Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [29]
“Never seen everything this bad.” The police sergeant revealed a nasal Brooklyn accent when he spoke.
“Can’t even call in to your normal communications desk. Nerve center they set up is always busy, too. Nobody knows what the Army’s doing. What the FBI guys are doing either. It’s completely nuts!”
“How would you handle it?” There was nothing patronizing in the question. Caitlin was always curious about the rank and file. That was one reason she made a good boss at the SEC. A second reason was that she was smart, so knowledgeable about Wall Street and the workings of business that most of her associates held her in awe. “If this was your show, what would you do, Sergeant?”
“Well… I’d hit every terrorist hangout we know about in the city. We know about a hell of a lot of them, too. I’d blow into their little maggot nests. Arrest everybody in sight. That way, we’d sure as hell get some information.”
“Sergeant, I believe that’s what teams of detectives have been doing all night. Over sixty separate squads of NYPD detectives. But the maggots are just not cooperating on this one.”
Caitlin arched her eyebrow, then smiled gently at the cop.
Predictably, he asked her for a date next, and just as predictably Caitlin turned him down.
With police and Army helicopters whirring overhead, Caitlin stood still and numb on the northwest corner of Broadway and Wall.
She allowed her eyes to roam across the most chillingly surreal scene she hoped to view in her lifetime.
What appeared to be billions of tons of granite block, of gray stone, shattered glass, concrete and mortar had crashed down onto Wall Street and Broad Street and Pell, and all the narrow, interconnecting alleyways. According to the latest Army Intelligence estimate, as many as sixty separate plastique bombs had detonated at 6:34 Friday evening. The police theory was that the bombs had been exploded by sophisticated radio signals. The signals could have been transmitted from as far away as ten to twelve miles.
Caitlin craned her neck to gaze up at nearby No. 6 Wall Street.
She winced as she observed the sheared, swinging clumps of wiring: thick elevator cables dangling between the highest floors of the office building. Here and there, patches of sky shone through great yawning holes in the building’s walls. The overall effect reminded her of a doll house disemboweled, utterly destroyed by a child in a temper tantrum.
She stood all alone, shivering and cold on the stone portal of the New York Stock Exchange. She couldn’t stop herself from impassively staring at the abysmal destruction, the incomprehensible damage on Wall Street. More than anything, she wanted to be sick,
She saw an oil painting, a Yankee sailing clipper hanging absurdly in a district office with two of the room’s walls blown away.
In the foyer of an adjacent building, an overturned copier had apparently collapsed through several floors before striking the unyielding marble in the lobby. She could see the shattered screens of computer terminals and the melted remains of keyboards that reminded her of some nightmare art form. All over the littered, desolate street, police and hospital emergency vehicles were flashing bright red and blue distress signals.
Caitlin Dillon could feel a cold, deadweight pushing down on her. Her body was numb. Her ears buzzed softly, as if there had been a sudden drop in air pressure.
She couldn’t stop a disturbing feeling of nausea, of sudden weakness in both her legs.,
She understood what many of the others still didn’t— that an entire way of life had quite possibly been destroyed, here, on Friday night.
Inside No. 13, Caitlin was confronted immediately by noisy squads of secretaries typing frantically in the marble and stone entryway corridors. Stock Exchange clerks milled around with a kind of busy uselessness, carrying clipboards with a hollow show of self-importance, carting files from one office to another.
Caitlin took in the command post scene and then, as she stepped nimbly around broken glass and debris that had been shaken