Crazy to think ... I still can't even buy the kid a drink.

So that was that. All the deals I'd cut after Dobson's confession. As for the one made before it, I'm fairly certain Sebastian has no regrets. In fact, I'm positive of it.

Sebastian Cole may be the last journalist on earth whom President Morris-with his twenty-one-percent approval rating-will actually grant an interview to, but Sebastian's firsthand account of what happened in that hotel room, including a very revealing Q&A with Dobson while he was under the influence of the serum, gave him the scoop of a lifetime.

Throw in the exclusive interviews Owen and I guaranteed him in return for his cooperation, and Sebastian all but owned the front page of the Times for an entire month.

But the best part-at least for me-was the cla.s.s he displayed throughout it all. The byline of every article he wrote covering the story read the same. By Claire Parker and Sebastian Cole.

"You're a far better man than I first gave you credit for," I told him.

"Likewise," he said.

It's been moments like that when I've missed Claire the most. That's when I usually hop in my car and make the drive up to Wellesley, west of Boston, and the Woodlawn Cemetery, where all Parkers have been buried for over a century. Only once, though, have I fallen into the cliche of talking to her tombstone. She would've laughed at the sight of that. And who knows? Maybe somewhere she is laughing, and doing that little crinkle thing with her nose that, in a weird and wonderful way, always made her look even prettier.

I know that as time goes on, those trips to her gravesite will happen less often. But not because I'll miss her less. No, eventually what will happen, maybe amid a gust of wind through the branches of a nearby northern red oak, is that I'll hear that tombstone of hers talk back to me.

"It's okay, Trevor," she'll say. "Now get on with it, will you? Maybe even ask out that gorgeous agent from the NSA. Though between you and me, she might be a little out of your league."

Claire always told it like it was.

Though, for the record, Valerie Jensen and I did manage to have dinner together when she was in Manhattan before the holidays. We even went back to her hotel afterward. "Your move," she told me.

Of course, that was during the game of Scrabble we played in the bar off the lobby. She'd brought the game all the way up from DC. And of course, she kicked my a.s.s but good. Her father also taught her poker, she said. "Maybe we'll play after the trial."

Which brings us fully up to date. Dobson's trial. And me sitting in the first row waiting my turn. It couldn't come soon enough.

"The prosecution calls Mr. Trevor Mann."

It felt strange to be back in a courtroom after all these years, and even stranger to be taking the witness stand. I'd always been in front, asking the questions, not actually sitting in the stand.

Place your left hand on the Bible, raise your right hand ...

No serum needed here. We were kickin' it old school.

"Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you G.o.d?"

You better believe it.

"THIS IS NOT A TEST"-EVERY NEW YORKER'S WORST NIGHTMARE IS ABOUT TO BECOME A REALITY.

ALERT.

FOR AN EXCERPT, TURN THE PAGE.

AT 3:23 A.M., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.

After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a quart of orange Gatorade from the cooler they'd brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating exuberantly, had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.

"Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?" said Tony, coming up for air.

"No. All yours, Tony. Truly, you broke your b.u.t.t down in the hole. I'm proud of you," Mr. Joyce said.

It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few hygiene suggestions, but no one could say he wasn't a worker. He'd been going at it hard for the last three hours between the two manholes, really hustling. He'd been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task with the equipment without a word of complaint.

They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty now, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.

"How's the link?" Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.

"Crystal clear," Mr. Beckett in the other truck replied.

They had hacked into the MTA internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every 1 Line station from Harlem to Inwood.

"OK, I see it," Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. "It's pulling out of 157th in the northbound tunnel. There. It's all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce."

Mr. Joyce took the cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a training phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone's only preprogrammed number.

Theory becomes reality, he thought, and he thumbed the call b.u.t.ton, and the two pressure cookers planted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.

THE INITIAL EXPLOSION of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn't meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the last three hours.

The tunnel was semicircular, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within seconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms so late, but in both stations the wave ripped apart vendor shacks and MTA tool carts and wooden benches.

As the wave hit the south end of the 181st Street station, a three-ton section of the vaulted tunnel's roof tore free and crashed to the tracks, while up on Broadway, the fantastic force of the blast set off countless car alarms as it threw a half dozen manhole covers into the air.

South of the main blasts, in the tunnel between the 157th Street station and 168th Street, the shock wave smashed head-on into the approaching Bronx-bound 1 train that Mr. Beckett had spotted. The front windshield shattered a millisecond before it tore loose from its moorings, killing the female train driver instantly.

As the train derailed, its only two pa.s.sengers, a Manhattan college student couple coming back from a concert, were knocked spinning out of their seats onto the floor of the front car. Bleeding but still alive, they had a split second to look up from the floor of the train through the front window at a rapidly brightening orange glow. It was strangely beautiful, almost like a sunset.

Then the barreling twenty-foot-high after-burn fireball that was behind the shock wave slammed home, and the air was on fire.

Back at the Harlem River sh.o.r.e, Mr. Joyce had to wait seven minutes before he heard the first call come in on the radio scanner he had tuned to the fire department band. He clicked a pen as he lifted his clipboard.

