Andrew Gross - Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 1 - The Dark Tide, Don’t Look Twice, Relentless

“ Beautiful. ” Cheryl clapped. “Well done.”

Karen had been raised in Atlanta. Her father owned a small chain of paint and remodeling stores there. She’d gone to Emory and studied art. At twenty-three she and a girlfriend went up to New York, she got her first job in the publicity department at Sotheby’s, and things just seemed to click from there. It wasn’t easy at first, after she and Charlie married. Giving up her career, moving up here to the country, starting a family. Charlie was always working back then—or away—and even when he was home, it seemed he had a phone perpetually stapled to his ear.

Things were a little dicey at the beginning. Charlie had made a few wrong plays when he opened his firm and almost “bought the farm.” But one of his mentors from Morgan Stanley had stepped in and bailed him out, and since then things had worked out pretty well. It wasn’t a big life—like some of the people they knew who lived in those giant Normandy castles in backcountry, with places in Palm Beach and whose kids had never flown commercial. But who even wanted that? They had the place in Vermont, a skiff at a yacht club in Greenwich. Karen still shopped for the groceries and picked up the poop out of the driveway. She solicited auction gifts for the Teen Center, did the household bills. The bloom on her cheeks said she was happy. She loved her family more than anything in the world.

Still, she sighed, shifting into chair pose; it was like heaven that at least for an hour the kids, the dog, the bills piling up on her desk were a million miles away.

Karen’s attention was caught by something through the glass partition. People were gathering around the front desk, staring up at the overhead TV.

“Think of a beautiful place….” Cheryl directed them. “Inhale. Use your breath to take you there….”

Karen drifted to the place she always fixed on. A remote cove just outside Tortola, in the Caribbean. She and Charlie and the kids had come upon it when they were sailing nearby. They had waded in and spent the day by themselves in the beautiful turquoise bay. A world without cell phones and Comedy Central. She had never seen her husband so relaxed. When the kids were gone, he always said, when he was able to get it all together, they could go there. Right. Karen always smiled inside. Charlie was a lifer. He loved the arbitrage, the risk. The cove could stay away, a lifetime if it had to. She was happy. She caught her face in the mirror. It made her smile.

Suddenly Karen became aware that the crowd at the front desk had grown. A few runners had stepped off their treadmills, focused on the overhead screen. Even the trainers had come over and were watching.

Something had happened!

Cheryl tried clapping them back to attention. “People, focus!” But to no avail.

One by one, they all broke their poses and stared.

A woman from the club ran over, throwing open their door. “ Something’s happened! ” she said, her face white with alarm. “There’s a fire in Grand Central Station! There’s been some kind of bombing there. ”

Karen hurried through the glass door and squeezed in front of the screen to watch.

They all did.

There was a reporter broadcasting from the street in Manhattan across from the train station, confirming in a halting tone that some sort of explosion had gone off inside. “ Possibly multiple explosions … ”

The screen then cut to an aerial view from a helicopter. A billowing plume of black smoke rose into the sky from inside.

“Oh, Jesus, God,” Karen muttered, staring at the scene in horror. “What’s happened …?”

“It’s down on the tracks,” a woman in a leotard standing next to her said. “They think some kind of bomb went off, maybe on one of the trains.”

“My son went in by train this morning,” a woman gasped, pressing a hand to her lips.

Another, a towel draped around her neck, holding back tears: “My husband, too.”

Before Karen could even think, fresh reports came in. An explosion, several explosions , on the tracks, just as a Metro-North train was pulling into the station. There was a fire raging down there, the news reporter said. Smoke coming up on the street. Dozens of people still trapped. Maybe hundreds. This was bad!

“ Who? ” people were murmuring all around.

“Terrorists, they’re saying.” One of the trainers shook his head. “They don’t know. … ”

They’d all been part of this kind of terrible moment before. Karen and Charlie had both known people who’d never made it out on 9/11. At first Karen watched with the empathetic worry of someone whose life was outside the tragedy that was taking place. Nameless, faceless people she might have seen a hundred times—across from her on the train, reading the sports page, hurrying on the street for a cab. Eyes fixed to the screen, now many of them locked fingers with one another’s hands.

Then, all of a sudden, it hit Karen.

Not with a flash—a numbing sensation at first, in her chest. Then intensifying, accompanied by a feeling of impending dread.

Charlie had yelled something up to her—about going in by train this morning. Above the drone of the hair dryer.

About having to take in the car and needing her to pick him up later on that afternoon.

Oh, my God …

She felt a constriction in her chest. Her eyes darted toward the clock. Frantically, she tried to reconstruct some sort of timeline. Charlie, what time he left, what time it was now … It started to scare her. Her heart began to speed up like a metronome set on high.

An updated report came in. Karen tensed. “It appears we are talking about a bomb,” the reporter announced. “Aboard a Metro-North train just as it pulled into Grand Central. This has just been confirmed,” he said. “It was on the Stamford branch. ”

A collective gasp rose up from the studio.

Most of them were from around there. Everyone knew people—relatives, friends—who regularly took the train. Faces drained of blood—in shock. People turning to each other without even knowing whom they were next to, seeking the comfort of each other’s eyes.

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” A woman next to Karen shook her head.

Karen could barely answer. A chill had suddenly taken control of her, knifing through her bones.

The Stamford train went through Greenwich.

All she could do was look up at the clock in terror—8:54. Her chest was coiled so tightly she could barely breathe.

The woman stared at her. “Honey, are you okay?”

“I don’t know….” Karen’s eyes had filled with terror. “I think my husband might be on that train.”

8:45 A.M.

Ty Hauck was on his way to work.

He cut the engines to five miles per hour as he maneuvered his twenty-four-foot fishing skiff, the Merrily , into the mouth of Greenwich Harbor.

Hauck took the boat in from time to time when the weather turned nice. This morning, with its clear, crisp April breeze, he looked off his deck and sort of mentally declared it: Summer hours officially begin! The twenty-five minutes on the Long Island Sound from where he lived near Cove Island in Stamford were hardly longer than the slow slog this time of the morning down I-95. And the brisk wind whipping through his hair woke him a whole lot faster than any grande at Starbucks. He clicked the portable CD player on. Fleetwood Mac. An old favorite:

Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night / And wouldn’t you love to love her.

It was why he’d moved back up here, four years ago. After the accident, after his marriage had broken up. Some said that it was running away. Hiding out. And maybe it was, just a little. So the hell what?