The Towers (6 page)

The compact, dark-skinned man wrung her hand. “Ms. Titus, so glad you came to us. This will be a fruitful partnership. Do you know General Galina? He recommended you highly. Said ya were a truly sharp lady.”

“I know Leon, yes. He was leaving the Building when I was arriving. Please give him my best, when you see him.”

Giory maneuvered her to a couch and called for coffee. Sat regarding her, legs crossed toward her. His accent was mingled Mumbai and New York. “We don't often get the opportunity to capture someone of your rank. What we do at Cohn, Kennedy involves a great deal of risk. We
encourage
aggressiveness. Things move fast. So we need sharp, sharp people who can think on their feet. Not react ta the situation. We prefer to stay two or three steps ahead.”

“I'm afraid I don't know a great deal about the bond market, Mr. Giory. And to be perfectly up-front, I haven't decided I belong in the trading arena. I've been offered a fellowship elsewhere, working on UN development policy.”

“Harry, please,” Giory urged, then nodded. “I understand. First of all, you would not be trading. Ya wouldn't be overseeing traders, either. If interested in speeding third-world development, you might enjoy working with our clients. We have several overseas who are very responsive to high-level contact. I won't go into names, you understand? But they're much the same as those you dealt with at Defense. In some cases, the very same individuals or families. It's as much personal diplomacy as it is finance. Are we on the same page, Blair?”

She weighed it. “Not exactly, uh, Harry. I don't want to be, or even appear to be, a front man. Or a meeter and greeter. You can find someone better suited to that.“

“No, no, you misunderstand.” Giory glanced at his watch. “I want'cha ta meet Mr. Kennedy. He'll be in his office soon. Understand he knew your dad?”

“That's right.”

“Family's important. That's the kinda firm we are. No, you would be working at the highest levels. Reassuring new clients their issues will be in good hands.”

“Really.”

“Sure. Ya see, when a foreign government considers issuing bonds, the question always is, who'll buy them? To issue 'em and not have anybody buy, that'd lead to a catastrophic loss of confidence. Everything in the financial world's based on confidence. Price. Volume. Futures. Derivatives. Do ya follow?”

“Yes, but—”

Giory overrode her, throwing his hands around before the massive window. “Lemme finish, now. They need advice on the price. How the market will receive the issue. Timing. And other relevant factors. We ourselves do not issue any securities. In fact, we're barred from dealing in those we consult on, although there are certain downstream products current regulations exempt us from.”

She finally got in a word. “As I understand it, you're describing the role of an investment bank.”

“That is true. Very true! The bank, of course, usually acts as the intermediary between issuing agent and purchaser. And they provide expertise as well. But we're leaner, faster, and much cheaper. Some of our clients have been badly hurt by banks or, for other reasons, prefer an independent evaluation. Since we've acted for them in other capacities, we've earned their trust. We listen. Do our homework. We give good advice, especially in innovative fixed-income securities. And in fact they're asking us to provide this new service. We're hoping to grow that business and you'd head up that department. Miss Munford would be working for you, along with four others—experienced, longtime traders familiar with the ins and outs. I'd like you to meet them, get a look at your team.” Giory rapped his desk. “Ya'd have to be completely objective. Not allow any other considerations to interfere with your judgments and recommendations. Yes, yes, all this is new. We've arranged a thirty-day introduction that will allow you to become familiar with the international capital markets and relevant regulations.”

He ran down at last and sat back. Blair sat back too, evaluating the feel of the place. Trying to sense if this was something she wanted to commit four to eight years to. It
was
exciting. There'd be compensation far beyond anything she could hope for in the federal executive service. Against that would be the expense of an apartment in New York, the Village or the East Side, or maybe out on the Island—she couldn't see both living and working in Manhattan. The question was, would Dan come? She suppressed annoyance. He refused even to talk about what he wanted to do. “I'd have to discuss it with my husband. He's leaving the military and hasn't quite decided what's next.”

