Early Warning (31 page)

The Central Park Reservoir

The killing had begun again that morning. Raymond had never felt so liberated, so alive. Being a martyr was a wonderful thing.

Up to now, he had never understood the principle, of life-in-death and death-in-life. He had never understood the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, which he’d read about in a book once and never quite got. The yin and yang thing he’d thought he understood, especially if it came with those sex diagrams attached, but it was one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel something viscerally.

But this was totally different. This was raw, exciting. This was what freedom felt like. Now he understood what those crazy suicide bombers felt like when they pulled the pin on their own grenades, secure in the knowledge that they were going to take bunch of the infidels with them, send them straight to hell, while they themselves would soon see paradise. He wasn’t quite sure if he believed all the blather about the seventy-two virgins, or raisins, or even if there was anything on the other side, but what the hell did it matter, because he was here, he was now and—

Blam! Got the bitch with one shot.

Blam! Another one.

Blam! Another one.

He could shoot them from the bushes. He liked the bushes. This was a nice park, much nicer than any he’d seen, even nicer than Golden Gate Park, where the Brothers had taken him once on an outing, although it didn’t have the same sweet smell of the eucalyptus trees, or the delicious salty taste of the fog in the late afternoons.

As usual, the chicken passersby started running in all directions, squawking. It was just as the Brother had said: no one would fight back against him. He was not only invincible, he was invulnerable. He was free to kill as he liked. He not only like God, he
was
God.

Devlin had already punched the name into the CSS database and gotten his readout: nothing. Raymond Crankeit or Kronkite or Krankheit or however you wanted to spell it, nothing. His worst nightmare: a punk with a rifle, a chip on his shoulder, and a limp noodle.

His secure PDA buzzed: MARTIN FERGUSON read the display.

“Eddie Bartlett,” as he’d been known on the last operation. Danny Impellatieri, his man main, his old buddy from Blackwater, now Xe, the country’s foremost PMC, or Private Military Company. There are dozens of them, and some very good ones, like Triple Canopy, but despite all the bad publicity Danny continued to work with and recruit from Xe—mostly ex-elite forces, like Danny, who knew what to do with a piece of equipment or a lethal weapon, and who also knew how to count money and keep their mouths shut.

Even though they’d never met, and operated together under strict rules, including a rotating series of aliases that, for laughs, were generated by random run-throughs of the movie database imdb.com, they trusted each other with their lives.

LOCATION?

STEWART. NEED CHOPPER

MILITARY? XE?

NG. CITY SEALED. OFFICIAL CHANNELS OUT.

ALL BUT ONE.

EXPLAIN

NYPD

NO CONTACTS

NO WORRIES.

WHAT KIND OF RIDE?

Danny had been one of the Army’s top helicopter pilots with the legendary 60th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), 2nd Battalion, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, known in the biz as the Night Stalkers. Danny, he knew, favored the MH-60/DAP (Direct Action Penetrator) Black Hawks, but the NYPD choppers were damn near as good.

STAND BY AND BE READY TO HOP

ROGER THAT.

He didn’t care what Danny needed the chopper for; he owed him. His next message was to Byrne:

HAVE POLICE CHOPPER STANDING BY ON MY ORDERS, WITH BARRETT. ANGEL

He had to make sure Kohanloo did not get off the island, and a chopper, which could sweep from one side of Manhattan to another in a couple of minutes, was the ideal way to ensure that. With everything closed, there was only one way off Melville’s Isle of the Manhattoes, and that was the way the original Dutchmen had come: by sea. Whatever other reason Danny might have for wanting a hawk, he was going to make damn sure Kohanloo stayed put, or died.

Kohanloo, if he was as smart as Devlin thought he was, would have had a boat ready, on a jetty, anything, most likely on the East River—the Hudson was too wide, he’d be a sitting duck, ripe for target practice—and would try to slip out under the cover of darkness.

Then, over the police scanner he was picking up with his PDA, he heard the reports of shots fired at the Reservoir. And he knew, he just knew, it was Raymond.