"We did it, Tony," he said, giving the driver a rare grin.

"Phase one complete."

MORE BLUE AND red emergency lights than I could count were swinging across the steel shutters and Spanish billboards of 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue when I pulled up behind a double-parked FDNY SUV that morning around 4:30 a.m.

I counted seven fire trucks, an equal number of police vehicles and ambulances. As I hung my shield around my neck, I saw another truck roar up. Rescue One, FDNY's version of the Navy SEALs. Holy s.h.i.t, was this looking bad.

I found the pitch-black subway entrance and went down stairs that reeked of smoke. All I could hear were yells and the metallic chirp of first-responder radio chatter as I swung my flashlight over the tiled subway walls.

The initial report I received from my boss, Miriam, was that some kind of explosion and a subway tunnel fire had occurred. One memory kept popping into my head as I hopped a turnstile toward the sound of radios and yelling.

Don't tell me this is 9/11 all over again!

I went past a token booth and almost knocked over the white-haired, blue-eyed fire chief, Tommy Cunniffe, thumbing something out of his eye.

"Chief, Mike Bennett, Major Case NYPD. What the h.e.l.l happened?"

"Ma.s.sive tunnel explosion of some kind, Detective," Cunniffe called out in a drill-sergeant baritone. "Two stations, 168th Street and here at 181st Street, are completely destroyed. We have the fire almost under control here, but there's colossal structural damage, a large cave-in at the south end of this station. It's like a mine accident down there. We're looking for bodies."

"Is anybody dead?"

"We don't know. I heard over the horn there was a train that got fried a little south of 168, but everything is just nonsense still at this point. I got two engine companies down there working this water line that we had to feed seven stories down through the elevator shaft. It's an unbelievable disaster."

"Chief," came a voice from his chest-strapped radio. "We got movement. A heartbeat on the monitor."

"Coming from where?" Cunniffe yelled back.

"Up near you in one of the other elevator shafts."

"Downey, O'Keefe, get me a G.o.dd.a.m.n halogen!" Cunniffe screamed at two firemen behind him.

I ran over with the firemen and helped them pry open the door to one of several elevator shafts. When we got the doors open, three huge firemen the size of rugby players appeared out of nowhere and tossed a rope.

"Hey, Danny, what the h.e.l.l are you doing? It's my turn," said one of them as the biggest clicked his harness onto the rope and lowered himself into the darkness.

"Screw you, Brian," the big dude said. "You snooze, you lose, bro. I got this. Watch how it's done."

I shook my head. These guys were amazing. Tripping over themselves to help. No wonder they called them heroes.

"Send down the rig," said the fireman in the shaft a minute later. "We got two, a mom and a daughter. They're OK! They're OK!"

Everyone started cheering and whistling as a pudgy Hispanic woman, clutching her beautiful preschool-aged daughter, was pulled up out of the shaft into the light.

"OK, good job, everyone. Attaboys!" Cunniffe bellowed as EMTs took the mother and child up the stairs. "Now get the eff back to work!"

An hour later, I was deep underground ten blocks south in full-face breathing apparatus and a Tyvek suit as I toured the devastation that had been the 168th station with FBI bomb tech Dan Dunning, from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

"This is unbelievable," he said, swinging the beam of his powerful flashlight back and forth over the vaulted ceiling.

"Which part?" I said.

"This was one of the grandest stations of the whole subway system, Mike. See the chandelier medallions next to the cave-in, and the antique sconces in that rubble there? This used to be the station for the New York Highlanders, who went on to become the New York Yankees. A part of history. Now look at it. Gone. Erased."

"Could it have been a gas leak?"

"Not on your life," Dunning said. "Gas and electric are surface utilities. These are the deepest stations in the system. Ten stories down. Whatever blew them up was intentionally put here. I can't say for sure yet, but you ask me, these G.o.dd.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.ds set off a thermobaric explosion."

"A what?"

Dunning pulled off his mask and spat something.

"Thermobaric explosions occur when vapor-flammable dust or droplets ignite. They rely on atmospheric oxygen for fuel and produce longer, more devastating shock waves. As you can see, when they occur in confined s.p.a.ces, they are catastrophic. They pumped something down here and lit it up. A gasoline mist maybe, is my guess. Just like in a daisy cutter. I mean, look at this!"

We hopped down off what was left of a platform and walked over the incinerated tracks toward a blackened train. As crime-scene techs took pictures, I could see that one of the train's plastic windows had melted and slid down the side of one of the cars like candle wax. Inside, the driver was burnt pulp, the two other bodies in the front car skeletal and black like something from a haunted house.

"Look at that," Dunning said, pointing his light at a charred sneaker in a corner.

"Wow, the shock wave must have knocked them out of their shoes," I said.

"Worse, look at the sole of it. It's almost completely ripped off. That's how powerful this bomb was. It separated the sole off a sneaker! Think of the incredible violence that would take."

I shook my head as I thought about it, breathing in the sweet gasoline smell of burn that the respirator couldn't filter out.

What is this and where is it going?