Black Friday

  Movies sometimes show particularly violent scenes in flowing slow motion. It wasn’t like that, Carroll knew. It was a jumpy collage of loud, shocking still photos.

  The disconnected photos clicked at him now in random order. They stopped. They started. They stopped. They started again.

  “Everybody hit the floor!” Carroll screamed. At the same instant, he fired the Browning.

  He didn’t watch the results. The first bullet brutally uncorked the right side of Anton Rashid’s throat, spilling his blood like wine from a broken jug.

  Hussein Moussa’s gun flashed; it roared as Carroll dove across the backs of a couple already lying on the floor.

  Seconds later, Carroll peered back over the table. His eyes and forehead were exposed for an instant. He fired off three more quick shots.

  Two of the bullets drove stocky Wadih Rashid hard against a hollow partition wall, decorated with black skillets. Twin holes opened in the terrorist’s chest. The heavy skillets clattered noisily to the tile floor.

  “Moussa! Hussein Moussa! You can’t get out! You can’t get past me.” Carroll began to scream, to negotiate with the man.

  There was no answer.

  Somewhere in the front of the restaurant, an old woman was wailing like an Arab imam. Several people were crying loudly.

  “Give up now, and you live…. Otherwise, I’ll kill you.”

  Carroll had to chance another fast look. He was gasping for a breath. One, two, three. He raised his head.

  He saw nothing of the Butcher this time. Moussa was down under the tables as well, hiding and crawling, looking for some advantage.

  He was moving either toward the front door or the kitchen. Which one was it?

  Carroll guessed it would be the kitchen.

  He began to scramble toward the kitchen.

  “I have antipersonnel grenades!” The Butcher suddenly let out a piercing, high scream. “Everybody dies in here! Everybody dies in this restaurant! Everybody dies with me! Women, children, I don’t care.”

  Carroll stopped moving suddenly; he almost didn’t breathe.

  Straight ahead, he stared at a badly shaking, very frightened woman curled like a snail on the floor. She looked about thirty years old.

  Carroll peeked above the dining tables again. A gunshot rang out to his immediate left. A salt shaker disintegrated in his eyes.

  Moussa was in the far right corner!

  The question was whether he did have grenades. It could be a bluff, but the worst was always possible with somebody like the Butcher.

  The people sprawled on the floor were inching toward panic; they were close to rising en masse and bolting for the door. This would be perfect for Hussein Moussa. In the confusion, Carroll wouldn’t run the risk of shooting.

  Food was spattered everywhere on the dining room floor. Carroll finally reached for a platter holding the relics of an unfinished meal of pungent lamb and rice. With a sudden wrist snap, he hurled the dripping plate hard against the kitchen door.

  At the same time he shifted upright into a professional shooting crouch—a two-handed pistol grip with both arms rigid.

  Moussa came up again, shooting. The Butcher fired twice at the slapping noise against the kitchen door. Moussa had a grenade in his left hand! Son of a bitch!

  Arch Carroll squeezed the trigger.

  Moussa looked incredibly surprised.

  The far right of Hussein Moussa’s forehead gushed blood. He slid down against a table still covered with mounds of food and tableware. His back dragged the cloth, plates, wine and water glasses. He spit out a throaty curse across the room.

  Then the terrorist’s gun rose again.

  Carroll shot Hussein Moussa a second time, the bullet exploding his right cheek. The Lebanese Butcher fell heavily forward onto the back of a fat diner lying on the floor.

  Carroll shot Moussa again, as the man trapped underneath wriggled like a beached fish and screamed.

  There was an eerie, terrible silence inside the Sinbad Star. A second or two passed like that. Then loud crying started. There were angry shouts and relieved hugging all over the restaurant.

  His gun thrust stiffly forward, Arch Carroll moved awkwardly across the chaotic room. He was still in a police school crouch. It was as if he were locked into that position.

  He carefully examined the Rashid brothers. Wadih and Anton were still alive. He looked at Moussa. The Butcher was dead, and the world was instantly a better place in which to live.

