Alert: (Michael Bennett 8), page 5
Mr. Joyce took a long, soothing sip of his cold McDonald’s OJ and began humming to himself as he looked out at the sunny day. As he watched, a low LaGuardia-bound FedEx cargo jet came roaring in overhead. Mr. Joyce, being an avid plane spotter, took one look at the shape of its purple tail and knew immediately that it was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F.
Searching for and finally spotting the exact location of the aircraft’s aft gas tanks, he vividly imagined shooting them with one of the refurbished FIM-92 Stinger missiles they had at the warehouse. He cocked his head to the left as he calculated the physics of a twenty-two-pound hit-to-kill blast-fragmentation warhead ripping into a six-hundred-thousand-pound plane’s fuel tanks at twice the speed of sound.
He took another sip of OJ. They continued to roll. All around was nothing but block after grim block of run-down brick warehouses and industrial buildings. There were no residential buildings or even gas stations in the desolate area, and many of its streets didn’t have so much as a sidewalk.
Which was precisely why they were operating out of this god-awful area. With no concerned citizenry for miles, it was a perfect place to base their operations.
After another block, Mr. Beckett, behind the wheel, hit a garage-door opener and they pulled under the rolling steel gate of an unremarkable but dilapidated two-story stucco structure wedged between an abandoned warehouse and a stinking recycling center.
When the steel shutter was closed behind them, they climbed out of the truck and came through the garage door into the lower floor of the small building. The dim, windowless space had black-painted walls and a long, fully stocked pinewood bar. There were neon signs, a jukebox in one corner, a pool table, and even several black-painted circular wooden booths along the far wall.
“Now, this is what I call a hideout!” Tony said, looking around in amazement. “This is awesome! And unexpected. I would never peg you smart guys for living in a dive bar.”
“I’m glad you like it, Tony,” said Mr. Joyce, going behind the bar and clicking a green neon Rolling Rock sign on and off. “It does have a certain ambience, doesn’t it? This building was once an illegal after-hours place. After we moved in, it was easier just to leave everything as is.”
“Where do you sleep? On the pool table?”
“Of course not,” Mr. Joyce said with a grin. “There’s an apartment upstairs. I’m going to hit the restroom for a pit stop. Why don’t you let Mr. Beckett fix you a drink? Sit and relax for a bit. I think we all need a well-deserved rest before we start phase two.”
Tony yawned and smiled back.
“What is phase two, anyway, Mr. Joyce? Same shit like with the trucks?” he said.
“All in good time, Tony. Relax now. I’ll be right back,” Mr. Joyce said with a wink as he headed down the hallway.
CHAPTER 14
MR. BECKETT SAT Tony in the booth at the far end of the long room and placed a rum and Coke in front of him. Then he went to the floor safe behind the bar and came back with a white plastic Food Emporium shopping bag containing the agreed-upon twenty thousand dollars in twenties and fifties.
“Hey, thanks,” said Tony, smiling from ear to ear as he glanced at the money and lifted the drink. “You know, you guys are such gentlemen. I mean, I thought I’d never get a job with my record, but then I look up and there you guys are outside that homeless shelter like some kind of godsend. My whole life I’ve partnered up with sucker after sucker, and I just want you to know how privileged I feel to finally work with a couple of real smart players. You must have been, like, professors or something, am I right?”
“Well, Mr. Joyce is the real brains,” said Mr. Beckett as he headed back to the bar. “He’s a genius in mathematics as well as materials engineering. He used to be an actual rocket scientist—well, missile scientist, if you want to get technical. And here’s some advice from personal experience.”
“What’s that?” Tony said.
“Don’t play chess against him, especially for money.”
“Not a chance,” Tony said with a laugh. “Never touch the stuff, Mr. Beckett. Why don’t you pour yourself a drink and come and sit?”
“Sorry, Tony. I don’t drink. I like to be in control at all times,” said Mr. Beckett.
