As I turned the corner of Broadway onto 170th, I could see that a portable stage and flag-flanked podium had been set up outside on the street in front of the Thirty-Third Precinct’s front door. Standing in the blocked-off street around the stage was a large crowd of FBI people and cops and mayor’s-office guys playing cops with coplike EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT Windbreakers over their shiny suits.
And still they were outnumbered by media people. Everywhere there were camera guys in plaid flannel shirts playing with light meters and tripods while their metrosexual news-producer bosses did that one-finger-in-the-ear thing as they gabbed into their cell phones.
In addition to regular news vans, I spotted a massive trailer-size national news satellite truck, like the ones you see outside events like the Super Bowl. I did a double take as I drove past a startlingly good-looking, tall brunette—a name-network reporter—with her head back, getting her eyeliner touched up by her assistant.
There’s a real buzz in the air, isn’t there? I thought as I parked and got out. Like we were at a red-carpet event.
I didn’t like it. I knew people were freaking out and needed to know what was happening, but this was nuts. It never failed. Every time these things happened, the circus atmosphere seemed to get worse. Less thought and emphasis seemed to be placed on the incredible human pain inflicted on the victims and their families and more on the hysterical contagious excitement generated by the knowledge that Something Big Is Happening.
I found Chief Fabretti with Lieutenant Bryce Miller on the sidewalk near the precinct’s front door.
“Just about to call you, Mike,” Fabretti said. “The mayor changed his mind about the briefing. He’s going on any second now, and he needs to, and I quote, wrap things up with his speech people.”
“His speech people, of course,” I said, nodding, as I looked out at the media horde. “You think this is the right approach here, Chief? Little on the splashy side, isn’t it?”
The mayor’s buddy, Bryce Miller, jumped in. “Mayor insisted it be outside,” he said. “Not holed up in a bunker somewhere. There’s a lot of scared folks out there. We need to project calm. It’s important people understand that everything’s okay. That we’re in control of things.”
In control of things? I thought, cocking my head. We are? I wanted to say.
Chapter 18
A moment later, accompanied by a barrage of camera clicks and flashes, the mayor, Carl Doucette, came out of the precinct with his five-man police security detail.
Normally a glad-handing, life-of-the-party type, the new mayor—tall, with curly gray hair—looked somber, serious, almost nervous as he stepped to the podium and took out his prepared statement. If he was faking looking shaken up, he was a fine actor, I thought.
“As everyone probably has heard by now, very early this morning there was a massive explosion in the number one train tunnel beneath Broadway in Washington Heights,” Mayor Doucette began.
“Three people have been killed that we know of, and I’d like to say first that our hearts go out to those victims and their families. We are still very much in the process of investigating the explosion, but from our initial review, we can say definitively that this was not a utility malfunction, nor was it industrial in nature.”
The clicking of the cameras increased as he looked up from his notes.
“At this point, we can only conclude that this was an intentional act, of what exact nature we cannot say. It seems as if a flammable material was pumped into the tunnel at some point last night, and that the built-up material was ignited with one or perhaps two explosive devices, causing catastrophic damage to a large segment of the tunnel as well as to the Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street and Hundred and Eighty-First Street subway stations.
“This part of the tunnel is ten stories down, one of the deepest in the entire system, and we have engineers still assessing the risk of further collapse. Though we are planning to bring back train service on a rolling basis this afternoon into the evening rush, people can expect that number one train service will be down in both directions for well into the foreseeable future.”
He paused again, took a breath.
“But though our train service is shut down,” the mayor said, staring at the cameras now with a calm and steady seriousness and intensity he’d never before displayed, “I want to let whoever committed this cowardly, murderous act know once and for all that the spirit of this city and its citizens will never be shut down.”
There was a smattering of spontaneous applause.
“We will continue as we have always done, and you will be found and brought to justice.”
“Yeah!” somebody with a deep voice called out from the media pit, and more people began to applaud.
“Try as you will, neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to shut down our city or the American people.”
Maybe doing a big press conference like this was a good idea after all, I thought as the clapping increased. I hadn’t voted for the mayor, because he seemed soft on crime, but he was surprising me. Watching him operate up close for the first time, I could see he was a natural leader with an ability to lift people’s spirits.
The mayor smiled gently as he raised his hands to wave down the applause. He brought the microphone in a little closer to himself as a chant of “USA! USA!” started from somewhere.
The mayor smiled at the chanting and was waving his hands for calm when there was a glow of something pink behind his head.
It was rose-colored, a strange, halolike mist that I first thought was some kind of weird television lighting, because as it appeared, the side of the mayor’s head suddenly looked like it was covered in shadow.
But then the tall mayor staggered oddly forward and to his left, and my mind finally caught up to my unbelieving eyes.
