“Mike, thank goodness. I was just going to call you,” she said.
“What have you got, Brooklyn?”
“Something good for a change. We got video of the guys—two guys—bringing the EMP device into East Eighty-First Street.”
“Video?” I said. “But I thought the super said that the on-site computer where they store the feed was fried with the EMP.”
“It was, but we canvassed at the high-rise across the street, and it turns out their video is run by a national firm that backs up everything off-site. The security firm sent the film over about an hour ago. It’s beautiful. You can see the guys bringing in the box, Mike…the plates on the van they were driving—the whole shebang. Check your e-mail. I just sent a clip of it to you.”
I opened the video.
It was incredible.
I thought it was going to be the two men from the video of the train tunnel bombing, but it wasn’t. I watched in color as two young guys in a white van, college kids, maybe, pulled into the garage next to the building and unloaded the metal device onto a hand truck.
“The plates on the van look funny to you?” I said to Brooklyn as I hit Pause. “They’re New York State, but what are they? Commercial?”
“Yep. Already ran them. The van is from a Hertz location downtown—or at least its plates are,” Brooklyn said. “Doyle’s on the phone with the manager, who’s on his way in. The manager said you can’t rent without a credit card and a driver’s license, so we’re looking good on a potential lead there. I’ll hit you with it the second Doyle calls me back and I hear anything.”
“Great job, Brooklyn,” I said.
“One more thing, Mike, that just came up. May or may not be related,” she said. “Two young men were just found shot dead at a construction site on Roosevelt Island. I called the desk sergeant at the public safety department on the island, and he told me they don’t have ID on them, but the general description seems about the same as these two guys on the video. You want me to head out there or stay here coordinating?”
A lead was a lead, I knew from experience. Even if the suspects were no longer in a position to talk to us, they could still provide us with valuable information.
“No, you stay there,” I said. “I’ll grab Agent Parker and check it out.”
Chapter 41
Twenty-six minutes after I hung up the phone, I sat in my unmarked on Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, staring at the garish neon lights as they geysered and flashed silently on the beautiful people-filled billboards above the worn and empty concrete canyons of Times Square.
As the song says, New York City never sleeps, but between 4:15 and 4:30 a.m., it sometimes takes a quick catnap. Even so, it was weird seeing Times Square devoid of people. Not to mention quite off-putting under the horrible circumstances.
I saw that Emily’s hair was still wet from her shower when she finally appeared at a run from her glass-fronted hotel. I smiled to myself as she pulled the car door open. The sight of her was anything but lonely.
“Let me bring you up to speed on some economic forensics I did on the mayor’s shooter, Alex Mirzoyan,” Emily said, thumbing her smartphone as we headed east for Roosevelt Island.
“First, the good news. That robotic gun-aiming device used in the mayor’s assassination is highly specialized, and we were able to track down the manufacturer. The company is giving us some pushback after we asked for their customer list, but we have the US attorney drawing up a warrant, and I think we’ll be making progress there.”
“What about the ownership of the apartment the shooter was in?” I said.
Emily scrolled through screens on her phone.
“No dice there, unfortunately. Apparently, the owner is a Columbia University international law professor who’s in Brussels for a semester’s sabbatical. It doesn’t seem like he’s involved. He rented it out anonymously for a thousand dollars a week through one of those Internet house-swapping services to a fake e-mail address that Mirzoyan must have set up called woopwoop-two-two-six at AOL dot com.”
“Well, it eliminates me as a suspect, at least,” I said, shaking my head. “My fake e-mail address is woopwoop-two-two-six at Yahoo dot com.”
“Very funny,” Emily said, tapping her smartphone screen again. “But what’s more promising is some weird stuff we found with Mirzoyan’s finances. Last week he opened a PayPal account that had three thousand dollars wired into it, which he immediately withdrew from a bank in South Miami.”
I glanced over at her.
“Expense money?” I said. “So he could come up to New York?”
“Could be. Like we’re doing with the rifle company, we’re in the process of having the attorney’s office try to persuade PayPal to tell us who the mysterious someone who wired the money is.”
