Born to Run

by John M. Green

  Maxine turned her head back but was propelled by the heaving crowd. She managed to cry out “Bomb” before her ankle twisted and she went over.

  And under.

  TWO minutes from Grand Central, the Metro-North train was already slowing.

  At Grand Central, a courier stood waiting at the head of Track 110, unaware of the red timer ticking down inside the white box he’d lugged here. If he could’ve seen it, he’d know he had 280 seconds to get the hell out. It was the same for the courier at Track 45… and the one at Track 120. Grand Central was a big place.

  279…

  278…

  35

  SIX MORE SHOTS blasted out of the row house’s ground floor windows, spraying what little glass was left after the first blast across the sidewalk. A quick radio count confirmed that none of Jefferson’s men was hit. He ordered Adder, across the street, to wait five seconds and fire a flash-bang CS gas grenade in through one of the windows. Inside, and upstairs, Jefferson signalled to Smith and Fredericks to brace for the noise, slip on their gas masks and sweep the upper floor.

  They found no one.

  Jefferson heard the grenade whistle over the street. Even upstairs and muffled through his ear protectors, the force of the explosion stung. Downstairs the flash was solar bright, deafening, designed to stun its targets for forty indispensable seconds.

  Jefferson two-stepped down the stairs first, the other two men covering him from above. Unusually, there was no coughing or moaning in response to the gas. Nothing.

  A trap?

  Jefferson took a turkey peek, hooking his head around the doorpost into the living room, and his left arm motioned for the other two to come down. His mask still in place, he took a long sweep before he withdrew his head back from the room. After one second, he swung back briefly as though to confirm something. “Five perps,” he whispered into his helmet microphone when he was back in the corridor, his back hard against the wall. “Two immobilised, seated centre of room. Backs to me, facing toward front windows and computer laptop on coffee table. Two pistols on table… one’s a Glock, the other’s a Siggy P226.” The Sig-Sauer was one of Jefferson’s favourite hand-guns; he loved its Colt/Brown short recoil.

  “Computer monitor shows a timer… numbers going down second-by-second. Last one I saw was 185. 185 seconds. Three other men… huddled below front windows… armaments at feet…. zero movement. Believe weapons to be MP5 and M16 fitted with M203s.” Jefferson was impressed—these men carried some serious protection: the classic M16 was fitted with a 40mm grenade launcher mounted under the barrel, and a Heckler & Koch MP5 carbine that handled beautifully as a machine gun. Jefferson preferred it for its laser-sighted single shots. Giving cross-hair accuracy up to 600 feet, it fired the same 9mm Parabellum rounds as the Siggy, just a lot more of them and a hell of a lot faster, at 800 rpm.

  “Jefferson, there’s a bomb on a timer at 42nd Street subway on Manhattan. The caller suggested this might be connected. The two men at the computer? Are they functioning?”

  Jefferson edged his mask back in again. The gas had pretty much cleared and the screen was already counting down to 178… no, 177.

  Not even three minutes to go. They must be detonating the subway bomb from here. His bones told him it couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Jefferson stepped sideways and filled the doorway. “Hands away from the computer,” he ordered. “Back off…! I said back off… now!”

  Neither man moved a muscle.

  “Back off or we shoot to kill.”

  One of the men shunted his arm toward the Siggy on the table. Jefferson fired, hitting him square in the back of the head and propelling him to the floor. The other man moved—maybe the first guy had nudged him as he fell, but no one was taking chances here and Fredericks, who’d followed Jefferson inside, fired a single shot into his back, smack into the curve of the “2” on his Michael Jordan basketball jersey, Chicago Bulls number 23.

  One of the three men slumped under the window rolled his head, and his arm agitated toward the M16. Fredericks fired a three-burst shock round and took all three men out, though Jefferson wished he hadn’t—they’d have no one to interrogate.

  Surveying the dingy room for anyone else was quick work—there was scant furniture to hide behind. Fredericks headed back to search the rest of the ground floor. Smith did a dead-check on Fredericks’ kills by the windows while Jefferson attended to the two computer jockies.

