Manhattan Lockdown

MANHATTAN LOCKDOWN

Death's Witness
Extraordinary Rendition
The Borzoi Killings

PAUL BATISTA

Copyright © 2016 Paul Batista

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-60809-197-3

Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Longboat Key, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Hazel, Nelson and Alma

MANHATTAN LOCKDOWN

C
LEOPATRA'S
N
EEDLE
R
OSE
above the acres of summer trees. In the glittering June sunshine two of the four sides of the thirty-six hundred-year-old Egyptian obelisk glowed in the light. It was the first time during the three-hour party that Roland Fortune had the chance to look out over the park's thousands of trees, the green expanses of the Great Lawn where hundreds of men and women were sunbathing, and the heights of the grand apartment buildings that lined Central Park West.

Sarah Hewitt-Gordan touched his arm. “They were geniuses, weren't they?”

“Who?” He looked at her. Even in the intense light her face was beautiful.

“Olmsted and Vaux.”

“The rock group?”

She laughed. “If the networks only knew what a comedian you are, you'd have your own show.”

Smiling, he kissed her forehead and turned to the crowd on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of the guests at his forty-seventh birthday party were under the white party tent. The murmur of voices, the tinkling noise of glasses, and the music of the band.

This was Roland Fortune's third year as the mayor of New York City. Raised in the Bronx, he made certain that ten of the eighty
guests invited to this early Sunday afternoon party were from the neighborhood on the Grand Concourse. But he also made certain that the other guests were the people he'd cultivated and who'd cultivated him in the fifteen years in which he rose as a member of the city council, then as a congressman from the South Bronx, and now as mayor; actors, writers, television news anchors, baseball and football players, other politicians.

And Sarah Hewitt-Gordan. She'd spent almost every night with him at Gracie Mansion since they first met a year earlier at a party at the Asia Society on Park Avenue. The daughter of a retired major in the British Army, she had graduated from both Eton and Cambridge. She was a partner at Goldman Sachs.

His closest aides, Hector Suarez, who had been with him since his city council days, and Irv Rothstein, his press secretary and a former
New York Times
reporter who joined him when he ran for mayor, had warned him against public involvement with a woman who had the style and accent of an English aristocrat, not to mention the tony name Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, “with a fucking ‘a' instead of an ‘o' in her last name,” Irv said. “And the hyphen is going to kill you in Bay Ridge.”

“Not a chance,” Roland Fortune answered. “Look at her. I'm the envy of every guy in New York, especially the Italian guys in Bay Ridge. And besides, I love her.”

Since it was early Sunday afternoon, guests were steadily coming and going. New people had arrived during the few minutes he and Sarah spent overlooking the undulating beauty of the park. Bill Cunningham, the eighty-year-old society photographer for the
New York Times
whose photographs of famous people at parties appeared in the Sunday society page, was slipping like an elf among the guests. He had already taken pictures of Robert De Niro, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Wolfe, and others. As Roland Fortune
entered the shade under the festive tent, he embraced Matt Damon, and Cunningham unobtrusively pointed his old-fashioned Leica at them.

Roland Fortune was exuberant.

***

He felt the concussion just as he heard the first explosion. As broken stone and concrete instantly ripped the party tent to shreds, he fell to his knees, pushed down by a stunning wave of sound and force just as powerful as an avalanche. Suddenly there were bodies on the ground near him, covered in the same white dust and stained by vivid red blood. Even though his ears rang painfully, he heard screams and moaning, shouting and the words, “My God, my God.” Now there was no sun, just an opaque drifting mass of dust laden with shards of glass. He found it painful to breathe. Dirt filled his mouth. He rubbed his eyes to dislodge the debris. It felt as though the grit was cutting the corneas of his eyes.

He stood up. He tried to shout Sarah's name, but he gagged. As he moved with his hands in front of him like a man in an unfamiliar black closet, he was propelled to his left by the second thunderous explosion. Something struck his left shoulder. At first it felt like a punch. He put his right hand on his shoulder, groping. He touched a tear in the fabric of his jacket and then the warm, sticky blood. Feeling a freezing flush of fear throughout his body, he tried to lift his arm. The pain was excruciating. He screamed. His own voice sounded as though he were underwater. He barely heard it.

He didn't want to fall again. He feared the people on the ground were all dead. He had a sense that if he went to the ground, he'd never rise again. He staggered like a damaged boxer but stayed on his feet.

In the aftermath of the second explosion there were no sounds: no screams, no sirens, no voices, not even the sounds of birds.

That eerie silence lasted only seconds. A hand grabbed his right arm. It was as if a lifeguard pulled him from a drowning downward spiral. He came face to face with Dick Maguire, the leader of his security detail. “Stay on your feet, Mayor. Stay on your feet. You can move. Follow me.”

