9:44 A.M.
FLOOR 18
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Dellenbaugh crabbed across the destroyed floor to the shattered window at the front of the tower. He sat back against a desk that was still there. He held the handgun he’d taken from the dead Secret Service agent. He felt overwhelming pain. He looked down; the bandage wrapped around his stomach was already soaked. He looked at the front of his pants and there was a large patch of wet red, blood that had already seeped from the wound and was now drenching him.
Dellenbaugh knew what it meant. Something was still embedded inside his body. He leaned back and could feel an odd, sharp, deep sensation of horrible pain. When he leaned forward he felt it less, but it was there.
Just above his head was a bent steel structural rod. He was seated at an angle of advantage and would see anyone enter. He knew they were coming. He would shoot them from where he was. Yet, the overwhelming sense of pain and torpor ripped at him from the inside, like a knife stabbing at his spine.
At the same time, he felt a sense of calm coming on. He knew it was shock from the pain. He couldn’t allow it to take him over, to envelop him in its painless cloud. If he went into shock, he would shut down.
Dellenbaugh reached his hand to the bandage and pushed the wet bottom of it up. He stuck his index finger into the wound, where the glass had penetrated, feeling amid a gelatinous surface as another part of him registered the entry of the foreign objects, the fingers from his own hand. Each fragment of an inch created pain he’d never imagined could exist. Tears of sheer pain, and the fight against it, streaked from Dellenbaugh’s eyes as his index and middle fingers found the source of the agony. It was a thick piece of glass, the size of a quarter. As shock reared its head again, and burning, razor pain hit him, he pulled the shard of glass from his stomach and put it on the ground, his fingers soaked in crimson, just as movement came from across the suite.
He looked at the small object, and, like removing a splinter, on some level felt relief—a lessening of the pain.
Dellenbaugh raised the gun just as a man entered the suite. He aimed the gun, though his arm was wobbly. When the gun fell from his hand all he could do was watch as the killer approached.