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liked the way her husband laughed—and how it would make his shoulders shake. But now she was very worried.
    In Tower Two, dense smoke had engulfed the upper floors and the stairwells. People tried to decide whether to fight their way down through the choking darkness or up to the roof and possible rescue by helicopter. On the eighty-fourth floor, Brian Clark pushed the fallen rubble off his back and began organizing a rescue. “Come on, everyone. Let’s go,” he yelled to fellow workers. A fire warden for his company, Clark was carrying a whistle and a flashlight as he led five colleagues to Stairway A.
    Three floors down, on the eighty-first floor, two people heading up warned them about going any farther. “You can’t go down,” said a woman. “The floors are in flames. We have to get above the smoke and fire.” For a moment or so, the group pondered, then four decided to go up and Clark and coworker Ronald DiFrancesco continued down. Suddenly, there was a noise—bang, bang, bang—coming from the destroyed offices of Fuji Bank. “Help! I’m buried!” someone yelled. “Can anybody help?’’ The shouts were coming from loan officer Stanley Praimnath. Clark managed to free him from the debris, and he joined the two as they continued down the stairwell and into the heavy smoke.
    By then the smoke was becoming thicker and breathing was difficult. DiFrancesco turned around and climbed to the ninety-first floor. Exhausted, he rested there for ten minutes and then, determined to get out, headed back down the stairwell and began pushing into the black, suffocating soot.
    Soon after Beverly Eckert reached her house, only about a mile away, the phone rang. It was Rooney. “Sean,” she yelled, elated, “where are you?” But the news was not good. Coughing and gasping for air, he said he was trapped on the 105th floor of the burning Tower Two. “Why are you there?” Eckert asked, confused and afraid, knowing he worked seven floors below. As with the employees of Euro Brokers, Rooney had first tried to climb down the emergency stairwell, making it to somewhere around the seventy-sixth floor. But the heat and smoke had become too intense, driving him back.
    Then, like Brian Clark’s colleagues, Rooney turned around and tried to escape to the observation deck on the 107th floor. But when he got there, he found the thick steel door firmly sealed. “The roof doors were locked,” he told Eckert. “How could they be locked?” she said, frantic for Rooney to find a way out. “Please, just try it again. Try it again, maybe it was just jammed when the building got hit.” But Rooney said there was no use, he was sure it was locked.
    He told Eckert that he was now on the north side of the building, and Eckert said she would pass the information on to the rescue workers. Confused as to what was happening around him, Rooney asked his wife what she could see on the television. “Where’s the fire?” he said. Eckert said there was fire on his side of the building, but it was many floors below. “The smoke is heavy,” Rooney said. “I don’t understand why the fire suppression isn’t working.”
    “Maybe they can get a helicopter to you,” said Eckert, desperately trying to get her husband to the roof and possible rescue. “Please try the door again. Pound on it. Maybe someone is on the other side and will hear you. Who is with you?” she asked. “I’m alone,” said Rooney. “Some other people are in a conference room nearby.” He then went back to the observation deck to try the door once again.
     
     
    Shortly after nine at NSA, Cindy Farkus again broke into Lieutenant General Hayden’s meeting, but this time she was almost running. Another plane had hit the second tower, she said. “One plane’s an accident, two planes is an attack,” said Hayden, who immediately adjourned his meeting and asked Farkus to quickly summon the agency’s top security officials to his office.
    That was not the way it was