Robert Tanenbaum: Resolved

"He was real clear," said Karp, and not for the first time. "There's a bomb in the basement big enough to destroy the entire building and he'll set it off unless he hears from ibn-Salemeh that his release is under way. He said we're not to bring in the feds, not to inform the press, and not to bring any additional police onto the scene. He said they're observing the building and if any move is made to evacuate it, or to move cops in, they'll blow it up. He gave us two hours."

Everyone looked at the governor. The governor looked at Karp. "Are we sure this isn't a bluff?"

"Well, I can't say from the conversation I had with him, Governor, but the connect between ibn-Salemeh and the Manbomber is fairly explicit by now. We shouldn't be in any doubt that these people can build, deliver, and explode bombs. And they don't care about killing people one bit."

The state police security man, a fellow named Lambert, said, "Governor, the limo is waiting right outside the DA entrance on Leonard Street. I can't see how they could learn you're moving, give the order, and explode the bomb before we had you safe and away."

The governor ignored this. "What about the other people in the building? How many are there, Jack?"

Keegan said, "Usually about fifteen hundred, and we have more than the usual number of kids in the day-care center. It's the big day for judicial staff Christmas parties and people like to bring family. There's usually well over a hundred. Do you want an exact count?"

"No, it's more than enough. We're staying." He turned to an aide. "Get Auburn on the phone. I want to talk to the warden."

While this was being done, they heard the sounds of a scuffle outside, a loud male voice and a higher female one, indignant. Karp stood up and walked to the door. Outside in the narrow corridor, his secretary was facing off with a state trooper twice her size.

Flynn met Karp's eye. "It's your daughter. She says it's an emergency and this lummox wouldn't let me by to tell you."

There is an excavation on the Baxter Street side of the courthouse. Half the street and all of the sidewalk have been taken up and replaced by a pit shored up on three sides by raw two-by-eights. On the fourth side is a ramp faced with perforated steel plates and large enough for a five-ton truck. This is how they moved material for the cooling and heating renovations down into the basement. Marlene sees the two men disappear down the ramp and she follows. A hole has been cut in the side of the building and shored with steel girders. Past that is the basement proper. Marlene sees them enter a hallway. Crouching slightly, she pursues them. She is thinking, These are the people who killed Pete, and Nora and those others, and all the self-pitying feelings of the day and the previous days are gone, and she is focused on the passing instant only, in full predator mode.

She is in a hallway, painted pale green. There are black bloodstains on the floor and two bodies, both of men in construction worker clothing. A man steps from a doorway holding a Skorpion submachine gun. He fires a burst at Marlene but he doesn't aim low enough and she hears the rounds snapping over her head and whining down the hall. She raises her pistol and without breaking her stride shoots him in the chest and face. He falls in the doorway and she trots forward and steps over him.

Marlene is on a small landing. Steel steps lead down to the floor of the main boiler room. Six men are on the floor of the room. Two of them are the men in coveralls she has chased here and the other four are wearing construction gear. Of these, three are armed with pistols or submachine guns. The scene is very clear and sharp to her, almost unnaturally so, like a museum diorama showing how the Indians made pemmican. There is a rough table in the center of the group, on which lie the two plastic tubes. One of them has been opened and wires emerge from it. These wires are wrapped around others coming from a cellular phone with its case removed. The man wrapping the wires looks up like a high school teacher interrupted at a demonstration of some elementary physics fact. It is Maybe Gonzales, the Berber. Because Marlene has a silenced weapon, they don't realize that she is killing them for a few seconds and so she takes out Gonzales and two of the armed ones and then there is a return fusillade from the floor and she has to retreat.

Lucy's 911 call got a lot of attention. The 911 system has been trained to take bomb threats very seriously, and after the operator had determined that Lucy Karp was a real person, and responsible, and the daughter of the soon-to-be DA, and that the threat was lodged in the courthouse, the governor also being onsite, things moved with dispatch. The recent events in New York had caused to be created several specialized Emergency Service Units to deal with terrorists. One of these teams was lodged in police headquarters, a few hundred yards from the courthouse. Three minutes after being scrambled, two extremely costly specialized black, four wheel-drive vehicles were racing up Baxter Street, loaded with enthusiastic, heavily armed men.

"Where are you now?" Karp asked.

"On Baxter, about a hundred feet from the north end of the courthouse," said Lucy. "I can see the construction hole Mom went down. Here come the cops."

"Cops? Christ, Lucy, we're not supposed to bring any cops in. He said they'd blow the building if we did."

"Who said?"

"Never mind that! I want you to go away from the building. Take the boys and leave."

"But what about Mom?"

"Lucy, take the boys and go! Run!"

Rashid tried again to raise Felнpe on his cell phone, to no avail. There had been no message from Carlos giving the ready signal, but there had been one from the boy he had watching the courthouse, telling of lights and sirens and the arrival of the police in strength. It was the snow, he thought. The initiator had been delayed by the snow and their timetable had been thrown off. No one could have counted on the snow. So he could not really be blamed. But the men were armed, they should have no trouble fending off the police for the few moments it would take to rig the bomb. The chief would, of course, be angry, but on the other hand, as Rashid would explain to him, the success of such an operation would make it possible, perhaps, to win his release with a mere threat. That was definitely the line to take. Against that, there was the loss of Carlos and Felнpe, or Mamoud and Habib, valuable men, but not irreplaceable, and a few others. He picked up his cell phone again and dialed a long-memorized number.

His heart missed a beat. He should have heard the explosion from here, the entire city should have heard it. He dialed again and again. Nothing. He does not know what to do now. He sits paralyzed.

A garbage truck-mounted snow plow, its yellow light flashing, is moving down the street. His car is blocking it. The plow driver honks. Rashid backs up too quickly, fishtails, smashes his rear lights against another car. There is a police car behind the snow plow. Its occupant gets out and walks around the garbage truck to see what the problem is. He walks over to Rashid's car and raps on the window with his knuckle. Rashid rolls it down. The cop looks in. At roll call that afternoon, this patrolman had been cautioned against racial profiling. Yes, they were looking for Arab men, but that didn't mean they could roust anyone who looked Arab. You had to have something else, some probable cause. And they had distributed sketch artist pictures of three men made from witnesses of the neighbors of that house that had blown up in Astoria.

The cop took a long look at this guy and thought that he looked enough like one of the guys in the sketch to constitute probable cause. Besides, it was freezing out and the guy was sweating bullets. He backed away.