A Danger to Himself and Others (Bomb Squad NYC #1)

Part 2

Albert Horn worked as a computer programmer in the research department of National Bible Publishers at 1440 Broadway. It had the potential to be a peaceful job and Albert Horn coveted peace. He saw it in the eyes of his coworkers, in their placid manners, in their kind smiles, and he wished he could find it in himself.

Mercifully the seventh floor felt more like a library than a business office. The small programming department huddled in one corner around a bend, the only part of the floor where people didn’t speak in hushed tones by default. Miles of bookshelves occupied most of the other areas: volumes upon volumes on subjects so esoteric that Albert Horn couldn’t explain them if he had years to prepare. All day long, on that part of the floor, scholars came and went. Editors settled down in carrels and at giant wooden tables, poring over ancient Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. When Albert Horn once asked a research librarian what those people were looking for after so many years, she replied with one word: “Insights.”

Insights. Albert Horn could dig it, looking for insights in books. Why not? He’d tried every other way and it had gotten him nowhere—worse than nowhere. He’d long ago mastered the computer world, once relished the places the Internet could take you, the way it could stimulate your mind. But that was a tease. You couldn’t touch and smell those places. On the screen they were just words and pictures.

In late 2002, when he was eighteen years old, Albert Horn had left Jamaica, Queens, for the United States Army. War was afoot and Horn considered himself a patriot, but it was more than that. He wanted to imbibe the world, touch it and taste it. And if he had to risk his life to do that, to his youthful mind that seemed worth the chance. He trained at Fort Jackson in South Carolina—first time he’d set foot below the Mason-Dixon line in his life—and got posted to the Eighth Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas. Before he shipped out, he and some buddies hiked the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Albert Horn used to tell whoever would listen that he never again felt as close to God as he did in the Blue Ridge—not in America or Europe or the Middle East, not in any church, and certainly, sad to say, not on the seventh floor of National Bible Publishers. Not that he didn’t try like hell to keep his chin up. In Hollis, Queens, where he lived, he rented a back-room apartment from his sister and her family, who were for the most part kind to him. They often ate together, sometimes went to church together, even hung out watching football and playing video games together. But, for all that, Albert Horn felt a creeping despair that carried him further from God’s love every day.

This was no secret. His sister knew there was something wrong with him, something deep in his mind, something beyond his physical disabilities. His boss, Youssef Naftali, also knew. Their team was halfway through a multiyear project but had fallen behind schedule. If this had been Microsoft or Oracle, some geek with a Coke in his hand would be standing over them pounding the table, urging them through all-nighters. Albert Horn couldn’t have handled that. He couldn’t even handle Naftali standing over him two hours ago, telling him gently that last week’s coding turned out to be dog poo. “Dog poo”—those were the words he used. Management allowed no cursing in the building.

Now, as a kind of forced leave, Horn had two tickets from Naftali to a Broadway matinee in his shirt pocket.

“They’re for Spider-Man,” Naftali had said. “Take them. Turn off the dark! You earned it, guy.”

Delivered in an Indiana twang, the cheerleading made Albert Horn sound like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Horn himself had a pronounced New York accent, but he hadn’t used it that morning to protest any further. He’d pretended to call his sister and invite his niece to accompany him, although in reality he’d done no such thing.

At exactly 2:30 he called for the elevator. A minute later he rode it down to the lobby. And a minute after that he walked out onto Broadway.

He called his sister, Lydia, from his cell phone as he hit the street. Naftali, he told her, in suggesting that he leave early had implied that Albert Horn’s prosthetic legs couldn’t carry him as well as another man’s, which was true up to a point, but just barely. After years of practice out in the real world, he hardly thought of the legs as a limitation—at least not in his daily routine, which took him on and off the subway, along city sidewalks, in and out of chairs, even up and down steps.