name, how could I not be sure who he was? He threw his arms around me and I melted-my brain didn’t register but my arms knew this overgrown bear of a man. It was miraculous to know someone, even if all I knew was that I knew him.
“Great to see you!” he shouted like he really meant it. He was huffing like he’d been running laps. Alongside him, a photographer in full battle gear-three cameras round his neck, flak jacket stuffed with lenses, batteries and memory cards-waited impatiently, legs twitching. “Are you covering this show?” Bill demanded. “Back in the game?”
“Yeah-sure,” I stammered and Billy thrust a card into my hand.
“My number’s there,” he said. “Call me-have to run.” He waved a finger at the photographer and they both took off, part of an army of ink-stained wretches pouring down the tunnel in the opposite direction.
I stuck the card in my pocket and shrugged at Max and the others. “I–I know him,” I smirked though it was all still a blank.
As soon as we stepped outside, the crowd noise swallowed us. The courtyard was packed, crowds swarming against barricades manned by lines of carabinieri in their silly black hats. A few buses and scooters puttered through the middle of the crowd like coffee through a spout. Signs bobbed in the thick air, French, German, English and some Cyrillic lettering joining the Italian. As we squeezed into the crowd, heads began to swivel upward, tracking an Air India jet making its approach. Murmurs and applause filtered in from all angles, until they filled the square.
“Singh,” Max said and his face went dark. He swept the crowd and then retraced the scan. “This way!” he said and the urgency in his voice was obvious. We pushed through the crowd, clearing people roughly out of our way, pushing hard for the center of the square. Max’s head was swiveling, searching, tracking something ahead of us. And then I saw him start, as though a shock had passed through him.
A moment later, a face appeared in the sky-no, in my head, it was in my head, but the way it looked was like it was floating translucent in the air above the courtyard. I could see through it or past it, but when I looked right at it, it had texture and shadows and substance. A youngish man, moving through the crowd, moving swiftly, purposefully, away from us. I knew this without knowing how I knew it. A moment later, I realized it had to be Max’s vision-the thought came to me before the image had ceased to be startling.
Next, in a progression I could barely understand, everything amplified and deepened. I jumped, all at once, inside the young man-feeling what he was feeling; rapid heartbeat and shallow rabbit’s breath, desperation and fear, fear of failure and fear of success. I could feel him now, somewhere just across the traffic island, moving through the crush, arms folded in front of his chest, sheltering the package there, the wires and plastic leading off the detonator on his chest. Suddenly I was pushing hard at the crowd, clearing them away rudely, sharply, yelling louder and moving faster. Kate and Tauber branched out behind me, apparently reacting to the same vision.
Max was ahead of us, moving fast-of course, people just got out of his way. He plunged into traffic, tipping his hand at a black-suited officer, who waved him on. The same cop jumped to stop us when we arrived three seconds later. “Max!” I shouted. I saw him turn, just a glance over his shoulder; the officer straightened like a ramrod and got the hell out of the way.
“Over there!” Max yelled, pointing toward the terminal exits. “Spread out!” The bomber was moving across the grain of the crowd and I kept riding his feelings. It was like a late-night drive, trying to hold onto a staticky distant radio broadcast that kept fading in and out-you held onto the fragments that made sense and tried to assemble the rest from context and guesswork. He wasn’t aware of us, the bomber wasn’t. He kept repeating the same frantic thoughts in succession. Get there. Not too soon. Get there. Not too soon. I kept waiting for something about the mission-the bomb, Singh, something — the kind of compulsion that could drive a person to suicide. But the connection ebbed instantly when I did, so I cleared my mind and returned to simply receiving what he was sending and following it. Necklaces and rings in the air rotated through his head in rotation with Get there. Not too soon.
A second later, I glimpsed a close-cropped haircut jerking through the crowd ahead and knew immediately this was him, this was the bomber, in plain sight, moving across the edges of the crowd where it was thinner and he could move faster. Tauber crossed over, moving to an angle where he could cut him off. I changed my angle to catch up behind them and threw myself through the crush. I could feel the boy’s desperation mounting, the sweat pouring down his face and chest, his hands twitching. Too soon, too soon. She’ll be here soon. His desperation matched my own. We’d come all this way and barely made it in time- if we were in time. Minutes to go-seconds? He still wasn’t aware of us-he wasn’t aware of anything now but her, the imminence of her. The plane had surely taxied in by now-she’d be at the gate anytime.
Tauber burst out of the crowd right behind the bomber, lifted his arms to grab him and-crack! — he was on the ground, writhing and quivering. I was there a second later-I reached for him but somehow managed to pull my hands back at the last second. The electricity made a crackling noise as it pulsed through his body. His skin was bluish and shimmering; the smell and sizzling noise were the same as in the back of Dave’s store in Florida.
Max rushed up, touched Tauber’s shoulder and the blue light drained off. “He’ll be okay,” he said. “Get after him!” The bomber had reached the edge of the traffic island-I could feel his satisfaction, a sense of finality, of relief. He’d made it. I anticipated his next step, jumping across traffic and making that last dash-a good run, but the last one-to the exit gate. To his target. But somehow, he stopped instead, lolling like he was right where he meant to be.
There was no one between us now. I ran, sprinting headlong, abandoning any concern about frightening or upsetting the crowd. But, with a couple yards to go, Max grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to the curb to watch. We had a front-row seat for the scuffle that made the news-the camera crew, in fact, stood right in front of us.
Five or six guys came from nowhere, swarming the bomber, wrestling and throwing him to the ground, pinning his arms behind him to eliminate any chance of tripping wires or throwing triggers. His shirt came open and the squares of plastic explosive on his chest, the wires and battery taped there, were suddenly visible to all. The crowd started to shriek and scatter in every direction. The panic spread like an infection through the crowd, starting close-by and gushing out in all directions, becoming more desperate with distance, blindness always worse than the most terrible sight.
Max pulled me the short distance back to Tauber-Kate was helping him regain his footing. His hair was sticking out in all directions and he was hissing like a dry cleaner.
“Are you alright?” Max asked.
“Fuck no, I’m not alright! What the hell happened?”
“You took a lightning bolt. I guess Marat can temper them enough to knock you over without killing you.”
“Ain’t that genteel of ‘im!” Tauber growled. He kept trying to lean against the lamppost but sparks kept flickering from his fingers when they got close together.
“I think the air shield would have protected you, if we’d known” Max offered, not that he sounded real confident.
“ Frying him first would protect me!” Tauber yelled. “Torching him down to his shoes would protect me!” They were arguing in the midst of a riot, understand-people rushing by, screaming, others rooted, paralyzed, watching the guards struggling with the bomber. He was still flailing and kicking, the whole group staggering back and forth until they finally tied his hands and clamped their own arms solidly around his neck and waist. Then the team lifted the bomber entirely off the ground, a van pulled up with perfect timing and they dragged him inside, shouting and protesting.
As the van made its way out of the square, the crowd seemed to get the message. Applause rippled through the courtyard and followed the van, lights flashing and siren whooping, as it pulled out of sight. We stood, deflated, in the midst of the cheering crowd, staring at each other blankly.
“So?” Kate said. “Are we done? Is that what we came for?”
People were filtering back into the square now that the drama had ended. We wandered to the corner where the guards had overpowered the bomber. Bits of wire and one brand-new Nike sneaker remained at the curb.
“Expensive shoe,” I said, “for an anarchist.”
“Too far away,” Tauber growled, gauging the distance to the gate. “Couldn’a done much damage from here if he wanted to.”
“He wanted to,” Kate said. “He had to. He was panicked, running late, frantic to make up time, I could feel it.
