Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“Maintenance!” Mr. Beckett cried. “They must have heard the bots in the duct. Shit! Detonate now! It’s our only chance!”

“No,” Mr. Joyce said, clicking the man off the screen and going back to his typing.

“What are you talking about?”

“I need more time,” he said calmly. “It’s not ready yet.”

“Time just ran out,” Mr. Beckett cried as he shook Mr. Joyce’s shoulder. “We’re discovered. We need to go with what we got now!”

“No,” said Mr. Joyce more firmly. He flipped a page in the pile of the building’s schematics on the workbench beside the tablet and began typing even faster.

“I need ten minutes,” he said. “We’re that close. My calculations do not lie. We can still get it done. Think about it. They don’t know what the bots even are. It will take time for them to call the bomb squad and piece it together and sound the alarm. By then I’ll be ready. I promise.”

“Well, hurry up already, would you please?” Mr. Beckett said, going to the aluminum blinds on the ambulance window that faced the target.

I immediately spotted the commissioner and the acting mayor, Priscilla Atkinson, in attendance when I entered the huge, crowded conference room. As I glanced up to the nosebleed section of the amphitheater seating, I was happy to see Brooklyn Kale and Arturo and Doyle and climbed up and sat down next to them.

Down on the floor in the center of the room, I could see my new fair-haired leader, Lieutenant Bryce Miller, going over his notes. I was almost glad I’d been taken off as case lead. It was high time to allow another Christian to be fed to the lions.

Someone dimmed the lighting, and a satellite image of the Queens warehouse from yesterday’s raid appeared. Bryce had just stepped to the podium and was still adjusting the microphone when the conference room doors burst open and two uniformed cops rushed in.

One of them made a beeline for the commissioner and whispered in his ear. I sat up straight when the puzzled, annoyed look on the commissioner’s face became one of intense concern.

“Ms. Mayor, everyone, excuse me,” the commissioner said, standing as the lights came back on.

Brooklyn and Arturo and Doyle and I all looked at each other with the same wide-eyed expression.

“Good grief. What the hell now?” Brooklyn said.

“Something has come up,” the commissioner said. “I’ll explain in a minute, but right now I’m going to need everyone to please stand and calmly head for the stairwells and proceed outside.”

He cleared his throat as everyone started freaking out.

“Quiet, now, everybody, okay? Head for the exit immediately. We have a problem. A red terrorist alert has been issued. We need to evacuate the building.”

“I told you, you stupid bastard,” Mr. Beckett said from the window, where he looked at the building through binoculars. “They’re coming out now! They’re evacuating! Blow it now!”

“One more minute,” said Mr. Joyce.

“No! Now!” Mr. Beckett cried. He watched as a truck pulled up in front of the building and a guy leaped out with a black Lab in tow.

“It’s the bomb squad! Do it now!”

“One second,” said Mr. Joyce, clicking away at the keyboard like a jazz piano soloist. “Just a couple more adjustments.”

Mr. Beckett tore a schematic in half and kicked the cooler.

“You’ve adjusted it enough! It’s now or never!”

Mr. Joyce ignored him, eyes on the screen, clicking buttons like mad.

Mr. Beckett looked through the binocs again, then started banging his head against the ambulance’s metal wall.

“Blow it,” he whimpered. “Blow it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Mr. Joyce said. “It’s all about the placement, otherwise it’ll do cosmetic damage at best.”

“I don’t give a shit! Blow the damn thing now!”

“Fine,” said Mr. Joyce. “You win. Just so you know, it’s not ready.”

“Blow it!”

“First say that it’s your call,” said Mr. Joyce. “I don’t want you blaming this on me later.”

“It’s my call! It’s my call!” Mr. Beckett cried.

Mr. Joyce set off the detonators on the eighty pounds of plastic explosives with a soft press of his thumb.

We were in the stairwell, nervous, feeling as powerless as schoolchildren in a teacher-led fire drill. It wasn’t the weird sound we suddenly heard that was that concerning. It was the hard shudder that a moment later came up through the ground and wrenched through the stairs and walls into the marrow of our bones.

Everyone stopped dead on the stairs with a collective gasp as the concrete drunkenly swayed back and forth under our feet. I looked up immediately at the ceiling, along with everyone else, suddenly feeling the hard beating of my heart as I wondered if it was about to drop down on top of us.

“Oh, my God, Mike! Look!” said Brooklyn, elbowing me in the neck as she pointed up at the stairwell window.

I looked.

Behind the courthouses, up on Broadway, about two long blocks away, I saw 26 Federal Plaza, the huge, monolithic FBI headquarters building. Something was wrong. Smoke was rising in the air above it. The smoke seemed to be coming from many of its seemingly blown-open windows.

Emily!

I watched helplessly as more of its windows blew out simultaneously, almost in a left-to-right diagonal line, flashing with a blinding white light.

I looked silently at what happened next.

The top floors of 26 Fed seemed to tremble and waft back and forth. There was a thunderclap crack of concrete and a horrid creak and groan of shearing steel. Then the top stories of the building freed themselves from their blown moorings and slowly slid away into empty air.

“Dear holy God,” I said. The building around us rocked again as most of 26 Fed’s million-pound avalanche of glass and stone crashed down onto the streets below.

When I peeled my eyes away from the mushrooming dust cloud out the window, I could hear somebody crying. It was the mayor, two steps above me. She was bawling her eyes out.

“They’re dead,” she kept saying as she crumpled to the floor. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

Every cop there turned and looked at each other as the dust plume rose into the sky. Doyle and Arturo and Brooklyn and Chief Fabretti. The shock was fine. What wasn’t so fine was the fear. The pale and shivering crazed looks of fear.

“Déjà vu all over again,” said Doyle, licking his lips. He had his gun in his hand. I gently helped him put it away.

“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy,” said Arturo hysterically.

I put my arm on Arturo’s shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I was speechless. He was in shock, the same as me. He was also right.

Then I was running down the stairs two by two, speed-dialing Emily as I began to pray that she miraculously might still be alive.

I hit the street and ran as fast as I could up narrow Saint Andrew’s Plaza toward the destruction.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky above the buildings. A misty cloud of gray dust was above it. It kept billowing wider and wider. Within the expanding gray cloud was a confetti-like, glittering mass of debris that I realized after a moment was paper.

I kept trying to call Emily as I ran, but her phone kept kicking into voice mail.

Maybe she’s just on the phone, I thought with desperate hope. Or her phone needs charging. Or the cell sites are down.

As I neared Foley Square, the Irish prayer to Saint Michael, the patron saint of cops, which Seamus had made me memorize when I graduated from the academy, suddenly popped into my head.