Byrne got the message. This was crazy, but crazy was all he had time for right about now. He didn’t like the tenor of his conversation with his brother—he never liked the tenor of their conversations—and he could tell the bastard was snooping around, planning something, plotting something, more likely. If it weren’t for their sainted mother, Irene, still alive and still living in the flat in Queens, although Frankie had been trying to coax her into a nursing home in the Bronx for years, a nice one, but she was convinced he meant the Hebrew Home for Aged and the very thought of that agitated the old Russian lady, who had retained her reflexive anti-Semitism all her life. Although, God knew, she had been through enough horror in her life, and the life of her family, for the world to cut a crazy old lady a little slack. Rufus even continued to keep watch over her, invisible and silent as ever, as he had for more than a decade. Rufus was a successful businessman in Jamaica, Queens, but he still cruised by the old neighborhood, looking for a random game of pickup hoops and always with the intent of checking in on Irene, just in case…

He ordered the police chopper on standby. He’d deal with his asshole brother later. As much later as he could.

Devlin moved slowly but deliberately, cautiously but not suspiciously. With the city still in lockdown, and the other shooters rounded up there would be cops rushing to the spot in minutes, converging on the Reservoir in full force. That’s what they were trained to do, and that’s the way he would have responded, too, were it not for one thing:

He knew, dead-solid-fucking-certain
knew
that Raymond whatever his name was, Mr. Disease, would not be there when they got there. Not because he was a genius. There was no chance a guy like him was a genius. He was in fact an idiot. But there were idiots and then there were idiots savants, and he’d long since pegged this last of the Mohicans as a savant.

Raymond would do nothing expected. He would do everything wrong. He was, in fact, like the enemy he served: technically inept, tactically amateurish, unable to grasp the basic concepts of warfare, except for the most important one: always keep your opponent guessing.

To get Raymond, he would have to think like Raymond. This was not like taking on Milverton. Milverton was good, great even, but Milverton and he had battled according to an unspoken set of precepts, like two chess grandmasters locked in mortal combat. This putz was the Paul Morphy of gunmen, probably mentally ill, but there was a brilliance in his illness, a genius in his madness.

Where would you go? What was motivating him?

Devlin’s mind raced as he neared the Reservoir. He thought back to Atwater’s report: Love and Revenge.

There it was. Raymond was not a patch on Skorzeny and his crazy apocalypse, of which the attack on New York now obviously was just another piece of the overall mosaic, but just as ontology recapitulated phylogeny, Raymond was an adumbrator of the greater genius of his puppetmaster.

What did he know about the man? Nothing, or close to it. He didn’t turn up in any databases, and Devlin hadn’t seen enough of his MO to be able to properly formulate a—

Hang on.

The burial. The bushes. He didn’t suddenly dig that grave for Ms. Stanley, he had dug it for some purpose. To bury his weapons, perhaps. But there was another reason. Jesus, it was so obvious:

He felt comfortable underground.

That was where he had slept. That was where he would go. Underground. And nowhere in America was there a more hospitable underground—if such an adjective could be used in this context—than New York City. The city was burrowed under by miles of tunnels: subway tunnels, steam tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; there was almost as much civilization under Manhattan as there was above it. Cops hated going down there, workers hated it, maintenance men hated it, and even the sandhogs, the brotherhood of blacks and Irish who were digging—and had dug—the gigantic water tunnels that flowed down from Westchester and gave life to the city—hated it.

That’s where Raymond would go. He had to beat him to it.

And where was the nearest underground?

Under the reservoir.
In the pump house.

Like its now-vanished cousins, the reservoir had once been the oasis of the city, not to the extent the old Collect Pond had been in the early days, which had fed the Five Points, both now buried under the concrete of the august courts of lower Manhattan. Nor was it a rival of the real reservoir that once had stood, in all its faux-Egyptian splendor, where the New York Public Library was today. Now that had been a reservoir. Still, the Central Park Reservoir could boast of something the others couldn’t, which was its survival.

He had to get to the pump house. And then he had to deal with Arash Kohanloo.

He glanced at his watch. Maryam should have checked in with him long ago. Well, she was a big girl and could take care of herself. No time to worry about something he couldn’t control. To think otherwise would not only be unprofessional, it would make him crazy.

Arash Kohanloo tried to stay calm. Everything was in readiness. The boat was going to leave from a private slip down the slope from River House. He was in River House, in the apartment of a fellow Iranian, who lived in the kind of splendor that he himself, for all his success, still aspired to. All he had to do was stay calm.

Calm.

The people who lived in River House were extremely rich, but while Manhattan’s newspapers may articulate the glories of philanthropy and the coerced public good of tax dollars, the bitter truth was that many of them had inherited their money, not earned it in any meaningful sense, and so could make a great show of working for a dollar a year, or donating their salaries to charity, or demanding that wage slaves pay up, secure in the knowledge that their capital was not only untouched, but always growing. After all, it was called an “income” tax, not a “capital” tax.

