Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (23 page)

The camera stopped as the red cable suddenly led into a large rectangle of strange white blocks. It looked like explosives—a charge the size of a kitchen cabinet stuck to the rock wall. The camera shifted to the center of the shaft, where the length of cables running down the seemingly endless corridor revealed charge after charge after charge stuck to the wall.

“This is Semtex,” the voice said as a hand clad in a black work glove patted the explosives. “The red cable is detcord, and the steel cable beside it is for spreading the force of the blast nice and even, to maximize shear. It’s not the most elaborate bomb I have ever made, but it is certainly the biggest. After all, there is an elegance in simplicity sometimes.

“As I have possibly convinced you with the subway bombing and the razing of 26 Federal Plaza, I am actually pretty good at blowing shit up, no? I like to think that no one has ever been as good at it as I am, but that is for history to decide, I guess.”

As the cameraman turned all the way back around, in the distance, up the shaft, we could see a bright opening in the tunnel, thin clouds in a pale-blue sky.

The camera guy started walking up toward the opening, and then as he reached it, everybody in the room gasped.

Through the cave mouth or mine shaft or whatever it was, the camera showed a bunch of dark, jagged volcanic peaks and a sheer drop-off down an immense cliff into a crashing ocean. The cave mouth was insanely high up—a hundred stories, maybe two hundred. Far below, down the dizzyingly immense slope of the mountain, there were dozens of little moving dots—seabirds flying above the spraying surf.

“Here’s what you need to know now,” said the voice. “If my calculations are right, and I believe they are, when I carefully detonate my network of explosives, I will peel off this entire peak and send a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan Island into the Atlantic Ocean at more than a hundred miles an hour.

“According to my computer models, this slide will create a tsunami a little more than twice as powerful as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and send it directly into the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Six hours from the time I detonate, Manhattan Island will be inundated with an unstoppable seventy-five-foot wave.”

“No,” said Arturo, beside me, in a whisper to the screen. “Just no.”

“New York City will be destroyed. As will Miami and Baltimore and Boston.”

There was a pause in the narration.

“I have one simple demand. Within twenty-four hours, I want three billion US dollars deposited into a list of numbered accounts that I have already sent to the mayor’s office by e-mail. That this amount is roughly the equivalent of the mayor’s personal fortune is not accidental. She can divert her money easily in the time allotted. The question is, will she? Your city’s fate lies solely in her hands.

“There will be no negotiation. The money will either appear in the accounts in the time allotted, and tomorrow will be just another day. Or it will not appear, and I will wipe New York City, along with the rest of the eastern United States, off the map.”

There was a second pause.

“Please know that, of course, any attempt to find and approach the place where the bombs are now located will result in immediate detonation. I will not contact you again. That is all.”

HALF AN HOUR
later, we were in the insanely crowded OEM’s seventh-floor war room. The packed, open room had monitors everywhere. Monitors on desks, monitors built into a long cherrywood conference table in the center of the room, and a movie screen–like monitor that took up an entire wall.

The wall screen was actually composed of a grid of smaller screens that showed different parts of the city—Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, the street out in front of the UN. As I watched, the screen changed into a still of the cave or mine housing the explosives.

At the head of the U-shaped conference table packed with scientists and government officials, the acting mayor looked pale. It was impossible to know what she was feeling, but it couldn’t have been good. It was incredible that all this—the bombings and assassination—was about cleaning her out financially.

Or at least that was what was being said now. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case.

“Please, someone, anyone, tell me what the hell is going on here,” the mayor said.

The scientists at the table stared at each other until a tan, lean, white-haired man who reminded me a lot of the famous college basketball coach Bobby Knight stood up, along with a pretty woman with chin-length chestnut hair.

“Everyone, my name is Larry Duke, and this is Dr. Suzan Bower, and we’re the coheads of the American Geophysical Union,” he said.

“Tell me this is a joke, Mr. Duke,” said the mayor. “It’s a bluff, right? Dr. Evil, James Bond bullshit? It’s too implausible. There are no islands near New York City in the Atlantic. How is this even a threat?”

