Had everything been a test, a trap?

The day's weirdness wasn't over.

A crowd had gathered outside the building, and as I pushed a way out toward my ride, someone called to me. "Dr. Cross!"

Dr. Cross? Who was calling me?

A kid in a tan and crimson windbreaker waved so that I'd see him.

"Dr. Cross, over here! Dr. Alex Cross! I need to talk to you, man."

I walked over to the young man, who was probably in his late teens. I stopped and leaned in close to him. "How do you know my name?" I asked.

He shook his head and backed up a step. "You were warned, man," he said. "You were warned by the Wolf!"

As soon as the words were out of his mouth I was all over him, grabbing at his hair, his jacket. I took him down on the ground in a headlock. I fell on top of him with all my weight.

Red-faced, his lean body torquing powerfully, he started screaming at me. " Hey! hey! I was paid to give you a message. Get the fuck off me. Guy gave me a hundred bucks. I'm just a messenger, man. English guy told me you were Dr. Alex Cross."

The youth, the messenger, looked into my eyes. "You don't seem like no doctor to me."

The Wolf was in New York. He couldn't miss the big deadline, not for all the money in the world. This was going to be too good, too delicious not to savor.

The negotiations were really heating up now. The U.S. president, the British prime minister, the German chancellor-of course, none of them wanted to make a deal, to be exposed for the incredible weaklings they were. One couldn't deal with terrorists, could one? What kind of precedent would it set? They needed even more pressure, more stress, more convincing before they collapsed.

Hell, he could do that. He would be only too happy to oblige, to torture these fools. The whole thing was so predictable-to him, anyway.

He went for a long walk on the East Side of Manhattan. A constitutional. He was feeling at the top of his game. How could the governments of the world compete with him? He had every advantage. No politics, no media pundits, bureaucracies, laws or ethics to get in his way. Who could beat that?

He returned to one of several apartments he owned around the world, this one a stunning penthouse overlooking the East River, and made a phone call. Lightly squeezing his black rubber ball, he spoke to a senior agent from the New York FBI office, one of their top people, a woman.

The agent told him everything the Bureau knew so far and what they were doing to find him, which was basically nothing of consequence. They had a far better chance of suddenly finding bin Laden than of finding him.

The Wolf yelled into the telephone receiver. "I'm supposed to pay you for this shit? For telling me what I already know? I should kill you instead."

But then the Russian laughed. "Just a nasty joke, my friend. You bring me good news. And I have news for you: there is going to be an incident in New York very soon. Stay away from the bridges. Bridges are very dangerous places. I know this from past experience."

Bill Capistran was the man with the plan, and also a very bad and dangerous attitude-serious anger-management problems, to put it mildly. But soon he'd also be the man with 250 large in his bank account in the Caymans. All he had to do was his particular job, and what he had to do wasn't going to be that hard. I can do this, no problemo.

Capistran was twenty-nine years old, slim and sinewy, originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. He had played lacrosse for a year at North Carolina State, then left for the Marines. After a three-year stint he'd been recruited to do merc work for a company out of Washington. Then two weeks ago he'd been approached by a guy he knew from D.C., Geoffrey Shafer, and he'd agreed to do the biggest job of his career. Two hundred fifty thousand's worth.

He was on the job now.

At seven in the morning, he drove a black Ford van east across Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, then turned north at First Avenue. Finally, he parked near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, also called the Queensboro.

He and two men in white painters' overalls climbed out of the van, then gathered up equipment from the back. Not paint and drop cloths and aluminum ladders. Explosives. A combination of C4 and nitrate to be packed into the bridge's lowest trusses at a strategic point near the Manhattan side of the East River.

Capistran knew the Queensboro inside and out by now. He stared up at the sturdy, ninety-five-year-old bridge, and what he saw was an open, flexible structure, a cantilever-truss design, the only one of the four East River bridges that wasn't a suspension bridge. Which meant that it required a special kind of bomb, one that he just happened to have in the back of the van.

This is something else, Capistran couldn't help thinking as he and his compadres hauled their gear toward the bridge. New York City. The East Side. All these fancy-assed big-business dicks, these blond princesses, walking around as though the world was theirs for the taking. Nerves aside, he was almost enjoying himself now, and he found himself whistling a song that struck him as pretty funny. "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" by Simon and Garfunkel-whom he considered to be typical New York City assholes, too. Both of them-Curly and the Midget.

For the past couple of days, Capistran had been working into the wee hours with a couple of sympathetic engineering students at Stony Brook University out on Long Island. One whiz kid was from Iran, the other from Afghanistan. They got a kick and a half out of the irony, too: New York-trained college students helping to blow up New York. Land of the fucking free, right? They called their team the Manhattan Project. Another insider joke.

At first they had considered an ANFO, a type of bomb that would blow a crater in a road for sure but was unlikely to topple a large bridge like the Queensboro. The college whizzes told Capistran he could see what an ANFO would accomplish just by setting off a firecracker on a city street. Or imagining it. The explosion would be characterized by "coward forces which always seek the path of least resistance." In other words, the bomb would make a nasty little burn on the road, but the real destructive power would escape up and sideways into the air.

Not good enough for today. Too benign. Not even close to what was needed.

Then the clever-as-hell college students came upon a much better way to blow up the bridge. They instructed Capistran on how and where to attach several small charges at different points in the foundation. This was similar to the way demolition companies toppled old buildings, and it would work like a charm.

Since he had absolutely no interest in being caught, Capistran had considered sending divers into the East River to set the charges on the supports. He had approached the bridge several times himself. And to his surprise, he found security to be virtually nonexistent.

That's exactly the way it was early that morning. He and his two associates walked out on the lower supports of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and nobody said boo to them.

From a distance, the ornate silver-painted ironwork and finials had made the old bridge look rather delicate. Up close, the real power of the structure was revealed: the massive trusses; rivets as large as a man's kneecaps.

This sounded crazy, but it would work-his piece would work.

Sometimes he wondered how he'd gotten so sour on everything, so bitter and full of rage. Hell, years ago in the Marines he'd been part of the rescue team that had extracted downed pilots like Scott O'Grady in Bosnia. Well, he wasn't a war hero anymore. He was just another capitalist working in the system, right? And that was a lot truer statement than most people could let themselves believe.