for work.”
The black Lab opened one eye in response to her words and then closed it again.
Meg chuckled. She had no concerns that the moment she picked up her go bag—the search-and-rescue backpack she carried everywhere in case she and Hawk were deployed to an incident—and gave a real command, he wouldn’t be raring to get to work. This was part of their job in the FBI’s Forensic Canine Unit—to be ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to wherever they were most needed. Minutes could mean lives, and Hawk had learned three years ago, when they’d joined the Human Scent Evidence Team, to take his rest when he could, because once they walked out the door, it might be a long time before he would find himself at his ease again.
They’d been up for nearly two hours by this time, and Hawk had eaten a hearty breakfast before heading out to their large shared backyard.
Meg had lived in the Cookes Park brownstone with her partner, DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services firefighter /paramedic Todd Webb, for almost six months now, with her sister Cara and her partner, Washington Post investigative reporter Clay McCord, moving in next door the month after Meg and Todd. One of the first things they’d done was remove the fence dividing their respective backyards, giving their dogs—Hawk, along with Cara’s two dogs, Saki, a mini blue pit bull, and Blink, a brindle greyhound, and McCord’s energetic golden retriever, Cody—space to run.
This morning, the dogs had enjoyed a romp over grass stiff and sparkling with the season’s first heavy frost. Cara had leaned out her back door far enough to wave at her sister before shivering and disappearing inside. Meg had retreated inside, as well, and had enjoyed the warmth with a second cup of coffee while the dogs frolicked together, easily visible through the sliding glass door.
As far as Hawk was concerned, nothing was better after a good breakfast and a run with friends than a nap with his dragon, and he’d been happily dozing since he’d come back in.
Meg’s gaze was drawn to the other side of the fireplace in their open-concept kitchen and family room, where a tall, fully decorated tree stood, its multicolored lights throwing a warm glow over the space and sparkling off reflective balls and through glass ornaments. Adding to the festive flavor, lights twined and twinkled through an evergreen garland draping the mantel; stockings labeled MEG, TODD, and HAWK hung below, flanking the fireplace; a stuffed elf lay in the dog bed behind Hawk; and an evergreen-scented candle burned on the stove.
The entire setting made her think of peace and family. This was both couples’ first Christmas living together, and Meg and Cara were looking forward to jointly hosting the family for the seasonal celebration. Meg had booked some vacation days over Christmas and was eagerly anticipating a little time off to relax and revel in the season. To rest and recharge, to enjoy family, as well as the holiday treats.
A break would also allow time to fit in a little wedding planning. Their summer ceremony was coming up fast, and there was still so much to do.
After pulling the elastic off her wrist, she gathered up her long dark hair—a gift from her paternal black Irish grandmother, along with her fair skin and ice-blue eyes—and tied it back into a ponytail. Pushing back from the table, she stood, then snagged the zip-up hoodie she’d tossed over the back of her chair and shrugged into it. Casual wear—her usual outfit of an athletic long-sleeved tee, yoga pants, and a hoodie—was a perk of life in search and rescue. You had to be ready to deploy at any moment, so you dressed in the morning for the ten-mile wilderness trail you might have to run with your dog later in the day.
She worked out of a building full of male and female FBI agents of various ranks, and every one of them wore some variety of business suit. She was happy to be in the active minority that got a pass on formal office wear.
Meg was just latching the dishwasher after loading in her breakfast dishes when she heard the sound of a key in the front door lock. With trepidation, she stepped toward the kitchen doorway leading out to the hallway and the front foyer. Todd had left for his eight o’clock shift almost an hour before, and there was no good reason for him to be home from the firehouse so soon.
The front door opened, and McCord stepped into her foyer on a chill gust of wind that ruffled his blond hair and wrapped around Meg’s ankles fifteen feet away. He was clearly in a rush, having not taken the time to put on his winter jacket but simply looping it over his arm. His intent, strained expression, and the way his gaze sharply locked on her, then shot to Hawk behind her, had the bottom dropping out of her stomach.
Normally, McCord would knock on the locked door and wait for Meg to open it instead of letting himself in with the spare key he and Cara kept for emergencies.
Something was wrong. Something so wrong he deemed the time it would take for Meg to answer the door was simply too much to lose.
“Hawk, come.” Meg’s voice was quiet, but the command in her tone had him scrambling upright. In a moment, her dog was sitting obediently at her knee as McCord strode toward them, his cell phone pressed to his ear.
