Politika

Forty-fifth Street and Broadway. I’m being told the ABC television network, which had been broadcasting from that location, is permitting it to be used as a pool camera by the rest of the news media until other transmissions can be restored in the area. There are no pictures coming out of Times Square at street level… whatever happened has caused extensive equipment damage… and while there are unconfirmed reports that the explosion was caused by a bomb, we want to caution you that there is no, I repeat, no evidence at all that it was a nuclear device, as stated by a commentator on one of the other networks. Word from the White House is that the President is expected to make a televised statement within the hour…”

Gordian felt an icy finger touch his spine as he suddenly recalled a phrase he hadn’t used, or heard anyone else use, in many years: Spooky’s working. It was yet another special delivery coming to him from the Vietnam of thirty years ago. The Spookies had been AC-47s mounted with 7.62mm machine guns that would stalk enemy positions in the black of night, unleashing sustained curtains of fire at a rate of six thousand rounds a minute, every third or fourth round a tracer. While American ground troops at a distance would find reassurance in the solid red wall of illumination that had poured down from the unseen aircraft, Charlie, huddled in his trenches, had been terrified by those firing missions. For him, it must have felt as if Heaven itself were venting its wrath. As if there were no safety anywhere.

“… Wait, just a moment,” the anchor was blurting, her hand held to her earpiece. “I hear now that the governor of New York has issued a general curfew in the city and that it will be strictly enforced by police as well as National Guard units. Repeating what I just said, a curfew has gone into effect throughout the five boroughs of New York…”

Ah God, Gordian thought. Ah, God.

Tonight, in America, Spooky was working.

SEVENTEEN

NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 1, 2000

Police commissioner Bill Harrison never heard the blast that killed his wife.

There were, however, many other memories of that terrible event — far too many — that would haunt him as long as he lived.

He would remember sitting beside Rosetta on the VIP platform, holding her hand, one bemused eye on the folk-singing duo that had joined the mayor center stage, the other having been snagged by a couple of FAA bomb- sniffing dogs making a commotion some yards to his right. He would remember spotting a vender’s stand over there, and thinking wryly that the dogs had caught a whiff of something far less lethal than an explosive, unless they happened to be on diets that prohibited vanilla custard donuts and such. But then he’d noticed the serious look on the K-9 officer’s face, noticed his body language as he spoke to the man in the vender’s smock, and become more concerned. He had been doing police work for a quarter century, and started out his career as a foot patrolman in upper Manhattan, and he knew the cautious, attentive habits cops observed when approaching suspicious persons.

He’s staying about eight, ten feet in front of the guy so he can watch his movements, watch his hands, making sure they stay in sight, Harrison had thought. And he’s keeping his own hand near his sidearm.

Harrison would always remember feeling his stomach slip toward the ground when he saw the vender reach into his pocket, then saw the cop reaching for his weapon. Always remember his sudden fear, and the sense that time was accelerating, running much too fast, like a movie video that had been fast-forwarded in the middle of a critical scene. And then his gaze had swung to the Panasonic screen above him, and he’d noted the time display read 11:56, and thought, Four minutes, midnight on the head, that’s when they’d want to do it all right, unless something happens that makes them get to it faster.

He would always remember whipping his head around toward Rosetta and his daughter, Tasheya, thinking he had to get them off the stage, get them away from there, and then his fingers had tightened around his wife’s hand and he’d risen off his chair, pulling at her arm with wild urgency, and she had given him a surprised, questioning look, she had mouthed the words “What’s wrong?”—but before he could give her an answer everything had dissolved into a blinding flash of nova brilliance, and he’d felt a blast of superheated air smack his body, felt the ground rattle and tremble, felt himself being hurled off his feet, tumbling helplessly in that hellish, searing bright light, and he’d held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand, held onto Rosie’s hand—

Then suddenly the enveloping brightness peeled apart, and the heat, though high, was no longer a solid thing. Harrison became aware that he was still on the stand, sprawled on his side, his left cheek mashed into a rough, splintery nest of debris. His face felt wet, sticky, and the world seemed to have gone into a sickening tilt. Somehow his feet were higher up than his head.

There was fire and smoke all around him. Broken glass was hailing down from above. Sirens shrilled into the night and there were people everywhere, many of them bloody and motionless, others running, crawling, screaming, wailing, crying out to one another. Everywhere.

Harrison heard loud crashes from somewhere, heard the groan of buckling metal above him. He realized dimly that the platform had collapsed near the middle, its ends pitching downward and inward, accounting for his weird, dizzy angle. It was as if he were lying on a slantboard. Flames were crackling and spitting up through the planks, and the once-neat rows of folding chairs had been thrown about and upended, scattered like the pieces in a game of jacks. Huge blocks of concrete stretched endlessly across a zone of devastation that looked more like a moonscape than Times Square.

Harrison saw a gigantic toadstool of fire throbbing and churning somewhere off to his right, realized it was swelling out of a huge crater, an actual crater, and instantly decided that must have been where the vender’s booth had been, where that cop and his dogs had been standing, where the detonation had occurred…

Somehow that thought jerked his mind out of the hazy suspension of shock in which it had drifted for the first seconds after the blast, and an incredible realization descended upon him with anvil force — he had not yet checked on Rosie or Tasheya.

Until now only half-conscious of the position in which he’d landed, Harrison realized that his left hand was stretched out behind him, and that it was still gripping his wife’s smaller, far softer hand.

“Rosie?” he groaned weakly.

There was no answer.

“Rosie…?”

Still no answer.

Harrison forced himself to move. The grate of complaining metal overhead had become louder and more ominous, jolting him with a fresh sense of fear and dismay. He rolled over stiffly toward his wife, groaning her name again, afraid to ask himself why she had not yet answered.

“Rosie, are you—”

His sentence broke off as he saw her lying on her back, one eye closed, the other one staring blankly upward from a face that was covered with blood and cement dust, giving it the appearance of a ghastly Kabuki mask. Her hair was in disarray and there was a dark, murky puddle of wetness around the back of her head. Except for the arm he was clinging to, she was buried under a dune of jumbled wreckage from her neck to her waist.

He couldn’t see her breathing.

“Honey, please, please, we’ve got to get out of here, find Tasheya. You have to get up…”

She didn’t move. The dead expression on her face didn’t change.

Frantic, knowing in his heart that she was gone, that any human being would have to be crushed under a pile of rubble that huge, Harrison climbed up on one knee and tugged at her arm, tugged at it almost savagely, tugged at it with sobs choking his throat and tears streaming down his cheeks.

It came away from her body on the fifth tug, severed above the elbow, leaving a jagged shoot of bone protruding from her buried shoulder.

Harrison stared down at her, his eyes feverishly wide in their sockets.