Everyone stopped dead on the stairs with a collective gasp as the concrete drunkenly swayed back and forth under our feet. I looked up immediately at the ceiling, along with everyone else, suddenly feeling the hard beating of my heart as I wondered if it was about to drop down on top of us.
“Oh, my God, Mike! Look!” said Brooklyn, elbowing me in the neck as she pointed up at the stairwell window.
I looked.
Behind the courthouses, up on Broadway, about two long blocks away, I saw 26 Federal Plaza, the huge, monolithic FBI headquarters building. Something was wrong. Smoke was rising in the air above it. The smoke seemed to be coming from many of its seemingly blown-open windows.
Emily!
I watched helplessly as more of its windows blew out simultaneously, almost in a left-to-right diagonal line, flashing with a blinding white light.
I looked silently at what happened next.
The top floors of 26 Fed seemed to tremble and waft back and forth. There was a thunderclap crack of concrete and a horrid creak and groan of shearing steel. Then the top stories of the building freed themselves from their blown moorings and slowly slid away into empty air.
“Dear holy God,” I said. The building around us rocked again as most of 26 Fed’s million-pound avalanche of glass and stone crashed down onto the streets below.
When I peeled my eyes away from the mushrooming dust cloud out the window, I could hear somebody crying. It was the mayor, two steps above me. She was bawling her eyes out.
“They’re dead,” she kept saying as she crumpled to the floor. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Every cop there turned and looked at each other as the dust plume rose into the sky. Doyle and Arturo and Brooklyn and Chief Fabretti. The shock was fine. What wasn’t so fine was the fear. The pale and shivering crazed looks of fear.
“Déjà vu all over again,” said Doyle, licking his lips. He had his gun in his hand. I gently helped him put it away.
“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy,” said Arturo hysterically.
I put my arm on Arturo’s shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I was speechless. He was in shock, the same as me. He was also right.
Then I was running down the stairs two by two, speed-dialing Emily as I began to pray that she miraculously might still be alive.
Chapter 61
I hit the street and ran as fast as I could up narrow Saint Andrew’s Plaza toward the destruction.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky above the buildings. A misty cloud of gray dust was above it. It kept billowing wider and wider. Within the expanding gray cloud was a confetti-like, glittering mass of debris that I realized after a moment was paper.
I kept trying to call Emily as I ran, but her phone kept kicking into voice mail.
Maybe she’s just on the phone, I thought with desperate hope. Or her phone needs charging. Or the cell sites are down.
As I neared Foley Square, the Irish prayer to Saint Michael, the patron saint of cops, which Seamus had made me memorize when I graduated from the academy, suddenly popped into my head.
Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in this hour of conflict. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and... something, something... thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
“And please let Emily be okay, God,” I whispered. “Let me have this one. You have to let me have just this one, please. Amen.”
Fire-truck horns blatted and blasted in the distance as I finally sprinted past the row of Corinthian columns fronting the Thurgood Marshall courthouse into Foley Square. I was going at a pretty good clip, but when I glanced up and got my first good look at 26 Fed, I immediately slowed, then abruptly stopped in my tracks and just stood there in the street staring up, completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing.
Twenty-Six Federal Plaza’s normally perfectly sleek rectilinear forty-one-story glass-and-stone slab now looked like a giant cereal box that had been chewed up by a rabid pit bull. I grimaced at the grid of exposed offices in the horrifically wrecked upper half of the skyscraper. Everything was completely pulverized. Every ruined nook and cranny was filled with smoking wreckage.
An even harder pulse of dread shuddered through me as I suddenly noticed that what remained of the structure was still visibly swaying back and forth. I gripped down hard on my cell phone, wondering if I was about to watch the rest of it go, about to see it start pancaking down like the Twin Towers on 9/11.
When it didn’t happen immediately, I started racking my brain, trying to remember the one or two times I had been in the FBI building. I tried to think what floor Emily’s office or morning meeting room might have been on, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember. All I could do was stand there feeling numb as I stared up at the torn-apart office tower.
I wasn’t the only one. All over Foley Square, I suddenly noticed people standing silently out on the steps of the courthouses and on the sidewalks in front of the government buildings. The ones who weren’t filming with their smartphones were like me — just standing there frozen, a regiment of jaw-dropped statues staring up.
Somehow, after a minute or two, I shook myself out of my stupor and continued haltingly up Lafayette Street. When I got to the next corner, at Worth Street, I looked to the left — west, toward Broadway.
When I saw the devastation up close for the first time, I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.
How could anyone?
It looked like the entire top half of 26 Federal Plaza had fallen into Worth Street, filling it up like dirt in a trench. Through the concrete dust, I could make out a dark, immense, almost three-story mound of debris that completely blocked the street and both sidewalks.
At its top, a half dozen steel girders stuck up crookedly like a stand of burned, branchless trees. Around the girders, huge folded sections of the office building’s distinctive facade were slumped over on themselves like unspooled bolts of cloth. In the warm breeze that hit my sweating face, I smelled the acrid, industrial stink of burned metal and plastic.
A falling, flapping sheet of paper suddenly hit me in the temple like a tap, and I began shuffling forward at the terrible mound through the haze.
Chapter 62
There was a soft flapping sound as a steady rain of printer-paper sheets fell down around me. The dust above must have been doing something to the light, because everything was tinted with a strange, unreal bluish tinge.
I walked up the wide sidewalk around a haphazard maze of splintered desks, smashed office chairs, and cracked computer screens. I blinked down at an intact framed bachelor’s degree from Tulane University propped up against the gutter as if someone had placed it there.
As I continued my approach, a tall, skinny black bike messenger with a scratched face silently staggered past in the street, covered in a pale-gray coating of dust.
Then I came closer and saw something really amazing.
People were already up on the mound of debris, a dozen or so people. There were a few uniformed cops, but mostly they were civilians — office workers, a guy in a white doctor’s coat, a loose line of people silently passing down debris and rubble.
I climbed up over some chunks of concrete, immediately joining them. As the dry, stale taste of concrete and drywall dust filled my nostrils and mouth, I accepted a huge hunk of concrete from a short, Italian-looking guy in a ruined pinstriped suit above me. As I turned to heave it, I saw that a burly uniformed security guard had arrived behind me, waiting to accept it.