“You don’t drink? What do you do for fun?” Tony said.
Before Mr. Beckett could answer, there was a faint, flicking, whistling sound from the dimness on the other side of the room near the bathroom. Then there were two sounds, all but simultaneous. The first was the click of Tony’s dropped drink landing miraculously upright on the table. The second was the loud crack of his head as it slammed back violently into the plywood back of the booth.
Mr. Joyce emerged from the hallway with the compound hunting bow after Tony stopped twitching. He stood before the booth for a moment with his dark goatee cradled in his free hand, peering at the fletching and the twenty-seven-inch carbon shaft of the broadhead arrow that protruded from Tony’s left eye socket.
“That was just terrible,” Mr. Joyce said.
“Come now, Mr. Joyce. I liked Tony, too, but we have to cover our tracks,” said Mr. Beckett as he retrieved the bag of money and returned it to the safe.
“Please: you don’t actually think I care that Tony is dead, do you?” Mr. Joyce said with a laugh. “I’m just upset about this new bow I bought. I was aiming for right between the eyes, but one of the pulleys must be overtight. I booted it down and a little to the right at the last second.”
“Now, now, Mr. Joyce,” said Mr. Beckett as he came over. “You have to admit that this light is horrendous, and besides, no one is perfect one hundred percent of the time. Your little toy is quite effective, if you ask me. What’s the expression? ‘Close enough for government work?’”
Mr. Joyce took a pair of side cutters off the bar, reached behind Tony’s ruined skull, and cut away the carbon shaft embedded in the plywood. Tony landed faceup on the filthy concrete after Mr. Joyce kicked him off the booth seat. He slid the arrow out of Tony’s eye by the fletching, then lifted the dead man’s left hand and checked the cheap digital watch on his wrist.
“Look at the time, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said. “Grab his ankles, would you? We really need to get going. You know traffic is going to be a nightmare.”
CHAPTER 15
AT A LITTLE after eleven o’clock, I was back on the streets of Washington Heights. Well, back under the streets of Washington Heights, to be exact.
“See? It’s over there, Mike,” said Con Ed supervisor Al Kott, a few rungs below me on the Saint Nicholas Avenue manhole ladder. He pointed his flashlight at a ruined section of fire-blackened brick in the north wall.
“That wall there isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s been jackhammered, by the looks of it. And not by my guys. I already checked the records. There’s been no maintenance in this hole for the last eighteen months.”
“You see anything that looks like an air shaft in there, Al?” I said.
“Maybe,” he said, pointing the beam of his flashlight into the gap. “I don’t know. It’s all burned and wrecked to shit, but I think I see some ripped metal about five or six feet in.”
I nodded as I thought about that. More details had been revealed at the precinct meeting by the bomb experts. Evidence was pointing to two bombs placed on the tracks just north of the 168th and 181st Street stations. Massive cratering above the blasts at two air shafts corroborated the thermobaric bomb theory. Some kind of fuel had been deliberately pumped into the tunnel.
That had to be it, I thought as I stared at the ripped-open wall and massively damaged Con Edison manhole. This spot was one of the locations where the flammable bomb fuel, or whatever the hell it was, had been pumped down.
We had our where, I thought as I climbed for the circle of daylight above me. Now we just needed to find our who.
CHAPTER 16
THE BUILDING WAS a new thirty-two-story glass high-rise on Haven Avenue overlooking the Hudson River on the west side of Washington Heights.
The man was in apartment 32J. He was a junkie, thin and middle-aged, vampire pale, with long, gray ponytailed hair and a road-worn, angular face. In a wifebeater and once-black but now faded-to-gray pair of jeans, he sat on the gleaming oak floor of the small, high-end condo’s living room, his bony knees up and his back flat against a wall.
Despite this spartan sitting position, he appeared comfortable. Like he’d long ago become used to sitting on hard, bare floors.