  “Checking three perps below window… All in paradise fucking virgins,” Smith reported into his microphone. He patted them all down. “No body weapons.”

  Jefferson removed a glove to pulse-check the necks of the other two. “Two at computer… same. Okay, men… all inside the house… NOW!” he ordered. “Full search. Fast.”

  As they entered from the rear and from the street, his men re-entered every room to search for anything or anyone missed by the first sortie, including booby traps. Cortes placed his detector near the phone and when it beeped an all-clear, he picked up the handset and dialled HQ so the line could be checked and all recent calls analysed, particularly any during the last twenty-four hours… who to… who from. After an automated phone drone identified these addresses in mere seconds, HQ would dispatch SWAT teams to “visit” them. If they were cell phone numbers, their locations could be triangulated from the network towers, provided they were switched on.

  Jefferson’s job was to work the computer. Time was not on his side. He dumped the body that was still on the sofa on top of the Chicago Bull on the floor, and was about to sit in his place to face the screen when he saw he needed a rag—the splatter of blood meant he had no accurate idea where the timer was at now, but he guessed it was down to around 85.

  His eye caught the chicken-wire print of a Palestinian-type kefir hanging out of the back pocket of the topmost corpse, so he fished it out and dabbed the red off the screen as best he could.

  His ear picked up something from the computer.

  A hum? A voice?

  Across the top of the screen, scrolling like a newsbar, were the words, “New York, New York.” In the centre, the numbers were already down to 76…

  If he wasn’t tense enough already, what really did it for him were the inset frames that had popped up below the countdown: two side-by-side video frames, each one flashing up separate CCTV scans of subway stations, changing location every two seconds. The station names and platforms were superimposed over each picture, as well as the time, which was—he checked—current… these were live feeds direct from subway CCTV security cameras. In two sets of the paired shots so far Jefferson observed a striking coincidence: a loner in a courier uniform, agitated, glancing at his or her watch and hefting a large white box secured with black duct tape. Why the hell hadn’t any of the turkeys watching monitors at MTA subway control picked up on this? What were they doing? Scratching their balls? Hell!

  66…

  With the rest of the team scattered elsewhere in the house, Fredericks and Smith searched the front room. Smith found a print-out of the first two pages of a typed document written by a certain Jax Mason. He scanned it quickly.

  Jefferson noticed the pages were shaking as he took them from Smith. Like Smith, he only had to read the first two paragraphs.

  “Penguin,” he said, reporting to HQ. “You got to evacuate the entire subway…”

  “But which…?”

  Jefferson looked up to see Smith shaking his head and waving. He jabbed a paragraph below where his boss had stopped reading.

  “Holy… this is impossible,” said Jefferson taking a precious second to collect his thoughts.

  He had to explain this carefully. And precisely. Millions of lives were depending on him.

  “This laptop is programmed to detonate a pre-determined series of explosions only split-seconds apart, across over two hundred Manhattan subway locations. The explosions are timed to begin in, er, 52 seconds,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “They will start at stations�
�� I’m reading here… around the island perimeter and work inwards, methodically, each ring of explosions timed to build on the passing shockwave and accelerate the force tearing through the tunnels so that when the shockwaves in the various tunnels meet at the centre of the island… here I’m guessing… maybe at 42nd Street… it will generate a massive explosion… nuclear scale, sir… which will radiate back out again with enough force to obliterate the entire island of Manhattan. Sir, if we can’t stop this thing right here, in the next, ah, 50 seconds to be precise, we are totally…”

  “I hear you. 50 seconds, you say?”

  “49, sir.”

  “Can you do it…?” Penguin asked. “Pull the plug…?”

  “I think there’s something. Hold…” Jefferson clicked the mouse over the “New York” banner and dragged it lower down the screen. “There’s a ‘Stop’ button. It was hidden. Could be a hoaxer… a booby-trap… could be real… no way to know unless…” Jefferson lifted his arm again to wipe his face with his sleeve.

