Gone Tomorrow Read Free Page A

inch apart, that tiny gap perhaps narrowing and widening fractionally and rhythmically as her heart beat and her arm trembled.
    She was good to go, and I wasn’t.
    The train rocked onward, with its characteristic symphony of sounds. The howl of rushing air in the tunnel, the thump and clatter of the expansion joints under the iron rims, the scrape of the current collector against the live rail, the whine of the motors, the sequential squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through curves and the wheel flanges bit down.
    Where was she going? What did the 6 train pass under? Could a building be brought down by a human bomb? I thought not. So what big crowds were still assembled after two o’clock in the morning? Not many. Nightclubs, maybe, but we had already left most of them behind, and she wouldn’t get past a velvet rope anyway.
    I stared on at her.
    Too hard.
    She felt it.
    She turned her head, slowly, smoothly, like a preprogrammed movement.
    She stared right back at me.
    Our eyes met.
    Her face changed.
    She knew I knew .

Chapter 4
    We looked straight at each other for the best part of ten seconds. Then I got to my feet. Braced against the motion and took a step. I would be killed thirty feet away, no question. I couldn’t get any deader by being any closer. I passed the Hispanic woman on my left. Passed the guy in the NBA shirt on my right. Passed the West African woman on my left. Her eyes were still closed. I handed myself from one grab bar to the next, left and right, swaying. Passenger number four stared at me all the way, frightened, panting, muttering. Her hands stayed in her bag.
    I stopped six feet from her.
    I said, “I really want to be wrong about this.”
    She didn’t reply. Her lips moved. Her hands moved under the thick black canvas. The large object in her bag shifted slightly.
    I said, “I need to see your hands.”
    She didn’t reply.
    “I’m a cop,” I lied. “I can help you.”
    She didn’t reply.
    I said, “We can talk.”
    She didn’t reply.
    I let go of the grab bars and dropped my hands to my sides. It made me smaller. Less threatening. Just a guy. I stood as still as the moving train would let me. I did nothing. I had no option. She would need a split second. I would need more than that. Except that there was absolutely nothing I could do. I could have grabbed her bag and tried to tear it away from her. But it was looped around her body and its strap was a wide band of tightly woven cotton. The same knit as a fire hose. It was prewashed and preaged and predistressed like new stuff is now but it would still be very strong. I would have ended up jerking her off her seat and dumping her down on the floor.
    Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near her. She would have hit the button before my hand was halfway there.
    I could have tried to jerk the bag upward and swipe behind it with my other hand to rip the detonator cord out of its terminals. Except that for the sake of her easy movement there would be enough spare length in the cord that I would have needed to haul it through a giant two-foot arc before I met any resistance. By which time she would have hit the button, if only in involuntary shock.
    I could have grabbed at her jacket and tried to tear some other wires loose. But there were fat pockets of goose feathers between me and the wires. A slippery nylon shell. No touch, no feel.
    No hope.
    I could have tried to incapacitate her. Hit her hard in the head, knock her out, one punch, instantaneous. But as fast as I still am, a decent swing from six feet away would have taken most of half a second. She had to move the ball of her thumb an eighth of an inch.
    She would have gotten there first.
    I asked, “Can I sit down? Next to you?”
    She said, “No, stay away from me.”
    A neutral, toneless voice. No obvious accent. American, but she could have been from anywhere. Up close she didn’t look really wild or deranged. Just resigned, and grave, and scared, and