Ruth drove across to the waiting 747 and watched as the red box disappeared into the vast hold. She didn’t return to her office until the heavy door was secured in place. She checked her watch and smiled. The plane had taken off at 1.40pm.
Ruth began to think about the painting that would be arriving from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam later that evening to form part of the Rembrandt’s Women exhibition at the Royal Academy. But not before she had put a call through to Fenston Finance to inform them that the Van Gogh was on its way.
She dialled Anna’s number in New York, and waited for her to pick up the phone.
10
THERE WAS a loud explosion, and the building began to sway from side to side.
Anna was hurled across the corridor, ending up flat on the canvas as if she’d been floored by a heavyweight boxer. The elevator doors opened and she watched as a fireball of fuel shot through the shaft, searching for oxygen. The hot blast slapped her in the face as if the door of an oven had been thrown open. Anna lay on the ground, dazed.
Her first thought was that the building must have been struck by lightning, but she quickly dismissed that idea as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. An eerie silence followed and Anna wondered if she had gone deaf, but this was soon replaced by screams of ‘Oh, my God!’ as huge shards of jagged glass, twisted metal and office furniture flew past the windows in front of her.
It must be another bomb, was Anna’s second thought. Everyone who had been in the building in 1993 retold stories of what had happened to them on that bitterly cold February afternoon. Some of them were apocryphal, others pure invention, but the facts were simple. A truck filled with explosives had been driven into the underground garage beneath the building. When it exploded, six people were killed and over a thousand injured. Five underground floors were wiped out, and it took several hours for the emergency services to evacuate the building. Since then, everyone who worked in the World Trade Center had been required to participate in regular fire drills. Anna tried to remember what she was supposed to do in such an emergency.
She recalled the clear instructions printed in red on the exit door to the stairwell on every floor: ‘In case of emergency, do not return to your desk, do not use the elevator, exit by the nearest stairwell.’ But first Anna needed to find out if she could even stand up, aware that part of the ceiling had collapsed on her and the building was still swaying. She tried tentatively to push herself up, and although she was bruised and cut in several places, nothing seemed to be broken. She stretched for a moment, as she always did before starting out on a long run.
Anna abandoned what was left of the contents of the cardboard box and stumbled towards stairwell C in the centre of the building. Some of her colleagues were also beginning to recover from the initial shock, and one or two even returned to their desks to pick up personal belongings.
As Anna made her way along the corridor, she was greeted with a series of questions to which she had no answers.
‘What are we supposed to do?’ asked a secretary.
‘Should we go up or down?’ said a cleaner.
‘Do we wait to be rescued?’ asked a bond dealer.
These were all questions for the security officer, but Barry was nowhere to be seen.
Once Anna reached the stairwell, she joined a group of dazed people, some silent, some crying, who weren’t quite sure what to do next. No one seemed to have the slightest idea what had caused the explosion or why the building was still swaying. Although several of the lights on the stairwell had been snuffed out like candles, the photoluminescent strip that ran along the edge of each step shone brightly up at her.
Some of those around her were trying to contact the outside world on their cellphones, but few were succeeding. One who did get through was chatting to her boyfriend. She was telling him that her boss had told her she could go home, take the rest of the day off. Another began to relay to those around him the conversation he was having with his wife: ‘A plane has hit the North Tower,’ he announced.
‘But where, where?’ shouted several voices at once. He asked his wife the same question. ‘Above us, somewhere in the nineties,’ he said, passing on her reply.
‘But what are we meant to do?’ asked the chief accountant, who hadn’t moved from the top step. The younger man repeated the question to his wife, and waited for her reply. ‘The mayor is advising everyone to get out of the building as quickly as possible.’
On hearing this news, all those in the stairwell began their descent to the eighty-second floor. Anna looked back through the glass window and was surprised to see how many people had remained at their desks, as if they were in a theatre after the curtain had come down and had decided to wait until the initial rush had dispersed.
Anna took the mayor’s advice. She began to count the steps as she walked down each flight - eighteen to each floor, which she calculated meant at least another fifteen hundred before she would reach the lobby. The stairwell became more and more crowded as countless people swarmed out of their offices to join them on each floor, making it feel like a crowded subway during rush hour. Anna was surprised by how calm the descending line was.
The stairwell quickly separated into two lanes, with the slowest on the inside while the latest models were able to pass on the outside. But just like any highway, not everyone kept to the code, so regularly everything came to a complete standstill before moving off unsteadily again. Whenever they reached a new stairwell, some pulled into the hard shoulder, while others motored on.
Anna passed an old man who was wearing a black felt hat. She recalled seeing him several times during the past year, always wearing the same hat. She turned to smile at him and he raised his hat.
On, on, on she trudged, sometimes reaching the next floor in less than a minute, but more often being held up by those who had become exhausted after descending only a few floors. The outside lane was becoming more and more crowded, making it impossible for her to break the speed limit.
Anna heard the first clear order when she reached the sixty-eighth floor.