From the earliest days of River House, there had been a private egress down the shore, which not even the construction of the FDR Highway had disturbed. Once upon a time, the East River had been awash with vessels plying the waters around Manhattan, including steamboats, pleasure cruisers and even, in the early 19th century, a brisk trade in river piracy. The ill-fated
General Slocum
had passed this way, back in 1904, aflame and doomed, rushed toward her destiny on North Brother Island, just to the north, off the Bronx shoreline, but Arash Kohanloo neither knew nor cared about that now; all he could think of was getting off the island as quickly as possible and slipping out to sea.

He made his way down the dank stone stairs, slippery with age and shaking, in the damp and the chill, with his fear of this
Malak al-Maut
, this specter who had emerged out of the night to read his every thought, to know his every intimate wish and desire. Him he must flee; what would happen after that, after he got down to the rendezvous point in Red Hook, only Allah knew.

The boat was there, where it was supposed to be. On board were flares and firearms, maps and guidance systems, plus a communications device. He would have to run both silent and fast, but with the craft’s markings, he felt certain that no one would stop him. If anyone stopped him, he was on a mission of mercy, running medical supplies downtown. After all, he was on a Red Cross boat.

Central Park

The Reservoir—the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, to give it its full name—had not been actively connected to the city’s water supply system since the opening of a massive new water tunnel in 1991, but that didn’t mean the infrastructure wasn’t still there. As one of the main storehouses for the water that kept lower Manhattan alive, the reservoir collected the water brought down from Westchester and in turn sent it farther south, to where the people were. The area under the Park was one vast canal, much of it still in use, but some of it now abandoned. That’s where he would be.

There would be cops crawling all around the reservoir, so Devlin went in the same way the city’s rats headed wherever they wished to go, via the New York City sewer system.

People who were dazzled by Manhattan and who never ventured belowground, got only half the picture. True, the city’s skyscrapers, from the Woolworth Building to the late World Trade Center, had long been objects of wonder and envy. But underground, where the water tunnels, the subway tunnels, the steam tunnels, the electrical tunnels, the service tunnels and everything else all jostled for position, was a miracle of subterranean organization. Animals lived down there, and people too—the cops called them the “skells,” either in colonies or as lonely, wayward, and usually crazed souls, who had nothing to connect them to the world above.

He knew exactly how they felt.

Which was why he was chasing this boy now. From his observations of the scene with the woman buried behind the Met, he had already developed a profile in his mind. This boy had kept her, not killed her, which meant either he had other plans for her, or had felt a stab of something—love? compassion?—that prevented him from acting on his natural impulses, which had otherwise been given free rein.

The shooter was not a Muslim, of that he was certain. Muslim fighters may kill women, but it is an unmanly thing to do. There was no glory in killing women, even infidel women, and however poor their combat skills were otherwise—and aside from the occasional rush of crazy bravery, they were very poor indeed—their reverent contempt for women in general had no place for their murder, unless on moral grounds. So most likely he was an American, one of these poor lost skells who had not yet found the way to his place below and beneath the earth. But now, if Devlin had guessed right, he was about to embrace his destiny.

The Angel had left most of his tools behind him. He knew enough never to underestimate any adversary, but this job did not require the LMT, or the Glocks. Instead, he brought the Judge and a KA-BAR knife. That would be enough.

When Byrne got the message, he acted on it immediately. Luckily, there were no department channels to screw around with; in his world, he was the absolute boss, and what he said, went. If necessary, he could call Matt White directly and that would be that, but he needed to have a long conversation with the Chief later, when this thing was settled, and until then he had to play out the hand and win at all costs. His invisible ally, whoever he was, was on his side, and when he said he needed the best police chopper in the fleet on standby, on the roof of the old Pan Am building, fully loaded with a Barrett, Byrne didn’t hesitate.

There was just one detail that puzzled him: there was no need to bother about a pilot, because one was on his way…

Danny Impellatieri stood on the roof of the MetLife Building and looked around. He’d been to New York plenty of times, of course, but he’d never seen it like this, in several senses of the word. Not from the roof of this centrally located building, right around Grand Central Terminal, for one. And certainly not with a blown-out hollow just a few long blocks to the west, the old Times Square. The fires had been quenched, but the rubble was still smoldering; it was awe-inspiring to think of the damage a few determined gunners and a powerful plastic explosive could do. God forbid that these maniacs ever get their hands on something more lethal…

But all that had had to wait until he made the phone call. He got her on the first ring.

