“Look at that,” Dunning said, pointing his light at a half-burned sneaker in a corner.
“Wow, the shock wave must have knocked them out of their shoes,” I said.
“Worse, look at the sole of it. It’s almost completely ripped off. That’s how powerful this bomb was. It separated the sole off a sneaker! Think of the incredible violence that would take.”
I shook my head as I thought about it, breathing in the sweet gasoline smell of burning that the respirator couldn’t filter out.
What was this, and where was it going?
Chapter 12
Three hours later, our command post shifted four blocks northeast, to the NYPD’s new Thirty-Third Precinct building at 170th Street near Edgecombe Avenue.
When I wasn’t answering my constantly humming phone, I was busy upstairs in a huge spare muster room helping a couple dozen precinct uniforms set up a central staging area for what was obviously going to be a massive investigation.
Everywhere I looked throughout the cavernous space were stressed-out, soot-covered MTA engineers, FDNY arson investigators, and FBI, NYPD, and ATF bomb techs chattering into phones as they tried to get a grip on the scope of the disaster.
The biggest development by far was the discovery of shrapnel in two separate sections of the tunnel. Preliminary field reports seemed to indicate that the metal shards were from some sort of pressure-cooker bomb placed at the two main blast sites. We hadn’t released anything to the press as of yet, but it was looking like this was in fact a bombing, a massive and deliberate deadly attack.
At 6:05 a.m., the mayor suspended the city’s subway service systemwide. It was a huge, huge deal. Eight million people now had to find a new way to get to and from work and school. A mega meeting at the precinct command post had been called for nine thirty. The mayor and police commissioner were on their way, as were head honchos from federal law enforcement agencies and the MTA bosses who ran the subway.
I’d managed to get hold of my first coffee of the morning and had just declined a third call from some annoyingly persistent New York Times reporter when I looked up and saw the chief of detectives, Neil Fabretti, come through the command post door. I almost didn’t recognize him in his stately white-collar uniform. At his heels was a tall, clean-cut white guy in a nice suit whom I didn’t recognize.
“Detective, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you being all over this,” Fabretti said, giving my hand a quick pump. “I already spoke to Miriam. NYPD has the ball on this, and I want you to head up the investigation. The rest of Major Crimes is now at your disposal as well as any and all local precinct investigators, as you see fit. How does that sound? You up for it?”
“Of course,” I said, nodding.
“Do you know Lieutenant Bryce Miller? He’s the new counterterrorism head over at the NYPD Intelligence Division,” Fabretti said, introducing the sleek dark-haired thirtysomething cop at his elbow. “Bryce is going to be involved in this thing from the intelligence angle, so I wanted you guys to meet. You’re going to be working together hand in glove, okay?”
I’d heard about Miller, who was supposed to be something of a hotshot. He’d been an FBI agent and Department of Justice lawyer linked closely to the Department of Homeland Security before being hired splashily to show the new mayor’s seriousness in fighting the terrorists who seemed to love New York City for all the wrong reasons. But hand in glove? I thought as I shook Miller’s hand. I was in charge, but I also had a partner or something? How was that supposed to work? And who was to report to whom? I wondered.
Miller shook back briefly, as if he didn’t want my soot-stained jeans and Windbreaker to muss his dapper gray suit.
“Hercules teams have been deployed to Times Square and Wall Street,” Miller said in greeting.
I assumed Miller was talking about the Intelligence Division’s tactical units, used to flood an area to show any potential attackers the NYPD’s lightning-quick response capability.
“The helicopters are up, and there are boats in the water. Just got off the phone with the commissioner. We’re going full-court press in Manhattan, river to river.”
Weren’t such shows of force supposed to prevent attacks? I thought.
“Now, what is this thermobaric bomb stuff I keep hearing?” Miller continued. “That’s crazy speculation at this point, isn’t it? Something like that would take an incredible amount of technical know-how and meticulous planning. We would expect a blip of chatter activity from surveillance before such a large-scale attack, and my team and my contacts in Washington are reporting exactly nada. Couldn’t this just have been a utility screwup?”
“I don’t know about any of that, Bryce,” I said, eyeing him. “I was actually just with the bomb guys and saw the shrapnel from what looked like pressure-cooker bombs in two separate locations.”
My phone hummed again as I took a black piece of something out of the corner of my eye with a pinkie nail.