‘Get to the right, and keep moving,’ said an authoritative voice from somewhere below her. Although the instruction became louder with each step she took, it was still several more floors before she spotted the first fireman heading slowly towards her. He was wearing a baggy fireproof suit and sweating profusely under his black helmet emblazoned with the number 28. Anna could only wonder what state he’d be in after he’d climbed another thirty floors. He also appeared to be overloaded with equipment: coiled ropes over one shoulder and two oxygen tanks on his back, like a mountaineer trying to conquer Everest. Another fireman followed closely behind, carrying a vast length of hose, six pole arms and a large bottle of drinking water. He was dripping so much sweat that from time to time he removed his helmet and poured some of the drinking water over his head.
Those who continued to leave their offices and join Anna in her downward migration were mostly silent, until an old man in front of her tripped and fell on a woman. The woman cut her leg on the sharp edge of the step and began to scream at the old man.
‘Get on with it,’ said a voice behind her. ‘I made this journey after the ‘93 bombing, and I can tell you, lady, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’
Anna leant forward to help the old man to his feet, hindering her own progress, while allowing others to scramble past her.
Whenever she reached a new stairwell, Anna stared through the vast panes of glass at workers who remained at their desks, apparently oblivious of those fleeing in front of their eyes. She even overheard snatches of conversation through the open doors. One of them, a broker on the sixty-second floor, was trying to close a deal before the markets opened at nine o’clock. Another was staring out at her, as if the pane of glass was a television screen and he was reporting on a football game. He was giving a running commentary over the phone to a friend in the South Tower.
More and more firemen were now climbing towards her, turning the highway i
nto two-way traffic, their constant cry: ‘Get to the right, keep moving.’ Anna kept moving, her speed often dictated by the slowest participant. Although the building had stopped swaying, tension and fear could still be seen on the faces of all those around her. They didn’t know what had happened above them, and had no idea what awaited them below. Anna felt guilty as she passed an old woman who was being carried down in a large leather chair by two young men, her legs swollen, her breathing uneven.
On, on, on, Anna went, floor after floor, until even she began to feel tired.
She thought about Rebecca and Tina, and prayed they were both safe. She even wondered if Fenston and Leapman were still sitting in the chairman’s office, believing themselves impervious to any danger.
Anna began to feel confident that she was now safe and would eventually wake up from this nightmare. She even smiled at some of the New York humour that was bouncing around her, until she heard a voice behind her scream.
‘A second plane has hit the South Tower.’
11
JACK WAS APPALLED by his first reaction when he heard what sounded like a bomb exploding on the other side of the road. Sally had rushed in to tell him that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
‘Let’s hope it scored a direct hit on Fenston’s office,’ he said.
His second thoughts were a little more professional, as expressed when he joined Dick Macy, the Supervising Special Agent, along with the rest of the senior agents in the command centre. While other agents hit the phones in an attempt to make some sense of what was happening less than a mile away, Jack told the SSA that he was in no doubt that it was a well-planned act of terrorism. When a second plane crashed into the South Tower at 9.03am, all Macy said was, ‘Yes, but which terrorist organization?’
Jack’s third reaction was delayed, and it took him by surprise. He hoped that Anna Petrescu had managed to escape, but when the South Tower came crashing down fifty-six minutes later, he assumed it would not be long before the North Tower followed suit.
He returned to his desk and switched on his computer. Information was flooding in from their Massachusetts field office, reporting that the two attack flights had originated out of Boston and two more were in the air. Calls from passengers in those planes that had taken off from the same airport suggested they were also under the terrorists’ control. One was heading for Washington.
The President, George W. Bush, was visiting a school in Florida when the first plane struck, and he was quickly whisked off to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Vice-president Dick Cheney was in Washington. He’d already given clear instructions to shoot down the other two planes. The order was not carried out. Cheney also wanted to know which terrorist organization was responsible, as the President planned to address the nation later that evening and he was demanding answers. Jack remained at his desk, taking calls from his agents on the ground, frequently reporting back to Macy. One of those agents, Joe Corrigan, reported that Fenston and Leapman had been seen entering a building on Wall Street just before the first plane crashed into the North Tower. Jack looked down at the many files strewn across his desk and dismissed as wishful thinking, ‘Case Closed’.
‘And Petrescu?’ he asked.
‘No idea,’ Joe replied. ‘All I can tell you is that she was seen entering the building at seven forty-six, and hasn’t been seen since.’
Jack looked up at the TV screen. A third plane had crashed into the Pentagon. The White House must be next, was his only thought.
‘A second plane’s hit the South Tower,’ a lady on the step above Anna repeated. Anna refused to believe that kind of freak accident could happen twice on the same day.
‘It’s no accident,’ said another voice from behind, as if reading her thoughts. ‘The only plane to crash into a building in New York was in ‘45. Flew into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. But that was on a foggy day, without any of the sophisticated tracking devices they’ve got now. And don’t forget, the air space above the city is a no-fly zone, so it must have been well planned. My bet is we’re not the only folks in trouble.’
Within minutes, conspiracy theories, terrorist attacks and stories of freak accidents were being bandied about by people who had no idea what they were talking about. There would have been a stampede if they could have moved any faster. Anna quickly became aware that several people on the staircase were now masking their worst fears by all talking at once.
