“What’s the status of Homeland Security?”
“Alerted. They’re closing down the airports.”
“Coast Guard, State Police, National Guard, Port Authority?”
“All alerted.” Billy’s Irish accent was even more intense than usual, a sign of anxiety and adrenaline.
And finally she asked the question she had wanted to ask first. “What about the mayor?”
She had been invited to Roland Fortune’s birthday party on the roof garden of the museum. She’d called to tell him that one of her nieces was being confirmed that morning at the Church of the Assumption. That was not true. She avoided Manhattan society parties like a plague.
“Our people are telling me he’s dead. Not confirmed.”
In the far distance on this endlessly clear day, she saw two police helicopters, gleaming flecks of bright metal, suspended like toys above the tower of thickening smoke.
CHAPTER THREE
GABRIEL HAUSER’S ROUTINE on Sunday mornings was to walk with Oliver, his gentle collie, through the attractive streets in the neighborhood near the museum between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue. This was a particularly delicious Sunday morning. The London plane trees lining the quiet streets were lush, the air was sharp and clear, and a breeze shook the newly mature leaves, casting crisp and intricate patterns of light and shade on the sidewalks.
The morning was also delicious because he had slept for twelve hours. He worked fifteen hours every day except Sunday as an emergency room doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital, a cluster of old and modern buildings directly across from Central Park on Fifth Avenue between 97th Street and 101st Street. Because it was close to East Harlem, the emergency room was always hectic on Saturday nights: men, women, and even children who had been shot or knifed or who had overdosed on Valium, Xanax, Percocet, Vicodin, OxyContin, and other opioids, the new street drugs of the twenty-first century.
As he walked on 82nd Street, he could see at the end of the block the colorful crowds on the grand steps of the museum. There were wagons with bright umbrellas where food was sold, the New York fare of hot dogs, salted pretzels, and Italian ices. The food wagons were all aluminum. Their sides glinted in the bright daylight. From the heights of the museum’s walls immense banners displaying the names of artists and exhibits were suspended. They undulated in the cleansing breeze. Gabriel wondered if he would, in fact, find among the hundreds of men, women, and children on the museum steps the dark man who had sent him in one of his many text messages that single indistinct picture of himself.
The first explosion came from one of the food wagons. It was a flash at least as bright as the sun. A wall of sound and debris blew toward him, a dirty tsunami of dust and small flying objects of glass, broken stones, and flecks of metal. Still clutching Oliver’s leash, he lifted his hands to shield his face and felt the stinging of debris. Oliver wailed, hurt and bewildered.
Gabriel lowered his hands as soon as the hail of small, fragmented objects swept by him. He was able to see the steps of the museum. Bodies were on fire as if self-immolated. The remnants of the food wagon were burning. The banners along the heights of the museum were tattered. A sheet of fire flared on the waters of the long fountain in front of the museum even though, incredibly, the water continued to rise up. Water couldn’t quench the flames.
Even though he felt it immediately, he couldn’t see the source of the second explosion. His view was blocked by the apartment building at the corner of 82nd Street and Fifth that faced the museum. But he did see another nuclear-style wave of smoke, dust, and debris rushing down Fifth Avenue from the source of the explosion. More bodies in flame, propelled by the new explosion, were littered across the steps. He thought he could hear the crying and shouts of voices interwoven with the bell-like concussive ringing in his ears.
He pulled Oliver into the doorway of a brownstone. Although the dog was not visibly hurt, his trembling and crying were intense. Gabriel double-knotted the leash to the iron railing and tried to soothe him. The dog stared at him with bewildered, hurt eyes. He loved the devoted dog but knew he had to act.
Gabriel ran toward the museum. He had nothing with him to deliver aid to anyone, but he did have his knowledge and his experience as a combat-trained emergency doctor. Just as he reached Fifth Avenue, a third explosion, this one at the north end of the museum, blew him to the ground. He quickly jumped to his feet, like a football player knocked down and immediately rising, and ran across Fifth Avenue to the wide plaza and steps. He saw cars and buses in flames on the avenue and sidewalk. On top of one of the double-decker London-style tourist buses, passengers, mainly the Asian tourists who had visited the city in the thousands over the last six years, were thrown against the railings as it careened down the avenue before toppling over, spilling people onto the street like damaged toys.
He turned his attention to the injured on the nearby steps. Within an area of ten feet there were at least seven bodies, including two children torn to pieces like rag dolls. One of the adults, a woman whose face was ripped apart, appeared to be breathing, but when he knelt over her it was clear she was dead. In his two years as an Army surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had learned to abandon the dead immediately and seek out the wounded, like Dracula hunting hungrily for fresh blood. He could never help the dead, but he might be able to help the living.
A man lying near the first exploded wagon was moaning. His left arm below the elbow was limp, obviously broken, and hemorrhaging. Gabriel knew that the first essential act with even a mortally injured person was to give assurance-in Iraq he had come to call it “placebo hope.” As he took off his shirt to make a tourniquet of one of the sleeves, he leaned over the man. He was sweating, as was Gabriel. On the man’s face, just below his left eye and spreading just above his heavy beard from his cheek to his left ear, was a vivid birthmark in the shape of Japan. He was clearly an Arab, probably one of the men who worked at the first exploded food wagon. Somehow, he looked familiar to Gabriel, a vague image in the recesses of Gabriel’s anxious mind.
They were within inches of each other, their eyes totally engaged. “You’ll be fine,” Gabriel said. The man exhaled the breath of the near dead.
But Gabriel knew he could be saved. He twisted the sleeve of his own torn shirt around the man’s sinewy upper arm. The bleeding lessened. On his left wrist the man wore a metallic bracelet. It was thick, surprisingly large and silvery, with chain-like links, and sticky with blood. It was flexible enough to remove, and Gabriel did that because it could further aggravate the wounds. He slipped it over the man’s knuckles. Gabriel put it into his pocket, thinking he might keep it safe for this injured stranger, a man he knew he was unlikely ever to see again. It was odd, Gabriel thought, that this Arabic man, probably a Muslim, wore an ornament. The Koran forbade it, and in his years in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had never seen a native with even a ring on his finger.
With his practiced hands, he then probed under the man’s torn clothing for other wounds. He felt blood on the area above the left kidney and then, probing further, he touched a sharp point from which the bleeding came. He pulled, removing a shard of the aluminum casing of the food wagon. It was so large that when he tossed it away it made a distinctive noise, like a dropped nail, on the stone.
Holding his hand over the wound, Gabriel noticed in the midst of the debris around them an intact bottle of water. He opened the bottle, poured some water into his hand and washed the man’s face with it. Responding, the injured man opened his eyes wider and with his right hand held Gabriel’s wrist as if in gratitude. Gabriel put the bottle to the man’s trembling parched lips, and he drank.