She ran to the corner, waving for cabs that failed to materialize.

Sam Healy had the procedure down. That was one talent he had: the ability to memorize. He'd look at a list or circuit schematic once or twice and that would be it — it was in the mental vault.

Which was a good thing. Because there was a lot to remember when you were a Bomb Squad cop. He wondered if that had anything to do with why he'd chosen bomb detail in the first place. It was different from being a beat cop or an ESU cop. In Emergency Services you had to make fast decisions. They improvised.

Healy preferred to plan every detail out, then work step by step. Slowly.

The van clattered north. Hudson became Eighth Avenue and they passed Fourteenth Street.

The procedure: Set up a frozen zone for a thousand feet around the theater and evacuate everybody as best you can. Easy in a Long Island strip mall; impossible in densely populated Manhattan. Then you get the robot, with its gripping claws and TV-camera eyes, to stroll up to the damn thing and take a look at it. Then you pick it up in the claws...

The van rocked to a stop in the showroom of emergency vehicles on Seventh Avenue. They jumped out of the van.

... and wheel it out nice and easy because the cable on the robot is only fifty feet long and you can get killed as fast by chunks of robot as you can by IED shrapnel. Then you go up the ramp and into the containment vehicle...

And pray that the damn thing goes off in the vessel so you don't have to go inside and pick it up when you get to Rodman's Neck.

But also pray that if it does go off in the vessel it doesn't have such a high brisance and isn't so big that it turns the containment truck into a huge hand grenade.

And then you just pray...

That's if you can use the robot, of course. Assuming the bomb wasn't in some place the bulky crawler, looking like a moon-lander car, couldn't go.

Under a theater seat, for instance.

Which is, of course, where the bomb turned out to be, they learned as they deployed at the scene.

Healy looked at his partner, Jim Rubin, and nodded. “I'll do a hand entry. Let's get the suit.”

“I'll do it, you want,” Rubin said.