He saw a strip of night sky between the crenellated rooftops beyond the stairwell exit, and then cold air came sweeping over him and he was out on the street.
Even here, two long avenues west of the square, he could hear shouts of excitement and whoops of laughter bubbling up above muddier layers of sound, a dense torrent of human voices rushing between the high office towers on either side of him.
He turned north on Sixth Avenue, then continued at an unhurried pace, his leather jacket creaking a little as he adjusted the shoulder strap of his athletic bag. The bag was dark blue nylon, very inconspicuous. Still, the police had set up sawhorses at the intersections, and it was likely they would conduct spot inspections of carry bags and packages. The plan, therefore, was for Sadov to wait outside the checkpoint at the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street until the primary explosion drew their attention elsewhere. Only then would he briefly join the surging press of bodies and drop his bag. At the same time, Gilea’s man Korut, along with two of Nick Roma’s soldiers, would do the same at the other three corners of the square. Each of their satchel charges was on a ten-minute time-delay fuse and would detonate at the height of the crowd’s confusion.
Those within the kill zones would be ripped to shreds. Hundreds, possibly thousands, more would be injured during the pandemonium, trampled by the stampeding herd of humanity. And the screams of the dead and the dying would echo over streets awash in blood.
Sadov swung west on Fifty-third and looked up ahead, where a blue-and-white police barricade stood crosswise in the middle of the street, a huddle of uniformed officers around it, laughing, talking, standing with their arms crossed over their chests and very little to do but collect their overtime pay.
Slowing in the long shadow of an office building, Sadov checked his watch. In mere minutes, he thought, the policemen would have their hands full of things to do. Whatever the final number of casualties in the bombings, this night would be remembered ten centuries later, as the world turned toward yet another new millennium, and common minds filled with dread of things to come, and the leaders of nations yet unborn wondered what sins might have inspired such awesome rage.
On loan from the FAA at the police commissioner’s personal request, the bomb detection team had brought two of their best dogs to the scene. Fay, whose name was an obvious homage to her organizational keepers, was a five-year-old black Labrador that had sniffed out suitcase bombs at Kennedy International Airport four times in the past two years. Hershey, a Doberman retriever, had used his phenomenally sensitive nose to set off a red light at the Republican Convention the previous summer, preventing a catastrophic explosion by alerting security personnel to a chunk of A-3 plastic that had been concealed in a vase of flowers on the speaker’s platform. Though generally regarded as the smartest dog on the team, Hershey’s greatest weakness was a tendency to be sidetracked by the smell of chocolate… hence, the origin of his name.
Agent Mark Gilmore had been with the FAA’s civil security branch for a dozen years, and had been a canine handler almost half that long. He loved the dogs and knew their outstanding capabilities, but was also highly sensitive to their limitations. And from the outset, he had been concerned that his current assignment just wasn’t doable.
The bomb dogs were most effective at searching relatively closed-in areas, or at least areas in which distractions could be kept to a minimum, such as jetliner cabins, airport baggage holds, hotel rooms, and, as in the case of the Republican convention, empty auditoriums. The more sensory input they were hit with, the greater the chance they would be fooled or simply wander off track. Large spaces with open access and lots of hubbub diminished their ability to fix on the minute olfactory traces of explosive chemicals. Times Square on a normal night would be tricky; tonight, when it seemed like a cross between a mosh pit and the Mardi gras, it would be overwhelming — a hectic, blaring jumble of sights, sounds, and odors.
Basic movement was another difficulty. Earlier in the night, when the crowd was much thinner, the dogs still had had some roving room. Now, however, the crush was all but impenetrable and they were getting stressed. Which meant keeping them on a short leash, and narrowing their range to cordoned-off peripheries, like the restricted zone around the VIP stand.
A further problem for Gilmore was making sure the excited animals didn’t become dehydrated, a condition that could throw their systems into shock, even kill them, within minutes if it were severe enough. At 150 pounds each, they needed plenty to drink to prevent their revved-up canine metabolisms from overheating. Mindful of this, Gilmore had brought several gallon jugs of water in the bomb-detection van parked outside One Times Square, and the panting dogs had led him in that direction twice in the last hour.
He had been standing to one side of the stage, watching Rob Zyman and Joleen Reese take their places beside the mayor, when he noticed Fay tugging at the leash again. This had gotten him kind of disappointed. In these last few moments before the countdown, he had wanted to stick close to the worn but not worn-out folkies for a reason that was, he had to admit, not entirely professional. Gilmore had been a Zyman fan since his older brother had come home with his first album, Big City Ramble, back in the late sixties and, Zyman’s public appearances being few and far between nowadays, he’d figured this might be his last chance to see him perform before he slung his battered Gibson guitar over his shoulder and rambled off down the lonesome highway. Even if all he did was sing a verse or two of “Auld Lang Syne” in his famed and often-parodied sandpaper rasp, Gilmore had figured it would be an event worth catching.
But then Fay had started panting and tugging, signaling him in no uncertain terms that she needed her radiator filled.
Now he was making for the van with the dogs out ahead of him on about six inches of leash, staying inside the area that had been cleared below the stage, Fay’s tongue hanging halfway to the pavement. Hershey, in this instance, had stayed on the job, his head slouched low, sniffing this way and that, acting as if he’d gone along with his partner just out of canine chivalry.
Suddenly, thirty feet or so from where the van was parked, Hershey stopped dead in his tracks and turned to the left — toward the crowd — whining and barking, his triangular ears angling back against his head. Gilmore looked down at him, puzzled. The dog was frantic. Odder still, Fay was also barking like crazy, facing in the same direction as Hershey, her thirst seemingly forgotten.
Unease creeping up on him, Gilmore added more slack to the leash. The dogs began pulling to the left, hunting further, almost leading him into a collision with the horizontal plank of a police barricade. He made them heel with a sharp command, then steered them to a gap between two sawhorses, his eyes scanning the crowd.
All he could see was people. Thousands and thousands of them, crammed so close together they seemed to form a single amorphous organism. Most were looking at the stage or the Panasonic screen in anticipation of the countdown, now less than ten minutes away.
Then Gilmore spotted the vender’s booth about ten feet up ahead at the corner of Forty-second Street, the words “FRESH DONUTS” emblazoned across its front in big block letters. His gaze might have passed over it except for a couple of curious things: the glass display cases were empty, and the vender was exiting it through a side door in what appeared to be something of a hurry.