She has not cleaned the pistol, has not wanted to think about the pistol at all. Now here it is in her hand again, with her non-blind son staring at it and her with a mix of horror and fascination she cannot bear seeing. She slams the camper door on his protesting cry.
She runs forward. The two men are trudging through the drifts, two men in black coveralls, each one carrying a short length of gray, three-inch pipe capped on each end. She shouts to them to stop. They turn and see her and her gun. They start to run, slipping and sliding in the snow.
***
Karp is closeted in the DA's office with the DA and the governor of New York and all the senior NYPD people on the premises, and the governor's security chief.
"He was real clear," said Karp, and not for the first time. "There's a bomb in the basement big enough to destroy the entire building and he'll set it off unless he hears from ibn-Salemeh that his release is under way. He said we're not to bring in the feds, not to inform the press, and not to bring any additional police onto the scene. He said they're observing the building and if any move is made to evacuate it, or to move cops in, they'll blow it up. He gave us two hours."
Everyone looked at the governor. The governor looked at Karp. "Are we sure this isn't a bluff?"
"Well, I can't say from the conversation I had with him, Governor, but the connect between ibn-Salemeh and the Manbomber is fairly explicit by now. We shouldn't be in any doubt that these people can build, deliver, and explode bombs. And they don't care about killing people one bit."
The state police security man, a fellow named Lambert, said, "Governor, the limo is waiting right outside the DA entrance on Leonard Street. I can't see how they could learn you're moving, give the order, and explode the bomb before we had you safe and away."
The governor ignored this. "What about the other people in the building? How many are there, Jack?"
Keegan said, "Usually about fifteen hundred, and we have more than the usual number of kids in the day-care center. It's the big day for judicial staff Christmas parties and people like to bring family. There's usually well over a hundred. Do you want an exact count?"
"No, it's more than enough. We're staying." He turned to an aide. "Get Auburn on the phone. I want to talk to the warden."
While this was being done, they heard the sounds of a scuffle outside, a loud male voice and a higher female one, indignant. Karp stood up and walked to the door. Outside in the narrow corridor, his secretary was facing off with a state trooper twice her size.
Flynn met Karp's eye. "It's your daughter. She says it's an emergency and this lummox wouldn't let me by to tell you."
***
There is an excavation on the Baxter Street side of the courthouse. Half the street and all of the sidewalk have been taken up and replaced by a pit shored up on three sides by raw two-by-eights. On the fourth side is a ramp faced with perforated steel plates and large enough for a five-ton truck. This is how they moved material for the cooling and heating renovations down into the basement. Marlene sees the two men disappear down the ramp and she follows. A hole has been cut in the side of the building and shored with steel girders. Past that is the basement proper. Marlene sees them enter a hallway. Crouching slightly, she pursues them. She is thinking, These are the people who killed Pete, and Nora and those others, and all the self-pitying feelings of the day and the previous days are gone, and she is focused on the passing instant only, in full predator mode.
She is in a hallway, painted pale green. There are black bloodstains on the floor and two bodies, both of men in construction worker clothing. A man steps from a doorway holding a Skorpion submachine gun. He fires a burst at Marlene but he doesn't aim low enough and she hears the rounds snapping over her head and whining down the hall. She raises her pistol and without breaking her stride shoots him in the chest and face. He falls in the doorway and she trots forward and steps over him.
Marlene is on a small landing. Steel steps lead down to the floor of the main boiler room. Six men are on the floor of the room. Two of them are the men in coveralls she has chased here and the other four are wearing construction gear. Of these, three are armed with pistols or submachine guns. The scene is very clear and sharp to her, almost unnaturally so, like a museum diorama showing how the Indians made pemmican. There is a rough table in the center of the group, on which lie the two plastic tubes. One of them has been opened and wires emerge from it. These wires are wrapped around others coming from a cellular phone with its case removed. The man wrapping the wires looks up like a high school teacher interrupted at a demonstration of some elementary physics fact. It is Maybe Gonzales, the Berber. Because Marlene has a silenced weapon, they don't realize that she is killing them for a few seconds and so she takes out Gonzales and two of the armed ones and then there is a return fusillade from the floor and she has to retreat.
***
Lucy's 911 call got a lot of attention. The 911 system has been trained to take bomb threats very seriously, and after the operator had determined that Lucy Karp was a real person, and responsible, and the daughter of the soon-to-be DA, and that the threat was lodged in the courthouse, the governor also being onsite, things moved with dispatch. The recent events in New York had caused to be created several specialized Emergency Service Units to deal with terrorists. One of these teams was lodged in police headquarters, a few hundred yards from the courthouse. Three minutes after being scrambled, two extremely costly specialized black, four wheel-drive vehicles were racing up Baxter Street, loaded with enthusiastic, heavily armed men.