  “Please call me an ambulance,” Carroll spoke softly to the astonished restaurant owner. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry this had to happen in your establishment. These men are terrorists. Professional killers.”

  The Sinbad Star restaurant owner continued to stare with disbelief at Carroll. His black eyes were small, shiny beads stuck in his broad forehead and they pierced to the rear of Arch Carroll’s skull.

  “And what are you? What are you, please tell me, mister?”

  Chapter 9

  GREEN BAND HAD struck like an invisible army.

  Two nervous New York City TAC patrolmen, Airy Simmons and Robert Havens, were carefully threading a path through the smoldering ruins of the Federal Reserve Bank located on Maiden Lane. The two men were attached at their belts to five-hundred-yard-long safety lines snaking back toward the street.

  The patrolmen were deep inside what had once been the Fed’s massive and richly ornamented public lobby. Indeed, the gray and blue limestone, the sandstone bricks of the Federal Reserve had always impressed visitors with a sense of their durability and authority. The fortlike appearance, the stout iron bars on every window, had reinforced the image of self-importance and impregnability. The image had obviously been a sham.

  The destruction which officers Simmons and Havens found downstairs in the Coin Section was difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to assess.

  Mountainous coin-weighing machines had been blown apart like a child’s toys. Fifty-pound coin bags were strewn open every where.

  The marble floor was easily three feet deep in quarters, dimes, nickels. Building support columns had been knocked down everywhere on the basement floor. The entire structure seemed to be trembling.

  In the deepest basement of the Federal Reserve Bank was the largest single accumulation of gold stored anywhere in the world. It all belonged to foreign governments. The Fed both guarded the gold and kept track of who owned what. In an ordinary change of ownership, the Fed merely moved gold from one country’s bin into another’s. The gold was transported on ordinary metal carts, like books in a library. The security system in the deep basement was so highly elaborate that even the Reserve Bank’s president had to be accompanied when he ventured into the gold storage area.

  Now patrolmen Havens and Simmons were alone in the cavernous basement.

  Suddenly gold was everywhere around them. Rivers of shining gold ran through the dust and rubble. Gold bars, more than they could possibly count, surrounded them. There was well over a hundred billion dollars at the day’s market price of $386 an ounce, all within their reach.

  Patrolman Robert Havens was hyperventilating, taking enormously deep breaths that were almost yawns. His broad, flat face held almost no expression and hadn’t since he and Simmons had entered the Fed building.

  Both emergency policemen stopped inching forward suddenly. Robert Havens unconsciously let out a sharp gasp.

  “Christ Jesus! What the hell is this?”

  An armed Security Guard was sitting in a caned wooden chair directly blocking their path from the gold section into the Fed’s main garage. The cane chair still smoldered.

  The guard was staring directly into Robert Havens’ eyes.

  Neither man spoke.

  The Federal Reserve Bank guard couldn’t; he was beyond words. The man was horribly burned, charred a blistering charcoal black. The sight was so upsetting that the two policemen missed the most important clue at first …

  Wrapped around the bank guard’s right arm wa
s a shiny bright green band.

  Chapter 10

  AS ARCHER CARROLL maneuvered his battered station wagon along the Major Deegan Expressway, the words of the Atlantic Avenue restaurant owner came back to him with the persistence of an unanswerable philosophical question … And what are you?… What are you, please tell me, mister?

  He glanced at his tired face in the rearview mirror. Yeah, what are you, Arch? The Rashids and Hussein Moussa are bad people, but you ‘re some kind of national hero, right?

  He was drained, completely numb from the night’s carnage. He wanted everything to be quiet and still inside his throbbing head now.

  And what are you, mister?

  He turned on the car radio, looking for a diversion from his mood.

  Almost immediately he heard the news about Wall Street, delivered by a voice edged in the hushed hysteria so favored by newscasters when they describe events of national importance. Carroll increased the volume and stared at the tiny light emitted by the radio.

  He concentrated on the newscaster’s tensely delivered reportage. Then there were man-on-the-street interviews recorded against a brassy background of screaming sirens. It was impossible to mistake the shocked tones of the people who spoke.

