We were in the stairwell, nervous, feeling as powerless as schoolchildren in a teacher-led fire drill. It wasn’t the weird sound we suddenly heard that was that concerning. It was the hard shudder that a moment later came up through the ground and wrenched through the stairs and walls into the marrow of our bones.
Everyone stopped dead on the stairs with a collective gasp as the concrete drunkenly swayed back and forth under our feet. I looked up immediately at the ceiling, along with everyone else, suddenly feeling the hard beating of my heart as I wondered if it was about to drop down on top of us.
“Oh, my God, Mike! Look!” said Brooklyn, elbowing me in the neck as she pointed up at the stairwell window.
I looked.
Behind the courthouses, up on Broadway, about two long blocks away, I saw 26 Federal Plaza, the huge, monolithic FBI headquarters building. Something was wrong. Smoke was rising in the air above it. The smoke seemed to be coming from many of its seemingly blown-open windows.
Emily!
I watched helplessly as more of its windows blew out simultaneously, almost in a left-to-right diagonal line, flashing with a blinding white light.
I looked silently at what happened next.
The top floors of 26 Fed seemed to tremble and waft back and forth. There was a thunderclap crack of concrete and a horrid creak and groan of shearing steel. Then the top stories of the building freed themselves from their blown moorings and slowly slid away into empty air.
“Dear holy God,” I said. The building around us rocked again as most of 26 Fed’s million-pound avalanche of glass and stone crashed down onto the streets below.
When I peeled my eyes away from the mushrooming dust cloud out the window, I could hear somebody crying. It was the mayor, two steps above me. She was bawling her eyes out.
“They’re dead,” she kept saying as she crumpled to the floor. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Every cop there turned and looked at each other as the dust plume rose into the sky. Doyle and Arturo and Brooklyn and Chief Fabretti. The shock was fine. What wasn’t so fine was the fear. The pale and shivering crazed looks of fear.
“Déjà vu all over again,” said Doyle, licking his lips. He had his gun in his hand. I gently helped him put it away.
“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy,” said Arturo hysterically.
I put my arm on Arturo’s shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I was speechless. He was in shock, the same as me. He was also right.
Then I was running down the stairs two by two, speed-dialing Emily as I began to pray that she miraculously might still be alive.