His reddish goatee was gone now, and he wore his hoodie up over a Knicks ball cap and a reflective orange traffic vest over his black denim construction coat. Beside him on the bench was some construction equipment as well as a fluorescent yellow construction tripod along with a surveyor’s graduated staff.
He turned as a car pulled up. It was a big, bulky old ’76 Cadillac Calais, a two-door hardtop that was nineteen feet long with a 7.7-liter V-8 and a curb weight of more than five thousand pounds.
Mr. Joyce did not have to look at who was behind the wheel to recognize it immediately as one of Mr. Beckett’s many cars. Mr. Beckett, who was a bit of a gearhead, was obsessed with American cars, with a particular and peculiar soft spot for Cadillacs from the 1970s.
“You’re late,” said Mr. Joyce as Mr. Beckett emerged from his metallic-brown barge, putting on his own traffic vest.
“How is that possible?” Mr. Beckett said, smiling, as he extended his hands playfully. “The boss is never late.”
“Was there trouble?” Mr. Joyce said, eyeing him.
“Please,” Mr. Beckett said, knocking on the trunk. “You’re the brains, I’m the muscle. You do your part, and I’ll do mine, okay? Is it time to do our little survey?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Joyce handed him the staff and a walkie-talkie as they walked north toward the base of the 59th Street Bridge.
“So they did use the abandoned helipad, as you anticipated,” Mr. Beckett said as he gazed across the water and saw the activity on the Manhattan shore of the channel.
Mr. Joyce shrugged.
“With the streets impassable, a dock with helicopter access is the most logical place.”
Mr. Joyce stayed back near the street with the tripod while Mr. Beckett walked off a bit with the staff and stood on a patch of muddy grass near the water.
“This is one big bitch of a bridge, eh?” Mr. Beckett said over the Motorola. “How old is it? Give me the tour. I know you want to.”
“It was built in 1909,” Mr. Joyce said. “Between 1930 and 1955, in that bridge pier behind you, they actually used to have a car elevator to bring people on and off Roosevelt Island.”
“A car elevator in a bridge? That’s incredible. What an amazing city this is. It’s almost a shame bringing it to its knees.”
“Emphasis on the almost,” Mr. Joyce replied. “Move to your left.”
“If I go any more left, I’ll be swimming.”
“Okay, stay there. Don’t move.”
Instead of a construction level on the yellow tripod, there was a Nikon camera fitted with a zoom lens. For the next twenty minutes, Mr. Joyce took photographs of the police and FBI agents. It was time in their campaign for reconnaissance. Time to assess the competition, as it were. The police could hardly be called competition, especially at this point, but one never knew. The two partners couldn’t get too cocky. Besides, information was like weaponry. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Mr. Joyce snapped a photo and sent it through Wi-Fi to the facial recognition software on his iPhone. Michael Bennett came up on the readout with an address on West End Avenue. Mr. Joyce nodded. Good to know.
“Foggy out here today,” commented Mr. Beckett when they were done and heading back for the car.
“Yes, isn’t it?” Mr. Joyce said, walking with the tripod on his shoulder like a soldier on parade. “And I have a funny feeling it’s going to get even foggier.”
“What do you think of this honey, Mr. Joyce?” said Mr. Beckett in the car as they did a broken U-turn. “Rides like a dream, doesn’t she?”
“Tell me, how many miles to the gallon does it get, Mr. Beckett?” asked Mr. Joyce.
“City or highway?” asked Mr. Beckett.
“City,” said Mr. Joyce.
“One,” said Mr. Beckett.
He stopped suddenly another hundred feet up, by an abandoned construction site. The huge car’s weight bounced low and soft in the springs.
“Well, what do you know?” Mr. Beckett said, looking around. “Opportunity knocks. Give me a hand, Mr. Joyce, and we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
Mr. Beckett popped the trunk, and they got out. Mr. Joyce went to the back of the long car and stared down at the two NYU graduates they had hired to place the EMP devices. The young men stared back up with their empty eyes open and their hands and mouths bound in duct tape. They had multiple bullet holes in their heads.