“We have several husband-and-wife teams.”

That made her smile. “I don't think he'd be … happy working here.” She glanced down again. “Though he'd love the view.”

She was looking out toward the North Tower; over the immense outward spread of Manhattan, marching away under the bright, cloudless September sky, when something coalesced within that infinitely clear blue. Very small and far away, just above the most distant buildings. It glittered and she saw it had wings, but extremely thin, almost indistinguishable. She glanced back at Giory, but her eyes were drawn away again by a faint unease.

When she looked back, the speck was larger. Then it seemed to curve and disappeared behind the glass and steel corner of the North Tower. A small plane, possibly, though it was flying awfully low.

She blinked and was thinking again about the offer when a hurtling roar vibrated the windows and the back of the North Tower seemed to …
open up
 … and
things
 … strange moving things … began to emerge.

Her eyes still sent the raw video, but her brain seemed unable to ratify what was actually happening. The other tower was opening up, glass blowing out of the windows, a slow-mo effect, the windows and walls bulging, shattering, followed and mixed with a writhing, almost liquid
haze,
expanding toward her across less than a hundred yards of space. No, not directly at her; angled slightly to her left.

Giory must have caught her puzzled shock because he twisted in his seat just as the murky haze turned a bright white and then instantaneously into a hot, expanding orange-yellow flash.

She pitched forward, dragging him down from the window as the plate glass dented in and out like a shaken sheet of steel and the building shook. The boom came an instant later. It went on and on, trickling down into the mass of concrete and steel below them that flexed and crackled and shuddered, distributing and absorbing the transmitted energy.

Giory whispered something in a language she didn't know. She didn't reply. Just untangled from him and the chair, noticing a yellow peanut M&M lying all alone beneath his desk, and scrambled up off the carpet. They crowded side by side at the window, peering out through the narrow frame. “A bomb,” he said, breathing fast. “That's Marsh and McLennan over there. I got a friend with 'em. He—”

“A bomb? No, I saw something—”

“What?”

“I don't know exactly. I'm not sure. Should we leave?”

He didn't answer, staring across to where flame was beginning to stream out of the floors opposite, pulsing, as if pushed out by some immense wounded heart.

Interpretation arrived seconds late. Some of the
things
shooting out of the building had been bodies. Human beings, still alive, if their open mouths and thrashing limbs, trying to run, to gain purchase on empty air as they curved out and down and then fell away, had been any indication.

She felt pain in her hand and realized she was biting it. She looked down. How high they were. The building her body resided in had flexed, bent, moved. How far down those tiny streets, those minuscule cars actually were. Then reassured herself: it had been the other building. Not theirs.

Something terrible had happened over there. But here, they were alive, and safe.

8:58 A.M, THE NAVY COMMAND CENTER, PENTAGON

Dan stopped outside the conference room, stretching his fingers out of the fists they formed each time he confronted the intractable face of the Navy. Like God, it had many personas. The warrior. The seaman. The comradely uncle who took care of his own. This was the one he liked least, the brazen Shiva visage of inexorable rejection. His head felt as if it were swelling, about to come off.

Someone nearby cleared his throat. Dan glanced up to see an older fellow, gray-bearded, offering a wrapped candy. Dan popped it into his mouth, bemused, as the guy wandered off, putting a candy on this desk, then on that. Butterscotch. Good quality too.

He sucked a deep breath. So the voyage was over. Annapolis, career, command. Not as long a cruise as it might have been, but one he could take pride in. He could think, now, of what came next. What he and Blair could do together, for the rest of their lives.

When he looked up again, everyone was getting up from desks and consoles, men and women, leaving keyboards and screens and papers and drifting toward the wall of televisions. He rubbed his face. Then stepped around a desk and joined them as they stood almost touching, watching. The images were chaotic, confusing: quick cuts of a city glimpsed from what seemed to be a helicopter. “What's going on?” he asked a female chief who stood hugging herself. “What happened?”