“No matter how little anyone wants to say or hear it, this was definitely no accident.”
Chapter 13
Later that morning, Mr. Joyce and Mr. Beckett and Tony were in a brand-new dark-green Ford F-150 pickup truck rolling south down Faile Street in a heavily industrial area of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx.
Mr. Joyce took a long, soothing sip of his cold McDonald’s OJ and began humming to himself as he looked out at the sunny day. As he watched, a low LaGuardia-bound FedEx cargo jet came roaring in overhead. Mr. Joyce, being an avid plane spotter, took one look at the shape of its purple tail and knew immediately that it was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F.
Searching for and finally spotting the exact location of the aircraft’s aft gas tanks, he vividly imagined shooting them with one of the refurbished FIM-92 Stinger missiles they had at the warehouse. He cocked his head to the left as he calculated the physics of a twenty-two-pound hit-to-kill blast-fragmentation warhead ripping into a six-hundred-thousand-pound plane’s fuel tanks at twice the speed of sound.
He took another sip of OJ. They continued to roll. All around was nothing but block after grim block of run-down brick warehouses and industrial buildings. There were no residential buildings or even gas stations in the desolate area, and many of its streets didn’t have so much as a sidewalk.
Which was precisely why they were operating out of this god-awful area. With no concerned citizenry for miles, it was a perfect place to base their operations.
After another block, Mr. Beckett, behind the wheel, hit a garage-door opener and they pulled under the rolling steel gate of an unremarkable but dilapidated two-story stucco structure wedged between an abandoned warehouse and a stinking recycling center.
When the steel shutter was closed behind them, they climbed out of the truck and came through the garage door into the lower floor of the small building. The dim, windowless space had black-painted walls and a long, fully stocked pinewood bar. There were neon signs, a jukebox in one corner, a pool table, and even several black-painted circular wooden booths along the far wall.
“Now, this is what I call a hideout!” Tony said, looking around in amazement. “This is awesome! And unexpected. I would never peg you smart guys for living in a dive bar.”
“I’m glad you like it, Tony,” said Mr. Joyce, going behind the bar and clicking a green neon Rolling Rock sign on and off. “It does have a certain ambience, doesn’t it? This building was once an illegal after-hours place. After we moved in, it was easier just to leave everything as is.”
“Where do you sleep? On the pool table?”
“Of course not,” Mr. Joyce said with a grin. “There’s an apartment upstairs. I’m going to hit the restroom for a pit stop. Why don’t you let Mr. Beckett fix you a drink? Sit and relax for a bit. I think we all need a well-deserved rest before we start phase two.”
Tony yawned and smiled back.
“What is phase two, anyway, Mr. Joyce? Same shit like with the trucks?” he said.
“All in good ti
me, Tony. Relax now. I’ll be right back,” Mr. Joyce said with a wink as he headed down the hallway.
Chapter 14
Mr. Beckett sat Tony in the booth at the far end of the long room and placed a rum and Coke in front of him. Then he went to the floor safe behind the bar and came back with a white plastic Food Emporium shopping bag containing the agreed-upon twenty thousand dollars in twenties and fifties.
“Hey, thanks,” said Tony, smiling from ear to ear as he glanced at the money and lifted the drink. “You know, you guys are such gentlemen. I mean, I thought I’d never get a job with my record, but then I look up and there you guys are outside that homeless shelter like some kind of godsend. My whole life I’ve partnered up with sucker after sucker, and I just want you to know how privileged I feel to finally work with a couple of real smart players. You must have been, like, professors or something, am I right?”
“Well, Mr. Joyce is the real brains,” said Mr. Beckett as he headed back to the bar. “He’s a genius in mathematics as well as materials engineering. He used to be an actual rocket scientist—well, missile scientist, if you want to get technical. And here’s some advice from personal experience.”
“What’s that?” Tony said.
“Don’t play chess against him, especially for money.”
“Not a chance,” Tony said with a laugh. “Never touch the stuff, Mr. Beckett. Why don’t you pour yourself a drink and come and sit?”
“Sorry, Tony. I don’t drink. I like to be in control at all times,” said Mr. Beckett.
“You don’t drink? What do you do for fun?” Tony said.
Before Mr. Beckett could answer, there was a faint, flicking, whistling sound from the dimness on the other side of the room near the bathroom. Then there were two sounds, all but simultaneous. The first was the click of Tony’s dropped drink landing miraculously upright on the table. The second was the loud crack of his head as it slammed back violently into the plywood back of the booth.