Chapter 42
We were in Queens twenty minutes later. I got turned around after I got off the first exit of the Midtown Tunnel and wandered around the industrial maze of Long Island City for a bit.
“How are we lost, Mike?” said Emily, yawning. “I thought you were Mr. Native New Yorker.”
“I am, Emily, but this isn’t New York, it’s Queens,” I said, making a U-turn. “I mean, we just passed Forty-First Avenue and Twenty-First Street—or was it Twenty-First Avenue and Forty-First Street? Cops from other boroughs usually have to leave a trail of doughnut crumbs behind them in order to find their way back out.”
“What is this crazy place, Mike? Roosevelt Island, I mean,” Emily said as we rolled south under several varieties of train and car underpasses and finally swung onto the small, two-lane Roosevelt Island Bridge.
“Oh, just another one of the bizarre real estate situations you find in this crazy city,” I said. “I think it used to be the site of a mental asylum in the early 1900s, and then they put up some kind of rent-subsidized housing complex. I guess its claim to fame is that it has its very own ski chalet–like cable car you can take to get into Manhattan.”
“A Euro ski tram in New York City?” said Emily, her midwestern face scrunching. “Is it a heavily Swiss immigrant neighborhood or something?”
“Like I said, this is Queens, Emily.” I nodded out at the water. “What happens in Queens stays in Queens.”
The crime scene was at the base of the 59th Street Bridge, toward the south end of the small, narrow island.
I could see that the contingent of cops already waiting for us was definitely much larger than what you’d see at a regular homicide scene. In addition to at least four blue-and-whites from the island’s public safety people, there was a wagon circle of various unmarked detective cars, FDNY ambulances, the medical examiner’s mobile command center, and even an NYPD Emergency Services Unit truck.
Walking through the flashing blue and red lights toward the tape, I spotted Lieutenant Bryce Miller standing with his ESU intelligence commando cowboys. Even before the crack of dawn, the tall and polished pretty boy, looking like a soap opera actor, was in his power suit, ready for his close-up.
“Hey, Bennett. Glad you could make it,” Bryce said sarcastically as we went past him.
He must be a pretty good intel guy after all, I thought, nodding at him. It seemed that he, too, had heard the rumors about my upcoming demise as case lead.
I was coming around the back of the buslike medical examiner’s mobile command center when I saw the ME himself, Tom Durham, helping one of his assistants slide the first of the two stretchers with the already body-bagged suspects on them up a ramp to the vehicle’s back door.
“Hold it there, Tom,” I said to the NBA-tall medical examiner, whom I’d worked with a few times about a decade earlier, when I was in Homicide.
“Mike Bennett,” Durham said, peeling off his rubber glove to shake my hand over the corpse. “Well, well, out of the mists of time. You’ve put on weight.”
“Ah, c’mon, Tom,” I said. “You know how these blue and red lights always put on ten pounds. This is my partner, Emily. Any chance you find any ID
on these two?”
“Nope. Not a thing. We already printed them, too, for that guy in the suit over there. No help there, either, apparently.”
“You mind if we take a quick peek at them?” I said.
“Nope,” Tom said, grabbing the body-bag zipper. “And neither will they, I imagine.”
I placed the video still of the darker kid next to the kid on the gurney. The kid’s head was grotesquely deformed from several gunshot wounds, but I thought the picture looked like him.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think it’s him,” she said.
Tom looked over her shoulder.
“Me, too,” the ME said with a nod.
We quickly ID’d the other suspect as the second guy who dropped off the EMP device. We needed names, though. Somehow. There was no way I was going to allow this to be yet another dead end.
I thanked Tom, but instead of heading back to the car, I pocketed my phone and walked with Emily away from the police lights to the rocky edge of the island’s dark shore.
“Wait a second,” I said after a minute of looking out over the water. “Look.”
Across the quick current of choppy water, not too far away at the Manhattan base of the bridge, were the lights of our crisis post for the Yorkville disaster.
“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”
“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.
