Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (7 page)

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.

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.

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.

The mayor smiled at the chanting and was waving his hands for calm when there was a glow of something pink behind his head.

It was rose-colored, a strange, halolike mist that I first thought was some kind of weird television lighting, because as it appeared, the side of the mayor’s head suddenly looked like it was covered in shadow.

But then the tall mayor staggered oddly forward and to his left, and my mind finally caught up to my unbelieving eyes.

I watched in horror as the mayor dropped straight down behind the podium like a bridge with its pilings blown out.

THE NEXT FEW
moments were beyond strange. Frozen and dumbstruck, I stood there unable to do anything but stare down at the fallen mayor and the blood pumping out of him. My mind must have still been a little shell-shocked, because as he bled out, all I could do was keep looking him over, again and again, harping on the most useless details.

Like how he’d come out of one of his shoes, a new cordovan loafer. How though he was married, I saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. How there were little pink anchors on his navy-blue socks.

Though there were more than a hundred people standing around—cops, reporters, photographers, neighborhood residents—none of them seemed to be moving, either. It was suddenly impossibly quiet, as if someone had just called for a moment of silence. I distinctly remember hearing birds chirping in the park across from the precinct, and off in the distance on Saint Nicholas Avenue there was the brief grumble of a passing bus.

Then out of the dead silence, someone in a shrieking voice that was so high and loud it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman suddenly yelled.

“Sniper!”

The spell broke instantly. Everyone in the vicinity of the fallen mayor, including me, broke away like a stampeding herd from his body.

I didn’t know where Lieutenant Miller had gotten to, but Chief Fabretti and I dove immediately between a couple of cruisers parked out in front of the precinct. I could hear several cops crying out, “Where? Where? Where?” simultaneously over the chief’s radio as we crawled on our hands and knees in the gutter.

“Unbelievable! This isn’t happening! You hear the shot, Mike? I didn’t hear jack shit!” Fabretti said beside me, where he gripped a short-barreled .38 he had pulled out of somewhere. “Damn it! We have a sniper team covering the rooftops. What just happened?!”

I shook my head and was about to take a peek out at the rooftops myself when there was a loud, thunking crack of wood as another bullet ripped into the podium.

“Down!” I yelled. “We’re still under fire!”

I noticed that there wasn’t even a hint of a gun crack for the second shot, either. Which meant one of two things—either the shooter was using a suppressor, or he was really far away. I was going with the latter. The mayor’s massive wound indicated a large-caliber round probably shot from a rifle with a long range. I shook my head. Like Kennedy, I thought in horror. The mayor had just been
assassinated!

“That second shot just hit the front of the podium, Chief,” I said after a moment. “Tell your men that it seems to be coming from dead west, up a Hundred and Seventieth.”

Fabretti was calling it in when I heard a woman’s friendly voice.

“Excuse me, Officer. Over here, please. Excuse me.”

I looked up and squinted into a painfully bright light above the sidewalk. Next to it materialized a tall, attractive woman. It was the statuesque network reporter I’d seen previously, her painted eyes huge and dark and almond-shaped, her thick pancake makeup a garish, yellowy tan. Her camera guy was a short, stocky, friendly-looking bearded Hispanic guy who gave me a wink with his free eye.

We were still being shot at, and they wanted a sideline report?

I guess I wasn’t the only one in full-out shock.

“Get down!” I yelled as I grabbed them and yanked them behind the car.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
I was in my Impala, hammering it toward the west side of Washington Heights behind a trio of commando-filled NYPD Emergency Service Unit trucks. The trucks were military surplus BearCat armored personnel carriers; I used to think using them was overkill—at least I did up until I saw the mayor get blown away. The countersniper team in position near the precinct had triangulated the shot with their gunshot echo system, and we were headed now toward a high-rise building on Haven Avenue, where it seemed like the shots had come from.

I almost didn’t believe it when one of the SWAT cops pointed out the suspected building to me. It was so far away. On the other side of Manhattan. Easily three-quarters of a mile. The chill that had gone down my spine had stayed there. Because only a world-class sniper could have made a shot like that, I knew.

Which raised the question: Who, or what, were we dealing with?

“Dude, I blame the media. It’s all their fault, damn it!” cried out an uncharacteristically pissed-off Arturo in the front seat beside me as we roared west toward the building. The young Puerto Rican cop, whom I met on the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, was usually pretty even-tempered.

Along with half the department, my crew had responded immediately to the shooting. I’d grabbed them and taken them with me the moment the decision had been made to raid the suspected building.