Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

The Asian guy shook his head at the chest-high stack as Berger quickly rolled the hand truck away.

As Berger passed the antiterror cop on his way out, he went into his pocket and slid ballistic ear protectors into his ears. Then he turned into the long Lexington Avenue Corridor exit, took the cell phone from his pocket, and dialed the number for the trigger in the massive paper-wrapped bomb he’d just planted.

He winced as fifty pounds of plastic explosive detonated with an eardrum-splitting ba-bam! Ten feet from the exit door, a chunk of cream-colored marble the size of a pizza slid past him like a shuffleboard disk. A man’s briefcase followed. A cloud of dust and hot smoke followed him out the door into the street.

Outside on Lexington, cars had stopped. On the sidewalk, people were turned toward the station’s entrance, arrested in place like figures in a model-train display. The hand truck clattered over as Berger rolled it off the curb. Passing the rear of the truck he’d parked, he crossed the street and turned the corner of 43rd Street, walking quickly with his head down, the iPhone still in his hand.

When he was halfway up the block, he took a breath and dialed the other mobile phone trigger.

The one attached to the incendiary device in the cab of the truck.

Someone screamed. When he glanced over his shoulder, a pillar of thick black smoke was billowing up between the office towers.

Instead of creating just a distracting blazing truck, he’d seriously thought about filling the rear of the truck with diesel-soaked ammonium nitrate, like the Oklahoma City bomber did, but in the end he’d decided against it.

He chucked the hat and the glasses and the Christ head, feeling unsure for a moment, shaking his head.

All in due time, he thought.

He glanced back at the ink black pinwheeling mushroom cloud sailing into the July morning sky as he hit Third Avenue and started walking uptown. The first sirens started in the distance.

He hadn’t crossed the line this time, Berger knew.

He’d just erased it.

Chapter 19

I GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. In the predawn gray, I threw on some flip-flops and biked over to a deli a couple of blocks north of our beach bungalow. After I bought a dozen and a half Kaiser rolls and two pounds of bacon, I sat with a cup of coffee on a beat-up picnic table in the deli’s still-dark parking lot, gazing out at the beach.

As the sun came u

p over the ocean, it reminded me of the summer I was seventeen. A buddy and I pulled a Jack Kerouac and hitchhiked down to the Jersey Shore to visit a girl that he knew. My friend cut out with the girl, and I ended up sleeping on the beach. Waking alone to the sound of gulls, I was depressed at first, but then I turned to the water and sat there, wide-eyed and frozen, overwhelmed for the first time by what a flat-out miracle this world could be.

I smiled as I remembered being with Mary Catherine last night. No wonder I was thinking about my teen years, I thought, finishing the dregs of my Green Mountain French vanilla. After last night, I certainly felt like I was seventeen all over again. I was definitely acting like a kid. Not a bad thing, by any stretch in my book. I highly recommend it.

Seamus was on the porch waiting for me when I got back. I could tell by the bloodless look on his face that something was very wrong. He had my phone in his hand for some reason. I screeched to a stop and dropped the bike as I bolted up the stairs.

“No! What is it? One of the kids?”

Seamus shook his head.

“The kids are fine, Michael,” he said with a surreal calm.

Michael?

Shit, this was bad. The last time I remembered him using my Christian name was the morning I buried my wife.

I noticed that the radio was on in the house behind him. A lot of silence between the announcer’s halting words. Seamus handed me my vibrating phone. There were fourteen messages from my boss.

“Bennett,” I said into it as I watched Seamus close his eyes and bless himself.

“Oh, Mike,” my boss, Miriam, said. “You’re not going to believe this. A bomb just went off in Grand Central Terminal. Four people are dead. Dozens more wounded. A cop is dead, too, Mike.”

I looked up at the pink-and-blue-marbled sky, then at Seamus, then finally down at the sandy porch floorboards. My morning’s peaceful Deepak Chopra contemplation session was officially over. The big bad world had come back to get my attention like another chunk of cinder block right through my bay window.

“On my way,” I said, shaking my head. “Give me an hour.”

Chapter 20