***
"Where are you now?" Karp asked.
"On Baxter, about a hundred feet from the north end of the courthouse," said Lucy. "I can see the construction hole Mom went down. Here come the cops."
"Cops? Christ, Lucy, we're not supposed to bring any cops in. He said they'd blow the building if we did."
"Who said?"
"Never mind that! I want you to go away from the building. Take the boys and leave."
"But what about Mom?"
"Lucy, take the boys and go! Run!"
***
Rashid tried again to raise Felнpe on his cell phone, to no avail. There had been no message from Carlos giving the ready signal, but there had been one from the boy he had watching the courthouse, telling of lights and sirens and the arrival of the police in strength. It was the snow, he thought. The initiator had been delayed by the snow and their timetable had been thrown off. No one could have counted on the snow. So he could not really be blamed. But the men were armed, they should have no trouble fending off the police for the few moments it would take to rig the bomb. The chief would, of course, be angry, but on the other hand, as Rashid would explain to him, the success of such an operation would make it possible, perhaps, to win his release with a mere threat. That was definitely the line to take. Against that, there was the loss of Carlos and Felнpe, or Mamoud and Habib, valuable men, but not irreplaceable, and a few others. He picked up his cell phone again and dialed a long-memorized number.
His heart missed a beat. He should have heard the explosion from here, the entire city should have heard it. He dialed again and again. Nothing. He does not know what to do now. He sits paralyzed.
A garbage truck-mounted snow plow, its yellow light flashing, is moving down the street. His car is blocking it. The plow driver honks. Rashid backs up too quickly, fishtails, smashes his rear lights against another car. There is a police car behind the snow plow. Its occupant gets out and walks around the garbage truck to see what the problem is. He walks over to Rashid's car and raps on the window with his knuckle. Rashid rolls it down. The cop looks in. At roll call that afternoon, this patrolman had been cautioned against racial profiling. Yes, they were looking for Arab men, but that didn't mean they could roust anyone who looked Arab. You had to have something else, some probable cause. And they had distributed sketch artist pictures of three men made from witnesses of the neighbors of that house that had blown up in Astoria.
&n
bsp; The cop took a long look at this guy and thought that he looked enough like one of the guys in the sketch to constitute probable cause. Besides, it was freezing out and the guy was sweating bullets. He backed away.
"Sir, please step out of the car," he said.
Rashid flung the door open violently and began to run down West Houston Street. The cop had been a fairly good schoolboy safety not too many years ago and it only took him about twenty-five yards to catch Rashid and bring him crashing down on the untrodden snow.
***
Marlene is sheltering behind a wall and trying to think how many bullets she has left. She is in good position, although outgunned. One of them ought to lay down a base of fire and the others should rush her, but she thinks that this will not occur to them for some time, and then the police will be here. The main thing is that the bomb is not complete. Marlene knows a good deal about bombs and she has decided that what is on the table is a cell phone detonator and a pair of initiator charges. The main charge must be elsewhere. She gets down low and snaps her head around the corner of the door, and someone fires a burst and she shoots at the flash, and then the place explodes.
She is tossed halfway across the corridor when the wall she is leaning against blows out. The ceiling holds; she is not crushed. She does not lose consciousness, but is stunned by the magnitude of the sound. She has gone deaf. Her main problem, however, is sight. The blast from the initiator charge set off by Rashid's phone call has shattered every lightbulb in the basement, and the place is a cave, except for the dim emergency lights. These lights are dim because the air is nearly opaque with dust.
Marlene stands up and starts walking out of the basement. Her face is coated in ancient soot blown loose by the blast and stings from many small cuts. There is one on the side of the bridge of her nose that leaks blood into her good eye, and she has to keep wiping it off. She walks into the murk. After a while she sees flashlight beams ahead. Good, she thinks, the cops.
***
The DA's suite had been secured by every cop in the building- the DA detective's squad in its entirety and any uniforms or detectives who happened to be in the building at the time. The press had been shoved into a blocked-off hallway where they murmured and groaned like cattle in the vestibule of an abattoir. Inspector Battle was in command, of course, a duty that consisted of screaming into the phone, blaming various officers of the department for allowing this to happen, throwing a wide cordon around lower Manhattan, and attempting to insure that no additional police converged on the courthouse. On being informed that an ESU had rolled on a call some minutes ago, he demanded to be patched through to the unit commander.
He heard the explosion and stopped talking. Everyone stopped talking, all the little groups of powerful men felt a pang of mortality. The building did not collapse; everyone pretended they had not been frightened.
The governor spoke to the warden at Auburn and explained the situation. Then he called the commander of the state police and arranged for a helicopter to be sent to the prison. An aide approached him just after he put down the phone.