“Would you look at this trunk, Mr. Joyce?” Mr. Beckett said proudly. “Just look at it. It’s bigger than most apartments in this city.”
“It is rather roomy,” said Mr. Joyce as he bent and lifted the first dead kid up to his shoulder and carried him to the Dumpster and dropped him in.
Chapter 32
Several hours later, Emily and the team and I were just east of East 78th Street and Cherokee Place, alongside John Jay Park.
I’d never been to the park before or even heard of it. The buildings that formed a kind of horseshoe around it were nice ones, I saw. The park and playground were empty, but I could easily see it on the weekends being packed with kids and nannies. It was an upscale leafy enclave that reminded me a little of the famous Gramercy Park.
What wasn’t looking very upscale was the silver Volvo SUV that had jumped the curb on 78th and plowed into a fire hydrant and utility box and the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park.
The Volvo was now just a crumpled mass of metal and broken glass. The air bags had all deployed, but the hydrant and a huge dislocated section of the fence had gone through the car all the way to the backseat. Everybody in the car had died in an unimaginably horrible way.
Three more dead, I thought, sickened and angry and getting angrier. I’d heard that an old woman being transported out of Sloan Kettering had gone into cardiac arrest, which made the body count at least four. I thought of all the stores we had passed in our search for the EMP devices. Block after block of owners standing there mute and devastated in front of the darkened doorways of their nail salons and dry cleaners and restaurants and grocery stores, their lives and livelihoods in tatters.
All these poor people. I suddenly felt incredibly tired. And what was more frustrating was that we couldn’t help them. We were supposed to prevent these things, protect people, save them. And we weren’t doing it. We weren’t doing a damn thing.
The search for the NNEMPs had come down to the most basic footwork—i.e., walking to every building in the devastated area and asking supers and staff if they had received any strange deliveries. We’d been doing it all day to the tune of nada progress. The needle was still hiding in the haystack. If there even was a needle.
Emily came over as I sat on the curb by the park’s entrance and cracked open a bottle of water.
“How many injured, you figure?” I said up at her after a long sip. “How many dead?”
I suddenly chucked the half-filled water bottle in my hand as hard as I could into the middle of the street.
“And why the hell is this happening?!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
I was losing it a little, I knew. Maybe more than a little. I was beyond frustrated, beyond worried. I’d been hitting it hard for the last couple of days. Watching the mayor get shot was alone enough to give anyone a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This whole situation was just so freaking insane!
“I know you’re angry, Mike,” Emily said calmly, after a beat. “We all are, but unfortunately, anger will get us nowhere.”
“Yeah, well, neither is calm, cool, and collected, Emily, if you haven’t noticed,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to try raging pissed-off for a bit. Feel free to join me at any time.”
That’s when Doyle ran at me from across the street, hollering into his radio.
“That was from a uniform who knows the area,” Doyle cried. “He said some super said some kind of device was installed recently on the roof of his building on East Eighty-First, just two blocks from here. He
said it’s a metal box that looks burned. That’s what we’re looking for, right?”
Emily and I exchanged a glance.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” she said as she offered me a hand.
Chapter 33
Situated halfway between York and First Avenues, 421 East 81st Street was a narrow six-story disco-era white-brick apartment building.
Waiting for us out in front of the building were agent Ashley Brook Clark, an intense FBI technical analyst, and Dr. Michael Aynard, a pudgy, aging hipster in a yellow-and-brown flannel shirt and big glasses who was a physics professor at NYU and one of the foremost experts on NNEMPs in the world.
There were a lot of mirrors in the building’s small, low-ceilinged lobby and even more tenants—a tense crowd of mostly older people and a few young moms with toddlers. Several had flashlights to ward off the dimness of the unlit lobby, and some had packed suitcases with them.
Everyone except for the children looked distraught and confused. I thought of the thousands upon thousands of people who lived and worked in the area and felt truly terrible for them. The power was out, and all arrows were pointing to it staying out for a long, long time.