“That’s all you know so far?” McCord’s words were rushed and insistent. “Yeah, I get it. It’s early. I’m with Meg now. Can you run over it again for her? That will give me a chance to make notes.” McCord jabbed an icon on-screen before setting the phone down on the table. “You’re on speaker.” He dug in his back pocket, and pulled out the battered notepad he always carried, a pen jammed down its spiral ring. He met Meg’s eyes and cut right to the chase. “We have a major incident. Sykes just called me with it.”
Meg’s gaze shot to McCord’s phone, where the words “Martin Sykes” glowed in white block letters against the black screen. Sykes was McCord’s editor at the Post, and a call from him, especially outside regular work hours, meant a story. She sank down into a kitchen chair beside the phone. “Martin, good morning. What’s going on?”
“Have you been deployed yet?” Sykes’s words carried the same stress and rushed cadence as McCord’s.
Meg looked up to meet McCord’s wary blue eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. “No. Should we be?”
“Maybe Beaumont doesn’t know yet,” Sykes said, referring to Meg’s boss, Special-Agent-in-Charge Craig Beaumont, who ran the FBI’s Human Scent Evidence Team. “A building collapsed downtown.”
“What? Where?”
“Talbot Terraces on I Street NW.”
Meg closed her eyes, conjuring a map in her mind. Instead of running in a neat line, I Street NW ran in a series of jagged disconnects from just short of Union Station in the east to nearly all the way to the Potomac River in the west. The building’s location could be anywhere from the city’s main transportation hub to the heart of the nation’s political capital to one of the country’s most prestigious universities.
Correctly reading her silence, Sykes said, “The corner of I and 9th Streets NW.”
Meg’s eyes flew open to find McCord beside her, head bent, pen flying over the notepad. “That’s not even three-quarters of a mile from the White House.”
“I know.”
“Is there—”
“We have no idea,” Sykes interrupted, clearly reading her question about national security and the safety of the president simply from her tone.
“Sykes, give her the rundown of what you know.” McCord was still head down, writing, not willing to waste a second. “We need to be out the door in two minutes.”
“If not right now.” Sykes blew out a breath. “What I know so far: A twelve-story building collapsed minutes ago in the heart of downtown DC. It’s too early to know why, whether it was a structural failure or a malicious attack. Early reports say it just folded in on itself with no warning.”
“Twelve stories,” Meg breathed, already calculating the difficulty of a search at such a complex and massive site. “It’s a residential building?”
“Partly. Ten stories of high-priced condos, with a fancy pool and terraces on the roof. Shops and restaurants took up the extended first floor, so there was no true second floor.”
“And the whole thing collapsed?”
“I don’t think so. Early reports are chaotic, and the scene is mostly hidden in a massive cloud of concrete dust, but it sounds like part of the building is still standing. If it is, they’re going to mount a rescue for anyone trapped inside.”
Mount a rescue. And the first responders will come from DC Fire and EMS.
Meg’s hand locked around McCord’s wrist, and he stopped making notes long enough to look up, the tightness of his expression and the set of his jaw telegraphing he was already two steps in front of her.
“I know Webb’s on shift today,” he said. “Which means they’ll send him in.”
“If it’s as bad as it sounds, DCFEMS will send in everyone on shift and call for anyone off shift as well. And will already be calling in mutual aid,” Meg said, referring to the agreement fire departments had with their neighboring departments to help each other out in times of crisis, no questions asked. If so, Todd’s two brothers, Luke and Josh, both of whom had followed their father into the Baltimore Fire Department, might be on their way to DC shortly.
Meg stuffed her concern for Todd down in the face of her own challenges. If this scenario was as bad as she feared, she needed to be on point. Fretting about her partner could cost lives. He was smart, strong, and capable. Additionally, he would have his company with him. As always, they looked out for each other. She would have to depend on that to ease her fears so she could concentrate on what she and Hawk could do. “At this time in the morning, some of the residents would have left for work or school, but surely some would still be in their apartments. And if the entire height of the building has collapsed, even for just a portion of the building, they’re going to need the dogs to search for survivors in the rubble.”
“That’s why I wanted you to know right away,” McCord said. “Craig needs to mobilize the teams.”
“He’s my next call, but it’s going to be from the SUV. Can you give me the exact address?” Meg stood to retrieve her go bag and the extra equipment she knew this kind of site would require.
“Once we’re in the SUV, sure.”
She noted his use of the plural. “McCord, this is a rescue operation. You’re not rescue personnel.”
“It’s the only story in town today, and likely for the next few weeks. I’m coming no matter what. If I come with you, it saves clogging the streets with one more vehicle when every emergency person in the city is headed there. Do a guy a solid. I brought you the story after all.”