"Governor, we're thinking we should go ahead with the swearing in. It shows coolness under fire. Every one of those reporters has a cell phone and if we don't talk to them pretty soon, we're going to have mobs out there. We want to play it as bomb scare, small explosion, business as usual."
The governor agreed. But when they looked for Karp, he was nowhere to be found.
***
Detectives Renzi and Butler of the DA squad had been sent to guard the north fire stairway entry on the eighth floor, and as usual had been told zip except not to let anyone in or out. They knew who the approaching figure was and hailed him cordially, although they did not move out of his way.
"Sorry, Butch, no one in or out," said Renzi.
"Are you guys still on the DA squad?" asked Karp.
They acknowledged that they were.
"And am I the DA?"
They looked at each other. "I guess you are, now," said Butler. "Congratulations."
"Thank you. As the DA, I'm ordering you to let me through, and I'm ordering you to follow me down to the basement."
With that, he pushed past them and through the fire door.
As he descended, Karp was thinking about something Marlene had said to him once, that the working class was so invisible to the ruling one that someone dressed in overalls and a hard hat and carrying a greasy clipboard and a couple of tools could get in nearly anywhere. And he recalled what the super, Arno Nowacki, had told him about the boiler job, and the unknown low-bid contractors. Plumbers never got security checks. Of course, that's how they did it, how they moved tons of explosive into the courthouse basement in front of everyone's nose. It was as stupid, bold, and effective as 9-11.
They reached the basement, to find the main lights were out and the hallway lit dimly by the emergency lights.
Renzi grabbed his arm. "What's the story here, Butch. What're we down here for and what are we looking for?"
"They didn't tell you anything?"
"Are you kidding?"
"A bunch of terrorists have a bomb in the boiler room. They dragged it in here inside a boiler. They're threatening to blow the building unless we let one of their guys out of Auburn."
The two cops shared a look. "Ah, Butch, um, sir, I think we ought to go back where we were and leave this to the experts."
"You can do what you want," said Karp. "I need to look for my wife." Before they can say another word, he has vanished into the nearly opaque air.
***
Sergeant Jerome Bishop had been in this special ESU since its inception. On arriving at the courthouse, he had deployed his ten men to block all the exits and then followed his lieutenant and a team of six to find the bad guys. Bishop took the point himself. He was a big, self-confident man, an athlete, a superb shot with a spotless record, and yet he knew that some of the people on the squad still thought that he got the plum assignment because the bosses wanted a black face in there. So he took the point as often as he could, not that he needed to prove anything to assholes, but because he thought it went with the stripes.
He heard the bomb explode and flinched involuntarily, but the ceiling did not come down on them. It was inky, though, and all the ESUs turned on their lights. When the dust came pouring out they were ordered to mask up. Bishop moved cautiously forward into the cone of his light. He heard footsteps and stopped. A figure loomed in his beam, coming toward him. He told the radio net he had a possible perp in view and was ordered to engage and capture him. Bishop had an MP5. He made sure the selector was on single shot and drifted quietly to one side of the hallway.
"Freeze!" Bishop shouted. "Get down!" His shout was muffled by the mask.
The figure kept coming. Was it saying something? He couldn't tell- the sound the mask made against his ears and the net chatter in his ear bud made it hard to hear ambient sounds much softer than a gunshot or a siren. He could see now that it was a slight person dressed all in black, just as in the description the girl gave them. He shouted again for the guy to get down, get down!
Marlene, deaf, raises her hand to wipe the blood away and walks into the flashlight beam. Her eye is dazzled. She calls out, "Hello! Is that the police?"
Bishop sees the figure's hand rise, he sees the gun in it. He understands the rules of engagement. He flicks on his laser sight and the red line reaches out and touches the target's center of mass.
Karp trotted past the still-smoking boiler room, and stepped over a mangled corpse. In the thick dust on the floor he saw the print of high-heeled boots. He saw that they headed toward the boiler room and away from it. He felt a rush of relief. He called her name. The dust is thinning a little. He can see lights ahead, flashlights and the red pencil of a targeting laser.
Bishop hears a shout from the direction of his target. The red pencil moves. Another target has appeared, a large man in a suit. It rushes at the first target and takes it down. More shouts. Bishop speaks into
his radio, and orders his team forward.
"Jesus, Marlene, you could've been shot! Didn't you hear him shouting to get down?"
She looks at him and shakes her head, points to her ears. He realizes she can't hear anything. But he can. Half a dozen gas-masked men in black are surrounding them, pointing weapons.
"I'm the district attorney," says Karp.
"Get down! Get down! On your face!"
Karp and Marlene do as they are told. The cops snap handcuffs on them. Sergeant Bishop wonders why both of his prisoners are hysterically laughing.
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