GABRIEL OPENED ONE EYE, then, slowly, painfully, the other. He had lost consciousness, for how long he did not know—a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour or more. Nor could he fathom the attitude of his own body. He was submerged in a sea of debris, that much he knew, but he could not discern whether he was prone or supine, upright or topsy-turvy. He felt no undue pressure in his head, which he took as a good sign, though he was afraid he had lost the ability to hear. The last sound he could recall was the roar of the detonation and the whoosh-thump of the vacuum effect. The supersonic blast wave seemed to have scrambled his internal organs. He hurt everywhere—his lungs, his heart, his liver, everywhere.
He pushed with his hands, and the debris yielded. Through a fog of dust he glimpsed the exposed steel skeleton of the building and the severed arteries of network cables and electric wiring. Sparks rained down, as if from a Roman candle, and through a rip in the ceiling he could make out the handle of the Big Dipper. A cold November wind chilled him. A finch landed within his grasp, studied him dispassionately, and was gone again.
Gabriel swept aside more of the debris and, wincing, sat up. One of the kidney-shaped tables had come to rest across his legs. Lying next to him, motionless, dredged in dust, was a woman. Her face was pristine, save for a few small cuts from the flying glass. Her eyes were open and fixed in the thousand-yard stare of death. Gabriel recognized her; she was an analyst who worked at a pod near his. Jill was her name—or was it Jen? Her job was to scour the manifests of incoming flights for potential bad actors. She was a bright young woman, barely out of college, probably from a wholesome town somewhere in Iowa or Utah. She had come to Washington to help keep her country safe, thought Gabriel, and now she was dead.
He placed his hand lightly on her face and closed her eyes. Then he pushed away the table and rose unsteadily to his feet. Instantly, the shattered world of the Operations Floor began to spin. Gabriel placed his hands on his knees until the merry-go-round stopped. The right side of his head was warm and wet. Blood flowed into his eyes.
He wiped it away and returned to the window where he had seen the approaching truck. There were no bodies and very little debris on this side of the building; everything had been blown inward. Nor were there any windows or outer walls. The entire southern facade of the National Counterterrorism Center had been shorn away. Gabriel moved cautiously toward the edge of the precipice and looked down. In the forecourt was a deep crater, far deeper than the one that had been left outside the Weinberg Center in Paris, a meteor strike. The skyway connecting the NCTC to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was gone. So was the entire northern face of the building. Inside its shattered conference rooms and offices not a single light burned. A survivor waved to Gabriel from the cliff’s edge of an upper floor. Gabriel, not knowing what else to do, waved back.
The traffic on the Beltway had ground to a halt, white headlights on the inner loop, red taillights on the outer. Gabriel patted the front of his jacket and discovered he was still in possession of his mobile phone. He removed it and thumbed it into life. He still had service. He dialed Mikhail’s number and raised the phone to his ear, but there was only silence. Or maybe Mikhail was speaking and Gabriel couldn’t hear. He realized he had heard nothing since regaining consciousness—not a siren, not a groan of pain or cry for help, not his footfalls through the rubble. He was in a silent world. He wondered if the condition were permanent and thought about all the sounds he would never hear again. He would never hear the nonsensical chatter of his children or thrill to the arias of La Bohème. Nor would he hear the soft bristly tap of a Winsor & Newton Series 7 paintbrush against a Caravaggio. But it was the sound of Chiara singing he would miss the most. Gabriel always joked that he had fallen in love with Chiara the first time she made him fettuccini and mushrooms, but it wasn’t true. He lost his heart to her the first time he heard her singing a silly Italian love song when she thought no one was listening.
Gabriel killed the connection to Mikhail and picked his way through the debris of what a moment ago had been the Operations Floor. He had to give Saladin credit; it was a masterstroke. Honor was due. The dead were everywhere. The astonished survivors, the lucky ones, were hauling themselves laboriously from the rubble. Gabriel located the spot where he had been standing when he heard the first explosion. Paul Rousseau was bleeding heavily from numerous lacerations and cradling an obviously broken arm. Fareed Barakat, the ultimate survivor, seemed to have come through it unscathed. Looking only mildly annoyed, he was brushing the dust from his handmade English suit. Adrian Carter was still holding a phone to his ear. He didn’t seem to realize the receiver was no longer connected to its base.
Gabriel gently removed the phone from Carter’s grasp and asked whether Safia Bourihane was dead. He could not hear the sound of his own voice, nor could he hear Carter’s response. It was as if someone had pressed the mute button. He looked toward the giant video screen, but the screen was gone. And then he realized that Natalie was gone, too.
63
GEORGETOWN
SAFIA CLEARLY KNEW WHERE SHE was going. After making the right turn onto M Street, she blew through the red light at the base of Thirty-fourth and then swerved hard into Bank Street, a cobbled alley that climbed the gentle hill up to Prospect. Ignoring the stop sign, she made a right, and then another left onto Thirty-third. It was a one-way street running south-to-north up the length of Georgetown’s West Village, with four-way stops at every block. Safia flashed across N Street without slowing. She was holding the steering wheel tightly with her left hand. Her right, the one with the detonator, was clutching the grip of the shift.
“Are they still behind us?”
“Who?”
“The Americans!” Safia shouted.
“What Americans?”
“The ones who’ve been watching us at the hotel. The ones who followed us to the shopping mall.”
“No one followed us.”
“Of course they did! And they were waiting for us just now in the parking lot of the hotel. But he tricked them.”
“Who tricked them?”
“Saladin, of course. Can’t you hear the sirens? The attack has begun.”
Natalie could hear them. There were sirens everywhere.
“Alhamdulillah,” she said softly.
Ahead, an elderly man entered the crosswalk at O Street, trailed by a basset hound on a leash. Safia slammed on the horn with her detonator hand, and both man and canine moved out of the car’s path. Natalie glanced over her shoulder. The man and the dog appeared uninjured. Far behind them, a car rounded the corner at Prospect Street at high speed.
“Where did we attack them?” asked Natalie.