“Actually, ma’am,” Larry said, “off the west coast of Africa, there are dozens and dozens of volcanic islands.”

“Africa! That’s what? Three or four thousand miles away!” she screamed.

Dr. Bower smiled calmly as she raised her palm.

“Allow me to explain,” she said politely. “The potential destructive force of a truly massive landslide into a seabed is almost impossible to comprehend. In Lituya Bay in Alaska in the fifties, after an earthquake, a one-mile-by-half-mile chunk of rock slid off a coastal mountain into the water, causing a wave the size of a one-hundred-and-seventy-story building.

“Think about that. If a similar incident happened in the Atlantic basin, even from as far away as Africa, a tidal wave the size of the Indian Ocean tsunami would hit the Eastern Seaboard six hours later, just as the man on the tape said.”

“And nothing could stop it?” said the OEM head.

Larry shook his head sadly.

“Nothing,” he said. “For years, Suzan and I have been advising the government of exactly the problem here—that some of the West African islands are potential tsunami dangers from eruption-caused landslides.”

“But you said the landslide in Alaska was caused by an earthquake, an incredible geologic event,” said the mayor. “You can’t cause an earthquake or erupt a volcano with explosives, can you?”

“No, you can’t. But you can cause a landslide with explosives, especially if an area is already unstable, like many of the areas on some of these islands,” said Dr. Bower.

“Bullshit,” somebody said.

“I wish it was,” Larry said. “In 1903, there was a disaster called the Frank Slide in Canada. A segment of mountain about the same size as the one in the Lituya Bay incident fell and flattened a mining town. How did it happen? By miners blasting in one of the mines.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Bower. “Today, demolition experts are so good with explosives, they can blow things up so buildings fall wherever they want. For example, demo guys took down a half-mile-long section of nine bridges in Ohio with only one hundred and thirty-eight pounds of plastic explosives. You get a geologist together with a demo expert and place the pow in the right place, and you just might be able to do it. You simply need to give it a push, and millions and millions of pounds of rock and gravity do the rest.”

“Shit,” I said to Emily. “Just like Twenty-Six Fed. A little bit of explosives placed perfectly took that building down pretty as you please. They know how to do it.”

“So you think it’s possible for these terrorists to actually use explosives to cause a landslide to create a tsunami?” said the mayor.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Larry said with a sad smile. “But the answer is yes.”

TWO HOURS LATER,
we were sprawled out in a corner of the OEM building’s third-floor cafeteria. We sat at a new folding table—which still had a sticker with the Walmart bar code on it—washing down vending-machine candy with coffee. I had my feet on a chair by the window and was sharing glum looks with Doyle and Arturo and Emily.

“Gosh, it’s tiring to beat your head against the wall,” said Arturo.

He was right. We’d just gotten off the phone with Robertson and Brooklyn. They’d called to let us know that Dmitri Yevdokimov and Anatoly Gavrilov had lawyered up.

Not just with any lawyers, either. Two seven-hundred-dollar-an-hour mouthpieces from a white-shoe Wall Street firm had actually shown up at the precinct house raising hell until the precinct captain relented. The fact was we didn’t have enough on them to charge them with anything. Not yet, anyway. Like it or not, they’d been released, and our best leads just walked out the door.

To add insult to injury, we’d put surveillance on them, but they seemed to have shaken it. We’d also just received a forensics report from the FBI on the Russians’ credit cards and cell phones and Internet searches. There was nothing. They had no electronic trail of any kind. The two computer experts were Luddites, apparently.

I groaned as I looked out the window at the Hudson and Jersey on the other side. Then I looked south at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor and imagined a wave coming over her.

In the silence, Arturo got up and made himself another coffee.

“Look on the bright side, guys. They’ve got free K-Cups up here. Yummy. I love K-Cups,” he said sarcastically.

