Black Friday Read Free Page B

limousines—Mercedes, Lincolns, Rolls-Royces—were arriving and departing with dramatic haste.
    Important-looking men, and a few women, most of them in dark overcoats, hurriedly disembarked from the limousines and entered the building’s familiar Deco lobby.
    Upstairs on the forty-second floor, other CEOs and presidents of the major Wall Street banks and brokerage houses were already gathered inside the exclusive Pinnacle Club.
    The emergency meeting had commandeered the luxurious main dining room of the private club, which was glowing with crisp white linen, shining silver and crystal set up and never used for lunch.
    Several of the dark-suited executives stood dazed and disoriented before floor-to-ceiling nonglare windows, which faced downtown. None of them had ever experienced anything remotely like this, nor had they ever expected to.
    The view was a spectacular, if chilling one, down uneven canyons to lower Manhattan, all the way to the pencil pocket of skyscrapers which was the financial center itself.
    About halfway, at 14th Street, there were massive police barricades. Police department buses, EMS ambulances, and a paradelike crowd could be seen waiting, watching Wall Street as if they were studying some puzzling work of art in a Midtown museum.
    None of this was possible; it was sheer madness.
    Every rational mind in the executive dining room had already reached this conclusion privately.
    ‘They haven’t even bothered to reestablish contact with us. Not since six this morning,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, Walter O’Brien. “What the hell are they up to?”
    Standing stiffly among four or five prominent Wall Street executives, George Firth, the Attorney General of the United States, was quietly relighting his pipe. He appeared surprisingly casual and controlled, except that he’d given up smoking more than three years before.
    “They certainly were
damned
clear when it came to stating their deadline. Five minutes past five. Five minutes past or
what?
What do the bastards want from us?” The Attorney General’s pipe went out in his hand and he relit it with a look of exasperation.
    Madness.
    What they’d experienced for a decade in terrorist-plagued Europe. But never before in the United States.
    A somber businessman named Jerrold Gottlieb from Lehman Brothers held up his wristwatch. “Well, gentlemen, it’s one minute past five …” He looked as if he were about to add something, but whatever it was, he left it unsaid.
    But that was the unlikely place they had all entered now. An unfamiliar territory where things couldn’t be properly articulated: the uncharted territory of the unspeakable.
    “They’ve been extremely punctual up to now. Almost obsessive about getting details and schedules perfect. They’ll call. I wouldn’t worry, they’ll call.”
    The speaker was the Vice-president of the United States, who’d been rushed from the U.N. to the nearby Mobil Building. Thomas More Elliot was a stern man with the look of an Ivy League scholar. He was a Brahmin who was out of touch with the complexities of contemporary America, his harshest critics carped.
    For the next hundred and eighty seconds, there was almost uninterrupted silence in the Pinnacle Club dining room.
    This tingling silence was all the more frightening because there were so many highly articulate men crowded into the room—the senior American business executives, used to having their own way, used to being listened to, and obeyed, almost without question. Now their voices were stilled, virtually powerless.
    Their power, normally awesome, had distilled itself into a sequence of small, distinct, noises:
    The scratchy rasp of a throat being cleared.
    Ice cracking in a glass with an almost glacial effect.
    The tapping of fingers on the bowl of a dead pipe.
    Madness.
The thought seemed to echo in the room.
    The most fearsome urban terrorism had finally struck deep inside the United States, stabbing right to the heart of