“I just heard, Mike. You have these guys in custody? Do you think it’s them?”
“Maybe, Emily,” I said as Brooklyn and Doyle came out from questioning Anatoly Gavrilov.
“He’s not talking, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “At least not in English, except when he demands a lawyer.”
“What about your guy, Mike?” Doyle said.
“Same,” I said.
“What now?” Doyle said.
“There’s no way we’re letting them go anywhere until we can confirm their whereabouts in the last few weeks. And months and years,” I said. “We need a full background on these guys. Immigration records, educational background, political affiliations, finances, any recent upheavals in their life that might have set them off.”
That’s when my cell phone rang.
“Mike, what the hell is going on? I thought your team grabbed these guys,” Fabretti said when I picked up.
“So did I. What’s up?”
“The bastards just made contact again five minutes ago.”
I closed my eyes. Shit. Not again.
So the Russians we had weren’t involved? What the hell was this?
“They’ve listed their demands, Bennett. I can’t talk about it over the phone. You need to get back to City Hall now.”
Chapter 75
We were coming over the Macombs Dam Bridge near Yankee Stadium when a lot of frenzied chatter started up on the NYPD-band radio.
I turned it up. They were shifting roadblocks, apparently, and rerouting traffic in midtown. Traffic crews were being mobilized in various precincts and, for some unknown reason, they seemed to be shifting all traffic flow to the north.
“I just got a text from my brother-in-law, who works at Midtown South,” said Doyle from the backseat. “You gotta be kidding me! They’re calling in everyone. And I mean everyone. Every Tom, Dick, and Sally in the NYPD is being told to get their ass in to work!”
I looked at Emily anxiously. The only time I’d ever heard of that happening before was on 9/11.
The first thing the Unabomber had said to us rang in my head.
They’re going to destroy New York City—you know that, right?
“Something must be up,” said Arturo, shaking his head in the seat next to Doyle.
“Ya think, Lopez?” Doyle said, rolling his eyes.
We were thrown another curve as we were coming up on City Hall on lower Broadway twenty minutes later. Fabretti called and told us that they’d moved the mayor six blocks northwest, to the Office of Emergency Management’s new crisis center, at the western end of Chambers Street.
It was a crisis, all right. By the time we got to the new twelve-story glass building on the shore of the Hudson, they’d cordoned off the entire block. Past the roadblock, there was pandemonium on the street outside the building, where cops and National Guardsmen and techs were moving boxes and equipment in and out of trucks.
When it was finally our turn at the checkpoint, the tall, middle-aged female sergeant told me in no uncertain terms to turn around, as no one was being allowed in. I actually had to call Fabretti three times before he radioed the gate and told the hard-ass lady cop it was okay.
There was a city park beside the facility filled with dozens of cop and fed cars and SUVs parked haphazardly up on the grass. We left the car in front of an idling Office of Emergency Management bus, and as we got out we looked up and watched as an NYPD Bell helicopter landed on a helipad beside the building.
The chopper dumped out a half dozen people who looked like feds and civilian professor types. Beside the helipad, at a dock, an NYPD Harbor Unit boat was unloading more smart-looking folks. One of them had on a blue Windbreaker with yellow letters on the back.
“NHC?” I said to Emily. “What the heck is the NHC?”
“National Hurricane Center?” she said, staring at me wide-eyed.
“What? We’re going to have a hurricane now? These guys can make it rain, too? That can’t be!” Doyle said.
“All hands on deck and batten down the friggin’ hatches,” Arturo said as the Harbor Unit boat sped past in the water with a roar.
Chapter 76
Inside the sleek, low-ceilinged lobby of the building, it was even worse.
Every political staffer and cop we saw rushing to and fro was looking completely freaked. I stepped aside when a tall balding guy grunted, “Out of the way!” as he hustled past with a stack of printouts. I even tried to wave down Lieutenant Bryce Miller, who appeared at the end of the lobby, but he blew right past me with his phone glued to his ear and a bewildered look on his face.
“Well, at least everybody is keeping it together,” Doyle cracked.
As Bryce Miller left, Fabretti popped out of a stairwell door and rushed over to us.
“Bennett, tell me you got something—anything—on these Russians that you just picked up.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “They’re claiming that they were framed. I’m not sure if I believe them, but their alibis look pretty solid so far. But even if they were framed, we’re definitely getting closer now, Chief. Because the real bombers—whoever they are—had to know the Russians in order to frame them. We just have to find the link. What the heck is going on here? Why is all hell breaking loose?”
“Because it is. C’mon,” he said, leading us down the crowded hallway. “These bastards FedExed a video this time. They’re showing it in the press room.”
“A video?” said Arturo.
“Don’t get your hopes up, buddy. I doubt it’s from Netflix,” Doyle said.
The video was rolling on a screen set up on the stage as we came into the crowded press room.
It showed what looked like stock news footage—people running on a beach as waves crashed at their backs.
As the terrified people ran for their lives, the same strange electronic voice from the first phone call started up like a documentary voice-over.
