“If you’d just initial this for me,” she pressed, “to confirm I was standing here at this particular time.” Her fingers tapped at her watch. “I’d be real grateful.”
Out of the corner of the mother’s eye, she could see that balancing against Maxine’s hip was a strange white box strapped with black duct tape, but she still didn’t look up; eye contact would only get her in deeper, embroil her, and she wrapped her arms even tighter around her boy. “Signing?” she said, shaking her head. “It’s a bit diffic…”
As Maxine shook the ticket at her, the carton slipped and, despite her fumbling for it, it fell to the ground, breaking open.
The two women peered down at the contents and froze. They didn’t need to know specifically that the exposed putty-like slab was a restricted-use, military-grade variant of the hyper-explosive C-4. But if they had known that impact couldn’t trigger it, even if it smashed against the platform floor, their hearts might not have exploded into their mouths, gagging their screams.
Maxine’s eyes were drawn to the blue blasting cap that was pressed into the white explosive. Bizarrely, she noted it was the same blue as the baby’s bonnet and the candy petals on her cousin’s wedding cake last month. Yet this would be no party. And only one of these two women would survive it.
With the presidential election in its final countdown, panic and terror were about to crack themselves across the nation like a bullwhip. It was calculated to spur a stampede, millions of skittish votes once again hurtling toward security.
The baby squealed as if he sensed the danger, and the two women’s eyes paused only to blink at each other before they snaked along the two thin wires, one yellow, one green, that led from the blasting cap to the anodised aluminium cube on which a small screen was flashing a three-digit red number. It flashed again.
320…
Three-hundred-and-twenty what?
319…
Seconds.
AT Melrose Station in the Bronx, the train doors hissed shut against the few who’d run onto the platform a second too late to board. Phlegmatic, they shrugged and unravelled their newspapers as the train pulled out without them. There’d be another along soon.
Those who’d just made it and slid into their seats were hit by the acrid stench of body-heat that filled the car as well as the confronting racket that pumped out of the large black boom-box in the seat between two scruffy teenagers.
34
ARMONDO CRUZ IN Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security had just placed his phone bets on the next day’s card at Parx Racetrack when the call to the tip-off line came in at 5:15 PM. Cruz, a former cop had only transferred to POHS from Philadelphia’s northeastern 22nd District a week earlier so his first anonymous call, especially one so urgent, freaked him, though the caller with the middle-eastern accent didn’t seem to notice.
Taking deep breaths, he meticulously followed procedures. Using the encrypted security codes he’d been given, Cruz’s computer, as well as instantly alerting everyone up the chain of command and triggering certain pre-set actions, tagged directly into the hangar hidden in the city’s outskirts—even he didn’t know where—and set off an immediate dispatch of Captain Merrill Jefferson and his crack team of counterterrorist specialists to the suspect address.
“Imminent threat. Alleged Muslim terrorists ready to launch,” Cruz passed on. “Anonymous tip-off. Caller with middle-eastern accent. Immediate response required.” Cruz was taking no chances.
Captain Jefferson’s unit was primed and ready, as always. They clipped on their arsenal as they ran through the armoury toward their Huey, one of two unmarked UH-1 Iroquois choppers at their disposal. Their pilot, Terry Jarmin, was already firing up the rotors. Only minutes later, at 17:20, Jarmin dropped ten of Jefferson’s men half a block north of the suspect address and they ran down the street spreading toward it. It was an especially chilly evening for October at only 5oC. A few rugged-up residents huddled on the street but when Jefferson’s black-garbed men appeared, they all seemed to be summoned inside for various family crises—all except a waifish drunk in filthy coveralls who was slumped in the gutter between two vehicles, a burnt-out Ford Escort and an ’83 Mustang. His—or was it her?—black dreads snaked out from under a grey baseball cap and his hands, with sky blue fingernails no one noticed because of the gloves, gripped a half-empty gin bottle, whose contents were merely water.