She knew she didn’t have time to argue with him. “Fine.” She turned back to the phone. “Thanks for the heads-up, Martin.” Meg pushed McCord’s phone toward him and jogged to the mudroom to get her bag and the gear she’d need for this kind of search.
Within a few minutes, they were speeding toward downtown in Meg’s SUV, with Hawk lying in his canine compartment behind them, visible through the mesh separating the front passenger seats from the large area that took up the space where a back seat would normally be. He’d been trained to rest in that compartment, as once they arrived at any search site, he’d have to hit the ground running.
They’d just made the turn onto P Street NW when Meg’s phone rang. One quick glance at her handset, securely mounted on the dash, told her Craig had saved her making the call herself. Answering the call from her steering wheel, she skipped unnecessary salutations. “Craig, I know about the collapse. McCord and I are already on the way. You’ve deployed the teams?”
“You were my first call. McCord alerted you?”
“Yes. Calls came into the Post, and Sykes looped in McCord, who came to find me. We’re about fifteen minutes out under normal circumstances.”
“Going to be hard to get there, as they’re already locking the area down. Flash your badge to get through. I’m coming too. Can you call Brian? I’ll take care of Lauren and Scott.”
“Can do. I’ll call you when I’m on-site, and we can figure out where incident command is.”
Meg hung up and immediately called Brian Foster, her partner on the Human Scent Evidence Team. Her fingers tapped the steering wheel impatiently as his phone rang three times before Brian picked up.
“Morning,” Brian said, a cheerful note in his voice. “Are you—”
Meg cut him off. “Grab your gear and get downtown. You’ll need coveralls, your hard hat, and steel toes. And winter gear for underneath. We could be outside for hours.”
“What happened?” Brian’s congenial tone was wiped clean away, replaced by pure business.
“Twelve-story building collapse at I Street NW and 9th Street NW. Mixed business and residential.”
Brian sucked in a sharp breath. “Any idea about casualties?”
“None. It literally just happened. Craig’s scrambling the teams and is meeting us downtown. Hawk and I are en route.”
“Lacey, come.”
Meg could picture Brian’s German shepherd, Lacey, morphing from relaxation to work mode at that single command.
“We’ll be out the door in sixty seconds,” Brian said, “and will get there as soon as we can fight our way through traffic. Call you when we’re there.” He hung up.
Meg white-knuckled the steering wheel a little tighter, cursing the single lane of traffic open to her as a row of parked cars filled the curb lane.
“Don’t strangle the steering wheel,” McCord said. “It’s not going to get us there any faster.”
Meg forced herself to loosen her hold slightly and gave McCord a sideways glance where he sat in the passenger seat, his own tension revealed in his stiffly upright posture rather than his normal casual slouch. “You know, you talk a good story about trying to keep the downtown core clear of traffic, but don’t think I missed your real angle here.”
“And what’s that?”
“Every Metro PD cop in the area is converging on the site, and they’re locking down the area for blocks. But I’ll get in because I can badge my way through the barricades. You’ll get carried along for the ride.”
“All it’s going to do is gain me some time. You know I’d get through one way or another on foot. This early on, there’s no way they’ll be able to block every access point.” McCord’s usual irreverence was entirely missing from his tone, replaced by a dogged insistence. “You’re saving me annoying a bunch of cops who will already have their hands full.” He stared out the windshield, his fingers rhythmically clasping and unclasping his knees. “This is going to be bad.”
“Yeah.” When silence stretched, Meg felt she owed it to McCord to give him more detail. She might give him a hard time for using her to angle for a story, but she didn’t blame him. Especially when she knew full well any story in his hands would be told fairly and truthfully. “Hawk and I, we’ve been deployed to earthquake sites several times, which is the closest experience I can draw from for this. It’s . . . hard.”
“Because you can’t reach people in time?”
“That, yes. But also because you find a lot of people died instantly. You’ll spend hours searching and often won’t find anyone alive. And time is a real factor. Often, you don’t find anyone after the first day of searching. But in a collapse site like this, sometimes you’re days away from tunneling down to anyone who might have survived the original collapse.” The car in front of them turned right; Meg hammered the gas, and they jumped forward into open road. “I just want to get there. I can’t imagine the terror of being trapped in the dark, waiting for someone—anyone—to find you. Hawk can do it. He can find them.”
McCord leaned forward, peering through the windscreen, as Meg approached Dupont Circle. “And here’s your way to speed things up. Right . . . there!”
