They went back inside the surveillance room and wiped the suspended powder out of the way until they could just make out what was happening in the array of monitors that covered nearly half of one wall, each broken up into a grid of video feeds. It was worse than Morgan had imagined.

He looked at the lobby camera feeds first. People—by the way they were dressed, mostly hotel staff—were being herded by men with guns into the middle and made to kneel. He counted the seven Secret Service agents, fallen where they had stood minutes before—none of those had even managed to draw their guns, which betrayed the deadly coordination of this attack. Another two lay dying behind a couch in the lobby, where they had taken cover. He counted five more dead from the hallway feeds.

“Jesus Christ,” said Rosso.

“I’ve got nine hostiles in the lobby,” said Morgan. He tried his radio again, but the signal wasn’t going through.

“Two more in the hallways,” said Rosso. “And one coming down the stairs here.”

“Do you have a visual on Ramadani?”

“Negative,” said Rosso. He motioned to a row of feeds that were completely dark. “Those are for the floor of his suite. His people disabled the cameras. You think Ramadani’s men turned?”

“Yeah, they did,” said Morgan. “The question is, turned on whom?”

9:50 a.m.

Soroush emerged from the stairwell into the lobby, where about one hundred people—staff and the guests who had been downstairs when they struck—were seated on the floor, hands on their heads. Three of Soroush’s men were moving among them, unspooling the wire and securing it to each with a zip tie. Soroush reveled in the hostages’ terrified incomprehension, in the tears of the women.

Zubin rushed forward to meet him. “The doors are secured. The bombs will be armed within five minutes.”

“Good,” said Soroush. “We need precision. The blasts must be timed exactly to our departure. Masud is getting the President ready to be transported. Ten minutes.”

9:52 a.m.

Alex Morgan examined her left ear in a compact mirror borrowed from a Latina girl about two years younger than her who was sitting nearby. The ear was cut up and looked like it might leave scars. Wincing, Alex dabbed at it with a wet wipe provided by the same girl, cleaning out the dirt and congealed blood. Fresh blood welled out bright red. She wiped that away too, and held the sleeve of her sweater against it like a compress until the bleeding stopped. She’d have preferred to do this in the bathroom rather than sitting on the cold marble floor, but the line to the bathrooms went halfway around the downstairs waiting area.

“How are you doing?” she asked Clark, who lay back against the marble floor, staring at the ceiling, phones in his ears. He shrugged, hoodie rustling against the stone beneath.

She reached to her pocket to check if her cell phone was there, but it wasn’t. She’d left it in her backpack, which she lost when she was knocked down by the crowd.

“Hey,” she said, prodding him. He removed his earphones. “Can I borrow your phone?”

He pulled the earphones out by the wire and propped himself up on his elbows. “Here,” he said, pulling out the headphone jack and holding it out for her. “I tried to call the ’rents already, though. Couldn’t get through. Maybe you’ll get lucky, though.”

She dialed her father, then her mother. No luck.

“I’m going to take a look around,” she told him, handing him back the phone. She stood up with aching muscles. She couldn’t sit still. She was antsy, with a bad feeling something else might happen, something worse. More than anything, she wanted to make herself useful.

The main concourse of Grand Central Terminal echoed with loud voices. People were standing and sitting around the expansive floor, and more were downstairs. She estimated that they numbered at least five hundred. MTA Police had spread out, mostly keeping to the exits and the walls, although she spotted two K9 teams doing rounds, inspecting people’s bags. She passed a prayer circle as she made her way around the concourse, people old and young, of all races, holding hands as a middle-aged black man spoke a solemn supplication. “Lord, deliver all your children from harm . . .”

Near the passage to the Lexington Avenue and Forty-seventh Street entrance, she heard the disconsolate sobs of people who had lost someone outside, or who had simply broken down from fear and shock. “My son is out there,” one young mother pleaded with a policeman holding people back from the door. She sank to her knees. “Please. My Lawrence, my baby . . .”

From there, Alex made her way to Vanderbilt Hall, which opened into the main entrance. It had been cleared and set aside to form a sort of makeshift hospital. Here, people in everyday clothes were attending to the injured. Only two of the people there had bullet wounds. The rest had been injured in the tumult, trampled, pushed, or had fallen against the pavement.

“Hi, excuse me, dear,” said a tiny lady who looked to be in her forties sporting spiky orange-red hair in comfortable pants and a casual sweater. She spoke with surprising authority. “Come over here, we’ll have someone look at your ear.”

Alex said, “No, my ear’s okay. I want to help. I have some first-aid training.”

“Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said the woman. “We actually have enough doctors and nurses here. But we could use some more water, if you’d be a dear and get it for us at the market.”

It wasn’t the help she wanted to give, but, of course, help shouldn’t be about what the helper wants. Alex made her way to the Grand Central Market. The shops all seemed to be closed, but a group of girl scouts and other children were lined up to receive bottles of water and fresh fruit at the door to the market itself, where four vendors were distributing them to the kids for free. Alex approached one of them, a young, brown-skinned Hispanic man in a black cap.

“I need water,” she said. “For the wounded.”

He set off into the market and came back with a plastic-sealed case of six twenty-ounce water bottles.

“You want me to carry that for you, miss?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, grunting under the weight as he handed the case to her. “You look like you have your hands full.”

9:58 a.m.

Morgan and Rosso watched through security video as two of the Iranians attached the wire, which had been zip-tied to about one in four people in the crowd, to the ten or so black suitcases that were laid along the perimeter of the hostages.

“What are they doing?” asked Rosso. He sat in the chair, clutching his wound, his breathing heavy. His eyes were beginning to glaze over.

“It’s a trip wire,” said Morgan. “Attached to the bomb in the suitcase. If the wire is cut or detached, they blow.”

“They’re going to have to cut the zip ties loose one by one,” said Rosso. “Evacuation’s going to be impossible.”

“Yeah,” he said. “For the hostages and the terrorists.” Morgan reached for the phone on the desk. “I need to talk to my man on the outside.” He lifted the receiver, but it was dead.

Rosso pointed toward the dead Secret Service agents. “Whatever they had to communicate with the outside, they’re definitely not using it anymore,” said Rosso.

Morgan bent down over one of them. He had short, curly brown hair, and he was young, so goddamned young. He had the slightest bit of stubble, and Morgan could tell his beard was still patchy and irregular. “Sorry about this,” Morgan said, and popped the earbud out of his ear and followed the line to the transmitter in his breast pocket. Morgan pulled it out and fiddled with it to patch into the frequency he was using to communicate with Conley.

“Conley, Conley, come in,” he said.