Линкольн Чайлд - City of Endless Night

The crowd continued pouring out, excited, talking, still full of the inspiring speech. They streamed along the velvet ropes, all very orderly, surging as Dr. Adeyemi, her entourage, security guards, and fans moved through the lobby. The place was as full of people as Attiah had ever seen it, all centered on Adeyemi like bees clustering around a queen. The press was there, of course — bristling with television cameras.

Suddenly Attiah heard a series of rapid reports: bang, bang-bang-bang, bang! Well trained in firearms, he recognized instantly that the sounds were not, in fact, gunfire, but firecrackers. But the crowd had no such revelation, and the effect was electric: sudden, overwhelming panic. Shrieks and screams filled the lobby as people ran for cover, any cover, dashing madly about in all directions, colliding, falling, trampling each other. It was as if their brains had been shut off and pure instinct had taken over.

Attiah and his fellow guards tried to bring order and implement the carefully rehearsed anti-terrorist drill, but it was hopeless. Nobody was listening; nobody could listen; and the velvet ropes, the stanchions, the barricades all went down like a house of cards.

Fifteen seconds after the firecrackers, there were two hollow booms! one after the other, and in the blink of an eye the vast lobby filled with blinding thick smoke, which raised the level of terror to a pitch he hardly believed possible. People were crawling along the ground, screaming, grasping and tearing at each other like drowning souls. Attiah tried to help, did everything in his power to calm people down and lead them to the established safety zones, but they all seemed to have become crazed, mindless animals. He heard sirens through the murk as the police and fire and anti-terrorist teams arrived at the plaza outside, invisible in the smoke. The blind panic went on, and on, and on... And then the atmosphere began to clear, first just a thinning of the darkness, then a dirty-brown light, and then it cleared to a haze. The lobby doors were open, the forced-air systems roaring full-tilt, the NYPD cops were charging in, along with a slew of anti-terror units. As the smoke cleared, Attiah could see that almost everyone was still lying on the ground, having done what they could to take cover after the smoke bombs went off by dropping flat and crawling to safety.

And then Attiah saw a sight that struck such horror into his heart that he would never forget it as long as he lived. Lying on the floor, on her back, was the body of Dr. Wansie Adeyemi. He knew it was her because of the distinctive kitenge robe. But she had no head. Two security guards, whom Attiah assumed had been sheltering her, also lay dead next to her.

A huge pool of blood was still spreading from this scene of carnage, and as the full dimensions of the murderous situation dawned on the people around her corpse, a shrieking wail of grief rose up as her security guards charged about in confusion and fury, looking for the killer, even as the NYPD was mobilizing, organizing, directing, shouting, and clearing the mass of terrorized people.

Staring across the lobby, with its dark, drifting smoke, the cries of the frightened, the suited and helmeted figures rushing through the gloom with their loudspeakers blaring directions, the dense mass of flashing lights and sirens outside — Attiah felt like he had descended into Hell itself.

Bryce Harriman made the long ascent of the DigiFlood building, the glass elevator showing the lobby dwindling to a speck beneath him. Anton Ozmian himself had requested a meeting, and that of course was enough to make Harriman curious indeed — but at the moment he had other things on his mind, as well.

First and foremost was the murder of Dr. Wansie Adeyemi. Ever since his interview on America’s Morning the day before, Harriman had been the toast of the town, his every prognostication taken as gospel. It had been a wonderfully heady feeling. And so this new murder, tragic as it was, had been like a sucker punch to his gut. On the face of it, the beheading — and in particular the nature of the victim — seemed to have nothing in common with the earlier deaths. And therein lay the rub. Harriman realized that his command of the Decapitator story depended on the upholding of his theory. He’d already gotten three calls from his editor that day, asking if he’d dug up the dirt yet.

The dirt. That dirt was precisely what he needed — the skeletons in the closet of this saintly woman, this Mother Teresa, who had just won a Nobel Peace Prize. There had to be skeletons, he reasoned — nothing else made sense. And so in the hours that followed news of Adeyemi’s death, he’d launched on a desperate search for that sordid but well-hidden past: doing deep background, talking to everyone he could find who knew anything about her, pressuring people, demanding they reveal what he was certain they were hiding. And as he did so — aware that he was making a terrific nuisance of himself — he was acutely aware that if he couldn’t dig up anything on the woman, then his theory, his credibility, and his command of the story would be in jeopardy.

In the middle of this frantic search, he’d received a cryptic note from Ozmian, asking him to drop by his office that afternoon at three. “I have important information regarding your effort,” the note had read — nothing more.

Harriman was well aware of Ozmian’s reputation as a ruthless entrepreneur. Ozmian was probably pissed off he had interviewed his ex-wife, Izolda, and surely he was angry about all the shit about his daughter Harriman had published in the Post . Well, he’d dealt with angry people before. He expected this meeting with Ozmian to be similar, one long screaming session. So much the better — everything was on the record unless it was specifically excluded. Most people didn’t realize that when dealing with the press, and in fury they often made outrageous — and highly quotable — statements. But if on the other hand Ozmian did have “important information” — perhaps regarding his search for Adeyemi’s dark past — he dared not pass up the chance to get it.

He stepped out as the elevator doors opened onto the top floor of the DigiFlood tower, announced himself to the waiting secretary, then allowed himself to be led by a flunky through one soaring space after another until he at last reached a pair of massive birchwood doors, with a smaller door set into one of them. The flunky knocked; a “come in” was heard from beyond; the door was opened; Harriman entered; and the flunky retreated backward as one might when in the presence of a monarch, closing the door behind him.

Harriman found himself in a severely decorated corner office, with a magnificent view overlooking the Battery and One World Trade Center. A figure was sitting behind a vast, tomb-like desk of black granite. He recognized the thin, ascetic features of Anton Ozmian. The man looked back at him, expressionless, his eyes barely blinking, like a hawk’s.

Several chairs were arranged in front of the desk. In one of them sat a woman. She didn’t look corporate to him — she was a little too casually, if stylishly, dressed — and he wondered what she was doing in his office. Girlfriend? But the faint smile playing about her lips seemed to suggest something else.

Ozmian motioned Harriman to one of the other chairs, and the reporter took a seat.

The room fell into silence. The two kept their eyes trained on Harriman in a way that quickly became unsettling. When it seemed apparent neither one planned on saying anything, Harriman spoke up.

“Mr. Ozmian,” he said, “I received your note, and I understand you have information that is relevant to my current investigation—”