Born to Run

by John M. Green

  She eyed it suspiciously but decided it would fit under the strap on her bike, only just, and as he handed it to her, she could feel its weight. “What’s in it?” Maxine asked.

  “Who gives a… The really big prize is they get to be on SatTV live tonight. They all love it. They get home and show everyone in the neighbourhood when it’s replayed after seven. It’s all marketing crap.”

  “Yeah, but the box?”

  Dwayne glanced over at Gary and shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care,” he said, ending the conversation.

  “But I’m the one carrying this,” she said, a wrinkle of worry crossing her forehead.

  This was taking too long. No more Mister Nice Guy. Dwayne furrowed his bushy eyebrow into the deepest vee he could muster, “Listen, I don’t set this up; some guy with a big-buck paycheque tells me what he wants. And my job is to make it happen. If it’s too hard for you, pink hair lady, we got plenty other messengers.” He stabbed his thick stumpy index finger toward the line behind her.

  Maxine took the hint, as well as the hefty box, and left the pair to deal with the couriers jostling behind her.

  SHE circled the area around the 42nd Street subway looking for a railing she’d be happy chaining her bike to. It was near the corner of 44th and 8th, at the top of a subway ramp—the package was heavy and this would save time. It was 5:05 PM. She had twenty minutes to spare. She slid the box off her bike, supporting it on her hip, and headed into the subway, as fast as the weight of the box would let her.

  She used the Metrocard, pushed through the turnstile and found the platform for the A-train heading north.

  People crammed together waiting and reading. A few were chatting but most were avoiding eye contact.

  Maxine was tetchy. She’d entered at the completely opposite end of the crowded platform and had to shoulder herself down its entire length to get to where the first carriage would open up.

  After pushing hard and persistently, she reached where she guessed the train’s first compartment would stop—only a few stragglers stood beyond that point. Her stomach tightened: no TV crew. It was 5:12 PM. Thirteen minutes to go.

  The tunnel at the other end started to glow. If she didn’t make the drop, she wouldn’t get paid, plus she would’ve wasted ninety damn minutes. She resisted panic and waited, nervously on edge. They’ll be here. She rocked up and down on the heels of her boots. Maybe the crew was coming in by train, this train.

  It wasn’t an A-train; it was a C sharing the same platform. It careered down the track and screeched to a halt in front of her—at least she’d positioned herself correctly. Swapping the package to her other hip, she wiped her forehead

  The crowd surged around her toward the doors and she held back, shielding herself against one of the purple I-beam steel uprights as the doors shushed open to launch the contest between those pushing their way on and those forcing their way off.

  When the closing doors signalled the battle was over, her eyes searched up and down the platform for the TV crew. They’re running late, she decided, but the feigned confidence did nothing to ward off the mounting despair that she wasn’t going to get paid.

  5:18 PM, and still no sign. Maybe she hadn’t heard the bald guy correctly and she was supposed to wait for the A-train going downtown? She gripped the box and raced through the nearby exit, tearing up the stairs and through the pedestrian tunnels. After what seemed like an age she flew onto the other platform, almost slamming into an elderly lady carrying a green Harrods shopping bag from London.

  Her pulse pounded behind her eyes. No camera crew. But down the other end of this platform, she spotted one of her Crisis Courier colleagues with a similar box. Damn! It was someone else’s platform.

  She tried to calm down and pulled out her copy of the delivery slip to check the details. It was definitely the uptown train. Hell! She sprinted back, this time taking the correct stairway to deliver her direct to the head of the platform.

  5:25 PM. On cue. Her head swivelled around and back like a police car beacon, but there was no TV crew in sight. She was in the right place; she was positive. She’d just have to be patient.

  Proof. She needed proof she’d been here on time. She placed the box at her feet and her clammy hand yanked her cell phone out of her pocket and dialled her dispatcher, but there was no signal. Her hand punched down on her leg: who needs this shit? Maxine was tensed up. This had been a bad week for her. She wiped her face on her sleeve and picked up the box.