“During the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, two hundred thirty thousand people died within minutes as a thirty-foot-high wave struck coastal areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, and the Maldives. It was caused by a massive undersea megathrust earthquake. But that isn’t the only way tsunamis are created.
“Welcome to an undisclosed location,” said the voice as the image on the screen shifted.
Up-to-date digital film was showing what looked like some type of cave or mine corridor. A beam of light moved along a rough, brownish-grayish rock wall in a descending, low-ceilinged shaft. When the light and camera panned left, a thin braided-steel cable hanging from rock bolts embedded in the wall came into view. Running alongside it was a red plastic-coated cable of some kind—electrical, maybe.
The camera stopped as the red cable suddenly led into a large rectangle of strange white blocks. It looked like explosives—a charge the size of a kitchen cabinet stuck to the rock wall. The camera shifted to the center of the shaft, where the length of cables running down the seemingly endless corridor revealed charge after charge after charge stuck to the wall.
“This is Semtex,” the voice said as a hand clad in a black work glove patted the explosives. “The red cable is detcord, and the steel cable beside it is for spreading the force of the blast nice and even, to maximize shear. It’s not the most elaborate bomb I have ever made, but it is certainly the biggest. After all, there is an elegance in simplicity sometimes.
“As I have possibly convinced you with the subway bombing and the razing of 26 Federal Plaza, I am actually pretty good at blowing shit up, no? I like to think that no one has ever been as good at it as I am, but that is for history to decide, I guess.”
As the cameraman turned all the way back around, in the distance, up the shaft, we could see a bright opening in the tunnel, thin clouds in a pale-blue sky.
The camera guy started walking up toward the opening, and then as he reached it, everybody in the room gasped.
Through the cave mouth or mine shaft or whatever it was, the camera sh
owed a bunch of dark, jagged volcanic peaks and a sheer drop-off down an immense cliff into a crashing ocean. The cave mouth was insanely high up—a hundred stories, maybe two hundred. Far below, down the dizzyingly immense slope of the mountain, there were dozens of little moving dots—seabirds flying above the spraying surf.
“Here’s what you need to know now,” said the voice. “If my calculations are right, and I believe they are, when I carefully detonate my network of explosives, I will peel off this entire peak and send a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan Island into the Atlantic Ocean at more than a hundred miles an hour.
“According to my computer models, this slide will create a tsunami a little more than twice as powerful as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and send it directly into the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Six hours from the time I detonate, Manhattan Island will be inundated with an unstoppable seventy-five-foot wave.”
“No,” said Arturo, beside me, in a whisper to the screen. “Just no.”
“New York City will be destroyed. As will Miami and Baltimore and Boston.”
There was a pause in the narration.
“I have one simple demand. Within twenty-four hours, I want three billion US dollars deposited into a list of numbered accounts that I have already sent to the mayor’s office by e-mail. That this amount is roughly the equivalent of the mayor’s personal fortune is not accidental. She can divert her money easily in the time allotted. The question is, will she? Your city’s fate lies solely in her hands.
“There will be no negotiation. The money will either appear in the accounts in the time allotted, and tomorrow will be just another day. Or it will not appear, and I will wipe New York City, along with the rest of the eastern United States, off the map.”
There was a second pause.
“Please know that, of course, any attempt to find and approach the place where the bombs are now located will result in immediate detonation. I will not contact you again. That is all.”
Chapter 77
Half an hour later, we were in the insanely crowded OEM’s seventh-floor war room. The packed, open room had monitors everywhere. Monitors on desks, monitors built into a long cherrywood conference table in the center of the room, and a movie screen–like monitor that took up an entire wall.
The wall screen was actually composed of a grid of smaller screens that showed different parts of the city—Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, the street out in front of the UN. As I watched, the screen changed into a still of the cave or mine housing the explosives.
At the head of the U-shaped conference table packed with scientists and government officials, the acting mayor looked pale. It was impossible to know what she was feeling, but it couldn’t have been good. It was incredible that all this—the bombings and assassination—was about cleaning her out financially.
Or at least that was what was being said now. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case.
“Please, someone, anyone, tell me what the hell is going on here,” the mayor said.
The scientists at the table stared at each other until a tan, lean, white-haired man who reminded me a lot of the famous college basketball coach Bobby Knight stood up, along with a pretty woman with chin-length chestnut hair.
“Everyone, my name is Larry Duke, and this is Dr. Suzan Bower, and we’re the coheads of the American Geophysical Union,” he said.
“Tell me this is a joke, Mr. Duke,” said the mayor. “It’s a bluff, right? Dr. Evil, James Bond bullshit? It’s too implausible. There are no islands near New York City in the Atlantic. How is this even a threat?”
“Actually, ma’am,” Larry said, “off the west coast of Africa, there are dozens and dozens of volcanic islands.”
“Africa! That’s what? Three or four thousand miles away!” she screamed.
Dr. Bower smiled calmly as she raised her palm.
“Allow me to explain,” she said politely. “The potential destructive force of a truly massive landslide into a seabed is almost impossible to comprehend. In Lituya Bay in Alaska in the fifties, after an earthquake, a one-mile-by-half-mile chunk of rock slid off a coastal mountain into the water, causing a wave the size of a one-hundred-and-seventy-story building.
