to stop him.
Halfway across the open space, weaving through the abandoned folding chairs, he looked up at Kerr’s office. All his concentration was centered on it, on the people he knew were within it.
Be safe, Irene, he thought. Be safe, Seth. Please be safe. I’m almost there.
He heard the shouting of the others mixing with the pleading in his mind, both more frantic as he moved forward, the distance between him and the corner office seeming to double with every step, as if each passing second robbed him of progress.
The blast struck like a thunderclap that could take the world apart — all the shouts and pleas lost in the deafening roar of an explosion that shook the ground beneath his feet and thrummed in the marrow of his bones.
In helpless horror he watched as Kerr’s window and a hundred windows near it blasted out and the upper floors of the building crumpled in on one another.
He screamed her name, but even he could not hear it among the other screams, the answering rattle from every building around the plaza, the hard rain of glass and debris that pelted down on them, as if falling from the thick clouds of smoke billowing from the building. Walls and ceilings and floors collapsed, banging down on one another, then lay askew like drunks who had caused one another to stumble. As they fell, bits of concrete shot from them as if from cannons, arcing down into the courtyard with murderous force.
In an instant, he saw the world go out of order, no longer operating as it should, and some part of his mind resisted all the uproar of his senses — the vision of destruction, the ringing in his ears, the choking dust. In defiance of this chaos, his thoughts sought possibilities.
Maybe she got his phone message and never got here.
Maybe they’re already safe, in another part of the city.
Maybe she heard the message and was already making her way back to him.
These thoughts circled through his mind like a toy train on its track, no sooner gone than they returned, while some other, darker knowledge moved him forward, toward a goal that was no longer where he had last seen it, toward a location that had vanished — the knowledge that he must lay aside this resistance, because the very place he could not bear to be was exactly the place he must seek.
52
Friday, July 14, 12:45 P.M.
Courthouse Plaza
The first hour passed in a warped version of time. What he waited and hoped for made the minutes seem too long, what he feared made them pass too quickly.
He knew the statistics. About ninety percent of survivors would be rescued in the first forty-five minutes. He watched in silence, anxiously studying every dazed creature who emerged from the ruins of the building and then every stretcher, and finally, every body bag. These were the “surface victims” — those able to walk out on their own and the ones who could be easily seen by rescuers. The next group must be found by a careful search of the rubble of the building. With luck, survivors would be discovered in the void spaces — pockets formed by the angles of collapse and by objects and materials in the building — a row of filing cabinets might prop up a portion of a fallen ceiling, the area under a sturdy desk might shelter someone from crushing debris.
At one point he became aware that his muscles ached from nothing more than tension, from the strain of keeping his emotions in check — knowing that any loss of control would mean the loss of this horrible privilege of nearness to the scene. At first, rescue workers had tried to force him away and he had missed seeing a few of the injured. But the director of the bomb squad activities was the man who had been at his home just that morning — that long-ago morning — and he took pity on Frank and allowed him to stand near where the first of the injured and the dead were brought out.
He also told the others that Frank had made the warning call, and some thanked him then — because even with such little warning they had gained a few advantages. Before the blast, they had been able to evacuate the courtyard and most of the building, so that relatively few people were in it when the largest device detonated. A fire department battalion chief was on-site, and a command center had already been set up to coordinate the activities of the bomb squad, paramedics, police, firefighters, and the technical rescue team. The first responding unit had been able to shut off the utilities so that the fire damage had been minimal.
The building, they told him, was made of reinforced concrete — if the older building had been bombed, the damage would have been more severe.
Again and again, they told him how much worse it might have been.
He tried to find comfort in that, and couldn’t.
A few of the rescuers and firefighters talked to him briefly as they passed by or while they waited for clearance to enter the building. They tried to give him a word of encouragement, to tell him more about what was going on.
Once the fire was out, the bomb squad went in first. Often bombers left secondary devices — insidiously designed to injure rescue personnel or to slow the rescue process and thereby raise the number of deaths the bomber had “scored.”
While the bomb squad looked for these devices, the Urban Search and Rescue teams — the USAR teams — prepared to enter the building as soon as possible. These technical rescue squads were elite teams of firefighters, as specialized in their work as SWAT teams were in the police department.
Still others interviewed survivors, asking, “Who was in there with you? Was anyone else in the office? Where did you last see this person?” and so on. Some survivors were unable to do more than gaze blankly at their rescuers, while others were frenzied in their desire to be farther away from the place, but most tried to concentrate, to recall the moment before the blast — doing their best to remain calm, to be precise — all while managing their own lingering terror and sudden exhaustion, the high-octane rush of relief and burden of guilt that often came to the rescued. Some were reunited with family members or with coworkers they had thought lost — some who had been little more than acquaintances now weepingly embraced.
Although the fire had been quickly extinguished, a few of the injured and many of the dead were terribly burned. Others had been crushed. Some were unrecognizable — the worst, hardly recognizable as human.
Of each of these, Frank made himself ask the questions:
