“We got it!” The shout came from the kitchen. Cole’s heart was racing. He felt sick to his stomach. He heard the words in his head again: “Chaos eats everything.” What happened to them in India? Cole thought. He looked over into the kitchen. Three of the officers were standing around the kitchen table, staring at the laptop. “It’s all here,” one of them said. “We fucking got it.”
Cole looked back up at Shiva. He knew there was more in his head, but he had no interest in going back into that memory. He wasn’t sure how it would help now anyway. They had a bomb to stop.
Cole walked into the kitchen and looked at the laptop. The police were staring at a map of a park in New York. There were other files, Word documents and more pictures, in the same folder. They opened up one of the documents. Cole glanced at it. He saw a date and a time. The date was today. The time was less than six hours away. It all lined up. “What if it’s a lie?” he asked the men sitting around the table.
“What if it’s not?” one of them answered him.
The head of the unit chimed in. “We’ll keep searching, but right now this is the only lead we have and we’ve got to work it. We need to move fast.”
“Okay, I’m in,” Cole said, glancing back up at the statue of Shiva one more time.
“How can you help?” the unit head asked. It was a practical question, not meant as an insult.
“I think I might know why she’s doing it,” Cole answered. Cole knew that he was stretching the truth. The motive wasn’t religious. The statue of Shiva was a symbolic trinket for them. And it wasn’t nihilism. Cole could feel love in his memories. It was something else. He needed to find out what. He needed to find out how dangerous the memories in his head were. “If I can get to her, if I can talk to her, I think I can help. I think she’ll talk to me.” He believed that to be true.
Chapter 32
TWO HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING
Cole kept going over everything in his head. April had left enough information in her apartment for them to piece everything together. She was planning on setting off her bomb in the middle of Bryant Park at one o’clock that afternoon, at the exact date and time Cole had remembered. At that time on a Sunday, Bryant Park would be full of families, full of children. The plan was meant to dwarf the impact of Faith’s attack at the mall. The device, the suicide vest, was similar, but April was planning her attack for an open area that would be far more crowded. By plotting her attack outside, she would do less damage to a building and more damage to human bodies, human tissue, and human life. No walls would stop the shrapnel that would explode out of her vest once she pressed the button. The only thing that would stop the mix of screws and metal would be a few trees, a few garbage cans, and a mass of human flesh. Faith’s attack at the mall had been a mere warmup. The casualty estimations that Cole heard being thrown around were between twenty people and two hundred, depending on the potency of the vest and April’s location when she set the bomb off.
April had thought this through. By doing it out in the open, she made it incredibly hard to devise a plan to sneak up on her. Bryant Park fills one square block in the middle of Manhattan. On one side of the park is the New York Public Library. On the other side is an area with a bar and outdoor games for kids. A large lawn lies in the middle where, on nice days, families go for picnics and people stretch out on the grass and read. The lawn is surrounded by tree-shaded tables and chairs where people can sit with a drink or a book. On one side of the lawn there is a carousel for small children. It plays bittersweet French organ music as it spins, though the music isn’t loud enough to drown out the screams and laughter of the riding children.
“So you understand the plan?” Officer Greco asked him again.
“Yeah,” Cole answered. Officer Greco was in charge. He looked the part, his blue SWAT jacket sending signals of authority in every direction. Greco was in charge, but everything that was going to happen depended on Cole. It was too late to try to stop April before she got into the park. They had decided they were better off securing the park and approaching her inside it, rather than risk having her detonate the bomb on the way to the park as soon as she got suspicious. They were hoping they could move a significant number of people out of the park without her noticing, though they knew that it would be impossible to clear it out completely. The only way to save everyone would be to stop her from detonating the bomb.
“Let’s go over it again,” Greco said. They were in the back of a squad car together, speeding down the West Side Highway toward midtown. They wouldn’t drive the car anywhere near Bryant Park. They were merely using it to get them close.
“You have snipers on the roofs of all of the surrounding buildings,” Cole said. Officer Greco nodded. “They’ll be looking for the bomber. If they see her, you’ll tell me where she is.”
“That’s right. We’ll get you the earpiece before you walk into the park. Nobody will be able to see it.”
“Once you’ve located her, I’m supposed to slowly make my way toward her.”
Greco nodded again. “We’ll watch her. If we have an opening to take her out without any risk that she’ll blow the bomb, we’ll take it. The problem is, if she’s got her finger anywhere near the trigger, then any shot we take would have to be perfect. If we hit the bomb, it could go off on its own. If we hit her when she’s holding the trigger, she could press it. If we hit her when she’s not holding the trigger but don’t kill her, she could reach for it and press it. So what do we need?”
“Time,” Cole answered. In other situations, he might have been offended by being spoken to like he was in grade school, but in these circumstances he actually found it comforting. “You’ve been in situations like this before?” Cole asked Officer Greco.
“I have,” Greco answered him. “Just not on this continent.” The city zipped by them. Cole stared out the window, watching the buildings fly by as he listened to Officer Greco. “So we need time. Why do we need time?” the officer asked Cole.