As McCord pointed over the steering wheel, past the driver’s side mirror, the long wail of a siren sounded as a white SUV, with blue-and-red accents and lights flashing, sped toward them.
“There’s only one place he’s going,” McCord stated. “Get in behind him. He’s not going to take the time to stop to ticket you—”
“I’ve talked myself out of tickets and into a police escort before,” Meg interrupted. “But I agree, he’s not going to take the time to pull me over.”
The cruiser shot past, and Meg swung into the circle behind it, pushing the pedal to the floor so they slipped in before any other vehicle, and sped after it. As cars pulled off to the side to make way, she stayed behind the cruiser.
Traffic was no longer a problem. As McCord lapsed into silence, Meg took the time to get into the right headspace. Today was going to be a hard day, but miracles could happen.
Craig’s words from the Jamie L. Whitten Building bombing twenty months earlier rose in her mind. Bring home the ones you can.
She knew what it meant: Save every life possible, but leave the lost behind when you leave the site. Don’t carry them with you. Concentrate on life.
She had a bad feeling she was going to need that miracle to come out of today with any kind of win.
Foundation: The lowest structural element of a building, designed to support the entire structure and transfer the total gravity load to the ground beneath.
Tailing the police cruiser got them all the way to the historic Carnegie Library. After that, they stopped only long enough for Meg to show her ID and roll down the back window for the officer blocking traffic to see Hawk and wave them through.
She turned onto 9th Street NW. Then shock eased her foot off the accelerator, letting the SUV coast, as Talbot Terraces came into view.
Or what was left of it.
“Oh my God . . .”
McCord’s stunned murmur echoed her own thoughts as she struggled to piece together the downtown core she knew with the current reality. She’d driven these streets for three years, ever since she’d joined the FBI. Especially since moving to Cookes Park, she’d often use 9th Street NW as her conduit south to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. She regularly passed the luxury condo building, which took up over half the block, a towering structure of pale spears of concrete; wide, glass-fronted balconies, supported by lengths of decorative I-beams that ran the breadth of the building; and what had to be panoramic views of the nation’s capital from long stretches of unobstructed windows. And then there were the terraces for which the building was named—tiers of gardens stepping down to the rooftop pool. In summer, the terrace greenery tumbled over the railings, as if reaching for the streets below. As someone who loved classic architecture and who would lecture Brian during their crack-of-dawn jogs through old residential DC about her favorite aspects of the Federal or Beaux Arts houses around them, even Meg could see the appeal of Talbot Terraces for those who liked a clean, modern look.
Now an unnatural hole in the cityscape revealed the sky beyond as the backdrop to the crumbling wreck of the tower.
It took her breath away.
The building was partially masked in a haze of suspended concrete dust, but the scope of the disaster was undeniably clear, and Meg knew in that moment any kind of miracle might be out of reach. She had an impression of hazy height on the west end of the building, but she couldn’t tell how much of the structure was still standing. What she could see more clearly was the devastation at the east end of the building, which abutted 9th Street NW.
She’d never counted the floors, but Sykes had said there were twelve. Those twelve stories had crumbled, falling as if in a coordinated fashion on a slight angle, one floor at a time, each layer above pancaking down on the one below it. The stepped levels of the different floors were clear, but instead of occupying twelve stories, all that concrete, glass, and steel was only about three stories tall.
She couldn’t see the historic Gerrard Apartments behind Talbot Terraces. It was four stories itself, so it should have been visible. Was it also down, or was it still standing and hidden in the cloud of dust and behind stories of packed debris?
How many could still be alive in all that?
Meg’s foot hit the accelerator again, and the SUV jerked forward from her sudden need to get there, to get onto the pile. But they made it only about twenty feet farther before being stopped by a mass of emergency vehicles. Knowing this was as close as they were likely to get, and any time spent looking for parking could be counted in the last breaths of victims, Meg pulled off to the side of the road, ignoring the NO PARKING signs along 9th Street NW, and cut the engine. “We’ll go on foot from here.”
“Yeah.” McCord remained frozen, his gaze riveted on the devastated structure still visible through the windshield, over the open-air parking lot to their right. “How could . . .” He trailed off, as if trying to find a way to put his question delicately. “What are the chances . . . anyone survived that?”
Meg was already climbing out of the SUV to circle to the back and pop the hatch. “We’re going to be searching for voids or anyone close to the surface or the edges.” She paused, her hands fisted around the straps of her go bag, as her gaze drifted past McCord, still in the passenger seat, and through the windshield. “Otherwise, no one survived that.”