There was no furniture in the room. Not a stick of furniture in the whole apartment, in fact. The only other object in the apartment was a white iPad, facedown on the floor between the gaunt man’s beat-up hiking boots. He sat there, staring at it steadily. As if, any second now, it were about to perform some sort of amazing trick that he didn’t want to miss.
Every once in a while, he’d flick a glance around the empty room. The bare white walls. The rectangle of cloudless, cornflower-blue sky showing through the big, curtainless window.
He wondered who owned this place. Would they actually have bought an apartment just for this? Or maybe it was rented.
He yawned, rolled his shoulders, stretched. As if that mattered. He didn’t need to know about all that. He only had to make sure his own part worked so he could get the rest of the money.
The instructions couldn’t have been simpler. He just needed to do it, leave the apartment, get into the rental car parked in the lot on Broadway, and head straight back to Florida.
He glanced at his watch. Three minutes. Hot damn! Three! he thought. Then he went back to staring at the tablet again.
He was trying to keep his mind blank, stay serene. But as the clock ticked down, it became exceedingly difficult.
He kept thinking about the craziest, most screwed-up shit he’d ever done in his life. How he’d broken into houses when people were home sleeping. How he’d knifed that kid who tried to take his shit that time when he was living on the beach in Key West. In the back of the neck, too. He had to have killed him. He sure hadn’t stuck around to find out.
The worst was in the midnineties, when, during a Christmas visit to his little brother Kenny’s house, he up and flat-out stole his brother’s new Toyota Echo, which had his two nieces’ car seats in the back and a woman’s new winter coat in the trunk that couldn’t have been anything but Kenny’s Christmas present to his wife.
But all that put together, thought the man as he rubbed his sweating palms on the soft, threadbare thighs of his Levi’s, couldn’t hold a candle to the act of certifiable insanity he was about to commit.
Literally, no one had ever done anything like this. No one. It was going to rearrange people’s minds.
Did he really want to be part of that? He didn’t know. Half of him was afraid, of course, especially about getting caught. That would not be good. But he really didn’t think he would. The plan was pretty much foolproof.
The other half of him was excited about it. Not just about the $150K he was due but also because it was so big-time. Monumental. Wasn’t like he was winning any Nobel Prizes anytime soon, so what he was about to do would definitely leave a mark.
The alarm on his cheap watch suddenly went off. The tinny blip-blip, pause, blip-blip was like an electronic amplification of his racing heart.
It was time.
He flipped over the iPad and propped it in his lap and pressed an app and the screen suddenly showed a live shot of upper Manhattan, to the east. Small buildings could be seen far below with Matchbox-like cars between them moving slowly in the congested streets.
It was the view from the camera he’d already mounted on the high-rise building’s roof that was connected to the iPad through Wi-Fi. In the corner of the screen, numbers showed the camera’s satellite GPS coordinates to the second decimal point and that its elevation was at 326.8 feet.
On the iPad screen, the tiny buildings began to grow in size as he remotely activated the camera’s zoom lens.
Zooming and meticulously searching and zooming again, the man swiped at the screen with his long fingers, zeroing in on the target.
CHAPTER 17
A SUDDEN FRANTIC call from Chief Fabretti redirected me immediately from the Saint Nicholas Avenue bomb site back to the command center at the precinct.
I was told that the mayor was about to speak for the first time about the attack to the press, and to the world, and I was needed to deliver an up-to-date briefing to him in person before he went on.
As I turned the corner of Broadway onto 170th, I could see that a portable stage and flag-flanked podium had been set up outside on the street in front of the Thirty-Third Precinct’s front door. Standing in the blocked-off street around the stage was a large crowd of FBI people and cops and mayor’s-office guys playing cops with coplike EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT Windbreakers over their shiny suits.
And still they were outnumbered by media people. Everywhere there were camera guys in plaid flannel shirts playing with light meters and tripods while their metrosexual news-producer bosses did that one-finger-in-the-ear thing as they gabbed into their cell phones.
