“I meant now,” he said. “Go! Get moving!”
She walked down the short hallway ahead of Nolan.
“Getting pushed out of the nest already, huh?”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Asking a couple of questions of a hotel clerk. How hard could it be?”
8:26 a.m.
Tracie Flowers, ten years old, sat next to her mother as the train clattered along the Long Island Rail Road. The train had pulled out from Pinelawn at 7:39 A.M., a full three minutes late, she had noted with some dissatisfaction. But she had been pleased that the train had reached the other stations with no additional delays, and they were on schedule to pull into Penn Station at precisely 8:37, with a journey lasting exactly the projected fifty-eight minutes. Tracie found this pleasing.
Being content at having fit the train’s progress into a neat pattern in her mind, Tracie counted the seats, the windows, and the slats on the luggage racks. She counted the passengers all along the way, keeping track of those who entered, those who left, and the luggage that each had stowed up on the racks. She counted the number of people wearing hats, those using headphones, and the number of people with each hair color. (She was distressed that she couldn’t quite classify one man’s hair as either red or blond. Her mother cast the deciding vote for blond, and all was well again.) She took each of the numbers and factored it, then figured out if it could be expressed as a sum of primes, and then found complex mathematical relationships among them, as well as between each one and the current day, month, and year.
This occupied her mind for most of the forty-five minutes of the ride so far. At 8:32, right on schedule, the train’s brakes began to whine as it pulled into Woodside. She heard the familiar hiss and opening of doors, and Tracie mouthed the announcement of the station along with the recording. Things became disordered as people got up and others came in, and it took a moment for everything to settle down and Tracie not to become overwhelmed. The train started moving again, and she got busy with the task of mentally recording those who had gotten off the train and those who had gotten on. The person wearing a patterned knitted cap was gone, as was the one with short-cropped black curly hair and the one with the red-and-white striped beanie. Among the newcomers were a bald man and a younger guy whose hair was long and greasy.
Tracie counted them up and tried to work out what, from her previous counts and calculations, had changed. Except that when she tried, not everything added up. Something was off about the new numbers, about the scene in that train car. Sometimes she just had the feeling that something was wrong, and it took a lot of thinking to figure out what it was. Anxiety welled up in her. They were nearing Penn Station. She only had six minutes, by her calculations, to figure out the puzzle, or else, in her mind, something very bad would happen. Her mom would say that it was only her OCD, that nothing really was going to happen. But to Tracie, it was real. If she didn’t find out what was wrong, she had the inescapable feeling that someone was going to die.
She closed her eyes and went through the numbers in her head, number of passengers and hats and hair color, until she noticed that it was something about the baggage. She looked at each luggage item stowed on the rack above the seats, straining to see each piece, making a mental connection between each piece of luggage and its owner.
There was one piece of luggage that didn’t belong to anyone on the train. It was a blue backpack that had belonged to the man with curly hair—the one who had gotten off at Pinelawn. He had forgotten it! The thought was distressing to Tracie, but she knew how to fix it. She pictured a line, like the ones she imagined connecting each piece of luggage to each passenger, stretching from the backpack, through a tiny crack in the doors, and all the way back to Pinelawn, to a faceless, curly-haired figure standing on the platform. The backpack now was connected to its rightful owner in her mind, and everything seemed fine again. Nobody was going to die because of her carelessness.
She could feel the pull of the train’s deceleration, and then she heard the announcement over the PA—which she again mouthed as the conductor spoke—that they were pulling into Penn Station. The train came to a stop, and people gathered their things. A few of the more hurried ones lined up at the train door. Her mother tugged at her sleeve and stood up. The doors opened and they moved forward with tiny steps, Tracie counting each one. They walked a few feet, and Tracie looked up to see that they were right next to the blue backpack on its rack. She once more imagined it to be connected to its distant owner.
Tracie Flowers never made it out of the train. Her mind cut to black before she could even feel the blast that killed her.
8:48 a.m.
Alex put her tablet into her black Targus backpack to the familiar whine of the brakes as the train rolled into Grand Central Terminal. Passengers around her shuffled, at least three quarters of them getting to their feet before the train came to a complete halt. This wasn’t the normal commuter crowd, but rather the Black Friday shoppers whose moods ranged from antsy to bloodthirsty.
The doors slid open and cool air streamed in. Alex waited while people elbowed each other to get off. Clark hung back, waiting for her to make the first move. Once the aisle had cleared, they followed the slow-moving crowd onto the platform, walking a few paces behind the crowd to avoid the tumult. It also gave her room to look around as she emerged into the elegant marble concourse. No matter how many times she walked into it, Alex always had to stop and wonder at its beauty. The sun’s rays filtered in from the stories-high east windows, casting pools of light that reached the information booth with its four-faced brass clock.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” she said, turning to Clark to see that his attention was immersed in his cell phone. She scoffed under her breath and surveyed the crowd, opting to take the main exit and leading her distracted friend across the concourse.
Alex’s instincts told her that something was wrong before she was aware of it. At first, it was an unconscious uptick in the number of ringing cell phones, and then in the buzzing of several people in the crowd. Something about it was disconcerting, even if she couldn’t put her finger on what. And then, as they were passing the clock in the center of the concourse, Clark spoke, playing out a conversation that was happening in minor variations throughout Grand Central terminal.
“Alex,” he said. “There’s been an attack.”
“Where?” she asked. Clark had his eyes glued to his smartphone.
“It’s all over Twitter,” he said, holding up his phone so she could see the screen. The same message appeared in the familiar telegraphic style, shared by several people, celebrities alongside Clark’s personal friends. Bombs in Penn Station. She pulled out her own phone and checked the news, but only one of the news outlets had reported on it, and all it did was refer to the now-viral tweet.
“We need to find my dad,” she said. Policemen, she now saw, were fanning out, and she saw two K9 units walking out onto the concourse.
“Was he staying near there?” Clark asked.
“No, he—”
She was cut off by a man’s voice on the PA. “This is an emergency. We are beginning immediate evacuation. Please remain calm and make your way to the exits in an orderly fashion.”
Jesus, Alex thought as people began swarming to the exits. A terrorist looking for maximum damage couldn’t hope for a better situation than this funneling of the crowds. Alex pulled Clark by the arm. “Come on!”
People were streaming out of the heavy wooden doors, so many that the sidewalks couldn’t hold them all and they were spilling into Forty-second Street under the Park Avenue overpass. Alex was knocked side to side by the crowd and lost touch with Clark. The heat and crush of the mass of people knocked the wind out of her.
“Clark!” she called out, but there was no hope he’d hear in all the commotion.
Then, the first bullet hit.
8:53 a.m.
Adele picked through what was left of the silver platter of fresh