  Next to her, a calm and Burberry-clad woman in her early thirties cradled a small baby. Oblivious to Maxine’s plight, the mother’s head was bent, cooing sweet nothings to her child. She started the babble game and hummed a cute, vaguely familiar tune at the same time as repeatedly flicking her fleshy bottom lip with her index finger. The baby gurgled and cackled and those nearby grinned, apart from one ragged man who, undisturbed—or maybe not—continued rifling through an imaginary trashcan bolted to the wall.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. I’ve got to deliver this box to a TV crew. They’re supposed to be here. You haven’t seen them?”

  “We haven’t seen any TV crew, have we Sweetpea?” the stylish woman lilted to her baby, not looking Maxine in the eye.

  “See, if I can prove I was here from before 5:25, I’ll get my money.”

  Maxine’s box was too big not to notice and through the corner of her eye the mother also noted Maxine’s pink hair and sweat-glistened face and the dark threatening circles spreading under her arms. She’d heard stories. New York went hand in hand with scams. Don’t get involved.

  ABOVE them in Times Square, the rush-hour traffic was nearing gridlock. Maxine was lucky not to have gotten caught in it and miss the time for her delivery altogether. On the sidewalks, motley street vendors hassled passers-by, indifferent to which were tourists, pre-theatre diners or office workers. Their sole concern was peddling assorted products of variable worthlessness: massive salt rocks pegged into hot pretzels; “gen-u-ine” luxury-brand watches for the price of a Texas Toast in a greasy diner; and pirated DVDs that were filmed with hand-held cameras in Chinese movie theatres.

  Jaywalking pedestrians darted across the choked roads, dodging the honking Yellow Cabs, themselves ritually jerking from lane to lane.

  The same chaotic picture screened all the way up past Central Park, and all the way back down Broadway to Wall Street where elevators worked overtime as neck-straining office buildings spewed out their human guts into the streets, into teeming rivers of floating workers bobbing home, thirsting for a cool can and a warm TV for tonight’s big game.

  THE train slithered in from Connecticut, against the tide of suburbanites on their rush-hour flow out of Manhattan. With busted airconditioning, thank you for nothing, Metro-North. Despite the outside temperature, it sweltered inside the railcar like a foil-wrapped string of frankfurts left out in the sun, with passengers’ eyes drooping from the fixed windows as they wished the journey was over.

  33

  DESPITE THE BADGERING from the dwindling line of couriers, Dwayne and Gary completed their task on time, as Isis expected. In their circle, Dwayne’s planning was revered, as was Gary’s dogged execution. Usually. The episode with Jax Mason in London had been a rare exception.

  With no more messengers or boxes, they ripped down the SatTV sign they’d hung outside the warehouse. After rolling it up and shoving it into Gary’s backpack, they walked briskly into the loading bay, fired up the truck they’d stolen earlier that day and hammered it the six miles to LaGuardia airport’s freight terminal, where twenty or so cargo planes were lined up. To anyone not blinded by the pink-washed glints of sunset, the odd-looking pair scurrying between the planes was like a silhouette of the nursery-rhyme dish running away with the spoon.

  The pilot whose plane they were pacing toward was pumping his money into the vending machine in the waiting bay, a solemn pre-flight ritual that involved concentration and dexterity but, with years of practice, even this reformed drunk could manage it.


  Three dollars for a cup of tepid coffee was a bit rich, he bellyached. Yet one more setback. He’d become a shit magnet he decided and, no longer caring, he dressed the part. His standard issue navy, tan and gold uniform was designed so even the most shapeless individual could impress; on most, it evoked the image of neat hospital corners, but on him it was an oversized blanket tossed over a sagging torn mattress. Self-esteem was not his strong suit. He hadn’t seen a razor for at least three days yet no one would dream of complimenting him as fashionably unshaven.

  He was in luck for a change. The click signalled the coffee was about to drizzle out. Gut-warming sludge it might be, but he loved the burnt aroma.

  One of the planes taxiing off the apron shot a glint of the low sun into his bloodshot eyes and, as they swung over to check his own plane he puzzled, squinting at the two shapes he thought he saw clambering into his cockpit. “Hey,” he yelled, abandoning his coffee. It was a reckless move. And they say that coffee kills.