“Think about that. If a similar incident happened in the Atlantic basin, even from as far away as Africa, a tidal wave the size of the Indian Ocean tsunami would hit the Eastern Seaboard six hours later, just as the man on the tape said.”
“And nothing could stop it?” said the OEM head.
Larry shook his head sadly.
“Nothing,” he said. “For years, Suzan and I have been advising the government of exactly the problem here—that some of the West African islands are potential tsunami dangers from eruption-caused landslides.”
“But you said the landslide in Alaska was caused by an earthquake, an incredible geologic event,” said the mayor. “You can’t cause an earthquake or erupt a volcano with explosives, can you?”
“No, you can’t. But you can cause a landslide with explosives, especially if an area is already unstable, like many of the areas on some of these islands,” said Dr. Bower.
“Bullshit,” somebody said.
“I wish it was,” Larry said. “In 1903, there was a disaster called the Frank Slide in Canada. A segment of mountain about the same size as the one in the Lituya Bay incident fell and flattened a mining town. How did it happen? By miners blasting in one of the mines.”
“Exactly,” said Dr. Bower. “Today, demolition experts are so good with explosives, they can blow things up so buildings fall wherever they want. For example, demo guys took down a half-mile-long section of nine bridges in Ohio with only one hundred and thirty-eight pounds of plastic explosives. You get a geologist together with a demo expert and place the pow in the right place, and you just might be able to do it. You simply need to give it a push, and millions and millions of pounds of rock and gravity do the rest.”
“Shit,” I said to Emily. “Just like Twenty-Six Fed. A little bit of explosives placed perfectly took that building down pretty as you please. They know how to do it.”
“So you think it’s possible for these terrorists to actually use explosives to cause a landslide to create a tsunami?” said the mayor.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Larry said with a sad smile. “But the answer is yes.”
Part Four
Please Stand By
Chapter 78
Two hours later, we were sprawled out in a corner of the OEM building’s third-floor cafeteria. We sat at a new folding table—which still had a sticker with the Walmart bar code on it—washing down vending-machine candy with coffee. I had my feet on a chair by the window and was sharing glum looks with Doyle and Arturo and Emily.
“Gosh, it’s tiring to beat your head against the wall,” said Arturo.
He was right. We’d just gotten off the phone with Robertson and Brooklyn. They’d called to let us know that Dmitri Yevdokimov and Anatoly Gavrilov had lawyered up.
Not just with any lawyers, either. Two seven-hundred-dollar-an-hour mouthpieces from a white-shoe Wall Street firm had actually shown up at the precinct house raising hell until the precinct captain relented. The fact was we didn’t have enough on them to charge them with anything. Not yet, anyway. Like it or not, they’d been released, and our best leads just walked out the door.
To add insult to injury, we’d put surveillance on them, but they seemed to have shaken it. We’d also just received a forensics report from the FBI on the Russians’ credit cards and cell phones and Internet searches. There was nothing. They had no electronic trail of any kind. The two computer experts were Luddites, apparently.
I groaned as I looked out the window at the Hudson and Jersey on the other side. Then I looked south at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor and imagined a wave coming over her.
In the silence, Arturo got up and made himself another coffee.
“Look on the bright side, guys. They’ve got free K-
Cups up here. Yummy. I love K-Cups,” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah. Nothing like a smooth, soothing K-Cup to while away the afternoon before the destruction of your city,” said Doyle, flicking a coffee stirrer at him.
I stared out the window down to the courtyard, where soldiers were setting up cots.
Were the cots for the soldiers? Were they expecting refugees? What the hell were cots going to do when the water came? Become flotation devices?
I only knew that we had to keep our heads about us in this whirling dervish of a mess. I sat up.
“Okay, let’s do this again. Theories,” I said to Emily.
“I almost can’t believe it’s a ransom,” she said as she swirled her coffee. “I was really leaning toward a Unabomber-style suspect. One man on a mad mission, like you said. This now? Three billion? This is a real curveball.”
“It’s the Russkies. Has to be,” said Doyle as he rolled out of his chair onto the floor and started doing push-ups. “Think about it. The fed forensic report shows they have no credit cards or computer records, yet they’re computer experts? They have stuff. They just know how to hide it. They’re in on this.”
Then the real chaos began.
Chief Fabretti came into the cafeteria talking on his phone.
“You’re kidding. Jeez. Wow, just like that. Okay, thanks.”
“What’s up, Chief?” said Doyle as he hopped to his feet.
“Turn on the TV,” Fabretti said, pointing to the set in the cafeteria’s corner. “This is unbelievable.”
Doyle ran over and clicked on the set. I stood up as I saw something there I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.
There was a blue screen with two words in yellow.
STAND BY.
Doyle changed the channel. It was on every one. A long and bright beep sounded out, followed by a squawk of radio feedback. Then it did it again.
“This is not a test,” said a calm, feminine voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System. Please stand by. Please stand by.”