In addition to regular news vans, I spotted a massive trailer-size national news satellite truck, like the ones you see outside events like the Super Bowl. I did a double take as I drove past a startlingly good-looking, tall brunette—a name-network reporter—with her head back, getting her eyeliner touched up by her assistant.
There’s a real buzz in the air, isn’t there? I thought as I parked and got out. Like we were at a red-carpet event.
I didn’t like it. I knew people were freaking out and needed to know what was happening, but this was nuts. It never failed. Every time these things happened, the circus atmosphere seemed to get worse. Less thought and emphasis seemed to be placed on the incredible human pain inflicted on the victims and their families and more on the hysterical contagious excitement generated by the knowledge that Something Big Is Happening.
I found Chief Fabretti with Lieutenant Bryce Miller on the sidewalk near the precinct’s front door.
“Just about to call you, Mike,” Fabretti said. “The mayor changed his mind about the briefing. He’s going on any second now, and he needs to, and I quote, wrap things up with his speech people.”
“His speech people, of course,” I said, nodding, as I looked out at the media horde. “You think this is the right approach here, Chief? Little on the splashy side, isn’t it?”
The mayor’s buddy, Bryce Miller, jumped in. “Mayor insisted it be outside,” he said. “Not holed up in a bunker somewhere. There’s a lot of scared folks out there. We need to project calm. It’s important people understand that everything’s okay. That we’re in control of things.”
In control of things? I thought, cocking my head. We are? I wanted to say.
CHAPTER 18
A MOMENT LATER, accompanied by a barrage of camera clicks and flashes, the mayor, Carl Doucette, came out of the precinct with his five-man police security detail.
Normally a glad-handing, life-of-the-party type, the new mayor—tall, with curly gray hair—looked somber, serious, almost nervous as he stepped to the podium and took out his prepared statement. If he was faking looking shaken up, he was a fine actor, I thought.
“As everyone probably has heard by now, very early this morning there was a massive explosion in the number one train tunnel beneath Broadway in Washington Heights,” Mayor Doucette began.
“Three people have been killed that we know of, and I’d like to say first that our hearts go out to those victims and their families. We are still very much in the process of investigating the explosion, but from our initial review, we can say definitively that this was not a utility malfunction, nor was it industrial in nature.”
The clicking of the cameras increased as he looked up from his notes.
“At this point, we can only conclude that this was an intentional act, of what exact nature we cannot say. It seems as if a flammable material was pumped into the tunnel at some point last night, and that the built-up material was ignited with one or perhaps two explosive devices, causing catastrophic damage to a large segment of the tunnel as well as to the Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street and Hundred and Eighty-First Street subway stations.
“This part of the tunnel is ten stories down, one of the deepest in the entire system, and we have engineers still assessing the risk of further collapse. Though we are planning to bring back train service on a rolling basis this afternoon into the evening rush, people can expect that number one train service will be down in both directions for well into the foreseeable future.”
He paused again, took a breath.
“But though our train service is shut down,” the mayor said, staring at the cameras now with a calm and steady seriousness and intensity he’d never before displayed, “I want to let whoever committed this cowardly, murderous act know once and for all that the spirit of this city and its citizens will never be shut down.”
There was a smattering of spontaneous applause.
“We will continue as we have always done, and you will be found and brought to justice.”
“Yeah!” somebody with a deep voice called out from the media pit, and more people began to applaud.
“Try as you will, neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to shut down our city or the American people.”
Maybe doing a big press conference like this was a good idea after all, I thought as the clapping increased. I hadn’t voted for the mayor, because he seemed soft on crime, but he was surprising me. Watching him operate up close for the first time, I could see he was a natural leader with an ability to lift people’s spirits.
The mayor smiled gently as he raised his hands to wave down the applause. He brought the microphone in a little closer to himself as a chant of “USA! USA!” started from somewhere.
