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Scene 1

New York City, December 16, 2000

“Let nothing you dismay.”

Christmas Muzak was playing over the loudspeakers in Penn Station as Ellen Johansson strode to the escalator leading from the AMTRAK train waiting area to the taxi stand. So eager was she to make her date that she walked up the escalator steps even as they rose.

There was little to burden her. She carried only a purse and a small briefcase filled with correspondence, much of it written on onion-skin paper, postmarked from one of the world’s hotspots.

In the briefcase, she carried something else. A surprise she longed to present to her foreign correspondent.

Pushing through the glass doors with the crowd, Ellen buttoned up her dressy winter coat and arranged the scarf she chose especially for the occasion. It would help the person she planned to meet to recognize her. She only hoped that person would also remember to wear something similarly recognizable.

If there had been room to do it, Ellen would have paced with impatience as she waited with passengers from Boston and elsewhere who swelled the snaking line of people seeking taxis. Instead, she found herself wringing her hands, a gesture that was quite uncharacteristic.

When, at last, it was her turn for a taxi, Ellen leaned forward toward the driver’s rolled-down window and said, “Can you take me to the World Trade Center?” As she made her request, a gust of wind tossed her strawberry-blonde hair across her freckled face.

She brushed it out of her eyes as the driver barked, “Get in, lady,” in a heavily accented voice.

Ellen unbuttoned her coat in the overheated cab as it made its way out of the station and turned a corner. At the tail end of the Christmas rush, the area was thronged with shoppers. Ellen knew she looked like the out-of-towner she was, and wondered if the cabbie would try to take a circuitous route all the way to the Twin Towers. Then she would have to deal with the unpleasantness of telling him she knew better

“Mind if I smoke, lady?” the cabbie said, lighting up a cigarette before she could reply.

“Yes, I do,” she wanted to say, but decided to pick her battle instead, asking, “Are you heading for Seventh Avenue?”

“Of course, lady,” he said, assessing her through the rearview mirror. “You think I take you for a ride?” he added, chuckling at his own joke.

But his eyes seemed mirthless in the small rectangle of reflective glass.

“Alhamdulillah,” he mumbled in Arabic. By the grace of Allah.

“By the grace of any god, I’ll get to my destination,” Ellen mused inwardly while matching the man’s face, as reflected in the mirror, with his identification picture posted on the seatback in front of her. “Same man, all right,” she thought. “Samir Hasan,” his card read.

The traffic remained jammed, but Hasan demonstrated skill in crawling through it, sometimes squeezing so close to other cabs that Ellen was sure their sides would scrape or the mirrors jutting out would slam together. Looking at her watch, Ellen’s anxiety grew, but she had to admit, no driver could have improved upon Hasan’s effort. And while he wove among other vehicles, around double-parked delivery vans, and stopped on a dime to let a man push a rack of garments across the taxi’s path, he kept up an animated conversation in Arabic with another male voice on his two-way radio.

Animated, yes. But also very earnest.

Once, Ellen caught him casting his eyes back at her through the rear-view mirror with a kind of intense scrutiny. But then he shook his head as if laughing at himself.

The radio conversation might have been about anything unpleasant. Marital problems. A nasty cab dispatcher. A business deal gone bad.

Then it took on a new tone. Might they be discussing a woman in intimate detail?

As, at last, the cab turned onto Seventh Avenue, Ellen found Hasan’s eyes on her again. Paired with the tone of the conversation, his gaze instilled in her a sense of real dismay. Was he describing Ellen herself to his radio pal? But no, it must be someone else, she realized, as she heard him mention more than once a woman named Tina. Ellen indulged in a good-natured mental shrug, and asked herself if she would have been similarly uneasy if the driver were of something other than Middle Eastern extraction. Silently, she scolded herself for almost entertaining the prejudice that so many embraced after the towers she was about to visit were the targets of terrorist truck bombers in 1993. And, after all, wasn’t she on her way to make contact with a Palestinian who held major importance in her life?

The Twin Towers loomed ahead. She was almost there.

The cabbie pulled the taxi to a stop. “Here you are, lady,” he said, and collected his fare.

Ellen stepped out of the cab. “Shukran,” she said, on impulse, thanking the cabbie in his own language.

Looking over her shoulder to gauge his reaction, Ellen had to wonder if she was imagining what she saw.

The color seemed to drain completely out of the man’s swarthy complexion.