I watched in horror as the mayor dropped straight down behind the podium like a bridge with its pilings blown out.
Chapter 19
The next few moments were beyond strange. Frozen and dumbstruck, I stood there unable to do anything but stare down at the fallen mayor and the blood pumping out of him. My mind must have still been a little shell-shocked, because as he bled out, all I could do was keep looking him over, again and again, harping on the most useless details.
Like how he’d come out of one of his shoes, a new cordovan loafer. How though he was married, I saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. How there were little pink anchors on his navy-blue socks.
Though there were more than a hundred people standing around—cops, reporters, photographers, neighborhood residents—none of them seemed to be moving, either. It was suddenly impossibly quiet, as if someone had just called for a moment of silence. I distinctly remember hearing birds chirping in the park across from the precinct, and off in the distance on Saint Nicholas Avenue there was the brief grumble of a passing bus.
Then out of the dead silence, someone in a shrieking voice that was so high and loud it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman suddenly yelled.
“Sniper!”
The spell broke instantly. Everyone in the vicinity of the fallen mayor, including me, broke away like a stampeding herd from his body.
I didn’t know where Lieutenant Miller had gotten to, but Chief Fabretti and I dove immediately between a couple of cruisers parked out in front of the precinct. I could hear several cops crying out, “Where? Where? Where?” simultaneously over the chief’s radio as we crawled on our hands and knees in the gutter.
“Unbelievable! This isn’t happening! You hear the shot, Mike? I didn’t hear jack shit!” Fabretti said beside me, where he gripped a short-barreled .38 he had pulled out of somewhere. “Damn it! We have a sniper team covering the rooftops. What just happened?!”
I shook my head and was about to take a peek out at the rooftops myself when there was a loud, thunking crack of wood as another bullet ripped into the podium.
“Down!” I yelled. “We’re still under fire!”
I no
ticed that there wasn’t even a hint of a gun crack for the second shot, either. Which meant one of two things—either the shooter was using a suppressor, or he was really far away. I was going with the latter. The mayor’s massive wound indicated a large-caliber round probably shot from a rifle with a long range. I shook my head. Like Kennedy, I thought in horror. The mayor had just been assassinated!
“That second shot just hit the front of the podium, Chief,” I said after a moment. “Tell your men that it seems to be coming from dead west, up a Hundred and Seventieth.”
Fabretti was calling it in when I heard a woman’s friendly voice.
“Excuse me, Officer. Over here, please. Excuse me.”
I looked up and squinted into a painfully bright light above the sidewalk. Next to it materialized a tall, attractive woman. It was the statuesque network reporter I’d seen previously, her painted eyes huge and dark and almond-shaped, her thick pancake makeup a garish, yellowy tan. Her camera guy was a short, stocky, friendly-looking bearded Hispanic guy who gave me a wink with his free eye.
We were still being shot at, and they wanted a sideline report?
I guess I wasn’t the only one in full-out shock.
“Get down!” I yelled as I grabbed them and yanked them behind the car.
Chapter 20
Twenty minutes later I was in my Impala, hammering it toward the west side of Washington Heights behind a trio of commando-filled NYPD Emergency Service Unit trucks. The trucks were military surplus BearCat armored personnel carriers; I used to think using them was overkill—at least I did up until I saw the mayor get blown away. The countersniper team in position near the precinct had triangulated the shot with their gunshot echo system, and we were headed now toward a high-rise building on Haven Avenue, where it seemed like the shots had come from.
I almost didn’t believe it when one of the SWAT cops pointed out the suspected building to me. It was so far away. On the other side of Manhattan. Easily three-quarters of a mile. The chill that had gone down my spine had stayed there. Because only a world-class sniper could have made a shot like that, I knew.
Which raised the question: Who, or what, were we dealing with?
“Dude, I blame the media. It’s all their fault, damn it!” cried out an uncharacteristically pissed-off Arturo in the front seat beside me as we roared west toward the building. The young Puerto Rican cop, whom I met on the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, was usually pretty even-tempered.
Along with half the department, my crew had responded immediately to the shooting. I’d grabbed them and taken them with me the moment the decision had been made to raid the suspected building.
And no wonder Arturo was freaking out. The mayor had been rushed to Columbia Presbyterian, but everyone knew he was dead. First a bombing and now an assassination? We were in a new territory of spooky, and the adrenaline couldn’t have been running higher.
“What did you just say?” said Brooklyn Kale from the backseat. “The media? What are you talking about, Lopez?”
“Exactly, Arturo,” said Doyle, sitting beside her. “When you open your mouth, it would be nice if you maybe made some sense from time to time.” Jimmy Doyle, another young cop from the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, had become my right-hand man.
“Use your brains, fools,” Arturo insisted. “The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention.
“Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.”
“So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn.
“How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.”
“Congrats, Arturo,” Doyle said as we skidded to a stop in the driveway of the Haven Avenue building’s underground parking garage. “I think you actually might have made your first-ever good point.”
“Shut up, people, please,” I said, turning up my radio as a just-arriving NYPD helicopter swooped in from the south and hovered over the building.
“There’s something on the east side of the building,” the pilot said after a minute. “It looks like some sort of a rifle.”
The ESU cops spilled out into the driveway and busted out their ballistic riot shields and submachine guns. We stayed behind them as we went across the pavement toward the side door of the building. Having neither the time nor the inclination to find and ask the super for the key, the ESU breach team unhesitatingly cracked the door open with a battering ram.
After dismissing the elevators as dangerous because of potential tampering, the ESU guys left a small contingent in the new building’s sleek marble lobby as the rest split up into the building’s two stairwells.
My team and I followed the ESU team in the north stairwell. Despite being pumped up with adrenaline, we had to stop twice for short breathers to get up the thirty-two floors.
We were the first team there. An alarm went off as the lead ESU guy hit the roof door, and we were out in the suddenly cool air with the roaring, hovering NYPD Bell helicopter right there almost on top of us. The pilot pointed to the top of a little structure that housed the elevator equipment.
I ran across the tar paper to its ladder and climbed up and just stood there staring at it.
Chapter 21
I’d never seen anything like it before. I wasn’t an expert, but the long black rifle looked huge, like a sniper rifle, perhaps a .50 caliber. It was bolted into two strange, bulky stands that could have been motorized.
But the strangest thing was what was attached to the top of the rifle. Perched where the scope should have been was a bulky device about the size of a hardcover book that looked like a robotic owl. It had a single viewfinder in the sighting end and what looked like greenish-tinged binoculars in the front.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said ESU sergeant Terry Kelly as he arrived behind me.
“What the hell is it?”
The short, muscular cop spat some chewing tobacco as he knelt and carefully tilted the gun over on its side.
“One of those damn things!” he said. “On a .50-caliber Barrett! Of course. Why not? It’s like the training video said. Only a matter of time.”
“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” I said.
“We saw a Homeland Security video about this three weeks ago,” Kelly said. “See this scope thing on top? It’s a computerized targeting system. It has a laser range finder in front, like rich golf guys have to get exact distances.”
I nodded.
“Well, you get behind it and sight your target through the system’s long-range zooming video camera and just tag it with the laser. Then the computer calculates all the factors of the shot—the air density, Magnus effect, even target movement—and puts them through the computer. Then the computer—not you—robotically positions the gun and fires it.
“Anyone, a three-year-old child, can become a world-class sniper with it. All you have to do is tag the target. What am I saying? You don’t even have to be behind the gun! It has Wi-Fi.”
“So this was probably done remotely,” I said.
“Without a doubt,” he said. “Why expose yourself on a rooftop when all you have to do is set the gun up beforehand and just do it from cover? All you would need is to be within Wi-Fi range.”
“Call the other team and tell them to go straight to the top floor,” I told him. “We need to get the super up here and start searching every single apartment.”
We rushed off the roof and down onto the thirty-second floor and started banging on doors like it was Halloween for cops. Only three of the residents were home. After we were done searchin
g their apartments, the super, a tall, middle-aged guy who looked like a stoner, finally showed up in a brown bathrobe, holding a set of keys.
“Listen, man,” he said, “I’m still waiting to hear back from the management office. I don’t even know if I should be letting you into people’s apartments. Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“Tune in, bro,” Kelly yelled in his face. “While you were busy watching Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the mayor just got blown away with a rifle we found on your roof.”
“What? Okay, okay. Give me a second,” he said, fumbling with the keys.
One by one, we searched seven apartments, but there was nothing.
“What about this apartment?” I said to the super. “Where’s the key?”
“Uh…that one’s vacant,” the stoner said. “It’s for sale, so I don’t have the key. The management company has it, I think.”
“Don’t worry about the key,” said Kelly as he led the way, holding the battering ram. “Fortunately, we brought our own.”
The ESU men blasted open the door of 32J and rushed inside.
When they gave the all-clear and we went in, the first thing I noticed was the shattered living room window. The second was the skinny guy with a gray ponytail sprawled out in front of the kitchen’s breakfast bar with the top of his head missing. There was an iPad beside him.
I turned and looked west, out through the broken window at the Hudson.
On the Jersey side of the river, about a mile away, there was another high-rise.
Where someone else had shot the mayor’s shooter with another computerized rifle, I thought. I would have bet my paycheck on it.
This isn’t good, I thought as I radioed aviation to hit the roof of the building on the Jersey side to see what they could see.