  He puffed and wheezed up to his Cessna just as its engines fired. Even if Gary and Dwayne hadn’t been wearing headphones, the roar of the motors would have blocked out his screams. His fists slammed against the cabin door. Dwayne, focused on take-off, sneered at him and signalled to Gary to deal with the inconvenience. Smiling, Gary unlatched the door so it smacked the pilot in the head and yanked the dazed man up into the small two-seater cockpit.

  Gary’s serrated grin stayed fixed. With crazed eyes, Gary poked his scraggy nose into the man’s terrified face and, without warning, roughly shoved the hysterical fumbler into the narrow space behind the seats that he and Dwayne had commandeered. “Shut the fuck up!” shouted Gary as his hand closed round the pilot’s throat. Dwayne neither heard nor felt the pilot slump. He looked at his watch and remarked, “On time.”

  THE sweat dripped down the parcel courier’s pink hair and trickled under her collar. The appointed 5:25 PM had passed and not even a hint of the expected TV crew had materialised. Maxine’s eyes scoured the subway platform again. “Damn it,” she blasted, out loud, but no amount of cursing would alter fate… that in three minutes’ time nothing would matter to Maxine Powers.

  When Maxine involuntarily stamped her foot in frustration, the already nervous young mother close by edged back and nuzzled even deeper into her baby’s neck, as if their private bond would block out this crazy woman.

  “Excuse me,” Maxine persisted, shoving a crumpled dispatch voucher forward.

  The mother flinched, keeping her eyes down.

  “If you’d just initial this for me,” she pressed, “to confirm I was standing here at this particular time.” Her fingers tapped at her watch. “I’d be real grateful.”

  Out of the corner of the mother’s eye, she could see that balancing against Maxine’s hip was a strange white box strapped with black duct tape, but she still didn’t look up; eye contact would only get her in deeper, embroil her, and she wrapped her arms even tighter around her boy. “Signing?” she said, shaking her head. “It’s a bit diffic…”

  As Maxine shook the ticket at her, the carton slipped and, despite her fumbling for it, it fell to the ground, breaking open.

  The two women peered down at the contents and froze. They didn’t need to know specifically that the exposed putty-like slab was a restricted-use, military-grade variant of the hyper-explosive C-4. But if they had known that impact couldn’t trigger it, even if it smashed against the platform floor, their hearts might not have exploded into their mouths, gagging their screams.

  Maxine’s eyes were drawn to the blue blasting cap that was pressed into the white explosive. Bizarrely, she noted it was the same blue as the baby’s bonnet and the candy petals on her cousin’s wedding cake last month. Yet this would be no party. And only one of these two women would survive it.

  With the presidential election in its final countdown, panic and terror were about to crack themselves across the nation like a bullwhip. It was calculated to spur a stampede, millions of skittish votes once again hurtling toward security.

  The baby squealed as if he sensed the danger, and the two women’s eyes paused only to blink at each other before they snaked along the two thin wires, one yellow, one green, that led from the blasting cap to the anodised aluminium cube on which a small screen was flashing a three-digit red number. It flashed again.

  320…

  Three-hundred-and-twenty what?

  319…

  Seconds.

  AT Melrose Station in the Bronx, the train doors hissed shut against the few who’d run onto the platform a second too late to board. Phlegmatic, they shrugged and unravelled their newspapers as the train pulled out without them. There’d be another along soon.

  Those who’d just made it and slid into their seats were hit by the acrid stench of body-heat that filled the car as well as the confronting racket that pumped out of the large black boom-box in the seat between two scruffy teenagers.

  34

  ARMONDO CRUZ IN Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security had just placed his phone bets on the next day’s card at Parx Racetrack when the call to the tip-off line came in at 5:15 PM. Cruz, a former cop had only transferred to POHS from Philadelphia’s northeastern 22nd District a week earlier so his first anonymous call, especially one so urgent, freaked him, though the caller with the middle-eastern accent didn’t seem to notice.

  Taking deep breaths, he meticulously followed procedures. Using the encrypted security codes he’d been given, Cruz’s computer, as well as instantly alerting everyone up the chain of command and triggering certain pre-set actions, tagged directly into the hangar hidden in the city’s outskirts—even he didn’t know where—and set off an immediate dispatch of Captain Merrill Jefferson and his crack team of counterterrorist specialists to the suspect address.

