Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (10 page)

And now, at exactly 8:15 a.m., Yorkville’s dark history began to repeat itself as a mechanical coughing started up in the two metal boxes that had been illegally positioned the day before at 421 East 81st and 401 East 66th.

The coughing, followed by a revving sound, came from small but quite powerful modified gasoline-powered generators contained inside each device’s metal housing. As the engine rose in pitch, the generator drove its steadily increasing electrical current through a four-foot-wide tightly wound coil of copper wire that was surrounded by a copper tube of equal length. The movement of the current through the copper cylinder instantly began to build an electromagnetic field. One that mounted and mounted as the engine pitched higher and higher, like an opera singer’s crescendo.

Then the explosives packed between the devices’ wire and tubing suddenly went off, sending a massive, invisible electromagnetic pulse in all directions at the speed of light.

The volume of the detonation inside the roof-positioned devices was negligible—a loud electrical pop, like a transformer blowing. But the sudden effect was anything but negligible.

The first official sign that something was wrong was the critical-failure alarm in the busy control room of the city’s Department of Transportation. The supervisor on duty dropped the Red Bull he’d just cracked open when he looked up and saw on the big board that every traffic light from 59th to 90th Street had just gone off-line, as though someone had hit a switch.

The traffic lights weren’t the only things in Yorkville to go off-line. At Gracie Mansion and Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Bloomingdale’s and the moneyed Chapin and Brearley schools and every other building within a hundred square blocks, all electrical activity instantly vanished, and every computer and light and elevator immediately ceased to work. It was like the return of the Stone Age.

People screamed and went flying as a packed southbound number 4 train coming into the 86th Street station jerked to a sudden stop. The same thing happened on a smaller but no less terrifying scale as the Roosevelt Island tram car coming out of its concrete berth over Second Avenue and 59th Street slammed to a halt and swung back and forth above the traffic.

It wasn’t just the buildings. In the side streets and avenues and even on the FDR Drive, alongside the East River, the morning rush-hour commute’s cars and delivery vans and taxis and dump trucks en masse began to coast out of control and plow into each other as their engines suddenly and inexplicably failed.

As countless car accidents occurred, pedestrians halted, staring at their suddenly fried cell phones. Shop owners opened the doors of their suddenly darkened businesses and stepped out onto the sidewalks, looking around.

On the riverside jogging path just north of John Jay Park, a female NYU student stopped by the river’s railing to check what was wrong with her suddenly dead iPod. Tugging out the earbuds, she glanced up at a strange low whining sound above her.

Then she screamed and looked, dumbstruck, at the still-spinning rotor blade from a falling traffic helicopter as it missed her head by less than five feet, a split second before it crashed nose-first into the East River.

At a safe distance away, and above the electromagnetic pulse, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Courtyard hotel on Broadway and 54th Street, a man in a white bathrobe stood in the east-facing window of his room with a pair of binoculars.

Behind him came the sudden hiss and pop of radio static followed by a frantic voice. Then another. Then another.

Mr. Beckett lowered his binoculars and turned and smiled at the police-band radio on the table behind him.

The abject confusion from their latest attack was already starting, he thought.

Good.

He smiled at Mr. Joyce, who was sitting in a soft chair beside the radio, also in a white bathrobe, fastidiously clipping his toenails.

Mr. Beckett lifted the mimosa from the room-service cart at his elbow. He raised it in the direction of his friend.

“What shall we toast to, Mr. Joyce?”

“The power of the human imagination, of course, Mr. Beckett,” said Mr. Joyce as he finished his left foot and recrossed his legs and started on the right.

He shrugged.

“What else is there, after all?”

AFTER THE CONFERENCE
ended, my team and I set up shop at a couple of desks in a far corner of the crowded, kinetic Intelligence Division bull pen.

Although it was early in the morning, everyone already seemed a little haggard. The cops around me were doing their best to hide it, but it was obvious that people were getting scared. A bombing and an assassination were insane even by New York’s standards.

