The thing that horrified him the most was his own unbidden physical response to her nearness.
The attraction she held for him was incredible.
She leaned closer still, putting her face next to his, her lips brushing against his ear.
“You know what I came here for,” she said. “You know what I want.”
Roma’s throat felt dry. His heart was pounding.
He breathed. Breathed again.
He took his hand off his gun and reached out to pull her against him. And as her soft flesh touched him, warm against his skin, he glanced at the mirror and smiled a small, private smile.
NINETEEN
The city was in shock.
There was no other word for the malaise that gripped New York. Not even the World Trade Center bombing had so tested the people and resources of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.
Of course, the World Trade Center bombing hadn’t taken out the heart of the city.
Times Square was nearly as packed with people at this moment as it had been when the explosion occurred. The red and blue strobes from the emergency vehicles that ringed the blast site and the arc lights that the rescue workers had brought in were fading, giving way to the slanting rays of dawn.
The day promised to be clear and cold, and the early morning light threw everything into stark relief. Ten- foot-tall temporary chimneys, hastily put in place by city workers to cover broken steam pipes in the streets, spouted clouds of vapor, shielding workers from the hot blasts and directing the flow upward. Wisps of fog from the chimneys flowed around and through the site, wreathing it in clouds and backlit rainbows, giving it an otherworldly appearance. People with acronyms — FBI, NYCFD, ATF, NYPD — silk-screened onto their nylon coats crawled though the wreckage, sifting the debris for the smallest fragments that might lead them to those responsible for the atrocity. Members of the National Guard, hastily mobilized, kept gawkers at bay so that the site would remain undisturbed — if that was a word that could be applied to what was essentially a bomb crater — except by the rescue workers. Everybody, no matter how intent they were on their search, gave way to emergency workers and the teams combing the wreckage with dogs. The dogs were looking for victims. Their handlers were praying for survivors.
The long night had been punctuated by this search. A dog would whine and scratch at the crumpled remains of a massive neon sign, the tangled web of a broken bleacher, the tortured fragments of a skyscraper. An ants’ nest of activity would erupt around the excited dog. Rescue workers would bring an amazing array of instruments to bear on the spot — infrared heat sensors, supersensitive microphones, tiny video cameras on flexible probes, ultrasound machines, metal detectors, motion detectors, X-rays.
If there was even the slightest indication that the person trapped inside was still breathing, no effort was spared to shift the wreckage and get him or her out. Cranes, bags that could be inserted into the smallest crevices and then inflated to lift the obstructions slowly and gently, levers, braces, and plain old manpower were used to get to the people who needed help. But as time dragged on, the desperate effort to extract survivors was giving way to the heartbreaking act of marking remains. Fluorescent orange flags on slender wire stakes fluttered in the breeze, each representing a life lost. Eventually, when it was clear that there were no more survivors, the grim task of retrieving the corpses would begin.
And through it all, the men and women in the nylon coats continued their search for evidence.
Half a mile away, the morning light slanted through the stained glass windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The air of the church, heavy with incense and smoke from thousands of candles lining the walls and altars, took on a rainbow hue. But the people who filled the pews were immune to its beauty. Many of them had been in Times Square when it happened. More had seen it on CNN or the local news. Some had lost friends and family. The deadly blast and the screams of the dying echoed in their memories. Nothing, not even the solace they’d sought here in an all-night mass for the victims, would ever silence them.
The meeting took place a little past noon in a sub-basement conference room at UpLink’s corporate headquarters on Rosita Avenue, in San Jose. With its clean lines, direct overhead lights, beige carpeting, and coffee machine, it looked very much like the upstairs conference rooms minus the windows. But being sealed away from a view of the Mount Hamilton foothills was only its most superficial difference.
Access was restricted to those in Gordian’s inner circle, all of whom were provided with digital key codes that unlocked the door. Two-foot-thick concrete walls and acoustical paneling soundproofed the room from the keenest human ears. Steel reinforcements within the walls had been implanted with noise generators and other state-of- the-art masking systems to thwart monitoring of electronic communications. Sweep teams went through the room on a regular basis, and telephones, computers, and videoconferencing equipment going in or out of it were checked for bugs using spectrum and X-ray analysis.
While Gordian felt the term “secure” was a relative one, and supposed that someone who was crafty enough, determined enough, and had enough sophisticated hardware at his disposal could still find a way to listen in on his top-level discussions, he was confident that this part of his operational center was as resistant to eavesdropping as caution and countersurveillance technology allowed. In the comint game, the most you could ever do was stay one step ahead of the droops — a word of Vince Scull’s creation meaning “dirty rotten snoops.”
Now Gordian looked at the faces around the conference table, considering how best to start a meeting that was light-years from business-as-usual. Present in the flesh were his Foreign Affairs Consultant Alex Nordstrum, Vice President of Special Projects Megan Breen, and Security Chief Peter Nimec. On a video docking station across the table, Vince’s puffy-eyed, basset-hound face was scowling at him over a high-band satellite link from Kaliningrad.
Gordian took a deep breath. He had observed that, to a person, their features reflected his own low, grim mood.
“I want to thank all of you for coming in virtually without advance notice,” he said. “I don’t know how many of you lost friends or loved ones in Times Square last night. For those who might have, my profound condolences.” He paused and turned his gaze toward Megan. “Have you gotten any word from your brother and sister-in-law?”
A trim brunette in her late thirties, Megan looked at him with alert, sapphire-blue eyes.
“Not yet,” she said, “but that isn’t any reason to assume they were hurt. The long-distance phone lines to and from New York are choked.”
Megan’s unworried tone didn’t fool Gordian. He had once — long ago — made the mistake of thinking she was just another starched and stuffy executive clone cranked out by the Harvard Business School — in her case, one with an added sheepskin in psychology from Columbia. An executive clone who was apt to play mind games, then. That had been pure bias, a last prickly vestige of the blue-collar resentments that were the bulk of his familial inheritance. It had taken him years to discard his unfair, limiting preconceptions about those with upper-class backgrounds. Dan Parker had been the first to make him see things differently. Meg had taken him the rest of the way down the road.
In a sense, though, those stereotypical notions had worked in Meg’s favor when he’d originally employed her as a human resource executive/headhunter for the R&D divisions. He’d wanted someone who could make hiring and firing decisions in a detached, intelligent manner, and that she had done. But he’d also gotten an inspired thinker, and a trusted confidant, in the bargain. And that was something he hadn’t expected of her.
“Pete, you have people out east. You think they can do anything to help Megan find out about her relatives?” he said.
Nimec tipped his narrow jaw downward slightly, his tightly wound version of a nod.
“I’m sure they can,” he said.
“Good.” Gordian was quiet a second, his eyes moving around the table again. “I think we’d better do some
