True Allegiance

Ben Shapiro TRUE ALLEGIANCE

Prologue

New York City

BY THE TIME JENNIFER COLLIER hit the George Washington Bridge, it was already almost 9:00 a.m. Rush hour. The bridge had turned into an enormous parking lot.

Jennifer looked out at the sea of red lights before her, stretching all the way into New York, and sighed. There had to be thirty thousand cars on this bridge, all of them moving two miles an hour.

Jennifer glanced at her watch and sighed.

She was on the west side of the bridge, and she could see its two enormous steel-encased towers looming before her. In the passenger seat, her daughter, Julie, breathed softly, sleeping.

Jennifer glanced at her watch again. 9:03. “Come on,” she muttered.

Which is when she heard it.

The bridge groaned.

It was a loud, low groan that made the car vibrate.

Julie woke up. “What was that?” she asked drowsily.

The groan died away.

“Nothing,” said Jennifer. “Probably just a plane overhead. Go back to sleep.”

“Mommy…”

The bridge groaned again. This time, it was longer, more drawn out. Jennifer felt the brake pedal vibrate beneath her foot.

“Mommy, that’s not a plane,” said Julie, wide awake now.

The groaning continued, booming from beneath them.

The bridge was undulating slightly up and down now. Jennifer could see the cables of the suspension bridge oscillating like the strings of a guitar.

“Mommy, what’s going on?” Julie cried.

Cars ahead were honking now, urgently pleading for those at the front of the bridge to hurry up. A few cars were trying to ram their way through the traffic, pushing other cars toward the edge of the bridge. The honking and crashing, combined with the burgeoning low roar, made Jennifer’s head ache, pound, the driving rhythm of her blood surging through her temples.

Then the bridge’s roar stopped again. The people ahead of Jennifer kept honking, panicking, trying to get off the bridge. After about thirty seconds, the honking seemed to die down a little bit. Julie’s wide eyes grew wider. She was staring at a crash on the other side of the divider, the flames leaping from the engine of a smashed Toyota. Jennifer could see a man’s arm hanging, lifeless, out the window.

Jennifer reached out and gripped Julie’s arm. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, wetting her lips.

Then time seemed to stop.

The noise of the traffic went silent.

Jennifer’s eyes opened in horror.

The bridge before Jennifer tilted sideways. The 604-foot tower before her began to lean, almost gracefully, to her right.

Jennifer screamed, but it was drowned out in the ear-splitting cracking noise, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel twisting and bending and grating on each other, the sound of a million airplanes all crashing at once. Jennifer looked to her left as she heard the steel cables shriek, stretch on the other side of the bridge. She locked eyes with an elderly man driving a silver Lincoln Continental. Behind him, she saw one of the enormous metal cables snap clean and slither wildly back and forth like a beginning fly fisherman’s messy cast.

“Look out!” she shouted at the man. He couldn’t hear her, but he turned to follow her eyes.

The cable ripped through the Lincoln, slicing its occupant in half vertically, a jet stream of red following in its wake, splattering Jennifer’s windshield.

She opened her mouth to scream and realized that she was already screaming so hard, no sound was emerging.

In front of her, the road itself began to tilt. Cars slid horizontally toward the railings, bath-time playthings of an angry god.

The first tower buckled.

Jennifer felt herself fall as the top level of the bridge dropped. For a moment, she was weightless—the peculiar memory of jumping inside an elevator when she was a little girl flitted through her brain—and then the second level of the bridge slammed down on top of the first level at a twenty-five-degree angle. The tower stopped, bending but holding grotesquely, the metal shrieking and moaning, smoke emerging from below.

Jennifer could hear the screams and cries of the wounded below her, the carnage of metal and bone. An awful crematory smell burned her nose as cars exploded beneath her, one by one, muffled by the tons of cement and steel, sounding for all the world like popcorn. Julie was screaming uncontrollably. In the distance, sirens sounded eerily, and over the river, she could see emergency helicopters approaching.

Jennifer fumbled for her purse and dug through it for her cell phone. She threw aside her wallet, her makeup, poured out the contents on the floor of the passenger seat. Grabbed her cell phone. Speed-dialed Bill.

It rang once. Then twice. Finally, it went to message.

“I love you,” she whispered into the phone.

As she did, Julie pointed through the front windshield, her lips quivering in silent horror.

The second tower was tilting, too.