Mike had the door open. The reporter dumped the sandbag across his arms, grabbed the stirrup pump and bucket, and raced up a rickety staircase. Mike ran up after him, but by the time he got there with the sandbag, the reporter already had the incendiary out.

Mike smothered it with sand, just in case, and the reporter said, “That’s one less fire I’ll have to cover tonight,” but by the time they got downstairs again, flames from the warehouse next door were licking at the side of the building, and yet another wave of planes was buzzing overhead.

“Do you hear that?” the reporter said unnecessarily, and then Mike realized he was talking about a jangle of bells. A fire brigade.

A fire engine pulled into the street, and men swarmed off it and began hooking up a hose to the hydrant. Water belched from the hose and then slowed to a trickle. “There’s no water in the main!” one of the firemen shouted.

“We’ll have to hook them up to the pumps!” the one in charge said, and the men connected the hoses to portable pumps and began playing water on the flames.

Good, Mike thought. The professionals can take over. The reporter seemed to be thinking the same thing. He picked up his camera from where he’d left it on the doorstep and began snapping pictures of the firemen training a hose on the fire station.

Mike edged away from him, gauging whether he could get down Paternoster Row to the cathedral or was going to have to go around. The blaze didn’t seem to be any bigger, but the wind was starting to pick up, fanning the flames.

“Here,” a fireman said, shoving a hose into Mike’s hands. “Take this branchpipe down to Officers Mullen and Dix.”

“I’m not one of your firemen,” Mike said, determined not to get caught again. He thrust the hose back at him and said what he should have said to the reporter. “I have to get to the cathedral. I’m a member of the St. Paul’s fire watch.”

The fireman slapped the heavy nozzle and hose back into Mike’s hands. “Then this is where you belong.”

“But—”

“If we don’t stop it here, nothing you can do at the cathedral will save her. Run it along there, where Mullen and Dix are,” he ordered, pointing at two firemen, barely visible through the smoke, playing water on a warehouse fifty yards or so up the street.

And fifty yards closer to St. Paul’s, Mike thought.

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” he muttered, and slung the hose over his shoulder and limped off with it down the wet street, stepping over two other hoses and going around a pile of burning debris. He’d hand the branchpipe to Mullen and Dix and take off, and hopefully the smoke would keep the first fireman from seeing what he’d done. Or at least give him a head start.

If he could get past the fire they were trying to put out. It was a bookstore—he could see the wrought-iron signboard above the door: T. R. Hubbard, Fine Books—and the inside of the store was an inferno, flames leaping from every single window all the way up to the roof and lunging out into the middle of the narrow street.