‘Keep to the right, and keep moving,’ was the constant cry emanating from whatever uniform trudged past them. Some of the migrants on the downward journey began to tire, allowing Anna to overtake them. She was thankful for all those hours spent running around Central Park and the shot after shot of adrenalin that kept her going.
It was somewhere in the lower forties that Anna first smelled smoke, and she could hear some of those on the floors below her coughing loudly. When she reached the next stairwell, the smoke became denser and quickly filled her lungs. She covered her eyes and began coughing uncontrollably. Anna recalled reading somewhere that 90 per cent of deaths in a fire are caused by smoke inhalation. Her fears were only exacerbated when those ahead of her slowed to a crawl and finally came to a halt. The coughing had turned into an epidemic. Had they all become trapped, with no escape route up or down?
‘Keep moving,’ came the clear order from a fireman heading towards them. ‘It gets worse for a couple of floors but then you’ll be through it,’ he assured those who were still hesitating. Anna stared into the face of the man who had given the order with such authority. She obeyed him, confident that the worst must surely be behind her. She kept her eyes covered and continued coughing for another three floors, but the fireman turned out to be right, because the smoke was already beginning to disperse. Anna decided to listen only to the professionals coming up the stairwell and to dismiss the opinions of any amateurs going down.
A sudden feeling of relief swept through those emerging from the smoke, and they immediately tried to speed up their descent. But sheer numbers prevented swift progress in the one-way traffic lane. Anna tried to remain calm as she slipped in behind a blind man, who was being led down the stairs by his guide dog. ‘Don’t be frightened by the smoke, Rosie,’ said the man. The dog wagged its tail.
Down, down, down, the pace always dictated by the person in front. By the time Anna reached the deserted cafeteria on the thirty-ninth floor, the overloaded firemen had been joined by Port Authority officers and policemen from the Emergency Service Unit - the most popular of all New York’s cops because they deal only in safety and rescue, no parking tickets, no arrests. Anna felt guilty about passing those who were willing to continue going up while she went in the opposite direction.
By the time Anna reached the twenty-fourth floor, several bedraggled stragglers were stopping to take a rest, a few even congregating to exchange anecdotes, while others were still refusing to leave their offices, unable to believe that a problem on the ninety-fourth floor could possibly affect them. Anna looked around, desperately hoping to see a familiar face, perhaps Rebecca or Tina, even Barry, but she could have been in a foreign land.
‘We’ve got a level three up here, possibly level four,’ a battalion commander was saying over his radio, ‘so I’m sweeping every floor.’
Anna watched the commander as he systematically cleared every office. It took him some time because each floor was the size of a football field.
On the twenty-first floor, one individual remained resolutely at his desk; he’d just settled a currency deal for a billion dollars and he was awaiting confirmation of the transaction.
‘OUT,’ shouted the battalion commander, but the smartly dressed man ignored the order and continued tapping away on his keyboard. ‘I said OUT,’ repeated the senior fire officer, as two of his younger officers lifted the man out of his chair and deposited him in the stairwell. The unfulfilled broker reluctantly joined the exodus.
When Anna reached the twentie
th floor, she encountered a new problem. She had to wade through water that was now pouring in on them from the sprinklers and leaking pipes on every floor. She stepped tentatively over fragments of broken glass and flaming debris that littered the stairwell and were beginning to slow everyone down. She felt like a football fan trying to get out of a crowded stadium that had only one turnstile. When she finally reached the teens, her progress became dramatically faster. All the floors below her had been cleared, and fewer and fewer office staff were joining them on the stairs.
On the tenth floor, Anna stared through an open door into a deserted office. Computer screens were still flickering and chairs had been pushed aside as if their occupants had gone to the washroom and would be back at any moment. Plastic cups of cold coffee and half-drunk cans of Coke littered almost every surface. Papers were scattered everywhere, even on the floor, while silver-framed family photographs remained in place. Someone following closely behind Anna bumped into her, so she quickly moved on.
By the time Anna reached the seventh floor, it was no longer her fellow workers, but the water and flotsam that were holding her up. She was picking her way tentatively through the debris when she first heard the voice. To begin with, it was faint, and then it became a little louder. The sound of a megaphone was coming from somewhere below them, urging her on. ‘Keep moving, don’t look back, don’t use your cellphones - it slows up those behind you.’
Three more floors had to be negotiated before she found herself back in the lobby, paddling through inches of water, and on past the express shuttle elevator that had whisked her up to her office only a couple of hours before. Suddenly even more sprinklers jetted down from the ceiling above, but Anna was already drenched to the skin.
The orders bellowing from the megaphones were becoming louder and louder by the moment, and their demands even more strident. ‘Keep moving, get out of the building, get as far away as you possibly can.’ Not that easy, Anna wanted to tell them. When she reached the turnstiles she’d passed through earlier that morning, she found them battered and twisted. They must have been brushed aside by wave after wave of firemen when they transported their heavy equipment into the building.
False Impression (2006) Page 5