“To move as many people out of the park as we can without her noticing,” Cole answered. He was doing his best to focus only on the mission at hand, to bat away the random memories that popped into his head.
“That’s right. We’re going to start wide, and slowly move our way in, but the closer we get to her, the more likely she is to notice that people are disappearing. We’ll do what we can, but there’s no way to evacuate everyone. If that bomb goes off, dozens of people are going to die, including you. That’s where you come in.” Cole nodded. “You’re sure about this?” Officer Greco asked.
“Yes,” Cole lied. He had convinced them all that he could talk April out of going through with it. The truth was, he simply wanted to talk to her, and no one had come up with a better plan in the short amount of time that they had. Cole thought that talking to April might trigger Faith’s memories and that he could use Faith’s memories to stop her.
The only other plan that anyone had come up with was to simply shoot her and hope that the shot was true enough. Cole’s plan, as simple as it was, didn’t add any risk to the people in the park. The snipers would still take the shot when they had to. Cole’s plan added risk to only one person: Cole. While they were slowly moving as many people away from the bomber as they could, Cole would be walking toward her.
They drove down a street full of restaurants serving the Broadway matinee crowd: Italian, Thai, Indian, Brazilian, Mexican. The sidewalk was littered with people. None of them were in danger even though they were only a few blocks away from what could be, at any moment, pure carnage.
“You really think you can talk her out of this?” Officer Greco asked again. Cole could hear the skepticism in his voice. Cole knew that he was trying to gauge how sure Cole was because he wanted to know how quickly his men should pull the trigger.
Cole nodded. “I have her friend’s memories in my head.” He didn’t bother to tell anyone that he’d barely been able to remember any of those memories. He wished that he sounded more confiden
t. He didn’t want to die.
“Okay,” Greco said to him, “as long as you realize that we can’t protect you. If we have the shot or if we think we need to take the shot, we’re taking the shot. The way you can help us? Convince her to keep her hand away from the bomb’s trigger. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Cole said. He got it.
It was a beautiful day. The bright sun hung high in the sky, shooting rays of light down between the tops of the tallest skyscrapers. The air was warm and dry. It was, quite simply, the perfect day to lounge around in the park.
Cole’s walk began three blocks west of Bryant Park. They attached his earpiece and sent him on his way. Undercover police officers would work their way to the park from different directions, slowly moving people away from the park and cordoning off the perimeter so that no one new could get any closer to the bomber. They’d already closed the two nearest subway stops. Cole imagined the anger of the riders as the trains careened past their intended stops without telling them why. Technical difficulties. Cole figured that’s what they would call it. That’s what they always called it. Yeah, the difficulty of trying to keep you from getting yourself technically blown up.
As Cole walked toward the park, he tried to imagine what he was going to say to April. He’d known as soon as he saw her picture that he had memories of her in his head. He’d seen her image in his dreams but had never had a coherent memory of her, since most of Faith’s memories were still so vague to him. All of them, in fact, except for the morning of the bombing: those memories that were more robotic than human. He knew he had to break that. He had to make Faith feel human again.
Cole entered the park at its northwest corner, right at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. The park was teeming with people. If they’d started moving people out yet, Cole couldn’t tell. He stepped up the stairs. He was in the middle of Manhattan, surrounded by people of every color and every shape and size. He couldn’t have counted the number of children if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. For a second, his mind flipped back to the memory of the children running around the mall in Queens before the explosion. Cole pushed the memory away. Skyscrapers towered around him. He looked up at them to see if he could spot any of the snipers that were supposed to be surrounding the park. He didn’t see anything. He figured that was probably for the best. “Keep your eyes down,” a voice spoke into Cole’s ear. “There’s no need to draw any attention up toward us.”
Cole didn’t answer, though he knew they would be able to hear him if he did. He didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself. Instead, he kept on walking, brushing past the crowds of people coming and going. At the top of the steps, he took one long scan of the park. To his left, people were sitting in the shade, drinking coffee and reading books. To his right, others were sitting at an outdoor bar, laughing and having an early Sunday drink. Behind them, he could see a group of kids playing miniature golf on a small putting green, and some other game that he’d never seen before, where they tried to knock down wooden pegs with other wooden pegs. Past the putting green was the carousel, spinning pleasantly, full of smiling children, and beyond that, kids and grownups were playing chess and other board games on small green tables. In front of him were the fountain and the lawn. Cole did a quick count and guessed that there had to be more than a hundred people spread out on the lawn, resting under the warm afternoon sun, and another thirty sitting around the fountain. All the sounds that he heard around him collapsed into a pleasant din of meaningless conversation and sporadic laughter.
Cole didn’t see April. At first, he was relieved. Then a wave of panic hit him. What if they were at the wrong place? What if all of her clues were a setup? What if she was somewhere else, about to set off a bomb, and no one was there to try to stop her? All the panic went away when Cole heard a crackle in his ear. “We’ve spotted her.” Cole began visually searching the crowd again. “She’s sitting alone on the south side of the lawn, roughly at the midpoint, in front of the board game area.” Cole slowed his visual search down. Then he saw her. She was sitting on the grass with her legs crossed. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was wearing large sunglasses. She had a sweatshirt on, a far warmer sweatshirt than was needed on an afternoon like this. She almost looked like she was meditating.
