"A nuke."
"A nuke?"
"Yeah, that's it, a nuke," Scott said excitedly. "A nuke knocks out power. Of course."
"Right," Ben said mockingly. "I can hear it now: Portion of 17th. Floor of Exchange Devastated by Nuclear Bomb. News at Eleven."
"Never mind," Scott brushed it off. "Can we get up there?" He pointed at the ceiling. "See the place?"
Ben pulled a few strings and spent a couple of hundred of Scott's dollars but succeeded in getting to the corpse-less site of the explosion. Scott visually poked around the debris and noticed a curved porcelain remnant near his feet. He wasn't supposed to touch, but, what was it? And the ruby colored chunks of glass? In the few seconds they were left alone, they snapped a quick roll of film and made a polite but hasty departure. At $200 a minute Scott hoped he would find what he was looking for.
"Ben, I need these photos blown up, to say, 11 X 17? ASAP."
The press conference at 4:15 in the morning was necessary. The Stock Exchange was not going to open Thursday. The lobby of the Stock Exchange was aflood with TV camera lights, police and the media hoards. Voices echoed loudly, between the marble walls and floor and made hearing difficult.
"We don't want to predict what will happen over the next 24 hours," the exhausted stocky spokesman for the Stock Exchange said loudly, to make himself heard over the din. "We have every reason to expect that we can make a quick transition to another system."
"How is that done?"