  Carroll tightened both of his hands on the car steering wheel. His mind was crowded with images of urban guerrilla destruction. He understood that Wall Street was a perfect target for any determined terrorist group—but he couldn’t make the necessary jump from his thoughts to the horrible reality of what had happened.

  He didn’t want to think about it. He was almost home and he didn’t need to drag the world inside the last sanctuary left to him. Not tonight, anyway.

  Chapter 11

  MOMENTS LATER, CARROLL swung his stiff, aching body inside the familiar, musty front hallway of his house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Automatically, he hung his coat up on the hook under an ancient totem—the snoopy-eyed Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  Turn out the night light. Home from the wars at last, he thought.

  As he slumped into the living room, Carroll sighed out loud.

  “Oh poor Arch. It’s almost eleven-thirty.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t see you there, Mary K.”

  Mary Katherine Carroll was sitting neatly curled up on one corner of the couch. The room was only dimly illuminated by an amber light from the dining parlor.

  “You look like a scuzzy Bowery bag man. Is that blood on your sleeve? Are you all right?” She stood up suddenly.

  Carroll looked down at his torn, dingy shirt sleeve. He turned it into the dining parlor light. It was blood all right.

  “I’m fine. The blood isn’t mine.”

  Mary Katherine frowned deeply as she came forward to examine her brother’s arm. “The bad guys get banged up too?”

  Carroll finally smiled at his twenty-four-year-old “baby” sister. Mary Katherine, who was the keeper of his house, the substitute mother for his four children, the uncomplaining cook and chief bottle washer, all for a two-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend, “a scholarship.” It was all he could possibly afford to pay her right now.

  “I had to kill one of them.…The kids all asleep?”

  The kids, in order of arrival, were Mary III, Clancy, Mickey Kevin and Elizabeth.

  All four of them were too Irish-American cute for their own good: tow-headed and blue-eyed, with infectious smiles and quick, almost adult wits. Mary Katherine had been their house mother for nearly three years now.

  Ever since Arch’s wife Nora had died on December 14, 1982.

  After Nora’s funeral, after just one desolate night at then-old New York apartment the six of them had moved into the Carroll family homestead in Riverdale. The old house had been closed and boarded-up since the deaths of Carroll’s mother and father back in ‘80 and ‘81.

  Mary Katherine had immediately redecorated. She even set up a huge, light-filled painting studio for herself in the attic. The kids were out of New York City proper, at least. They suddenly had acres of fresh air and space in which to ramble around. There were definite advantages to being up in Riverdale.

  Carroll had held on to their old rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive. Sometimes he even stayed there when he had to work weekends in New York. It wasn’t ideal, but it could have been a lot worse. Especially without Mary K.

  “I have several important messages for you,” Mary Katherine announced brightly.

  “Mickey says, if I might paraphrase, that you work too hard and don’t make enough skoots. Clancy says, if you don’t play catch with him this weekend (and not video game baseball), you’re a dead man. That’s a direct quote. Let’s see … oh, yes, I almost forgot. Lizzie has decided to become a prima ballerina. Lessons for the spring semester at the Joliere school start at three hundred per, Dad.”

  “That all?”

  “Mairzy Doats left you a humongous kiss, and a hug of equal magnitude and intensity.”

  “Uncomplicated young woman. Shame she can’t stay six years old forever.”

  “Arch?” Mary Katherine suddenly looked concerned. “You heard about this Wall Street thing? The bombing?”

  Carroll nodded wearily. He wanted to box Wall Street off in a dark, private corner until he was ready to deal with it.

  Carroll finally bent and loosened his flopping high-top sneaks. He peeled off a discolored, satin Tollantine High School jacket. His fatigue had yielded to a kind of peaceful, ethereal, waking slumber.

  In the large bathroom on the second floor, he turned on the tub full blast. Curling hot steam rose toward the ceiling from the chipped and scratched white porcelain. He took off the rest of his squalid street bum ensemble. Finally, he rolled a fluffy bath towel around his waist.

