Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"It's particle physics to him," said Murrow and Karp was about to come back with a rejoinder when the phone rang. He listened for a moment or two, and Murrow, observing his face, asked, "Bad news?" Karp held up a shushing hand and continued to listen. He said, "I understand" several times and hung up.

"What?" asked Murrow.

"Bomb threat," said Karp.

"Here?"

"Yeah, it sounded like the real thing, too. They said they're going to take down this building unless we release Feisal ibn-Salemeh."

Rashid clicked off his cell phone, put his car in gear, and drove carefully away. It was his supreme moment, giving orders to Karp in that way. He felt for the first time in his life entirely in control. Except for the car.

He had never driven in this kind of snow before, and the tension of driving racked his nerves. But besides that, he felt everything had worked out remarkably well, a tribute to his organizing genius: the gigantic coup was now fact, all the layers of deception jerked away to reveal the perfection of their plan, nearly six years in the making: assembling the papers and the money, infiltrating the sleepers, buying the necessary firms, gaining the skills. Then those morons had blown up the World Trade Center and suddenly no Arab could move freely around the country and they had had to recruit Felix. A mistake as it turned out, but he had brilliantly compensated for it, and no real harm done, because of the depth, the intricacy of the plan. The bidding for the contract to supply two boilers for the building, which, of course, they won. Everyone knew that Americans thought only of money, so in order to gain access to any place all you had to do is become the low-bid contractor. He had seen that the boilers were put in place, he had led the quick violent action that neutralized the few outside workmen. His troops were completely in charge of the courthouse basement. Rashid had wired the blasting cap to a cell phone ring circuit, and left the construction site and driven a few streets away and made his call. All that was needed now was for Carlos and Felнpe to arrive from the Inwood site with a plastic pipe full of acetone peroxide crystals. They would insert the pipe into a hollow drilled into the seventeen thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate that filled one of the boilers. Placing the initiator charge was the trickiest part of the operation, but ibn-Salemeh had been adamant about doing it that way. You had to have a good burn to bring down a prewar building of solid masonry and steel, and the initiator was essential to a good burn. But the peroxide was sensitive stuff and it had to be made fresh before use.

Rashid checked his watch. At this moment Carlos would be installing the initiator into the heart of the great bomb.

He drew the car to the curb, or at any rate out of the middle of the street. He had not counted on the snow, but it seemed to be letting up and would make no difference to the success of the plan. He had to keep moving because they would be trying to pinpoint the location of the cell phone from which the calls originated. He sat for a moment with the heater running full blast, enjoying the quiet of the blanketed city. Then his cell phone warbled. That would be Carlos giving the coded message that the bomb was ready for detonation, that the booby traps guarding it were in place, and that the whole crew was out of the building. He answered the phone and waited. But it wasn't the coded message.

"They're not answering at the courthouse," said Lucy, hanging up the phone.

"It's probably crazy there, with the snow and the governor and the ceremony," said Marlene. "Let's just go."

"Can't we finish this game?" asked Zak.

"No," answered his mother, tossing in her cards, "you'll have your whole life to play hearts. Get your coats!"

So they bid Dan good-bye and bundled up in their warmest and hit the frozen streets. It was the kind of day when not people who love people, but people who own four-by-four high-bed pickup trucks with knobby tires, feel like the luckiest people in the world.

"It seems to be letting up," observed Marlene as she steered east on a nearly empty Grand Street.

"Yeah, from a total white-out blizzard," said Lucy, sitting next to her. "I'm glad it's you driving." In the family, Marlene was famous for her winter driving skills. As she passed Baxter, Marlene found that the sole lane down the center of the snowy road was blocked by a plumbing company van. The driver had skidded sideways and was now doing the worst possible thing, gunning his engine, spinning his wheels, and digging himself in even deeper.

"That moron!" said Marlene and rolled down her window. "Don't do that!" she yelled, "Rock it!" The engine up ahead continued to roar, however, and sent up blue clouds of stinking smoke.

"Can you back up?" asked Lucy.

"No, there's a big tow truck behind me," said Marlene, after checking her side mirrors. "Crap!" The tow truck honked its air horn helpfully.

Then the passenger-side door of the van opened and a man jumped out. He walked back to the rear of his truck and examined the situation, which was that the rear wheels were sunk to the hubs and spinning on solid ice. He yelled to the driver, who stuck his head out of the window and yelled back. The wheels stopped spinning. The man opened the double rear doors of the van and yelled something else. The driver stepped down from the van.

"That's Tamazight," said Lucy.

"What?"

"Those guys are speaking Tamazight, like the guy we saw…" She rolled her window down and looked out at the man behind the plumber's van, who was now talking into a cell phone.

"That's him," said Lucy. "That's Maybe Gonzales. What're they doing out here? Should we call the cops? Mom?"

Marlene doesn't answer. She is staring at the man, who has put his cell phone away and is now removing a short length of three-inch plastic pipe from the rear of the van. The tow truck honks again. Marlene understands what she's seeing, and understands what she has to do. She hands Lucy her cell phone.

"Yeah, call the cops. Tell them we've spotted people who are probably members of the Manbomber gang, right next to the courthouse. They've got what looks like big pipe bombs. Give them the details on the guys, and remind them that the governor is in the courthouse right now. Then call Dad and tell him the same thing."

"What are you going to do?" Lucy asks. She doesn't like the look on her mother's face.

"Call," says Marlene and slips from the cab of the truck. She goes to the rear and pops the camper door.

Zak asks, "What's going on, Mom? Why did we stop?"

"A little problem. Look, both of you, it's real important that you stay here with Lucy. I have to go and check on something."

She takes a key ring out of her bag and uses a cylinder key to open a steel lock box bolted to the bed of the truck. The can suppressor is still screwed to the barrel of the Beretta nine-millimeter from the night she used it on Cherry and her dealer.

"What's going on, Mom?" asks Giancarlo. The guide dog whimpers.

She has not cleaned the pistol, has not wanted to think about the pistol at all. Now here it is in her hand again, with her non-blind son staring at it and her with a mix of horror and fascination she cannot bear seeing. She slams the camper door on his protesting cry.

She runs forward. The two men are trudging through the drifts, two men in black coveralls, each one carrying a short length of gray, three-inch pipe capped on each end. She shouts to them to stop. They turn and see her and her gun. They start to run, slipping and sliding in the snow.

Karp is closeted in the DA's office with the DA and the governor of New York and all the senior NYPD people on the premises, and the governor's security chief.