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 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.

FOUR

WE LOOKED STRAIGHT AT EACH OTIIER FOR THE BEST part of ten seconds. Then I got to my feet.