This really was a disaster, I thought, not for the first time that day. Like a flood or a hurricane, it was affecting multiple thousands of random innocent people. It was what insurance companies used to call an act of God. I wondered if that was what this was. Someone who believed he was God.
I was snapped out of my wonderings by a wiry middle-aged woman in a ratty green bathrobe who began arguing loudly with the Filipino superintendent by the front door.
“What do you mean you can’t? ” the woman cried. “Why do you think we bought the damn thing after Hurricane Sandy? As vice president of the board, I demand that you get that portable generator on now. My medication is going bad as we speak!”
“But I keep explaining. It’s broken, Mrs. Schaeffer,” the young, stocky super said soothingly. “Everything is broken. No one’s phones work, right? See, it’s not just the electricity. There must have been some kind of crazy surge or something. I talked to every super up and down the street. This isn’t a normal blackout.”
“But my medication!” Mrs. Schaeffer insisted.
“Your medication is toast, ma’am, unless you get out of here with it as soon as possible,” Dr. Aynard interrupted in a bored voice. “In fact, unless everyone here is interested in what it’s like to live in the Dark Ages, I recommend you pack up your valuables, pick a direction, and start walking until you find yourself in an area where there’s electricity.”
He cleared his throat.
“Ding-dong! It’s fact-facing time, people,” he said. “The power isn’t coming back on today, tomorrow, or probably for some six months at least, and sitting around here isn’t going to change it.”
“Way to sugarcoat things, Dr. Bedside Manner,” Brooklyn Kale mumbled behind me as we stepped up to the super.
Chapter 34
The superintendent’s name was Lionel Cruz, and after we told him why we were there, he led us across the lobby and up six flights of stairs in a darkened stairwell and out in the rain onto the roof.
The device was in the southeast corner of the roof, on the other side of a dark, looming water tower. A strange, narrow, chest-height aluminum box about three feet wide. I thought it looked almost like a filing cabinet. One whose sides had been ripped open from a small bomb or explosive device that had gone off inside it.
“How did it get up here?” I said to Lionel.
“That’s just the thing,” the super said, shaking his head repeatedly. “I like to think I run a pretty tight ship here, but I have absolutely no idea. I’d check one of the security cameras at the front door or in the garage, but they’re both not working with the power loss. I’d call my staff about it, except the phones are down. I only came up to look around when Mrs. Willett, who lives on the top floor beneath here, said she thought she heard some kind of explosion.”
“Does this look like the device?” Emily said to Agent Clark, who was down on one knee on the tar paper, peering with a flashlight into the strange metal box’s blown-open gap.
“It has to be,” said Dr. Aynard, who was looking over the kneeling tech’s shoulder. “The remains of that metal cylinder there is the armature, and that segment of coiled copper is obviously the stator wiring.”
“And I’d say what’s left of the gas engine in there was the power source,” Agent Clark finished grimly. “This is a textbook flux compression generator bomb.”
“Brilliant, really,” said Aynard as he knocked on the metal housing with a knuckle. “Simple, efficient, not expensive, and highly effective.”
“Oh, it’s brilliant, all right,” said Arturo sarcastically. “Quick! Someone call the Nobel Prize people and nominate the terrorists for efficiently erasing civilization for a hundred square blocks.”
“So you’re saying this small box did the entire neighborhood?” Doyle said.
Aynard winced as he thought about it. He looked in again at the box’s burned remains.
“Maybe not,” he finally said. “Though this device definitely packed quite an electromagnetic punch, it does seem a little small. I’d say there’s probably at least one more somewhere, maybe even two.”
I thought about that. How a box as small as the one before us could do such unbelievable, unheard-of damage. I also thought about how there could be dozens more ready to go off at any moment.
I lifted my radio and called Miriam Schwartz, who was coordinating from the law enforcement staging area by the bridge.
