Ahmed reached over and switched off the radio. “Take it back up to twenty-five thousand feet.” He pushed the throttles all the way forward. The plane screamed toward Washington.
After more than an hour of desperate work, transit authorities managed to pull the cement truck back from the brink and away from the open hole over the Fulton Street station.
They emptied out the subway down below and one of ATF’s bomb-disposal units was gingerly moving in on the vehicle. ATF had already been briefed by the military on the fuel-air device that authorities believed was on board. If Thorpe was right, it was the big one from North Korea, the one that Soyev called Fat Man.
The mixing barrel on the truck was about the right size. Thorpe wanted to know if the cement truck could be safely moved from its present location to somewhere outside the city where the bomb could be safely defused. But the bomb squad said no.
While the manual triggering device in the cab could be controlled, and the trembler switch, if there was one, wouldn’t present any particular difficulties since the truck had already been driven to the site, they couldn’t be sure until they looked whether there was a timing device.
Given the size and potential destructive power of the fuel-air device, the bomb squad couldn’t guarantee that if they moved the truck through the streets of New York it wouldn’t go off.
They could try to move it onto a barge and haul it out into the Hudson. But it would take time to get all of the necessary equipment together. And time was the one thing they didn’t have if the bomb had a clock on it.
They were probably lucky in one respect. If whoever put the device together had mounted a pressure switch under the driver’s seat, the bomb would have gone off when the transit cop pulled the dead driver out from behind the wheel. They were guessing that the bomb maker probably didn’t want the device to go off until it was down in the hole, where it would do the most damage.
The short answer to their dilemma was that they couldn’t move the truck. Instead they would have to move all of the news helicopters and anybody with a television feed away from the scene so that viewers wouldn’t be able to see what was happening when one of the members of the bomb squad crawled inside the tumbler of the cement truck and tried to defuse the detonator.
The fear was that the detonator could also be remotely controlled by someone close enough who, if he saw what was happening, might set it off.
They assumed, given the nature of the device, that the detonator was probably electronic. If they could safely clip its power source, they could then cut the wires to the manual trigger, make sure there was no secondary detonator, and then haul the truck away to dispose of the massive bomb somewhere safe.
I’m standing near the exit to the garage still trying to reach Joselyn on the phone as they roll Herman into the back of an ambulance. Half of the blood from his body is now on the concrete floor near where he lay. But sadly, I don’t have time to think about it.
On the third ring she finally picks up.
“Hello, Paul, where are you? I thought you were coming right back.”
“Never mind,” I tell her. “Are you still in the room?”
“Yes.”
“Stay there, and don’t open the door unless you hear my voice. Do you understand?”
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“I’ll be there in a minute. Just wait for me.” I hang up and look over my shoulder. The cop who was taking my statement is busy talking to somebody else.
I step out into the sunlight, take off the yellow jacket, and hand it to one of the firemen. “Thanks.” And before he can say anything, I skip across the street and scurry down the sidewalk on the other side under the chrome marquee and through the front door of the Hotel George.
Shirtless and speckled with Herman’s blood, I draw stares from curious onlookers as I make my way through the lobby to the elevator. One older woman is standing there waiting for a car to arrive. She looks at me wide eyed.
“An accident,” I tell her.
“I take it someone was hurt?”
“Yes. He’s on his way to the hospital.”
“What a shame,” she says.
“Yeah, it is.” We walk into the elevator together and I lose her on the third floor as I get off and head for my room. I knock on the door. “It’s me.” Then I use my key to get in, but the door is locked with the safety bar.
“Just a minute,” she says. Joselyn comes over, closes the door all the way, then opens it again. “What happened to you? Where’s your shirt? Are you cut?”
“No. But Herman’s been stabbed. It’s bad,” I tell her. “He’s on the way to the hospital.”
“What do you mean, it’s bad?” she says.
I head for the bathroom to wash my hands. “I don’t know if he’s going to make it. It was Liquida. Herman was able to tell me before he passed out. And Thorn got away. Slipped out of the garage somehow.” I grab a facecloth, wet it down, and start to mop the blood off my body, then notice that the knee of my pants where I pressed it into Herman’s back is stained a dry brown. I strip my pants off.
“Let me get you some clothes,” she says. A few seconds later Joselyn is back at the bathroom door with a clean shirt and a pair of pants. “Here.”
“What I need to know from you is who you called,” I tell her.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your source who gave you all the assurances that the FBI and the police had Thorn under glass. Because there was nobody there. Thorn led Herman into a trap in the garage. And the only way he could have done that was if someone tipped him off and he knew that we were following him.”
“What are you talking about?” she says.
“It’s possible Thorn might have seen Herman following him,” I tell her, “but I doubt it. Herman was too good to let that happen. But even if he did, that doesn’t explain Liquida. Herman didn’t say anything on the phone this morning when he called about anyone else tagging along with Thorn. According to Herman, when Thorn came out of the elevator in his hotel this morning, he was alone. If anybody had been with him, Herman would have mentioned it, especially if it looked like it might be Liquida. But he didn’t. That means Liquida was already waiting for Herman over in the garage. And the only way that could have happened is if someone tipped Thorn off that we were here. And the only person we’ve talked to besides Thorpe, and he didn’t know where we were staying, was your contact.”
I look at her as all the computations are being made in that sharp little brain behind her eyes. “I…I find that hard to believe,” she says.
“Hard to believe or not, it’s a fact. Who else knew we were here?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“It’s time to cough it up. The name,” I tell her. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Zeb, sorry to break in, but we got another problem.” This time it wasn’t Thorpe’s secretary but Ray Zink, his assistant. And from the look on Zink’s face, Thorpe knew it was trouble.
“We’ve got reports that there’s a commercial air-freight flight, a FedEx plane originally bound for Newark, reporting some kind of onboard emergency and requesting permission to land at Reagan National. Air traffic control tried to divert the flight to Dover Air Force Base and then lost radio contact. But the plane is still in the air and bearing down fast on Washington.”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do? Did they scramble fighters?” said Thorpe.
“Yeah. Two F-16s out of Andrews,” said Zink.
“Okay, well, keep me posted.”
Zink turned and started to leave.
“Just out of curiosity,” said Thorpe, “where did the wayward FedEx flight originate?”
Zink turned and looked at him. “Puerto Rico.”
It took about two seconds of cold fusion before all the circles and rings began to link up in Thorpe’s brain. He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course. That’s it!”