The mood at the lab was shattered and jittery. Mondiale had lost a branch office inside the World Trade Center. While most of the Mondiale staff had retreated from the burning building in good order, two fatalities had been entombed in the giant disaster site. To have dead colleagues horribly killed by terrorists, that was very bad news, but the physical damage to Mondiale’s telecom system was a stunning calamity. When Manhattan’s two tallest buildings collapsed, New York’s microwave capacity had been gutted.