  “Do it,” Penguin ordered unnecessarily.

  43…

  Jefferson’s tongue licked dry at the corner of his mouth, and his entire body drained.

  Smith closed his eyes.

  Jefferson inhaled.

  40…

  He clicked on “Stop” and a shower of static hazed over the two inset video frames. They faded to black. The subway station camera links had been cut.

  But the countdown ticked on … 37… 36...

  36

  IT WAS THE nightshift changeover at St Barts Hospital in London. The male nurse, a weasely man, locked the door of Room 603 behind him before slipping the patient’s chart out of its slot at the foot of the bed. He checked the heart monitor: steady but weak. The chart graphed like this for weeks, apart from three valiant spikes that sustained themselves at close to normal levels for only a few hours each. The day-nurse, Jeni Crompton, had made a note next to the last one, “Encouraging.”

  “Touching,” the night-nurse smirked, letting the chart drop to the floor.

  There was nothing particularly remarkable about this man, or so the six other staff who’d seen him on duty would later testify to police, apart from some strange marks, tattoos maybe, on his knuckles.

  “What were they?”

  “No idea, sorry. Didn’t want to look too close… It would’ve been bad manners.”

  “Had you seen him before?” Implicit in the question was “why’d you let him hang around if you hadn’t.”

  “No, but with all the cutbacks, things have been a bit topsy turvy round ’ere.”

  THE “nurse” took the foil-covered cylinder from his pocket, ripped back the wrapping to reveal a cone-shaped dose release pellet at the end of a spike, and pressed it hard into Jax’s heel, holding it there for a few seconds before pulling it away and slipping it back into his pocket.

  The slightly hunched man stepped back and waited, an arched eyebrow impatient over the heart monitor. Finally, it flat-lined and he unlocked the door and strode out humming Should auld acquaintance be forgot…

  37

  “THE LINKS ARE down,” Jefferson said, trying a workaround.

  At thirty seconds to go, the “New York, New York” strip zoomed up to fill the screen completely. “I don’t know what’s happening here,” said Jefferson, going even colder. He started to explain exactly what he was seeing when he said, “Hold it, the numbers are back… 26… 25… Shit. The ‘Stop’ button didn’t work. Penguin, are you evacuating the stations?”

  “We’re linked direct into NYC’s OEM,” he said, referring to the City’s Office of Emergency Management. “The Watch Command. They’ve turned all trains heading into Manhattan back, heading out in reverse. But they can’t possibly evacuate the stations. Not in the time frame. The panic would be disastrous.”

  “So will this, sir. The flood mitigation barriers in the tunnels… can we close them, to stop the shockwaves building?” Jefferson was referring to sliding barriers that had been installed in some subway tunnels to contain flood by sealing off entire sections.

  “Too late.”

  22…

  At 17, the laptop’s volume robotically spun up to maximum so the vague sound Jefferson had thought he’d been hearing for the last minute or so was blaring full blast, “… It’s up to you, New York, New York.”

  “Frank fucking Sinatra? Is this some kind of joke? Jesus…13… 12…”

  He kept clicking on “Stop” but to no effect. Nothing… 10… 09…

  He pulled the power cord out but, the battery was on full charge and, he checked, it was screwed in, and the heads had been mutilated to prevent quick extraction. There was no external cable going to an internet connection, so this had to be a wireless link.

  Think.

  Forget the battery. Disable the modem. Destroy the coordination and maybe stop the bombs. He located it on-screen under “Settings” but as he was about to do it, the song ended on its celebrated finale blast of brass. No.

  07… 06…

  He disabled the modem, and at 05 the countdown hung.

  “It’s frozen at 05… It’s stopped.”

  “Maybe,” said Penguin. “Hold your breath everyone… and pray.”