“Danny? Danny? Is that you?” Hope had said, even before he spoke, and he could tell by the tone of her voice that those were not simply questions, but profound expressions.

He tried to stay calm. “It’s me, Hope. All you all right? Are the kids all right?”

“Oh, Danny, it was—it was horrible. We were up on the roof and then you found the way down and then…”

“And we found that cop,” he could hear Rory saying in the background.

“And then we got down just before the whole building collapsed and there was this wounded cop, just about as dazed and fucked up—pardon my French—as we were and he helped us and they got us over to the hospital to make sure everything was okay and it was, and we’re all fine and when can you get—”

“Hope,” said Danny, “wherever you are right now, I want you to stay there. If it’s safe, don’t move. I’ll come for you.”

He could feel the disappointment over the line. “But why can’t you—”

“There’s something I have to do first. Something really important.”

She got it. Good Girl. She got it. “Is it dangerous?”

He decided to laugh. “If it wasn’t dangerous, why would they ask me to do it? Any schmuck could do it.”

“Schmuck,” she repeated. “Is this a word I’m going to have to know and use?”

“Three times in a sentence, and then it’s yours,” he replied. He liked a woman with a sense of humor. No, check that, he needed a woman with a sense of humor. After that, everything else was negotiable. And from what he could tell of Hope Gardner, there wasn’t going to be much else to negotiate. Just the date of the wedding. Which he’d do right after he got back from this job.

“See ya in a few. Kiss the kids for me.”

Flying a helicopter over the East River was not as easy as it looked, but that was the gig. Unknown whether there would be incoming. Unknown at what altitude. There would be buildings to thread and bridges to dodge, no matter what.

He knew what it was before he heard it. Not one of the old Bells, the kind they used to use, or even one of the new 412 EPs, but an Augusta A-119 Koala—not just any old off-the-shelf model, either, but a souped-up jalopy that could fly at night with no lights.

He smiled. Okay, maybe this was going to be fun after all.

Devlin passed around, over and through things he didn’t want to think about. He couldn’t wait to take a bath after all this was over. He needed to take out his man and then get aboveground as quickly as possible, for after he dispatched this boy, Mr. Kohanloo was next. And then make contact with Maryam. That he hadn’t heard from her for a while was not worrying in itself, because op-sec was everything, but…He had to admit it: for the first time in his life, he cared.

There, up ahead: the connecting tunnel. Plenty of visitors, runners mostly, used the bathrooms provided above, and that effluent had to be flushed somewhere. If he’d read the plans correctly, he could go up via that passageway, break through to a utility closet, and be right where he needed to be.

If he couldn’t kill his man, he could stink him to death.

There—he was out of the sewer and into the utility room, which was larger than he had expected. At some point it must have been expanded a bit, probably during one of the Park’s many renovations and upgrades. There was a wash-basin and a toilet even down here, and he permitted himself a small chuckle as the thought occurred to him that this wasn’t much different from his office back at The Building, its entry-way, anyway.

The chuckle was on his lips and the thought on his mind when suddenly he was struck from behind by a tremendous blow to the head.

Arash Kohanloo set the Red Cross boat into the waters, heading south. Occasionally, furtively, he scanned the skies above for the drone, half-convinced it would come back after him. That
Malak al-Maut
knew his every move. But the skies were clear.

The waterways, too. A few boats moved on them, but the lockdown had affected all aspects of traffic in and around Manhattan. There would be cops about, of course, but to his relief he saw that there were other emergency craft churning the waters. He would glide in among them and use them for cover. His papers were all in good order. The thought had crossed his mind that perhaps they should have disguised the boat with Red Crescent markings instead—the politically correct authorities would be overjoyed to see America’s Muslim brothers helping out, and should anyone raise a fuss, the
New York Times
would be there to take their side—but it was too late for that now. Besides, many Middle Easterners were Christians, not just in Lebanon, but across ancient Assyria and into Iran itself, so he could certainly fake it and hope the cops had other and better things to do.

For the first time since the appearance of the Angel of Death, he began to breathe a little easier…

Danny climbed into the chopper and took a look around. A-OK. The baby was fully loaded, and there was a nasty-looking Barrett sniper rifle all greased up and ready to go.

