Jeremy could not move, speak. Happenings were happening too fast, and his mind switched from simple sentences. There was no subject, object, predicate, meaning predicated on simple words one after the other. He was stuck on four syllables: Alexandra.
Alexandra held hostage, Alexandra beneath a crush of rubble. Four syllables with life pulled out from under her. He thought of how he’d never told her he wanted them to die very old, him first, of course, and holding her hand. He had not even told Alexandra he wanted to choose paper towels with her.
Assimilate to the moment: in the offices of Strategic Hedge International, the volume of the television normally tuned to Bloomberg was turned high. Coffers stood erect before the men. It was tragic, the explosion, explosions, he told them, and the lesson from oh-one was it was time to execute the list. They must, he said, offload. Sell before the fall. Banks and hotels, British Airways. Buy up pharma. It is the responsibility owed their investors.
Gavin Thomas’s hands already maneuvered over his desk.
Try again: once, twice. Fingers clumsy on his mobile. At his ear: this is the sound of not reaching Alexandra.
Soon the internet servers failed, and at some point after it had been confirmed phone lines had gone down, Jeremy heard talking torsos declare normal programming had ceded to breaking news. One dead. King’s Cross and Russell Square. Old Street. Moorgate. One turned to twenty. Twenty dead.
“More information is worse news now,” someone said.
And it was true, Jeremy knew. Jeremy knew breaking news became broken history, knew news early in an emergency was a broadcast of provisional facts. Later, they’d shed authority, permute, redetermine. Information would redouble. He listened for names. Hers. From the flatscreen, the police commissioner announced it wasn’t coincidence on the Underground; it was terror. Jeremy did not need to be told.
Around the room, the men of Strategic turned to each other. Speculation shaped their lips. Proximity to the US Embassy at Grosvenor and a dense shopping strip meant that another attack could take them too, or else, maybe that was optimistic. Maybe everywhere meant open to the end.
“In a city of eight million people,” Thomas was saying, “consider stat’s twenty in eight million. Fact is, good fraction. Good odds.”
But Jeremy could not weigh probabilities. He could only think of the impossible. He once had had the other phone, the one his people had given him, not these numbers to nowhere, buttons that wouldn’t reach. He could only think of the impossible, though even if he did have the old phone, even if she were alive to call, she’d be on the regular service, the felled one. Alexandra couldn’t answer on the secure line. She, after all, had never been a spy.