"Who do you think planted the bomb and why?" Karp now asked Fulton, and could almost hear the big detective again shrug his shoulders.
"This stuff happens in gangland," Fulton said. "There's no saying what Ariadne was up to except that the guy she was with was part of the Karchovski family. She could have been working on a story about the Russian mob. Then again, there are those reports she's been writing about Kane and the hostage situation at St. Patrick's."
Ivgeny Karchovski was convinced that elements of the Russian government were complicit in staging "terrorist" attacks in Chechnya in part through the efforts of Russian agent Nadya Malovo, who'd pulled off Kane's escape. He believed that these elements were using the threat of Islamic terrorism to cast aspersions on the legitimate aims of Chechen nationalists, who happened to be Muslim, in order to control the oil flow through that satellite state.
Karp was about to ask which theory Fulton was leaning toward when he heard a shout in the background. "Hey, Butch! Looks like they found somebody alive," Fulton yelled into the phone. "I'm handing this back to Gilbert."
The next thing Karp heard was the sound of Murrow's breathing as he apparently ran toward where the shouts were coming from. "Gilbert, tell me what's going on," he demanded.
"They've found somebody, Butch," Gilbert replied breathlessly.
Karp detected the hope in his friend's voice and prayed that it wouldn't turn out to be false. This time his prayer was answered.
"It's her, Butch," Murrow shouted. "And she's alive! I think I saw her move her fingers. They're bringing her out on a backboard." There was silence and when Murrow came back, he was more subdued. "She's unconscious and…she looks pretty banged up. Sorry, Butch, I gotta go. I want to ride with her to the hospital."
The telephone went dead, but Fulton had called back from his phone a few minutes later. "Hard to tell," he replied when asked about Stupenagel's condition. "Out cold. Unresponsive. They had her strapped to a backboard, but that could have been precautionary. They loaded her up pretty quick into the ambulance."
"Let's get her some protection," Karp said. "I don't want to see what happens when somebody swings a third time."
"Already on it," Fulton said. "A couple of my guys are on their way to the hospital as we speak. Not that any bad guys will get past Murrow. They weren't going to let him on the ambulance, but he climbed in anyway and wouldn't come out. I had to have a word with the driver. I also sent a couple more to watch your place, just in case this is the start of something big."
Karp hung up and told Marlene and their two visitors what he knew. He walked over and looked down at the street from his window just as an unmarked police car pulled up and parked across the street.
"Wow," O'Toole said. "My problems are pretty insignificant compared to something like this. Maybe it's not fair to ask you to help me."
Karp looked at his wife, who was waiting to see how he would answer. "We'll play it by ear," he said. "But for now, I'm still on your team."
Two weeks later, Karp and Marlene walked into the room at Beth Israel hospital where they found Murrow sitting next to Stupenagel, reading to her from David McCullough's book 1776.
"Amazing we ever won the Revolutionary War," Murrow said when he saw them. "I think Americans today could learn a lesson or two from those first guys about courage and faith in the face of adversity." He put the book down and stood to hug them, then excused himself.
It had looked dicey when Stupenagel was brought in. Along with a broken arm, cracked vertebrae in her neck, and burns to her left leg, her skull had been fractured and there'd been significant swelling of her brain that could have proved fatal. But the doctors had induced a coma to allow her brain to heal, and she'd hung in there until gradually awakening on her own.
When she woke, the first person she saw was Gilbert Murrow sleeping in a chair next to the bed. With his round cheeks and pouty lips, his glasses askew on his face, he looked like a little boy, except for several days' growth of beard. He appeared to have been wearing the same clothes for a week.
In that instant, Ariadne's qualms about spending the rest of her life with just one man evaporated. She was content to watch him sleep and get used to the idea that she was completely in love with him. When he finally opened his eyes and saw that she was awake, he smiled and wiped away at a tear that rolled down his cheek, then stood to lean over and kiss her tenderly on her bruised lips.
"I love you, Ariadne," he said quietly. "You are never to go where I can't follow."
"I love you, too, Gilbert," she whispered. "And I would never dream of it."
They had all since learned that it was the call of nature that had saved her. "I was sitting on the damn toilet when the world came apart." She'd been found sandwiched between the steel walls of the toilet stall, which had protected her from most of the flying debris, the flash fire, and the weight of the wall that collapsed on top of her.
"Glad to see you're doing okay," Karp said after his assistant left the room. "But we didn't mean to chase Gilbert off."
"I asked him to give us a few minutes alone when you arrived," Stupenagel explained. "Hearing about all of this upsets him. Anyway, I know you don't have to answer me, Butch, but I need to ask if you've reviewed the evidence from the crime scene?"
Karp nodded. "I'm on the Five Boroughs antiterrorism committee and we got a report. Plus, Fulton and I asked to sit down with the detectives handling the case and review what they'd found to see if we might spot something that would indicate this was something more than gang warfare."
"So you've concluded that this was a terrorist attack, not a mob thing?" Stupenagel asked.
"Do you ever stop being a nosy reporter? Only a few days removed from getting blown up, and you're trying to get a quote out of me," Karp said, shaking his head.
"Nah, I'm not looking for a quote," Stupenagel insisted with a laugh that made her wince in pain. "At least not at the moment, though give me a couple more days and I'll be banging on your door."
"Well-and this is off the record, just in case you 'forget' what you just said-we're not sure yet if this was a turf battle or something else," Karp said. "But we're treating any mass murder, particularly in this fashion, as a terrorist act."
"I think you know better," Stupenagel said. "They were after me and/or the guy I was meeting and what he was about to give me."
"Yeah, and what was that? I heard you haven't been too cooperative about your dinner date," Karp replied.
The forensics guys had told him what they knew. The bomb had been contained in a blue Samsonite Oyster 26" Cartwheel, purchased in 2005 at the company's store in Stratford, Canada. It had contained hundreds of ball bearings packed around a very difficult to obtain, military-grade plastic explosive, and a canister of high-octane fuel. The bomb had been detonated by remote control using a transmitter and receiver from a toy car available at any electronics store-presumably by the couple who had been sitting with the suitcase when Stupenagel entered the restaurant.
Stupenagel's official statement to the police was that she'd gone to the restaurant to interview an unnamed source for a story. "Just a travel piece," she'd said when the detectives asked what the story was about.
Of course, no one believed her. Stupenagel's stories about the St. Patrick's Cathedral hostage crisis and her subsequent investigation into ties to the Russian agent who'd been captured and apparently released had been the talk of the town ever since they first appeared. There were plenty of people in New York City, as well as elsewhere, who believed the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government knew there would be an attack on 9/11 and allowed it to happen as a pretext for the War on Terrorism. Her stories just added to the conspiracy fodder.