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he does, I think it’ll be by accident.”
    “And when he gets down and finds the door to the lobby blocked, he’ll use the fire-door to the alley,” Mr. Ricardi said with what was, for him, eagerness. “We’ll hear the alarm—it’s rigged to ring when anyone pushes the bar—and we’ll know he’s gone. One less nut to worry about.”
    Somewhere south of them something big blew up, and they all cringed. Clay supposed he now knew what living in Beirut during the 1980s had been like.
    “I’m trying to make a point here,” he said patiently.
    “I don’t think so,” Tom said. “You’re going anyway, because you’re worried about your wife and son. You’re trying to persuade us because you want company.”
    Clay blew out a frustrated breath. “Sure I want company, but that’s not why I’m trying to talk you into coming. The smell of smoke’s stronger, but when’s the last time you heard a siren?”
    None of them replied.
    “Me either,” Clay said. “I don’t think things are going to get better in Boston, not for a while. They’re going to get worse. If it was the cell phones—”
    “She tried to leave a message for Dad,” Alice said. She spoke rapidly, as if wanting to make sure she got all the words out before the memory flew away. “She just wanted to make sure he’d pick up the dry cleaning because she needed her yellow wool dress for her committee meeting and I needed my extra uni for the away game on Saturday. This was in the cab. And then we crashed! She choked the man and she bit the man and his turban fell off and there was blood on the side of his face and we crashed!”
    Alice looked around at their three staring faces, then put her own face in her hands and began to sob. Tom moved to comfort her, but Mr. Ricardi surprised Clay by coming around his desk and putting one pipestemmy arm around the girl before Tom could get to her. “There-there,” he said. “I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding, young lady.”
    She looked up at him, her eyes wide and wild. “Misunderstanding?” She indicated the dried bib of blood on the front of her dress. “Does this look like a misunderstanding? I used the karate from the self-defense classes I took in junior high. I used karate on my own mother! I broke her nose, I think… I’m sure . . .” Alice shook her head rapidly, her hair flying. “And still, if I hadn’t been able to reach behind me and get the door open…”
    “She would have killed you,” Clay said flatly.
    “She would have killed me,” Alice agreed in a whisper. “She didn’t know who I was. My own mother.” She looked from Clay to Tom. “It was the cell phones,” she said in that same whisper. “It was the cell phones, all right.”
     
    14
    “So how many of the damn things are there in Boston?” Clay asked. “What’s the market penetration?”
    “Given the large numbers of college students, I’d say it’s got to be huge,” Mr. Ricardi replied. He had resumed his seat behind his desk, and now he looked a little more animated. Comforting the girl might have done it, or perhaps it was being asked a business-oriented question. “Although it goes much further than affluent young people, of course. I read an article in Inc. only a month or two ago that claimed there’s now as many cell phones in mainland China as there are people in America. Can you imagine?”
    Clay didn’t want to imagine.
    “All right.” Tom was nodding reluctantly. “I see where you’re going with this. Someone—some terrorist outfit—rigs the cell phone signals somehow. If you make a call or take one, you get some kind of a… what?… some kind of a subliminal message, I guess… that makes you crazy. Sounds like science fiction, but I suppose fifteen or twenty years ago, cell phones as they now exist would have seemed like science fiction to most people.”
    “I’m pretty sure it’s something like that,” Clay said. “You can get enough of it to screw you up righteously if