morning, an endless stream of sullen-looking men and women carrying bulging, black briefcases had begun to rise out of the steam-blooming subway station at Broadway and Wall Street.
These were the appointed drones of New York’s financial district; the straight salary employees who understood abstract accounting principles and fine legal points, but perceived little else about the Street and its black magic.
By 7:30, gum-popping secretaries were slouching off the Red and Tan Line buses arriving from Staten Island and Brooklyn. Aside from their habitual gum-chewing, several of the secretaries looked impressively chic, almost elegant that Friday morning.
As the ornate, golden arms on the Trinity Church clock solemnly reached for eight o’clock, every main and side street of the financial district was choked with thick, hypertense pedestrian traffic as well as with buses and honking cabs.
Over nine hundred and fifty thousand people were being melted into less than half a square mile of outrageously expensive real estate; seven solid stone blocks where
billions
were bought and sold every workday:
still the unsurpassed financial capital of the world.
The New York police hadn’t known whether or not to try and stop the morning’s regular migration. Then it was simply too late—the slim possibility had disintegrated in a frantic series of telephone calls between the Commissioner’s office and various powerful precinct chiefs. It had petered out into a nightmare of impossible logistics and mounting panic.
At that moment, a wraithlike black man, Abdul Calvin Mohammud, was very calmly entering the bobbing parade of heads and winter hats on Broad Street, just south of Wall.
As he walked within the spirited crowd, Calvin Mohammud found himself noticing corporate flags waving colorfully from the massive stone buildings.
The flags signaled BBH and Company, the National Bank of North America, Manufacturers Hanover, the Seaman’s Bank. The flags were like crisp sails driven by strong East River winds.
Calvin Mohammud continued up the steep hill toward Wall Street. He was hardly noticed. But then the messenger caste usually wasn’t. They were invisible men.
Today, like every other workday, Calvin Mohammud wore a thigh-length, pale gray clerk’s tunic with a frayed armband that said V ETS M ESSENGERS . On either side of the capitalized words were fierce Eighty-second Airborne fighting eagles.
But none of that was noticed either.
Calvin Mohammud didn’t look like it now, but in Vietnam and Cambodia, he’d been a Kit Carson Army scout. He’d won a Distinguished Service Cross, then the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life. After returning to the U.S. in 1971, Mohammud had been rewarded by a grateful society with jobs as a porter at Pernn Station, a delivery boy for Chick-Teri, a baggage carrier at LaGuardia Airport.
Calvin Mohammud, Vets 11, unslung his heavy messenger’s shoulder bag as he reached the graffiti-covered newsstand at the corner of Broadway and Wall.
He tapped out a Kool and lit up behind a plume of yellow flame.
Slouched in a nearby doorway, Vets 11 then casually reached into his shoulder bag and slid out a standard U.S. Army field telephone. Still concealed in the deep cloth bag was a sixteen-inch machine gun pistol, along with half a dozen 40-millimeter antipersonnel grenades.
“Contact.” He moved back into the cold building shadows, then whispered into the field telephone. “This is Vets Eleven at the Stock Exchange. I’m at the northeast entrance, off Wall…. Everything’s very nice and peaceful at position three…. No police in sight. No armed resistance anywhere. Almost looks too easy. Over.”
Vets 11 took another short drag on his dwindling cigarette. He calmly peered around at the noisy hustle and bustle that was so characteristic of Wall Street on a weekday.
Broad daylight.
What an amazing, completely unbelievable scene, just to imagine the apocalyptic
These were the appointed drones of New York’s financial district; the straight salary employees who understood abstract accounting principles and fine legal points, but perceived little else about the Street and its black magic.
By 7:30, gum-popping secretaries were slouching off the Red and Tan Line buses arriving from Staten Island and Brooklyn. Aside from their habitual gum-chewing, several of the secretaries looked impressively chic, almost elegant that Friday morning.
As the ornate, golden arms on the Trinity Church clock solemnly reached for eight o’clock, every main and side street of the financial district was choked with thick, hypertense pedestrian traffic as well as with buses and honking cabs.
Over nine hundred and fifty thousand people were being melted into less than half a square mile of outrageously expensive real estate; seven solid stone blocks where
billions
were bought and sold every workday:
still the unsurpassed financial capital of the world.
The New York police hadn’t known whether or not to try and stop the morning’s regular migration. Then it was simply too late—the slim possibility had disintegrated in a frantic series of telephone calls between the Commissioner’s office and various powerful precinct chiefs. It had petered out into a nightmare of impossible logistics and mounting panic.
At that moment, a wraithlike black man, Abdul Calvin Mohammud, was very calmly entering the bobbing parade of heads and winter hats on Broad Street, just south of Wall.
As he walked within the spirited crowd, Calvin Mohammud found himself noticing corporate flags waving colorfully from the massive stone buildings.
The flags signaled BBH and Company, the National Bank of North America, Manufacturers Hanover, the Seaman’s Bank. The flags were like crisp sails driven by strong East River winds.
Calvin Mohammud continued up the steep hill toward Wall Street. He was hardly noticed. But then the messenger caste usually wasn’t. They were invisible men.
Today, like every other workday, Calvin Mohammud wore a thigh-length, pale gray clerk’s tunic with a frayed armband that said V ETS M ESSENGERS . On either side of the capitalized words were fierce Eighty-second Airborne fighting eagles.
But none of that was noticed either.
Calvin Mohammud didn’t look like it now, but in Vietnam and Cambodia, he’d been a Kit Carson Army scout. He’d won a Distinguished Service Cross, then the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life. After returning to the U.S. in 1971, Mohammud had been rewarded by a grateful society with jobs as a porter at Pernn Station, a delivery boy for Chick-Teri, a baggage carrier at LaGuardia Airport.
Calvin Mohammud, Vets 11, unslung his heavy messenger’s shoulder bag as he reached the graffiti-covered newsstand at the corner of Broadway and Wall.
He tapped out a Kool and lit up behind a plume of yellow flame.
Slouched in a nearby doorway, Vets 11 then casually reached into his shoulder bag and slid out a standard U.S. Army field telephone. Still concealed in the deep cloth bag was a sixteen-inch machine gun pistol, along with half a dozen 40-millimeter antipersonnel grenades.
“Contact.” He moved back into the cold building shadows, then whispered into the field telephone. “This is Vets Eleven at the Stock Exchange. I’m at the northeast entrance, off Wall…. Everything’s very nice and peaceful at position three…. No police in sight. No armed resistance anywhere. Almost looks too easy. Over.”
Vets 11 took another short drag on his dwindling cigarette. He calmly peered around at the noisy hustle and bustle that was so characteristic of Wall Street on a weekday.
Broad daylight.
What an amazing, completely unbelievable scene, just to imagine the apocalyptic
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