By 12:08 the boy had been freed from underneath the beam and wheeled away on a gurney to exultant cheers from rescue workers. But neither they nor their lifesaving equipment were about to gain a respite: someone had been heard screaming for help underneath yet another pile of rubble across the street.
With the police, medical teams, and firefighters on Forty-fourth Street struggling to their job under these hazardous, chaotic conditions, it was simplicity itself for Nick Roma’s man Bakach to slip past their attention, drop his satchel charge on the ground near the EMS vehicle, and then nudge it under the vehicle’s chassis with the toe of his shoe.
Minutes after the sidewalk triage was set up outside her window, the barmaid on shift at Jason’s Ring, a tavern on Forty-fourth Street, began passing out bottled drinking water to grateful rescue workers and victims. There was a large stock in the basement and her boss had been hauling it up himself by the carton, totally unconcerned with what it was costing him in future profits.
The barmaid had just gone to the rear of the tavern for a fresh supply when she heard a loud boom behind her on the street, snapped her head around in terror, and saw the EMS vehicle blow apart in a dazzling orange-blue fireball. A millisecond later, smoking hunks of wreckage came streaking through the window of the tavern, smashing it to countless pieces, slamming into walls, breaking bottles, crashing onto the bartop like some bizarre meteor shower. The blast of heat that came scorching through the broken window at the same time rocked her back on her heels as the ambulance and everyone around it — rescue workers, police, patients, everyone—was incinerated.
Behind her, staring out the shattered window of the bar, her boss stood with his box opener in his hand, scarcely able to credit his eyes, telling himself that what he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, had to be some kind of horrible dream.
Tragically, this wasn’t the case — although it would be a long, long time before either of them was able to sleep without having the explosion replay itself in their darkest nightmares.
His face smudged with soot and tears, Bill Harrison was digging madly through the remains of the platform, screaming his daughter’s name, bellowing her name over and over, trying to find her, half-crazed with grief, shock, and desperation. His glassy, darting eyes were those of a man who had experienced what he’d thought would be the worst, only to be overtaken by the fear that it was but a prelude to even deeper horror.
He crawled through the wreckage on his hands and knees, scooping up chunks of concrete, sharp pieces of glass, splintered wooden boards — anything that might be concealing some trace of his youngest child. The tips of his fingers were skinned and blistered from the burning planks and red-hot bits of metal that he had grabbed and then tossed aside in his frantic search.
Exhausted and winded, he shouted her name again, his voice cracking this time, fresh tears blearing his vision. He felt an unmanageable tide of grief rise in his chest and smashed the piece of debris he was holding against the planks, smashed it down once and then again, smashed it in hopeless rage and loss, and was about to sledge it down a third time when a hand fell on his shoulder.
He looked up at the face above him.
Blinked.
“Baby?” he said, sounding as if he’d been jolted out of a trance. He covered her hand with his own. Needing to touch it, to feel her, before he would let himself believe she was really standing there. “Tasheya? My God, I thought you… your mother…”
His daughter nodded wordlessly, crying, tightening her grip on his shoulder. Her cheek and forehead were gashed, and the sleeve of her tattered coat was soaked in blood, but she was alive. Sweet mercy, alive. That singer, Zyman, was with her, helping to support her with one arm, though he was also bleeding and nearly as unsteady as she was.
“Cing’mon, man. We gotta get down off this stage while we can,” he said, reaching out to Harrison. “Ain’t gonna be much longer before it collapses altogether.”
Harrison grabbed hold of his hand, let himself be helped to his feet, and then was crushing Tasheya to him, feeling her chin press into the hollow of his neck, feeling the warm flood of her tears against his face. And for a brief moment, standing there amid the destruction, he understood that, while things might never be okay for him again — no, not even close to okay — there was reason to hope they would eventually get better.
“Our friend’s right,” he said finally, nodding toward Zyman. “We’d better go.”
EIGHTEEN
In his office at the Platinum Club, Nick Roma sat in pensive silence, his lights out, the dance hall on the floor below him silent. It was two o’clock in the morning. All but a handful of the people who had begun the night shaking their asses off down there had left hours ago, their partying having come to a finish after news of the Times Square explosion infiltrated the room like a plague virus. The few who remained were mostly core members of his crew, men who wouldn’t give a damn about anything except getting drunk at the bar.
Of course, he had known what was going to happen, known that the New Year’s celebration would become a national death rite before it was all over. But somehow, it wasn’t until he had seen the reports on television that he grasped the enormity of the destruction he’d helped bring about.
Nick sat in the darkness, not making a sound, thinking. He’d noticed there was very little sound out on the street, either. Every now and then the lights of a passing car would sweep across the windows overlooking the avenue, throwing a crazy quilt of shadows over his features, but otherwise the people down there had disappeared. They had seen lightning strike suddenly from the sky and burrowed down into their holes like frightened animals.
Could anyone really get away with what he’d been part of? If he was linked to it, the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, on this particular night, in the heart of its largest city… The country had never taken a hit like this before, and the pressure on law-enforcement agencies to find those behind it would be tremendous.
Roma pondered that for a moment. Could it be they would wind up tripping over each other’s feet? He supposed there was that danger for them. In the horse race to see which agency could make the first arrests, they might conceal leads, refuse to share information. Such things had happened before in investigations that threatened to become trouble for him, and he’d turned the situation to good advantage every time.
Still, he’d always been someone who dealt with expedients. His concerns were with running his business interests, not radical politics. He neither knew nor cared why Vostov had become involved in this affair, and had made it clear to his messengers that, while preferring to avoid a rift with the organizatsiya, he would not be controlled by anyone in Moscow. If Vostov wanted to reach out for assistance in smuggling the C-4 into the U.S., it was going to cost him. And if he wanted him to provide a broader range of support to Gilea and her group, it would cost even more. In money, and in favors owed.
A million-dollar payment from the Russians had settled his misgivings enough to win his participation, but Roma still wondered if he had gotten in over his head. He supposed he would feel less vulnerable when the strike team was out of the country…