Two men approached him as he revved ’er up: both cops. They made a beeline for him and hopped right in.

“I’m Capt. Byrne, this is detective Aslan Saleh,” said Byrne, pronouncing the name pretty well for a white guy, and reaching for the rifle. Saleh was obviously an Arab, and Danny let the question cross his mind that maybe NYPD had been infected by the PC-virus, then caught himself. Far more likely that NYPD had done what the useless CIA should have done in the days after 9/11, if not long before: start recruiting from the streets of South Side Chicago and the tougher parts of Brooklyn, instead of among the poet-asters of Kenyon College and the University of California at Berkeley. Good Lord, when was the Langley Home for Lost Boys going to learn how to fight?

“Martin Ferguson,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”

The chopper rose…

Devlin wasn’t sure what had hit him; some kind of stanchion, probably, something the kid had found in the room. Whatever it was, it hurt like hell. He was good, but he wasn’t Superman. He was tough, but he still bled. And he was bleeding now.

The blow to the head was followed by a power punch to the nose, which sent sparks shooting into his head. Either of the blows, had he known what he was doing, could have been killers; nobody had taught this punk, but he had the instincts of a pro. And Devlin hadn’t even seen his face yet. There was no worry that his opponent should see his, because no one had ever escaped from an encounter with the Angel.

Except, of course, Emanuel Skorzeny. And that mistake would someday soon be rectified.

Devlin rolled, confidently expecting to miss the next blow, but instead got a kick that just narrowly missed the point of his chin. Good God, who was this guy?

He lashed out, but again his man wasn’t where he expected him to be. The only thing he’d gotten right about this guy was his hidey-hole, and now he was beginning to think that that was on purpose.

Crash! A rusty old tool kit collided with the wall behind him, sending a shower of old, disused tools to the floor. At last, thought Devlin, he’s made a mistake. And then he realized that was exactly what the kid wanted to do. He knew Devlin would be armed; now he had an array of weapons to choose from, including screwdrivers, hammers, lug wrenches, and a couple of small saws with nasty, rusted-out teeth.

No more mistakes: the kid would be on him in a flash. And a kid he was, too, from the looks at him he could get. He had to end this and in a hurry.

“This is fun!” came the voice and a handful of nails hit him in the face, just missing his eyes.

A hammer hit him square on the back, missing the vertebrae.

Stop fighting like a pro, he thought to himself. Forget everything you know for about five seconds, just long enough to meet him in his own battlespace. Because right now you are getting the crap kicked out of you. Think; what did this punk want?

A sharp stab of pain as the point of a Phillips screwdriver slashed his pants and tore the flesh on his calf. Great, thought Devlin: I have enough toxic shit on me to poison the city, and now it’s heading for my bloodstream.
Finish this
. What did this punk want?

He had it: love and revenge. Just like everybody else.

“You’re good, Raymond” he said, dodging another thrust with the screwdriver. “Real good. I could train you.”

“Shit,” sneered Raymond. “From the looks of you, you old dog, you can’t even keep shit out of your ears.

Just a little pause in the assault. That was all he needed. A little more—

“I bet back home in Wahoo everybody thought you were a dork, didn’t they?” The kid threw a box cutter at him, with a wicked aim that creased the top of his hair. “Especially the girls. Am I right?”

Raymond’s eyes widened.

“And the girls probably made fun of you when you showed them that little dick, didn’t they? You need help, boy.”

“I don’t need no help to kick the shit out of you, buddy,” said Raymond, and he was on him again. This time, though, Devlin was ready. His head was still ringing, and there was blood somewhere and the clock was ticking and he had to finish his man and get the hell out of here, because Danny would be ready by now and—

“How could you help me? What could you teach me?”

That was all the opening he needed. Just that pause.

“How about this?”

Devlin lashed out with a perfect kick to the man’s throat, which sent him tottering backward, but didn’t knock him down. The kid was tough, he had to give him that. “Ow!” he exclaimed, and Devlin realized he was dealing with somebody who was maybe eighteen years old. Then he saw it, and any doubts he might have harbored about having the wrong man were gone. As Raymond tumbled, the woman’s hair fell from his belt, where it had been hanging. In a flash, Devlin scooped it up and held it aloft.

“She’s mine now, Raymond. I’m going to be the one who fucks her tonight, not you. So you’re going to have to listen to me and take my offer if you want to tap that ass.”