She slid her pack on and then closed the hatch as dread at the probable futility of what they were about to attempt roiled through her. She opened the compartment door to the sidewalk. “Hawk, down.” He jumped down in a single fluid leap, and she snapped the leash on his collar. Looking up, she found McCord beside her. “Stay with me. We’ll likely still have to badge our way into the site proper.”
She pulled out her phone as they started speed-walking down the sidewalk, and waited as the call connected to Craig. “We’re here.”
“Me too. Meet me at incident command. They’ve set up in the Park at CityCenter. You know it?”
“Yes. Todd and I were there a few weeks ago, when they held the annual tree lighting.” Her memory of that night was lit by a happy glow—surrounded by a large crowd, already well into the holiday spirit, she and Todd had stood holding hands, each with a hot chocolate, their faces illuminated by the white twinkle lights outlining the bare branches of every tree as the seventy-five-foot fir at the far end of the park transformed from darkness into brilliant, joyful light. Someone nearby had mentioned the tree held 150,000 lights and nearly 5,000 ornaments, and she believed it. It was magnificent and had made the night truly magical.
The thought of that location, a place of such joy only a few weeks ago, now the operations center for a scene of death and destruction was an extra kick to the gut.
“That’s the place,” Craig continued. “I don’t know where you’re parked, but you need to avoid I Street until we get started. When the building fell, part of it collapsed into the street.”
Cold horror rose in a wave. Meg knew what downtown DC was like in the morning—everyone trying to get somewhere as fast as possible. She herself had to build in extra time to get to the Hoover Building, because traffic in the city’s core could be stop and go at best. I Street NW would have been packed with traffic at that time of the morning. Not to mention the added pressure of holiday shoppers trying to get an early start to their day. “But . . . rush hour.”
“I know. We don’t know how many cars and pedestrians are under there. Hurry. We need to get started. DCFEMS is already on-site and is starting to mount rescues.”
Which means Todd is here somewhere. And since Engine Company 2 is physically closest, unless they were already out on a call, then he and his men were first on scene. That makes his chief the incident commander.
“Is Chief Koenig IC?”
“I think that’s what he said his name was. I quickly introduced myself so he knew our teams were incoming, but then I got out of his way. There needs to be three of him right now.”
“They’re lucky the closest house is staffed with one of the few battalion chiefs in town who also happened to be on duty. We’re in good hands. See you in a few.” She hung up.
“This way. Hawk, come.” Meg broke into a jog, and Hawk instantly matched her pace. She cut into the half-full parking lot, heading east, and jogged through lanes of parked cars to come out on the far side, onto the wide, tree-lined sidewalk of New York Avenue NW. A glance over her shoulder showed McCord behind her; then he closed the distance to run beside her. Beside them, the tall, mirrored facade of the Conrad hotel reflected both the bright blue morning sky and the postmodern granite and glass building opposite, an image that struck Meg as painfully normal on a day turned upside down. They barely paused at a red light at 10th Street NW, the mostly deserted streets giving them clear passage.
Across from them lay the Park at CityCenter. Part of the five-acre CityCenterDC area, which included both Talbot Terraces and the Conrad, the park was a small, triangular oasis bounded by New York Avenue NW, 10th and 11th Streets NW, and an eleven-story steel and glass office building to the south. Slate and granite pavers stretched throughout the park, broken only by a scatter of treed gardens, empty now with early winter’s chill, and a fountain, its water still gurgling and running down ridged, topographical spillways. At the far end of the park, the Christmas tree towered, magnificent even with its lights dulled in the brightness of morning.
Meg’s gaze was drawn to the emergency vehicles at the edge of the park, lights flashing in bursts of red, white, and blue. Fire engines and ladder trucks filled the street, interspersed with police patrol cars and SUVs. Uniformed officers and firemen in helmets and black turnout gear were everywhere, and the buzz of radio chatter filled the air. But it was the red-and-white SUV at the end of the park, where I Street NW took a jog to the right a block north, that caught her attention. The back hatch of the SUV was open, and even from there, Meg could see the incident command board: a long open case holding two white boards—one upright, one flat—and several smaller foldout boards. Todd had explained to her that this was how the incident commander at any fire scene kept track of who was where in the operation. It was a system designed to ensure every person was accounted for at all times, and it also laid out the incident action plan.
Meg’s gaze cut back down the street to the vehicles from what had to be at least five companies and every man available.
That board isn’t going to cut it for this.
She scanned the crowd for. . .
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That Others May Live
Sara Driscoll
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