“Miriam, we found the NNEMP,” I said. “But it’s small, and the experts on scene say there are probably more. We’re going to need search teams. Boots on the ground inspecting rooftops.”
“Search teams? For where? The affected area?” she radioed back.
I stared out at the wilderness of buildings in every direction.
“No—for everywhere,” I said. “There could be more of these things all over the city. I think it’s time to assume that there are.”
Chapter 35
The 59th Street Bridge staging area had turned into a full-fledged carnival of trailers and tents by the time we got back to it an hour or so later. To the constant hammering of temporary generators, twenty or thirty FBI agents and double that number of NYPD officers were busy setting up a crisis command post.
We had a meeting under a rain-soaked tent, where we got some of the brass up to speed. As per my recommendation, it was needle-in-the-haystack time all over the city. Cops and firemen everywhere were now in the process of searching rooftops.
At the end of the meeting, Chief Fabretti and Bob Madsen, the New York office’s assistant special agent in charge, who were now jointly running the show, named Emily and me the case’s investigative coordinators.
I was definitely pleased to be getting the case lead but even more psyched about officially working with Emily again. We worked well together. We’d stopped a psychopath who was kidnapping and killing rich kids a few years before, and more recently we helped take down a Mexican drug cartel head. Not only was she particularly adept at appeasing the government pen pushers, she also probably had better back-channel contacts in the Bureau’s various investigative support units than the director. She was all about results.
Emily grabbed us a couple of coffees from another tent after the meeting.
“C’mon, Mike. The rain’s falling off a bit. I want to stretch my legs.”
Emily said this casually, but I noticed her expression was pensive, a little standoffish. Her mental gears were spinning up to speed, I knew. Her investigative approach was like mine, one of ebb and flow. The idea was to gather as much info as possible and then back off of it in order to let things sink in. Give one’s initial and intuitive impressions a little time to set, so that after a while, a telltale pattern could be detected. You couldn’t talk things to death. Especially in the beginning.
&
nbsp; I followed her out onto 60th Street alongside the base of the bridge. We walked west, staring out at the Upper East Side. An evacuation had been declared a little after noon, and it was quite a spooky scene, with all the stopped cars in the empty streets. It was so silent you could actually hear the dead traffic lights creaking in the breeze at the intersections and the needles of rain drumming on the pavement.
Up on Second Avenue, we stopped and watched as a National Guard unit wrestled a length of chain-link out of the back of a olive-drab army truck. We stood there and watched as the soldiers unwrapped the fencing and held it upright while strapping it to lampposts on opposite sides of the avenue. When they were done, it looked as if everything north of 60th Street had been turned into a prison.
“What the hell?” Emily said in horror. “That looks so wrong.”
“It’s to prevent looting, I guess,” I said, shaking my head.
The last time I saw something like this was on Canal Street after 9/11. Definitely not a memory lane I liked to stroll down.
We turned right and walked north up deserted Second Avenue.
“How’s the kids, Mike?” Emily said out of the blue. “And Seamus? And Mary Catherine, of course.”
I gave her a brief family update as we walked up the desolate avenue. I left out the part about Seamus’s recent memory troubles. I looked around. Life seemed depressing enough.
“That stinks about Mary Catherine stuck in Ireland,” Emily said. “What are you doing about the kids?”
“Seamus finagled a temporary nanny,” I said. “Some nice Irish college kid named Martin. He actually just started today. How about you? Have you been keeping yourself busy?”
“Well,” Emily said, a little less pensive, “I’ve actually been seeing somebody. For about three months now. I guess you could say it’s pretty serious. At least I think it is.” I was shocked to suddenly feel a little crushed when I heard this. It was probably because Emily and I had almost gotten together a few times during previous cases. There was definitely some attraction there between us, a mostly unspoken chemistry. She was a smart, energetic, good-looking woman. And a heck of a hard-hitting investigator. What wasn’t there to be attracted to? But I really shouldn’t have been jealous, especially since Mary Catherine and I were serious now and getting more serious by the moment.