  38

  THE NEWS BULLETINS worked hard to maintain a veneer of responsible calm, but the edge in the relief that night was razor sharp. Every so often the façade would crack. When the cell phone networks crashed repeatedly from overload, people suspected the worst, holding their breath, skipping their hearts, cocking their ears for… anything. Subways were closed. Roads were a mess.

  The first panic surged through the city moments after 5:25 PM when word escaped from 42nd Street, but what really set off the storm was when the NYPD was ordered to evacuate every one of Manhattan’s 468 subway and train stations. According to the two-page note in Jefferson’s hand, there were 230 bombs, almost one every two stations, though pivotal stations such as 42nd Street and Grand Central had multiples. The countdown stopped without event, but no one in authority was taking chances. And even if there’d been a fine-balanced choice before, there was none once Captain Jefferson radioed in the name he’d found in one of the dead terrorist’s wallets: Karim Ahmed, a man who’d notoriously been once charged with financing terrorists.

  On current intelligence, there was no way of knowing if these 230 unknown couriers were suicide bombers programmed to explode their devices on-site if the timers failed. Jefferson heard the orders going out: evacuate subways; track down and secure all bombs; disable and arrest all couriers with white boxes on platforms. If necessary… take them out.

  “PLEASE stay calm…”

  Calm? Who were these people kidding?

  All over the island, the undergrounds hosed out gushes of panicked commuters and subway employees. The couriers, shocked by station announcements that branded them, instructing them to put down their parcels and to lie on the ground with their hands behind their heads, couldn’t move, and most were stuck to their spots cowering. Mistaking the reaction, emboldened commuters in several stations pinned a few couriers down, bumping the boxes to the ground and ripping them open, though wishing they hadn’t. “Bomb!”

  Hundreds of limbs cracked as the rush flung people beneath flailing feet or onto tracks—fortunately OEM had cut the power by then to the third rails.

  The whole city was a giant whose stomach clenched in fear. Millions of breaths held in, but there were no blasts.

  OEM had coordinated with Homeland Security to initiate emergency response procedures simultaneously with Jefferson’s team lifting off for Strawberry Mansion. And when he radioed in the news about video feeds from scattered subway stations, those of New York’s 35,000 police officers who were on duty, together with already alerted OEM and Federal Emergency Management Agency teams, were swiftly dispatched around the island. FEMA wasn’t going to have any Hurricane Katrina criticisms about this operation, no way. It didn’t take the authorities fifteen minutes to get each one of the co
uriers into temporary custody; this is what these guys were trained to do. Almost as quickly, 229 identical stories got radioed in, stories Emergency HQ backed up with the fifteen courier firms’ own records.

  CITIES around the nation shook with false alarms and rumours. The country teetered on hysteria.

  Bobby Foster was at a campaign barbecue in Alabama when he was told the news on camera, and he dropped his mouth and his plate.

  The plate was plastic admittedly, but his oh-fuck face would be memorialised in the press and on TV and no amount of wheedling explanations—“I was bumped,” for example—could get the clip taken off the David Letterman Late Show’s “Top Ten Stupidest Moments of the Year”. Niki Abbott would have given anything to have been there. Almost.

  HANK Clemens was in Charleston, giving an award for the best shag, the uniquely named state dance of the two Carolinas. He slowly put the ribbon down, wiped the corners of his mouth and, after taking a moment’s breath, looked deep into the intruding TV camera’s lens. “The men and women in our security and emergency response agencies know how to handle this threat.” They were comforting though sombre words. “I know a little about these things myself,” he said, “and I can assure you we are in good hands. Please… please, follow their directions until order is restored and then just go about your business. If we change… our routines… our activities… ourselves… ‘they’ will win… and we must not let that happen.”

  Gregory, who was there with him, was agog. Hank’s quiet modesty. His confidence. His calm. Hank hadn’t blown this. He wasn’t masterful, he wasn’t deep, but he was reassuring and showed a previously concealed hint of spine and resilience. It was lucky no one noticed, but a smile cracked open on Gregory’s face. Hank had a chance at winning.