An hour later, I was still on the horn with the department public relations office trying to disseminate stills of the Washington Heights bombers to the news outlets when it started.

I had just tucked the desk phone receiver under my chin when I suddenly noticed the rhythmic, low-toned, almost subliminal buzzing that had invaded the sterile white office space. When my hip vibrated, I realized that the sound was everyone’s cell phones vibrating.

But why would everyone’s phones be going off at once? I thought, hanging up my desk phone and snatching up my cell.

“Mike, did you hear?” It was Miriam Schwartz on the other end.

“No. What?” I said frantically.

“We’re getting reports of a massive blackout on the East Side of Manhattan. But it’s not just that. The cars have stopped. All the cars are in the streets. They’ve stopped working.”

“The cars have stopped?” I repeated stupidly.

“We just got nuked!” someone called out behind me.

My eyes popped wide open. That couldn’t be true. How could that be true? I thought. Yet I remembered from a late-night History channel show that one of the side effects of a nuclear bomb is frozen cars—the bomb fries all their electronics.

A strange numbness invaded my face, my brain. It was a weird sensation that I’d felt only twice before.

The day the doctor told us that my wife, Maeve, had inoperable terminal cancer.

And on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Dear God, my kids! Where are the kids? I thought as Miriam tried to tell me something. The damn bridge! I need to get over the bridge back to Manhattan, then get to Holy Name. But Brian went to school in the Bronx. I needed to figure out how I was going to get him.

“Mike! Damn it, listen to me!” Miriam said loudly. “It’s not a nuke. That’s what everybody is assuming, but it’s not true.”

I let out a breath and did my best to refocus.

“I’m listening, Miriam.”

“ESU reports on scene at the affected region state that there is no radiation being detected anywhere. Though it does look like a nonnuclear EMP-type weapon or something might have been set off. The power is out for a hundred square blocks, and New York State ISO—the organization that manages the electrical grid—said it isn’t a blackout. At eight fifteen, just bam! Everything went off in Yorkville like someone blew out a candle. The FBI’s JTTF is heading up to a staging area near the base of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. I already said you’d meet up with them there.”

“On my way,” I said, and I waved at Doyle and the crew to follow me as I hit the door.

IT WASN’T ON
the radio news yet as I sped out of Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge. Traffic was completely screwed up from almost the moment we arrived in Manhattan. We made it only as far as 44th Street and Second Avenue, a little past the United Nations, when the traffic became literally impassable.

I pulled the car over and double-parked and stood on the unmarked’s hood and stared north to see what was going on.

And continued to stand there, frozen and silent and blinking, in the cold falling rain.

It was a sight to behold. Something right out of a disaster movie. Second Avenue was stopped dead as far as the eye could see. On the sidewalks and between the utterly still cars, people were walking south, away from the area.

There were office workers, a lot of schoolkids. The worst were the doctors and nurses in medical scrubs pushing people in wheelchairs. A frantic and confused-looking churning multitude of scared New Yorkers was heading straight toward us.

“How’s it looking, Mike?” said Robertson as he got out of the car.

“Not good,” I said, hopping down. “Get the others. We need to walk from here.”

At Second Avenue and 59th Street, two empty NYPD cruisers and an empty FDNY ambulance stood in the middle of the entrance to the 59th Street Bridge on-ramp ominously silent with their flashers on.

I was silent, too, as I stood and stared above the emergency vehicles at the red trailer-size Roosevelt Island tram car, lightless, with its window broken open, swinging back and forth in the rain like a hanging victim.

We walked east, toward the FBI staging area, along the stone base of the bridge. There were a lot of frozen empty cars in the streets and an exodus of freaked-out people heading quickly past them and us.

At First Avenue, on the other side of the bridge underpass, I could see that a city bus had sideswiped half a dozen parked cars and was turned sideways up on the sidewalk. A crushed moped appeared to be stuck under its front bumper.

