Gone Tomorrow Read Free

of the bag, and then they loop up under the hem of the inappropriate garment.
    Passenger number four was wearing a black canvas messenger bag, urban style, looped in front of one shoulder and behind the other, and hauled around into her lap. The way the stiff fabric bulged and sagged made it look empty apart from a single heavy item.
    The train stopped at 28th Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. The doors closed and the train moved on.
    Point eleven: hands in the bag.
    Twenty years ago point eleven was a recent addition. Previously the list had ended at point ten. But things evolve. Action, and then reaction. Israeli security forces and some brave members of the public had adopted a new tactic. If your suspicions were aroused, you didn’t run. No point, really. You can’t run faster than shrapnel. What you did instead was grab the suspect in a desperate bear hug. You pinned their arms to their sides. You stopped them reaching the button. Several attacks were prevented that way. Many lives were saved. But the bombers learned. Now they are taught to keep their thumbs on the button at all times, to make the bear hug irrelevant. The button is in the bag, next to the battery. Hence, hands in the bag.
    Passenger number four had her hands in her bag. The flap was bunched and creased between her wrists.
    The train stopped at 33rd Street. The doors opened. No one got off. A lone passenger on the platform hesitated and then stepped to her right and entered the next car. I turned and looked through the little window behind my head and saw her take a seat close to me. Two stainless bulkheads, and the coupler space. I wanted to wave her away. She might survive at the other end of her car. But I didn’t wave. We had no eye contact and she would have ignored me anyway. I know New York. Crazy gestures on late-night trains carry no credibility.
    The doors stayed open a beat longer than normal. For a mad second I thought of trying to shepherd everyone out. But I didn’t. It would have been a comedy. Surprise, incomprehension, maybe language barriers. I wasn’t sure that I knew the Spanish word for bomb. Bomba , maybe. Or was that lightbulb? A crazy guy ranting about lightbulbs wasn’t going to help anyone.
    No, lightbulb was bombilla , I thought.
    Maybe.
    Possibly.
    But certainly I didn’t know any Balkan languages. And I didn’t know any West African dialects. Although maybe the woman in the dress spoke French. Some of West Africa is francophone. And I speak French. Une bombe. La femme là-bas a une bombe sous son manteau. The woman over there has a bomb under her coat . The woman in the dress might understand. Or she might get the message some other way and simply follow us out.
    If she woke up in time. If she opened her eyes.
    In the end I just stayed in my seat.
    The doors closed.
    The train moved on.
    I stared at passenger number four. Pictured her slim pale thumb on the hidden button. The button probably came from Radio Shack. An innocent component, for a hobby. Probably cost a buck and a half. I pictured a tangle of wires, red and black, taped and crimped and clamped. A thick detonator cord, exiting the bag, tucked under her coat, connecting twelve or twenty blasting caps in a long, lethal parallel ladder. Electricity moves close to the speed of light. Dynamite is unbelievably powerful. In a closed environment like a subway car the pressure wave alone would crush us all to paste. The nails and the ball bearings would be entirely gratuitous. Like bullets against ice cream. Very little of us would survive. Bone fragments, maybe, the size of grape pits. Possibly the stirrup and the anvil from the inner ear might survive intact. They are the smallest bones in the human body and therefore statistically the most likely to be missed by the shrapnel cloud.
    I stared at the woman. No way of approaching her. I was thirty feet away. Her thumb was already on the button. Cheap brass contacts were maybe an eighth of an