He let Fay and Hershey lead him forward again. They went for the booth like homing missiles, growling, the whites of their eyes showing large. Intimidated by their size and agitated behavior, the sea of revelers parted to let them through.
As they came within a yard of him, the vender halted between the snarling dogs and the booth, his eyes dropping to look at them, then leaping up to Gilmore.
“Excuse me, sir,” Gilmore said, looking steadily at him. The dogs were yanking at the leash so hard he thought they would wrench his shoulder from its socket. “Would you mind stepping aside a moment? I’d like to have a peek at your booth.”
The vender stared at him.
“Why?”
“Just routine,” Gilmore said.
The guy stood there, his eyes flicking between Gilmore and the dogs. Gilmore observed that a sheen of perspiration had formed on his cheeks above his beard.
“I’m busy packing up,” the vender said. Licking his lips. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”
“Sir,” Gilmore said, his internal bells of alarm clanging stridently now, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to move out of my way.”
The guy stood there.
Swallowed twice.
Then he shoved his left hand into his coat pocket.
“Go fuck yourself, American,” he said.
And pulled a small cylindrical object from his pocket and gave one end of it a twist with his left hand.
Gilmore started to reach for his sidearm, but never got the chance to draw it from its holster.
Insofar as what happened next, however, that really made no difference at all.
The cop in the ESU radio surveillance van had enough time to notice a blip in his monitoring equipment, some kind of low-frequency transmission in the thirty-to-fifty-megahertz range — less than you might pick up from a pager or cellular phone, but much more than you’d get out of an electronic car-door opener of the sort drivers carried as key-chain fobs.
He turned to his partner on the stool beside him, figuring it was sufficiently unusual to be worth mentioning.
“Gene,” he said, “what do you ma—?”
The roar of the blast sucked the words out of his mouth as the van, its crew, and everything else in it were vaporized by a sweeping wave of fire.
On the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, Gilea had been waiting for midnight, her detonator tucked in her palm, when the explosion filled the sky with unimaginable brilliance. The sound of it came next, rolling over her with physical force, hammering her eardrums, sending tremors through her bones, shaking the ground under her feet. Car and burglar alarms began howling everywhere around her. Windows shattered in office buildings up and down the avenue.
Breathless with exhilaration, Gilea reached out to steady herself against a wall, facing west toward Times Square, her eyes reflecting jags of light from the red-orange mountain of flame rising above it.
“Magnificent,” she muttered. “My God, it is magnificent.”
SIXTEEN
It was five minutes past midnight in New York.
Where the television cameras had been quick-cutting between scenes of raucous celebration in Times Square, they now showed a mass of orange flame, shot with glare, bulging upward within a spray of smaller blazes that, viewed from above, resembled glowing matches scattered across a dark tabletop.
His face ashen, horror and disbelief slapping through his brain, he gripped the armrest of his sofa with a hand that would not stop trembling. The glass of Courvoisier that had slipped from his fingers lay overturned on the floor, a wet purple splotch soaking into the carpet around it. He was oblivious to the spreading stain, oblivious to the fact that he had dropped the glass, oblivious to everything but the unfolding tragedy on the screen.
Five past midnight.
Ten minutes ago, the people of the world had been about to greet the new century as if they were gathered at the railroad station to watch the circus roll into town — but instead something that looked much more like the Apocalypse had come thundering down the track. And strangely, in those first numbing instants after the blast, Gordian had tried to resist the truth of what had happened, pushing back against its intrusion, trying to make himself believe it was all a mistake, that some technician at the television station had hit the wrong switch, run some god-awful disaster film instead of the Times Square broadcast.
But he’d never been one to duck reality for very long, especially when it was coming on broadside.
Now, a pulverized expression on his features, he stood motionless, holding onto the couch for support, holding on as though the floor had tilted sharply underneath him. Yet as he stared at the television, largely overcome with shock, a small part of his mind continued to function on an analytical level, automatically interpreting the images in front of him, adjusting for scale, calculating the extent of the destruction. It was an ability — some might have called it a curse — he had brought home from Vietnam and, like a black-box flight recorder aboard an aircraft, that embedded observational mechanism would keep working even if the rest of him were emotionally totaled.
Gordian drew in a long, shaky breath, but still didn’t think he could move without tripping over his own feet. Standing there with the television flashing its nightmarish overhead view of Times Square, and the news anchor stammering off disconnected snippets of information about what had happened, he remembered Vietnam, remembered the bombing runs, remembered the flames dotting the jungle like angry red boils. Whether playing tag with a Russian surface-to-air missile or looking down at a VC bunker that had just become the recipient of a five- hundred-pound bomb, he had known how to read the fiery dots and dashes of aerial warfare as signs of success, failure, or danger. He supposed he’d never expected that skill would be of use to him in civilian life, and right now would have given anything not to have found out he was wrong.
Gordian forced himself to concentrate on the CNN report. The anchorwoman’s voice seemed dim and distant, although he knew the volume on his set was turned up high enough to be audible several rooms over. Lonely, missing Ashley, he’d been listening to the New Year’s 2000 coverage from the den, where he’d gone to pour himself a brandy, and had heard what he had heard loud and clear.
Ashley, he thought. She had phoned at ten to say she was staying with her sister in San Francisco, and he briefly considered calling her there now. But what would he say? That he didn’t want to be alone at a time like this? That he ached for the comforting warmth of someone he loved? Given how he’d been ignoring her almost all the time lately, his need seemed a selfish, unfair thing.
“… again, I want to remind you that what we are seeing is live video from atop the Morgan Stanley Tower at