“Not good,” Arturo commented.

“At all,” Doyle concurred.

The worst sight of all was a block east, on York Avenue. In the distance, in the area known as Hospital Land, a large crowd of emergency personnel beside a line of ambulances appeared to be in the process of evacuating Sloan Kettering and Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“What are they doing?” said Arturo. “Don’t they just need to get all these cars out of here so they can get in some temporary generators?”

“To power what?” said Brooklyn. “Everything is fried. This isn’t just a blackout, Lopez. Everything electronic is broken. Everything. Every water pump to flush a toilet. Every fridge and stove is going to have to be fixed or replaced. They’re going to have to evacuate the area for who knows how long.”

“You’re right,” Doyle said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The FBI’s staging area turned out to be at the site of an old concrete dock and helipad jutting out into the East River almost beneath the bridge. A dozen agents, six of them in olive-drab tactical fatigues, had set up tents and tables and a gasoline-powered generator.

We’d just reached the first tent when there was a low, thumping hum, and a helicopter appeared from the fog under the 59th Street Bridge. We stopped and stared at the dark navy-blue Bell 407 with no markings as it slowed and banked and swung around and did a steady, controlled landing despite the wind.

Its rolling door snapped open, and out came four men and a woman in FBI Windbreakers carrying large kit bags. I kept looking at the copper-haired female agent as the whining helicopter lifted off again immediately and headed back the way it came.

I was either hallucinating or the woman was my old pal Emily Parker. With New York City under siege, I could have definitely been hallucinating, but it turned out I was right.

“Mike,” Emily said, giving me a grim half smile as I approached. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

“HERE, GIVE ME
a hand with these radios,” she said, pulling some out of her bag. “We’re definitely going to need them with all the cell sites fried.”

“What brings you here?” I said to Emily after I introduced her to my guys. “I thought you were back down in DC.” Emily worked there for the Bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and lived in suburban Virginia with her daughter, Olivia.

“That’s just my luck,” Emily said. “I came up this morning on the Acela and was starting a VICAP presentation to some junior agents when the bells went off. You know the drill. Now it’s all hands on deck until further notice. With the roads blocked the way they are, they’re going to chopper the entire New York office up here from lower Manhattan if they have to.”

“Have you heard anything?” I said.

“I was about to ask you the same question. One of the agents with me, John Bellew, was on the horn with some State Department think-tank guy. The initial read is that this was caused by one or several NNEMPs.”

“The whosiwhatsits?” said Arturo.

“Nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons. It’s a weapon that creates a massive electromagnetic field and then pulses it in a given area, creating an energy wave so powerful that it erases magnetic computer memories and welds closed the microscopic junctions in sensitive transistors and computer chips.”

Arturo looked befuddled. Agent Parker had that effect on people, I knew.

“That seems pretty high-tech. Who could pull this off?” asked Brooklyn.

“NNEMPs aren’t impossible to build, but it’s very difficult. You need someone with high-level technical expertise. Basically, this isn’t a homemade pipe bomb. This is the result of a highly intelligent operation that’s probably well funded.”

“Which points to terrorism—but as of now, there are no demands,” I said. “And no claim of credit. The subway explosion, the assassination, and now this. Why keep doing all this? What’s the motive?”

“The same as all terrorism,” said Emily. “To inspire fear, to cause pain and injury, and induce psychological torture. The rapidity of each act seems to be an attempt to crash the system, to overwhelm our ability to respond.”

“They’re doing a damn good job,” said Arturo.

“Is it Islamic?” asked Doyle. “Al Qaeda? Like nine eleven?”

“They’re certainly on the list, but it could be anyone. Iranians, North Koreans.”

“Hey, Mike, you hear that? Iranians again,” said Brooklyn.

“Why, what’s the Iranian link?” Emily asked.

“The mayor’s shooter is actually Armenian,” I said. “It could just be a coincidence, but he traveled home recently, and Armenia is next door to Iran.”