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As countless car accidents occurred, pedestrians halted, staring at their suddenly fried cell phones. Shop owners opened the doors of their suddenly darkened businesses and stepped out onto the sidewalks, looking around.
On the riverside jogging path just north of John Jay Park, a female NYU student stopped by the river’s railing to check what was wrong with her suddenly dead iPod. Tugging out the earbuds, she glanced up at a strange low whining sound above her.
Then she screamed and looked, dumbstruck, at the still-spinning rotor blade from a falling traffic helicopter as it missed her head by less than five feet, a split second before it crashed nose-first into the East River.
At a safe distance away, and above the electromagnetic pulse, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Courtyard hotel on Broadway and 54th Street, a man in a white bathrobe stood in the east-facing window of his room with a pair of binoculars.
Behind him came the sudden hiss and pop of radio static followed by a frantic voice. Then another. Then another.
Mr. Beckett lowered his binoculars and turned and smiled at the police-band radio on the table behind him.
The abject confusion from their latest attack was already starting, he thought.
Good.
He smiled at Mr. Joyce, who was sitting in a soft chair beside the radio, also in a white bathrobe, fastidiously clipping his toenails.
Mr. Beckett lifted the mimosa from the room-service cart at his elbow. He raised it in the direction of his friend.
“What shall we toast to, Mr. Joyce?”
“The power of the human imagination, of course, Mr. Beckett,” said Mr. Joyce as he finished his left foot and recrossed his legs and started on the right.
He shrugged.
“What else is there, after all?”
Chapter 28
After the conference ended, my team and I set up shop at a couple of desks in a far corner of the crowded, kinetic Intelligence Division bull pen.
Although it was early in the morning, everyone already seemed a little haggard. The cops around me were doing their best to hide it, but it was obvious that people were getting scared. A bombing and an assassination were insane even by New York’s standards.
An hour later, I was still on the horn with the department public relations office trying to disseminate stills of the Washington Heights bombers to the news outlets when it started.
I had just tucked the desk phone receiver under my chin when I suddenly noticed the rhythmic, low-toned, almost subliminal buzzing that had invaded the sterile white office space. When my hip vibrated, I realized that the s
ound was everyone’s cell phones vibrating.
But why would everyone’s phones be going off at once? I thought, hanging up my desk phone and snatching up my cell.
“Mike, did you hear?” It was Miriam Schwartz on the other end.
“No. What?” I said frantically.
“We’re getting reports of a massive blackout on the East Side of Manhattan. But it’s not just that. The cars have stopped. All the cars are in the streets. They’ve stopped working.”
“The cars have stopped?” I repeated stupidly.
“We just got nuked!” someone called out behind me.
My eyes popped wide open. That couldn’t be true. How could that be true? I thought. Yet I remembered from a late-night History channel show that one of the side effects of a nuclear bomb is frozen cars—the bomb fries all their electronics.
A strange numbness invaded my face, my brain. It was a weird sensation that I’d felt only twice before.
The day the doctor told us that my wife, Maeve, had inoperable terminal cancer.
And on the morning of September 11, 2001.
