There were less than three minutes left, so he decided to open the package from the publisher. He liked books about true crime, politics, or culture—with authors he might be able to book on the show.
Fans also liked to send him things. All kinds of things. Party invitations. A bikini, once. Death threats. Naked Polaroids of themselves. Marriage proposals. T-shirts. In honor of the show’s name, he had gotten more than a dozen hands made of wood, plastic, and metal. Poems. Pressed flowers. Brownies. He had made enough enemies that he never ate any food from a fan, even if was still sealed in a package. He figured that a determined person might still be able to inject something toxic through layers of plastic and cardboard. But Jim also liked to handle his own mail, just in case it contained items of a more, say, personal nature.
Jim pulled the red string tab on the envelope. It got stuck half way through and he had to give it an extra hard tug. There was an odd hissing sound as a paperback—Talk Radio—fell onto his lap. A book of a play turned into a movie—both based on the true-life killing of talk show host Alan Berg, gunned down in his own driveway.
What the?
Jim never got to finish the thought. Because the red string had been connected to a small canister of gas hidden in the envelope—and it sprayed directly into his face.
He gasped in surprise. With just that first breath, Jim knew something was terribly wrong. He couldn’t see the gas, couldn’t smell it, but he could feel the damp fog coat the inside of his nose and throat. His eyelids sank to half-mast. With an effort, he opened them wider.
He swept the package away. It landed behind him, in the far corner of the studio.
Whatever it was, it was in the air. So he shouldn’t breathe. He clamped his lips together and scrambled to his feet, yanking off the headphones. The whole time, Jim was thinking about what had happened in Seattle. Three weeks earlier, someone had spilled liquid sarin on the third floor of a 15-story downtown office building. Fifty-eight people had died, including an unidentified, Middle Eastern-looking male dressed in a janitor’s uniform. Was he a terrorist? Had he been in the process of putting the sarin into the ventilation system and then literally taken a wrong step? No one knew. Authorities had still not identified the culprit, and no one had claimed responsibility. But up and down the west coast and across the nation, people were on a heightened state of alert.
And now it was happening again.
His chest already started to ache. Jim looked out through the thick glass wall into the control room on his right. Greg, the board operator, was turned away from the glass, gobbling a Payday bar, watching his banks of equipment, ready to press the buttons for commercials and national feeds. Bob, the reporter, had his back to Jim, his head down as he reviewed his copy for the local segment of the news. In the call screener’s room directly in front of Jim, Aaron, the program director, talked rapidly to Chris and Willow, waving his hands for emphasis. None of them had seen what was happening. Jim was unnoticed, sealed away in his bubble.
He forced himself to concentrate. He had to get some air, some fresh air. But if he staggered out to the screener’s room, would the air there be enough to dilute what he had already breathed in? Would it be enough to clear the sarin from his lungs, from his body?
Would it be enough to save him?
But once the door was open, what would happen to the people out there? Chris, Willow, Aaron and the rest? He thought of the firefighters who had died when they responded to the Seattle attack. Would invisible tendrils of poison snake out to the dozens of people who worked at the station, the hundreds who worked in the building? The people in the control room, with its own soundproofing, might be safe if they kept their door closed. For a while, anyway. Until it got into the air ducts. Some of the people who died in Seattle had been nowhere near the original release of the gas. If Jim tried to escape, then everyone out there might die, too.
Die too. The words echoed in his head. Jim realized that he was dying, that he had been dying from the moment he first sucked in his breath in surprise. He had the innate sense of timing that you developed working in radio. It had been, he thought, somewhere between fifteen and twenty seconds since the gas sprayed into his face. No more.
Every morning, Jim swam two miles at the MAC club. He could hold his breath for more than two minutes. The magician on Oprah had done it for, what? Seventeen minutes, wasn’t that it? Jim couldn’t hold his breath for that long, but now that he had to, he was sure he could hold it longer than two minutes. Maybe a lot longer. The first responders could surely get him some oxygen. The line might be thin enough to snake under the closed door.
Jim pressed the talk button and spoke in a slurred, breathy voice. “Sarin gas! Call 911 and get out! Don’t open the door!”