Amazing what can happen in a New York minute, she thought as the two women dropped a couple of feet onto the roof of the neighboring building. Despite being loaded down with all her equipment and wearing heavy jump boots, Caitlin landed almost without a sound, whereas Donna struggled and grunted and heaved herself through the aperture before touching down with a loud bang.

"Ma'am, do you think I could come…"

"No," Caitlin said before she could finish. "I'm sorry, Donna, but you can't come with me. It's gonna get a lot worse before I'm done. You'd be way better off just hiding out in one of these buildings. It won't be more than a few days before things shake themselves out here. Whatever you do, though, Donna, do not go back to the hotel. Even if you have friends there, leave them. Do not try to rescue them. You'll fail and you'll die."

The rumble of distant explosions grew louder as if to emphasize her point. They had reached the tiny cabin at the top of the stairwell providing access to the roof of the apartment house. The sun had not yet fully arisen, but there was more than enough light to make them out. Caitlin hurried the woman along out of sight.

"You don't need to go much farther," she said. "But you do need to get out of this building. They'll look for you here. But if you take yourself along the street a ways, get yourself bedded down, and then keep your fucking head down, you will get through this, I promise."

Donna Gambaro looked anything but certain as Caitlin entered the stairwell, but throwing a glance back over her shoulder at the Plaza seemed to strengthen her resolve.

"All right, then," she said. "Whatever you say."

"Remember," Caitlin said. "Do not go back to the hotel. Move quickly and get out of sight. You've got maybe half an hour till Jukic is missed."

She gave Gambaro a reassuring pat on the shoulder before turning and hurrying down the darkened stairs.

If she was following the playbook, Donna Gambaro would have been dead, too, or at least trussed up and stashed away somewhere so that she couldn't interfere with the run of events. But as somebody who'd once been held captive and abused in a very similar fashion to the former waitress, Caitlin was well past giving a shit about the playbook.

Good luck, kid, she thought.

New York The shopping was a terrible disappointment. Jules had been hoping there might be one or two choice items somewhere along Fifth Avenue that she could take home as a souvenir of their visit to New York, but everyplace she looked had been comprehensively looted. Takashimaya was a burned-out shell in front of which a headless body swung by its heels. And Lord knew she'd never had any luck at Saks, anyway, so why bother trying now, especially when that particular block appeared to be swarming with jihadi whack jobs and pirate asswits-she really did like that cheeky Polish character-all heading into Rockefeller Center.

Jules used her binoculars to scope out that stretch of the avenue from their hiding place within the rubble of St. Patrick's. There was a lot of movement down there, which meant it couldn't be long before there was a response from the U.S. Air Force. Every time the pirates massed in any numbers, they got pounded flat.

"Looks like they're gonna make a stand there," the Rhino said around the stub of an unlit stogie. He was growing impatient, grunting and shaking his enormous and ugly head, which still was magnificently ornamented with the stupid Viking helmet.

"Do you think we might be done with the retail therapy soon, Miss Jules," he asked. "We really shoulda stayed over on Madison. Fifth seems to be lousy with tourists."

Jules ignored him. He was grouchy from having to drag his oversized ass through the tumbledown ruins of the cathedral to reach a safe vantage point where they could observe the activity on Fifth. There appeared to be a real concentration of ragheaded crazies in the shell of Saks. Every window in the department store was broken, and half the stock seemed to have been piled into a sodden heap out on the road. As she watched, dozens of fighters emerged from the building, but rather than scattering and heading into Rockefeller Center like their comrades, they took off at a sprint downtown.

"What do you think that means?" she mused out loud.

"It means the U.S. Air Force is going to be along very shortly to bomb the living bejeezus out of anyone foolish enough to be loitering in the vicinity of fucking Fifth Avenue," the Rhino said. "Come on, we've ticked all the boxes, reconnoitered like champions. We can see the place is crawling with vermin. But it's not our concern unless they make us. We should get going back over to Park Avenue. Quieter there. Wide-open spaces. It's a more amenable environment for your average pachyderm. And it's not like you're going to find anything you like here. I think you've probably left your shopping till a bit late."

"You're right," she admitted as she adjusted her sling, which was slipping off her injured shoulder, and crawled backward down the mound of rubble on which she'd been lying. St. Pat's was a gutted ruin, burned out and open to the sky where the roof had caved in. She wondered if it had been reduced to this state on purpose. Small jagged jewels of stained glass lay everywhere, and anything of value had been looted long ago. The vestibule in which they hid reeked of human excrement. "There's nothing worth having here now," she said. "Best we push on, I suppose."

"Yes, best we do," he muttered.

Just two blocks away, on Park Avenue, the city was surprisingly quiet again, indeed all but abandoned, allowing them to move with more freedom as long as they exercised some caution. The large number of enemy fighters in the blocks around the Rockefeller Center buildings had caused them a few hours' delay as they picked their way around the obstacles, with Jules insisting that they move slowly and take note of where the gangs had gathered their forces. It never hurt to know where your competition was setting up shop, although from what Milosz and the others had told them, perhaps it was time to stop thinking of the pirates as competitors. They seemed to want to actually take over the joint now rather than just clean it out.

The overnight downpour had abated, and the worst of the flooding was over, although great oily pools of water lay everywhere and small rivulets and streams ran out of some buildings with damaged roofs. The dull background roar of battle to the south probably explained the abandoned streets, Jules thought, as thousands of gang members rushed to join the battle. It couldn't be long before somebody else pushed in to fill the vacuum created by their departure from this part of midtown, however.

"It's all just fucked," she muttered to herself.

"What's that?" he asked as they paused at the corner of 52nd Street and Park, sheltering behind an overturned meat truck while they scoped the next block of real estate.

"Oh, it's just so fucking disappointing, isn't it," she grumbled. "I used to love this town, Rhino. And especially this part of it. I was just sort of hoping that… you know."

He paused in his scan of the terrain ahead of them.

"That it might not be completely fucked. That there might be some little trinket you could put in your pocket and carry home with you? A keepsake from the past, Miss Jules?"

"God, you put it like that and it sounds so naive."

"That's because it is naive. This is the reality now." He gestured with his gun at a bloated corpse lying half in and half out of a Citibank across the street.

"September 11 was the end of the fucking golden age here. The Wave just came in and washed the debris away. There wouldn't have been anything more after that. Come on," he said, dashing from the wreckage of the van to the cover of another pileup a hundred yards farther north. Half a dozen cars had collided with a big blue bus, forcing them to weave around the twisted wreckage. Gray water had gathered in a small depression, deep enough to reach the top of her boots, and Jules was slowed down considerably by nursing her shoulder injury. "Sorry," she gasped, a little winded.