  “Imminent threat. Alleged Muslim terrorists ready to launch,” Cruz passed on. “Anonymous tip-off. Caller with middle-eastern accent. Immediate response required.” Cruz was taking no chances.

  Captain Jefferson’s unit was primed and ready, as always. They clipped on their arsenal as they ran through the armoury toward their Huey, one of two unmarked UH-1 Iroquois choppers at their disposal. Their pilot, Terry Jarmin, was already firing up the rotors. Only minutes later, at 17:20, Jarmin dropped ten of Jefferson’s men half a block north of the suspect address and they ran down the street spreading toward it. It was an especially chilly evening for October at only 5ºC. A few rugged-up residents huddled on the street but when Jefferson’s black-garbed men appeared, they all seemed to be summoned inside for various family crises—all except a waifish drunk in filthy coveralls who was slumped in the gutter between two vehicles, a burnt-out Ford Escort and an ’83 Mustang. His—or was it her?—black dreads snaked out from under a grey baseball cap and his hands, with sky blue fingernails no one noticed because of the gloves, gripped a half-empty gin bottle, whose contents were merely water.

  When the chopper pilot saw the men below were in position—two clustered at the steps of each row house either side of the suspect property, two crouched behind a ’78 Chevy opposite, and four in the street at the rear—he hovered the Huey high and dropped the cables. Three men, including Captain Jefferson, slithered down to scale over the roof and launch themselves in through the upstairs windows. Over the city emergency radio networks, black and whites were ordered to seal off all streets leading to the area and to prepare to evacuate homes. Fire crews and paramedics were dispatched to wait silently one block back.

  The pilot watched Jefferson and his men slide down the cables, smooth and fast until a sudden stop just short of the roof to avoid any tell-tale boot crunch. But the second their steel-capped toes touched, the front ground-floor windows blew outwards, the hollow-point bullets cutting clean through the Chevy and lodging into the walls of the houses opposite, missing the two men hiding behind the car by a hair’s breadth. Someone had seen them.

  The drunk, startled awake from his alcoholic daze in the gutter, lurched off in fright.


  Two of Jefferson’s men covering the sides of the house had already dropped to the ground with weapons positioned to retaliate, another two kicked in the doors of the houses next door and charged through to the back, scaring the hell out of the families already cowering in the corner after the blasts a few seconds earlier. The two men opposite watched. Those already in the rear jumped the back fence and stayed ready. Captain Jefferson, on the roof and still clipped to one of the Huey’s cables, swung out and down, tossing a grenade in through a window. “Jarmin… all up,” he commanded through his helmet microphone and, instantly, he and the other men on the roof were hoisted up about thirty feet until the blast cleared. The three then lowered themselves back to the roof, slipped down the slope to the guttering, flew over the sides and swung themselves inside the windows, guns ablaze.

  318…

  Don’t panic, Maxine told herself. She and the woman clasping her baby stared at each other, too afraid to speak.

  317…

  Stay calm.

  Even under this tension, Maxine could still calculate that 317 seconds was just over five minutes. Shaking, she was a good ten feet from the foot of the platform’s exit stairway. Back further, she could see maybe a hundred commuters, and more were piling in. All these people…

  316…

  “BOMB!” she shouted, her lungs on fire.

  For one, maybe five, of the next 315 seconds, those close by on the platform craned their necks to see what was going on, few trusting their ears. “It’s a bomb,” she screeched, “It’s on a timer… Five minutes… Run!”

  The woman with the baby was stuck solid in shock. Her adrenaline didn’t seem to kick in. The baby laughed and gurgled, but this time no one thought it was cute. Maxine grabbed the mother’s free arm, dragging her and the baby toward the stairs. Others were already running and pushing ahead of them, behind them, beside them. Maxine could feel the wave of raw panic surging up the platform. As they passed an alarm box she slammed her palm against the flat red button. The mob swelling behind her was shoving her forward, and wouldn’t stop pushing to give her time to answer when the station attendant squawked “What’s the problem?” through the speaker.