“They don't know. Airplane in New York.”

“A small plane hit the World Trade Center,” someone else said.

Dan blinked, still thinking about Niles, then suddenly made the connection. “Holy shit,” he muttered, and pushed his way through to the front, staring up. The screen changed, became a silver obelisk, foreshortened, glittering, until three-quarters of the way up smoke seeped from a jagged rent. The announcer spoke about a light plane. “That wasn't any light plane,” someone said.

“How could you hit the
World Trade Center
?”

An older officer shrugged. “A bomber hit the Empire State, back during the war. Pilot had a heart attack, that's all. Let's get back to work, people. Back to your desks.”

Dan fumbled with his cell, wondering as he punched in Blair's number whether it would penetrate the concrete and reinforcing steel around them. He caught gazes directed his way; stepped into an empty cubicle. Listened to it ring.

She'd said World Trade Center, hadn't she? He glanced over his shoulder at the televisions.

The chief, at the door of what was obviously her cubicle. He tried to smile. “I think—I, uh, think my wife might be there, Chief. At the Trade Center. Could you check something on your computer for me?”

“Sure, sir. What?”

“Look up Cohn, Kennedy. An investment firm. They must have a Web site.”

The address was 2 World Trade Center. He felt relieved, then worried again; was that the North Tower? The chief keyed again and said, no, 2 was the South Tower. “Thanks,” he said. “She's in the other tower, then. That's great. I mean, well—thanks.”

“No problem, Commander. Glad she's not there. It didn't look good, where that thing hit.”

When he went out, the breaking news was that it had been an airliner. A huge jet engine lay in the street. The camera cut to upper floors bleeding a blackish gray thickness that looked solid. The tower's mast rose out of that black plume streaming across the sky. The officers had gone back to their cubicles. Some of the enlisted were still watching.

Dan was still standing with them when the camera, down at street level, suddenly slewed away, then came back and up and caught a wiping bloom of orange blossoming.

“That's a different plane,” someone murmured.

“No, it's a replay.”

“There's only one plane.”

“There's
two
. That's the other tower it just hit.”

“That's Blair's tower,” Dan said half aloud.

Officers and more enlisted were pouring out now, joining him and the others. Dan stared, the eerie unreality coating his skin like a cold film of something sticky. Melted ice cream? He fumbled with the cell again. “God damn it,” he muttered. Each time it tried to connect, he got a busy signal. It almost succeeded once; but there was no answer.

He stared at the tiny device in his hand, alone amid a rising tumult of raised voices and, suddenly, many ringing phones.

9:00 A.M., THE SOUTH TOWER, 2 WORLD TRADE CENTER

Blair pressed the
END
button. Around her, phones were ringing. Televisions were coming on. She considered calling Dan back, then tucked the cell into her purse. She needed to think about what to do next.

Giory was still staring out the window. Past him, smoke kept rising, thick and dark and somehow ashy, then thinning and turning gray.

“It was a plane,” somebody shouted, not far away, audible through the thin office wall. “A jet hit the North Tower.”

Giory walked to his desk, then wandered back. He smoothed his hair without looking at her. She felt ice rising from her toes. She'd been in a hotel bombing and barely gotten out. She remembered the DoD summer conference, the “hard problems” program. About the likelihood of a major terrorist strike. This didn't seem like one, but the possibility couldn't be discounted.

On the other hand, she might be overreacting. It was the other building, after all. “Should we evacuate?” she asked Giory again.

“We should stay here, I'm thinking.”

“Are they still trading?”

“Well, the market just opened.” He walked to the door. The noise level was much higher with it open. Phones were ringing, scores, maybe hundreds. “Is the ATS up?” he called, then turned back. “Everything's still online. CNN says it was a plane.”

A distinguished-looking older gentleman walked past. He announced, “A plane hit the North Tower. Call your families; let them know you're safe. No danger to us, but if anyone wants to leave, you're free to go.”