“I see her,” Cole said, as if speaking to himself. A flash of recognition burst into his brain. He was with her. They were jogging together around the Central Park reservoir. They were talking about their trip to India. They were talking about seeing someone there.
“We’ve evacuated the surrounding blocks,” the voice echoed into Cole’s ear, interrupting the memory. “We’re going to start pulling people out of the park. It won’t be long before she could notice the thinning crowd. It’s your turn, Cole.” Cole gave a little nod, confident that they were watching him. “God help you.” It wasn’t God that Cole was counting on, though. It was the memories of a murderer, the memories of a woman in her mid-twenties who, for some reason, decided to blow herself up and kill a whole bunch of people when she did it.
Cole began to walk toward April. His mind again ran back to the memories of that morning in the mall, to that feeling of not being human any more. Cole didn’t feel that way. With every step, he felt more human. He looked at the children playing around him. How could they do this? What had broken inside of them to turn them into these monsters? Cole wanted answers to those questions, but he also wanted to know if whatever broke them was inside of him too and, if it was, whether or not he would be able to fight it off. Cole looked at April’s hands. They were both jammed into her lap, pulled halfway into the sleeves of her sweatshirt. He couldn’t tell if she was holding the detonator in her hand or not, but her fingers were not moving.
Cole was only a few feet from April when she looked up at him. She seemed calm. Cole wished that he found that reassuring. He knew that, with one wrong look or word or movement, his body would be torn into thousands of little pieces along with the bodies of dozens of the people around him. As he neared her, she looked up into his face. Cole saw her finger twitch ever so slightly but not enough to cause an explosion. Cole hadn’t put too much thought into how he was going to introduce himself. He worried that anything too rehearsed would risk setting her off. If he wanted to make her feel human, he had to be honest.
Cole took a deep breath. His heart was racing in his chest. “Don’t you have doubts?” He asked April as she looked up at him.
“Excuse me?” April answered, apparently caught off guard by the question.
“Don’t you at least want to know how it all turns out in the end?” Cole kept watching April’s finger. He knew that they would be watching it too, the men with the guns in the sky.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” April sounded only slightly nervous now.
“Faith had doubts,” Cole told the aspiring bomber. He was bluffing, attributing his own doubts to Faith. Cole couldn’t believe that someone could do what she did without having at least some doubts, but he hadn’t remembered any. “They didn’t go away. She had them up until the moment the bomb ripped through her body. She tried to turn herself off, but the doubts persisted until the end.”
“How would you know what Faith felt?”
“I remember,” Cole told her. “I have her memories. They survived the bombing. Yours will too, if anybody wants them. The bomb rips through your body but it leaves your head pretty much intact.”
“Why you?”
“Because I’m a cop,” Cole answered her. “They wanted to know why she did it.”
“And now you’ve come to try to stop me,” April said. Her voice was confident now. She turned her hand over and showed Cole the wire running up her sleeve and the small red button in her palm.
“How could I stop you?” Cole answered her. He showed her his empty hands and patted his own empty pockets for her.
“Don’t try to wrestle this away from me,” April said, showing him the detonation tri
gger. For the first time, Cole noticed that her finger was already pressing down on the button. His heart began to race. “I modified it,” she told him. “See?” She waved the depressed little red button in front of his face. “Instead of the bomb going off when I press the button, the bomb goes off when I release it.”
“Did you expect someone to come and try to stop you?” Cole asked her.
“No,” April answered. “I did it this way so that it would be harder to stop myself, in case I had doubts.”
“You could always disable the bomb. You built it. You should know how.”
“With one hand?” April smiled at him. The sunlight lit up her face. She really was a very clever woman.
“So, do you have doubts?” Cole asked her.
“No,” she said. She was telling the truth. Cole could hear the truth in her tone of voice.
“Then what are you waiting for?” Cole asked her.
April looked around her. Cole followed her stare. They were still surrounded by plenty of people. The evacuation hadn’t gotten close enough yet to be noticeable. “I wanted to give them a little more time,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful day.”
“You could give them more time than that,” Cole replied to her odd comment. “You could give them days, years. All you have to do is keep your finger on that button.”
“No,” April said, her voice suddenly turning harsh and cold. “They don’t deserve that long.” She reached up and took her sunglasses off with her free hand. Her eyes were the darkest blue Cole had ever seen. “If you really had Faith’s memories, you’d know that.”
“I really do have her memories,” Cole answered her, “but they’ve only come to me in pieces. I can clearly remember the bombing, but everything else is in flashes and nightmares. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I can remember the day of the bombing but I can’t remember why Faith did it. I want to know why. Why did she do it? Why are you doing it?”
The Murderer's Memories Page 20