By seven-thirty gum-popping secretaries were slouching off the buses arriving from Staten Island and Brooklyn. Aside from their habitual gum chewing, some of the secretaries looked impressively chic, almost elegant, that Friday morning.
As the ornate golden arms on the Trinity Church clock solemnly reached eight o'clock, every main and side street of the financial district was choked with thick, hypertense pedestrian traffic, as well as with buses and honking cabs.
More than nine hundred and fifty thousand people were being melted into less than half a square mile of outrageously expensive real estate, seven solid stone blocks where billions were bought and sold every workday-still the unsurpassed financial capital of the world.
It was too late to stop the morning's regular migration. The slim possibility had disintegrated in a frantic series of telephone calls between the commissioner's office and various powerful precinct chiefs. It had petered out into a nightmare of impossible logistics and mounting panic.
At that moment a wraithlike black man, Abdul Calvin Mohammud, was calmly entering the bobbing parade of heads and winter hats on Broad Street, just south of Wall. As he walked within the spirited crowd, he found himself noticing corporate flags waving colorfully from the massive stone buildings. The flags signaled BBH and Company, the National Bank of North America, Manufacturers Hanover, the Seaman's Bank. The flags were like crisp sails driven by strong East River winds.