“Yeah. Nothing like a smooth, soothing K-Cup to while away the afternoon before the destruction of your city,” said Doyle, flicking a coffee stirrer at him.

I stared out the window down to the courtyard, where soldiers were setting up cots.

Were the cots for the soldiers? Were they expecting refugees? What the hell were cots going to do when the water came? Become flotation devices?

I only knew that we had to keep our heads about us in this whirling dervish of a mess. I sat up.

“Okay, let’s do this again. Theories,” I said to Emily.

“I almost can’t believe it’s a ransom,” she said as she swirled her coffee. “I was really leaning toward a Unabomber-style suspect. One man on a mad mission, like you said. This now? Three billion? This is a real curveball.”

“It’s the Russkies. Has to be,” said Doyle as he rolled out of his chair onto the floor and started doing push-ups. “Think about it. The fed forensic report shows they have no credit cards or computer records, yet they’re computer experts? They have stuff. They just know how to hide it. They’re in on this.”

Then the real chaos began.

Chief Fabretti came into the cafeteria talking on his phone.

“You’re kidding. Jeez. Wow, just like that. Okay, thanks.”

“What’s up, Chief?” said Doyle as he hopped to his feet.

“Turn on the TV,” Fabretti said, pointing to the set in the cafeteria’s corner. “This is unbelievable.”

Doyle ran over and clicked on the set. I stood up as I saw something there I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.

There was a blue screen with two words in yellow.

STAND BY.

Doyle changed the channel. It was on every one. A long and bright beep sounded out, followed by a squawk of radio feedback. Then it did it again.

“This is not a test,” said a calm, feminine voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System. Please stand by. Please stand by.”

“What is this?”

“The mayor just came out of another meeting with the scientists. She’s doing it. She’s pulling the trigger.”

I listened to the beep repeat.

“This is not a test,” said the voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System.”

“Pulling what trigger?” said Lopez. “You mean she’s going to give them the money?”

“No. She’s going to evacuate, right?” I said as I stared at the stand by on the screen.

Fabretti nodded.

“That’s right. God help us all,” said Fabretti. “The mayor is going to call for the complete evacuation of New York City.”

CHIEF FABRETTI RECEIVED
a text from the deputy mayor, and we followed him up the four flights of too-warm stairs and then through a corridor crowded with cops and suits into the main war room again.

In a fishbowl office in the corner, beyond a row of printers, stood the mayor, along with the glaring lights of the small camera crew that was filming her live for the emergency broadcast.

I watched as the blue screen on the wall was replaced by an image of the mayor.

“Fellow New Yorkers, hello. I am sorry to tell you this, but we have received word that an undersea earthquake in the Atlantic may be imminent within the next six to eight hours. It is believed by experts that this quake may cause an Atlantic Ocean tsunami large enough to be a serious threat to people throughout the city. We are not one hundred percent sure that this is the case, but for the sake of caution and the preservation of life, I have signed an order to evacuate the entire city.”

“Why is she lying and talking about an earthquake?” said Arturo. “Like people have been sleeping through the bombings and assassination?”

“Who knows?” Doyle said. “Maybe she—”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you!” said Fabretti, standing behind them.

“This evacuation is a legal order not a recommendation. All the people of the city—in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and the Bronx—must leave their homes as soon as possible and head inland. If you have a car parked in Manhattan, we are asking you to leave it where it is, as roads will soon become impassable with traffic. Please use public transport.

“The MTA and Port Authority have already been ordered to mobilize the mass transit system. All buses, trains, subways, and ferries will be open to the public at no charge in order to move people inland. Shelters in New Jersey and northern Westchester have already been set up, and we are working on opening more shelters farther north and inland as the number of people increases.

“We urge any and all of you to stay with family, but remember to stay away from all coastal areas within thirty miles of the shore. Please do not panic. We need to have as orderly an evacuation as possible. You have time to pack, and everyone will be given transportation and shelter. Stay tuned to local media. If you have not done so already, prepare a go bag.”