The City (The City 1)

In the days immediately after, I hoped that he had never seen me there in the bank. I found it too terrible to think that he saw me and went ahead with the plan anyway. That was a possibility so dark, if true, it might make me wish that I had never been born.

Amalia looked surprised—eyes wide, mouth an O—as the blast wave lifted her off her feet and flung her forward, and I do not believe she lived long enough to feel a moment of pain. That is a thing I must believe.

Poor devastated Malcolm, standing no more than two feet from her, driven to his knees by the blast, glasses knocked off, hair disarranged, but suffering only minor lacerations, while she lies slain before him, between him and me. One moment she is beautiful, vibrant, in love with life. An instant later she is a tumbled heap, clothes torn and bloody, dazzling green eyes wide and sightless.

They say five seconds elapsed between the first blast and the second. All I know is that it was time enough for Malcolm to look up from her body and meet my eyes, his face a wretched portrait of disbelief, horror, and piercing grief.

I have no memory of the second blast. Malcolm says it threw me harder and farther than the first one threw Amalia, that I came to the floor very near to her, my left arm outstretched, three fingers atop her right hand, as if I were imploring her to take me with her.

Because of her green stare and the breathless O of her mouth, he could have no doubt that his beloved sister was dead. But my eyes were closed, and he thought he saw plaster dust stir on the floor in front of my mouth, as if moved by my breath. He scrambled past Amalia and came to me and took my wrist and found my pulse. When he saw my back, he knew that he dared not move me—and that I would never walk again.

78

As the police later pieced it together, Fiona and Tilton waited to enter the bank until Mr. Smaller, stationed a block away, told them by walkie-talkie that the armored car had turned the corner onto National Avenue. Past observation had shown them that it would arrive in front of the bank in no less than three minutes and no more than five. Traffic that Monday suggested to Mr. Smaller that the armored car—actually a truck of the Colt-Thompson Security fleet—would be there in four.

Tilton was sitting on a bus-stop bench near the corner of 52nd Street and National Avenue when he received that message. Fiona stood under a tree toward the south end of the bank, with a walkie-talkie of her own. Each briefcase featured a four-tumbler combination lock, which she had converted into a timer for the detonator. They had only to click each tumbler to zero, and with the fourth, the clock in the briefcase began the countdown.

They entered opposite ends of the busy bank. She put her briefcase on the floor beside her and under one of the tall marble tables. He did the same. They picked up blank deposit slips from the supply each table provided and pretended to fill them out, but after two minutes or less, they left First National without approaching a teller’s window.

The armored truck stood at the curb when they came out of the bank. Because the nation had recently been plagued with race riots and violent street demonstrations, Colt-Thompson Security’s revised protocols required three—rather than the usual two—men per vehicle on certain routes in selected cities: two up front, the third in back with the money, bonds, and other valuables.

As Tilton and Fiona came down the steps from the bank, the street-side door of the truck opened, and the driver was the first out of the vehicle, which was standard procedure. The door locked automatically when he closed it, and the ignition key was in his pants pocket, on a long chain fixed to a metal ring on his belt buckle.

Lucas Drackman, in hospital whites, carrying a white first-aid kit with a red cross on it, as if he were a medical technician on an errand, turned the corner from 52nd Street onto National Avenue as the driver got out of the truck.

As soon as the driver exited and the truck wasn’t at risk of being hijacked through a curbside assault, that door opened, and the second guard got out.

In the bank, the first bomb went off, glass shattered in a flash of light, the muntins in a pair of bronze doors distorted as if they were made of plastic, one door tore loose of its hinges, clanged and clattered halfway down the steps, and the sidewalk vibrated underfoot as if, deep in the earth, something massive and Jurassic were waking from a hundred million years of sleep.

Everyone on the street pivoted toward the bank, except those who had known what was coming.

Lucas Drackman reached under his loose white shirt, drew a pistol from a cloth holster sewn to the inside of his waistband, turned to the shocked and distracted guard, shot him twice in the chest, and tucked the weapon under his shirt once more as the dead man dropped.

As Drackman was drawing the gun, the driver reached the back of the truck. Fiona came off the bank steps as the first bomb exploded, angling toward him, her right hand under her suit jacket, where she carried a pistol in a shoulder rig.

Just then, Mr. Smaller pulled to the curb behind the ColtThompson vehicle in a gray paneled van on the sides of which were emblazoned the name and logo of the armored-car service. Wearing a counterfeit Colt-Thompson uniform, he got out and headed toward the driver of the truck.

Fiona reached the driver first, and when he glanced at her, she came in close, doing her best to look terrified, saying, “Please, can you help me?” The second blast occurred, and the driver flinched, looked away from her. She shoved the muzzle in his gut and shot him dead, and Mr. Smaller arrived just in time to help her manage the body to the pavement, as if they were assisting a fellow worker who had suddenly been taken ill.

Pandemonium. People screaming, running, not sure what might happen next, oblivious to the heist in progress.

Lucas Drackman knelt next to the fallen guard on the sidewalk, by the open door of the armored truck, and popped the lid of his first-aid kit as if the man weren’t dead but merely in need of medical assistance.

At the back of the truck, Mr. Smaller dropped to both knees beside the dead driver. He used a small bolt cutter to sever the chain that connected a ringbolt on the man’s belt to the ignition key in his pocket.

After taking the key from Smaller, Fiona went to Drackman and tossed it to him. She quickly followed him into the truck as he clambered into the driver’s seat, and she pulled the door shut behind her. For security reasons, the windows were heavily tinted.

Mr. Smaller got up from the dead driver and once more got behind the wheel of the paneled van.

For use in an emergency, the Colt-Thompson truck had an array of flashing blue lights and an oscillating siren di

fferent from that of any police- or fire-department vehicles. Drackman switched them on and drove away from the curb just as the passing traffic began to jam up because of motorists gawking at the smoke now billowing from the shattered doors of the bank.

Mr. Smaller followed close behind in the paneled van. They turned right onto 52nd Street, where traffic was lighter.

When the remaining guard, closeted in the cargo hold, couldn’t get a response on the in-vehicle intercom, he made the mistake of assuming that twenty years of drama-free experience in his job must be predictive of twenty more. Curious but not sufficiently alarmed, he violated standard procedures and slid aside the steel plate that covered a two-inch-by-six-inch slot in the heavily armored wall between his redoubt and the forward compartment, calling out to the driver, “Hey, Mike?”

Prepared for this possibility, Fiona Cassidy thrust the muzzle of her pistol through the gap and emptied the magazine into the cargo hold. Following the roar of gunfire and the shriek of ricochets in the enclosed space, there was only silence from the third guard.