“Where's Sarah?”

“Keep moving, keep moving. Don't stop, don't stop.”

“Where's Sarah?”

“Let's move, move.”

They reached a security door at the edge of the roof garden. It had been blown open. In the stairwell the air was slightly clearer. Roland, who had been smothered by the swirling dust outside, began gulping for air. When he tried to sit on the steps, Maguire held him up against a wall. “Catch your breath, Mayor. We can't sit down. We've got to get out of here.”

“What happened?”

“Forget it. Got to get out.”

Roland Fortune was an athlete. He ran almost every weekend of the year in Sunday morning races in Central Park, along with thousands of other runners, and that strength, and his fear, supported him as he moved down the stairwell.

Two other members of Roland Fortune's security detail were waiting for him and Maguire when they burst through the emergency door on the museum's main floor. Screams, frantic movements, roiling clouds of dust. Centuries-old statues were toppled and broken, stained-glass windows shattered. Maguire and the other security men, bracing Roland Fortune up and hustling him along, were the only people with any sense of direction. They were headed to the rear wall—once all glass—that faced the lush greenery of the park's
gorgeous nineteenth-century interior. Everyone else was moving erratically. They were dazed. There were bodies all over the floor. Fires were burning on marbled walls and floors.

And then there was a third explosion.

Every pane of glass on the rear walls shattered into countless shards. More and more dizzy and unfocused, Roland felt himself lifted through a gaping space in the wall. Outside, on the sloping lawn, the world seemed almost peaceful while he was eased gently onto the grass. Just as he passed out, he smelled the rich, moist odor of the grass and earth. And of blood, his own.

G
INA
C
ARBONE, THE
commissioner of the New York City Police Department, began eating the rich antipasto her mother, that magician of food, had created for the family's annual start-of-summer get-together. Gina loved the texture of the cheese wrapped in carpaccio, the succulent slices of tomato, and the tang of the marinated artichokes.

The flagstone patio of the family house on Staten Island overlooked Fort Wadsworth, the Coast Guard base that resembled a small New England college campus and the glistening expanse of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. As a very young but observant girl, she had spent hours watching the bridge being built. It seemed to evolve out of air, gradually materializing like a spider's web. Her father was an ironworker who spent six years of his life on the construction crews fashioning the stunning span that arcs like a filament for two miles between Staten Island and Brooklyn. They lived so close to the Staten Island side of the bridge that her father was able to walk to and from work each day, carrying his gunmetal-gray lunchbox. She still thought of him whenever she saw the graceful arc of the bridge.

“Auntie,” her thirteen-year-old niece Elena said, “Mom says you had a date last night.”

Gina was uncomfortable with the way Elena, her favorite niece, was changing. She had a small silver stud embedded in her left
nostril. Gina had been tempted to tell her that it looked like snot, but she restrained herself. And now she noticed a tattoo in the shape of an eyelash on her niece's left wrist.

And, of course, Elena had taken to teasing about her unmarried aunt's love life.

“I did,” Gina said.

“But you got home before midnight and he didn't stay. Like what's that about?”

Gina Carbone spent at least one weekend each month at this three-story house where she'd been raised. The third floor had been converted into a separate apartment for her, complete with a state-of-the-art communications center. Gina felt deeply comfortable in this familiar home, redolent with the smell of slow-cooked food and her older brother's cigars. She went to the early Sunday morning Mass at the Church of the Assumption, the granite church where her father had taken her every Sunday morning until she graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army.

“It was a first date, sweetie.”

“You didn't even take him upstairs for a drink. I don't get that.”

“Elena, you've been looking at too much TV. What channels are you watching?”

“How do you ever expect to get a man?”

Playfully, she raised her voice. “Linda,” Gina called out to her sister, “you need to take your daughter to church.”

Linda Kotowski—her estranged husband was a Polish plumber who had moved to Jersey City—laughed as she carried more food to the table. “What, and fuck up the nuns?”

Linda, a schoolteacher, was two years younger than Gina. She was a slender, physically softer version of her sister. There was no rivalry between them; they had always loved each other.

It was exactly 1:30 when Rocco Barbiglia, the lieutenant who
traveled with her on the weekends, stepped through the door to the patio and said, in a subdued voice, “Commissioner? Can I see you for a second?”

Gina gave a playful slap to the side of Elena's head, as if saying
Wake up, kid
, and rose from the table. She walked past Rocco, who followed her to the edge of the patio. A refreshing sea breeze raised his thin hair.

“What's up, Rocco?” she asked. “Better be important. I was just about to tell my niece how to stay a virgin. I know a lot about that.”

“There's been a big explosion at the Met.”

“When?”

“Two minutes ago.”

“Bombing?”

“For sure.”