“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”
Chapter 43
Several hectic hours later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.
On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.
The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.
“Mike, you ready?” he said.
The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.
In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.
But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.
There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.
If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.
EVACUATION PLAN
“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.
The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue–raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.
Instead I began.
“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”
An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.
“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”
Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.
“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men—two men—placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”
“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.
“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”
“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.
“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”
That got the murmuring going.
“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”
“So we’re still in the dark?” said Ms. Atkinson.
“Not entirely,” I said. “We scoured their Internet and phone records and discovered that both were paid large sums of money over the Internet through what seems to be the same PayPal account. With the help of federal authorities, we are in the process of tracking down the owner of the account.”
“Get to it, Bennett,” the commissioner said after a beat. “Keep us apprised.”
I nodded at him and at Lieutenant Bryce Miller sitting below the commissioner like the good little doggie he was.
Guess I’m still on the case after all, Brycey, I mentally texted him.
As Fabretti showed us the door, I saw one of the White House suits start BlackBerrying like crazy; I hoped they were putting some pressure on PayPal to cough up a name. The mayor nodded at us before she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Seeing the obvious great concern and worry in her suddenly old-seeming face, I felt bad for her. She was just as strained and concerned and tired as the rest of us. And that was saying a lot.
Chapter 44
That night at around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.
Unfortunately, we weren’t at the state park for a midnight weenie roast. There were at least a dozen New York state trooper vehicles already in the large parking lot, along with the same number of unmarked FBI Crown Victorias. Beyond a trooper command bus were two matte-black BearCat troop trucks, and at the end of the lot, in a muddy clearing, sat a bulky olive-drab Black Hawk helicopter with military markings.
We were finally on the hunt now. At around five that afternoon, PayPal had revealed the name of the person who had sent funds to both the mayor’s shooter and the dead EMP guys, and it was a doozy.
The name on the PayPal transfer was Jamil al Gharsi. Al Gharsi was a Yemeni-born Muslim cleric who was already on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, suspected of running a militant and potentially violent Islamic group on a grubby cattle farm five miles due east of Fahnestock State Park.
Al Gharsi’s two dozen–strong group had a website that billed them as a kind of Muslim Cub Scouts, though they were anything but. The FBI had been following them closely since their inception six months ago, and they had been observed training with weapons.
The group also had ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, which boggled my mind. Why hadn’t they been shut down already? No one knew, or at least no one would say. If al Gharsi’s group turned out to be resp
onsible for the bombings and for the assassination in New York, I was truly going to kick somebody’s ass. If Homeland Security had let yet another Islamic terrorist attack occur, I was going to be the first to propose its disbanding.
Emily and I passed a bunch of troopers wearing their Smokey the Bear hats and climbed onto the crowded bus, where the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had already started its briefing.
A flat screen behind the driver’s seat showed a series of photographs from reconnaissance that had already been done.
The pictures featured a cluster of buildings in the center of a large hilly field near the bottom of a ridge. There was an old farmhouse—a low concrete building that almost looked like a school—and a large dilapidated barn that was listing so far to the left it looked as if some magic spell had frozen it in the midst of collapse.
“This is al Gharsi,” the HRT leader, Terry Musa, said as he handed out a printout showing a mean-looking bald guy with a beard that would make any of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup green with envy.
“He is six foot three,” Musa said as he tightened a strap on his helmet. “He is also a mixed martial artist and one tough bastard, apparently. We don’t know what kind of weapons or explosives we’re going to encounter. I wouldn’t even recommend going in on the bird with this EMP shit, but there’s no other way. So bottom line, be very, very fucking careful, okay, folks? Paying these assholes back won’t be any fun if you’re dead.”
Chapter 45
At the end of the briefing, Emily and I, along with two trooper teams, were assigned to watch a back road up on the ridge behind the farm.
Fifteen minutes later, with our headlights off, we coasted to a stop on a tree-lined gravel road beside a barred cattle gate. Beyond the gate was another gravel road that curved down to the left, out of sight through some trees. Down below the trees were the fields and farm.