  Quick mirror check. Okay. He was still around six-two solid, durable and sturdy. Pleasant face, even if it was a little pug ordinary, like some friendly mutt people generally take in out of the rain.

  While the hot water ran, Carroll stiffly padded back downstairs to the kitchen and popped the top of a cold Schlitz. Mary Katherine had bought the Schlitz as a “change of pace.” Actually, she was trying to stop him from drinking so much.

  Carroll took three chilled cans and headed back to the pleasantly steamed bathroom. Stripping off the soft bath towel, he slowly, luxuriously entered the hot tub.

  As he sipped the cold beer, he began to relax. Carroll used a bath the way some people use psychiatric therapy— to get back in touch, to sort it all out. Among other things, hot water and soap was the only therapy he could afford.

  Carroll began to think about Nora almost immediately. Damn. Always at night when he got home from work…. Their time. The emptiness he felt right then was unbearable. It beat against him with the consistency of a pulse. He was filled with a terrible, hollow longing.

  He let his eyes gently close and he could see her face. Oh, Nora, sweet Nora. How could you leave me like this? How could you leave me alone, with all these kids, fighting against this crazy, crazy world out there?

  She had been the best person Carroll had ever met. It was as simple, and no more profound, than that. The two of them had made a perfect fit. Nora had been warm, and thoughtful and funny. That they had found each other convinced Carroll such a thing as fate might indeed exist. It wasn’t all randomness and whim and unseeing chance.

  Strange, the ways of life and death.

  Growing up, all through high school in New York, at College (South Bend, Notre Dame), Carroll had been secretly afraid he’d never find anybody to love him. It was a curious fear, and sometimes he’d imagine that just as some people were born with a talent for art or music, he’d been given a gift of solitude.

  Then Nora found him and that was absolute magic.She’d discovered Carroll the second day of law school at Michigan State. Right away, from their very first date, Carroll simply knew he could never love anybody else; that he would never need to. He’d never been more comfortable around another person in his life.

  Only now Nora was gone. Ne
arly three years back in the cancer ward of New York Hospital. Merry Christmas, Carroll family. Your friend, God…

  “I’m just a kid, Arch,” Nora had whispered to him once, after she found out she was dying for certain. She’d been thirty-one then, a year younger than he.

  Carroll slowly sipped his can of watery beer. An old country song played through his head… “the beer that made Milwaukee famous, made a loser out of me.” Ever since she’d died, he understood he’d been trying to commit slow, sure suicide. He’d been drinking too much; eating most of the wrong things; taking stupid chances on the job…

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand the problem, because he did. He just couldn’t seem to do a damn thing to stop his steep downhill slide. He was like some daredevil skier determined to destroy himself on the most treacherous, glacial slopes. He didn’t seem to care enough anymore…

  Arch Carroll, supposed tough-guy, well-quoted cynic around town—there he sat in the tub with one of his kids’ rubber toys floating next to him. All four of the kids delighted and astonished Carroll. So why was he screwing up so badly lately?

  He was tempted to wake them up now. Maybe go sledding at midnight on the back lawn. Play catch with Mickey Kevin. Teach Lizzie how to do a pliÉ and become a hot-shit little ballerina.

  Arch Carroll’s ears suddenly tuned in sharply…. Something odd…. What was it?

  In another part of the house, he heard voices.

  Then, a door slammed.

  There were steps in the hallway. The floorboards creaked loudly.

  The kids were up! Exactly what he needed, Carroll thought, and he began to smile broadly.

  There was a light tap on the bathroom door.

  That had to be Lizzie or Mickey trying to be cute. Soon to be followed by Dolby stereo kid screams and uncontrollable belly laughs.

  “Entrez, Come right in you little assholes,” he called.

  The bathroom door opened slowly, and Carroll cupped his hands, ready to splash a tidal wave of water.

  He managed to control his impulse just in time.

  The man framed in the bathroom door was wearing a black London Fog raincoat, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a white button down shirt and striped rep tie. Carroll had never seen him before. “Er. Excuse me, sir,” the man said.