“THE LINKS ARE down,” Jefferson said, trying a workaround.
At thirty seconds to go, the “New York, New York” strip zoomed up to fill the screen completely. “I don’t know what’s happening here,” said Jefferson, going even colder. He started to explain exactly what he was seeing when he said, “Hold it, the numbers are back… 26… 25… Shit. The ‘Stop’ button didn’t work. Penguin, are you evacuating the stations?”
“We’re linked direct into NYC’s OEM,” he said, referring to the City’s Office of Emergency Management. “The Watch Command. They’ve turned all trains heading into Manhattan back, heading out in reverse. But they can’t possibly evacuate the stations. Not in the time frame. The panic would be disastrous.”
“So will this, sir. The flood mitigation barriers in the tunnels… can we close them, to stop the shockwaves building?” Jefferson was referring to sliding barriers that had been installed in some subway tunnels to contain flood by sealing off entire sections.
“Too late.”
22…
At 17, the laptop’s volume robotically spun up to maximum so the vague sound Jefferson had thought he’d been hearing for the last minute or so was blaring full blast, “… It’s up to you, New York, New York.”
“Frank fucking Sinatra? Is this some kind of joke? Jesus…13… 12…”
He kept clicking on “Stop” but to no effect. Nothing… 10… 09…
He pulled the power cord out but, the battery was on full charge and, he checked, it was screwed in, and the heads had been mutilated to prevent quick extraction. There was no external cable going to an internet connection, so this had to be a wireless link.
Think.
Forget the battery. Disable the modem. Destroy the coordination and maybe stop the bombs. He located it on-screen under “Settings” but as he was about to do it, the song ended on its celebrated finale blast of brass. No.
07… 06…
He disabled the modem, and at 05 the countdown hung.
“It’s frozen at 05… It’s stopped.”
“Maybe,” said Penguin. “Hold your breath everyone… and pray.”
38
THE NEWS BULLETINS worked hard to maintain a veneer of responsible calm, but the edge in the relief that night was razor sharp. Every so often the fa?ade would crack. When the cell phone networks crashed repeatedly from overload, people suspected the worst, holding their breath, skipping their hearts, cocking their ears for… anything. Subways were closed. Roads were a mess.
The first panic surged through the city moments after 5:25 PM when word escaped from 42nd Street, but what really set off the storm was when the NYPD was ordered to evacuate every one of Manhattan’s 468 subway and train stations. According to the two-page note in Jefferson’s hand, there were 230 bombs, almost one every two stations, though pivotal stations such as 42nd Street and Grand Central had multiples. The countdown stopped without event, but no one in authority was taking chances. And even if there’d been a fine-balanced choice before, there was none once Captain Jefferson radioed in the name he’d found in one of the dead terrorist’s wallets: Karim Ahmed, a man who’d notoriously been once charged with financing terrorists.
On current intelligence, there was no way of knowing if these 230 unknown couriers were suicide bombers programmed to explode their devices on-site if the timers failed. Jefferson heard the orders going out: evacuate subways; track down and secure all bombs; disable and arrest all couriers with white boxes on platforms. If necessary… take them out.
“PLEASE stay calm…”
Calm? Who were these people kidding?
All over the island, the undergrounds hosed out gushes of panicked commuters and subway employees. The couriers, shocked by station announcements that branded them, instructing them to put down their parcels and to lie on the ground with their hands behind their heads, couldn’t move, and most were stuck to their spots cowering. Mistaking the reaction, emboldened commuters in several stations pinned a few couriers down, bumping the boxes to the ground and ripping them open, though wishing they hadn’t. “Bomb!”
Hundreds of limbs cracked as the rush flung people beneath flailing feet or onto tracks—fortunately OEM had cut the power by then to the third rails.