Mr. Joyce emerged from the hallway with the compound hunting bow after Tony stopped twitching. He stood before the booth for a moment with his dark goatee cradled in his free hand, peering at the fletching and the twenty-seven-inch carbon shaft of the broadhead arrow that protruded from Tony’s left eye socket.
“That was just terrible,” Mr. Joyce said.
“Come now, Mr. Joyce. I liked Tony, too, but we have to cover our tracks,” said Mr. Beckett as he retrieved the bag of money and returned it to the safe.
“Please: you don’t actually think I care that Tony is dead, do you?” Mr. Joyce said with a laugh. “I’m just upset about this new bow I bought. I was aiming for right between the eyes, but one of the pulleys must be overtight. I booted it down and a little to the right at the last second.”
“Now, now, Mr. Joyce,” said Mr. Beckett as he came over. “You have to admit that this light is horrendous, and besides, no one is perfect one hundred percent of the time. Your little toy is quite effective, if you ask me. What’s the expression? ‘Close enough for government work?’”
Mr. Joyce took a pair of side cutters off the bar, reached behind Tony’s ruined skull, and cut away the carbon shaft embedded in the plywood. Tony landed faceup on the filthy concrete after Mr. Joyce kicked him off the booth seat. He slid the arrow out of Tony’s eye by the fletching, then lifted the dead man’s left hand and checked the cheap digital watch on his wrist.
“Look at the time, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said. “Grab his ankles, would you? We really need to get going. You know traffic is going to be a nightmare.”
Chapter 15
At a little after eleven o’clock, I was back on the streets of Washington Heights. Well, back under the streets of Washington Heights, to be exact.
“See? It’s over there, Mike,” said Con Ed supervisor Al Kott, a few rungs below me on the Saint Nicholas Avenue manhole ladder. He pointed his flashlight at a ruined section of fire-blackened brick in the north wall.
“That wall there isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s been jackhammered, by the looks of it. And not by my guys. I already checked the records. There’s been no maintenance in this hole for the last eighteen months.”
“You see anything that looks like an air shaft in there, Al?” I said.
“Maybe,” he said, pointing the beam of his flashlight into the gap. “I don’t know. It’s all burned and wrecked to shit, but I think I see some ripped metal about five or six feet in.”
I nodded as I thought about that. More details had been revealed at the precinct meeting by the bomb experts. Evidence was pointing to two bombs placed on the tracks just north of the 168th and 181st Street stations. Massive cratering above the blasts at two air shafts corroborated the thermobaric bomb theory. Some kind of fuel had been deliberately pumped into the tunnel.
That had to be it, I thought as I stared at the ripped-open wall and massively damaged Con Edison manhole. This spot was one of the locations where the flammable bomb fuel, or whatever the hell it was, had been pumped down.
We had our where, I thought as I climbed for the circle of daylight above me. Now we just needed to find our who.
Chapter 16
The building was a new thirty-two-story glass high-rise on Haven Avenue overlooking the Hudson River on the west side of Washington Heights.
The man was in apartment 32J. He was a junkie, thin and middle-aged, vampire pale, with long, gray ponytailed hair and a road-worn, angular face. In a wifebeater and once-black but now faded-to-gray pair of jeans, he sat on the gleaming oak floor of the small, high-end condo’s living room, his bony knees up and his back flat against a wall.
Despite this spartan sitting position, he appeared comfortable. Like he’d long ago become used to sitting on hard, bare floors.
There was no furniture in the room. Not a stick of furniture in the whole apartment, in fact. The only other object in the apartment was a white iPad, facedown on the floor between the gaunt man’s beat-up hiking boots. He sat there, staring at it steadily. As if, any second now, it were about to perform some sort of amazing trick that he didn’t want to miss.
Every once in a while, he’d flick a glance around the empty room. The bare white walls. The rectangle of cloudless, cornflower-blue sky showing through the big, curtainless window.
He wondered who owned this place. Would they actually have bought an apartment just for this? Or maybe it was rented.
He yawned, rolled his shoulders, stretched. As if that mattered. He didn’t need to know about all that. He only had to make sure his own part worked so he could get the rest of the money.
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 re
ally 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.
Chapter 17
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.