in the air and looked straight across the crowd to the patrolling Pete Mackay and Danny Kearns.
“OFFICER!” he yelled, loudly. Very loudly. “RIGHT HERE—OVER HERE, PLEASE!”
Officer Mackay spun around. He could see Don Martin’s raised arm, and he dodged and ducked thirty yards through the crowd. Danny Kearns was right behind him.
When they arrived, Donald Martin was herding people back, away from the briefcase, which now stood in solitude like a couple of roosters in a cockfight, hemmed in by the spectators.
“Officer,” said Martin, “a guy who looked like some kind of an Arab left that case right there and said he was going to Starbucks for coffee. But he didn’t. He went right past Starbucks, and he’s on his way out of the building right down that corridor.”
Pete Mackay grabbed a small state-of-the-art stethoscope from his belt and stuck one end into each ear, the long tube onto the briefcase. “Jesus Christ!” he breathed. “Danny, there’s a slight ticking sound. Get the detector.”
Danny Kearns pulled a wire contraption from his belt and held it against the case. It immediately bleeped. “That’s metal inside, Pete, and possibly explosive. This is a fucking live one.”
“What’s he wearing?” yelled Pete. “What the hell’s he wearing?”
“Tan-colored jacket,” replied Elliott Gardner. “Black T-shirt. He’s not tall, short black hair. Looks obviously Arabian.”
“GO GET HIM, PETE! LET ME TAKE CARE OF THIS.”
Danny Kearns had patrolled for a lot of hours in Boston’s airport. And he knew the real estate. Out through the wide glass doors, there was a four-lane throughway for dropoffs, cars, limos, and buses. Officer Kearns was accustomed to making split-second decisions, but had not previously been confronted by anything quite so urgent. Whether to evacuate the terminal as fast as possible? Or to take the death-or-glory route, grab the briefcase and get it out of here, hoping to Christ the sonofabitch didn’t blow?
The latter course held another diabolical question—what to do with the damn thing once it was outside? The terminal on the departures level was surrounded by concrete parking lots, and Danny Kearns sure as hell didn’t want to be holding the goddamned time bomb for longer than necessary.
His mind raced. If he flung the briefcase into the concrete ramparts of the parking garage, he’d wreck a few cars and maybe knock down a couple of floors, maybe injure or even kill a dozen people. If he left it in the terminal while he ordered people out, it would surely kill a thousand.
No contest. Danny Kearns, Patriots fan, husband of the beautiful Louise, father of Mikey and Ray, grabbed the briefcase. He held it in the classic grip of the running back, tucked against his body, his right hand securing its underside. Instincts, honed from watching thousands of hours of NFL football, caused him to run with a slightly lower gait than normal.
He looked ahead at the glass doors, and he set off, legs pumping, running hard for the first objective, brushing aside passengers, hitting anyone in the way with a crunching shoulder charge. Ahead of him was a group of maybe six people blocking the doors—the goddamned defensive secondary, too many of ’em. Danny rammed into the first astounded air passenger, then spun away, coming back in, hard on the left, grimly hanging on to the briefcase.
The doors were open; a redcap with a luggage cart blocked his way. But Danny Kearns saw only the free safety, a deep defensive backfield man, ready to hammer the tackle home. He rammed out his left hand and caught the luggage guy right under the chin. Then he cleared the empty cart and charged out into the airport dropoff zone.
A bus braked and was hit in the rear by a taxi. Two cops on duty heard Danny yell, “CLEAR THE PARKING LOT RIGHT NOW! I’M HOLDING A FUCKING BOMB!”
The two cops saw him running for the center of the roadway and charged out into the traffic. A limo driver hit a truck. An SUV mounted the sidewalk. And Danny Kearns kept running, dodging, sidestepping, and now he was shouting, yelling over and over, “GET OUT OF THE PARKING GARAGE—VACATE THE AREA!”
In front of him was the low concrete wall of the garage’s first floor, and Danny prepared for the greatest throw of his life. He could see that the area he wanted was empty, like a yawning end zone. In Danny’s mind, Tom Brady, the Patriots’ legendary quarterback who was still going strong at age thirty-five, was urging him on. The massed ranks