“Why?”
“Could you just not question me for once?”
Georgia obeyed as Marenko released the emergency brake and turned over the engine. The rumble of the diesel and the hiss and pop of the air brakes startled her. Johnny, the chauffeur, took a moment to process what was happening. He did a double take as Marenko slammed the cab door shut.
“Hey, what the—?”
“I owe you one, brother,” Marenko called to him. “I’ll take the heat.” Johnny banged on the side and cursed as the truck inched past him onto First Avenue. Traffic was at a crawl, but they had the advantage of being in an emergency vehicle. Marenko pulled into the fire lane, then asked Georgia to flip the lights and sirens. He had to point out where they were. The burns on his back made him grit his teeth when he lifted his arm.
“I was in the department’s chauffeur school when I got made a marshal,” Marenko explained. “Even with my injuries, I figure I can still drive this baby.”
“Mac, this is crazy. You could get fired for this.”
“Hey, I owe you my life. Least I can do is let you screw it up. Besides, even if that dispatcher doesn’t call in the rigs, every cop and fire truck in Manhattan’s gonna be at Saint Pat’s to bust my ass.”
Marenko turned up the department radio and nodded with satisfaction as a stream of information flew across the airwaves. “You see?” he said. “They’re sending our guys to evacuate Saint Pat’s. Your mother and Richie will get out of there. Don’t worry.”
Marenko leaned on the horn as they tore through red lights and down sidestreets double-parked with rush-hour cabs, limos, and buses. The dispatcher called out the time: 10:46 A.M. They got as close as the corner of East Fifty-first Street, across from Rockefeller Center and the great golden statue of Atlas with the world on his shoulders.
Already the scene was a mess. Police barricades were being set up to block off Fifth Avenue. An NYPD cruiser, in its zeal to beat out the fire department, had collided with a taxi, blocking traffic on East Fiftieth Street. Swarms of civilians streamed like ants from the church vestibule doors, spilling onto the steps and the street. Even if the NYPD had dispatched the bomb squad immediately, Georgia suddenly realized, there would be no way for them to get through this gridlock in time.
She looked up at the great white marble cathedral, spread out over an area larger than a football field. There wasn’t a wisp of smoke or flame in sight. God, she hoped this wasn’t another one of Finney’s “games.” Then again, maybe she hoped it was.
“I can’t park any closer,” Marenko apologized, wincing as he repositioned himself across the wheel. His skin looked clammy and gray. Fresh blood had begun to ooze through his sweatshirt. “I’ll come with you.”
“No.” She brushed her fingers across his face. “You need to get back to the hospital.” She stepped down from the rig. “Mac, I—”
He waved her away. “Go find your kid.”
The sidewalks were already clogged with people, the curbs with dozens of double-parked emergency vehicles and clusters of firefighters and cops trying to keep order. Some of the brass were probably still inside, a fact that would further complicate the chain of command.
Georgia looked at the faces coming out of the church now. Hundreds of people were already out of the building, pressing at her from all sides. A drop in the bucket, she realized. Even if the twenty-four hundred attendees streamed out of every door three abreast, it could take at least twenty minutes to completely evacuate. They didn’t have twenty minutes. It was ten-forty-seven.
She pushed through the crowd to the command post on Fifth Avenue, opposite the front doors of the cathedral. Chief Greco, in a starched white shirt and blue dress uniform, was pacing, the medals across his breast pocket gleaming in the late-morning sun. He had obviously planned to attend the mass and was saved only by the fact that he was running late. His aide, conferring with officers on his handie-talkie, stared at Georgia with reproach. She’d forgotten how much she looked like a street person.
“I know I don’t look like it, but I’m Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan,” she told the aide. “I called in the alarm.”
Greco walked over, then narrowed his gaze as the full weight of who she was and what she’d done began to sink in. “Skeehan”—he looked about nervously—“as if this department hasn’t had a bad enough week already.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Negative. And I’ve got uniformed personnel inside, searching. The bomb squad can’t get within ten blocks of this gridlock. Con Ed’s deploying an emergency foot crew to shut down the power forthwith.” In other words, immediately, thought Georgia, stifling the urge to roll her eyes. Even in a crisis, Greco was still a bureaucrat.
She suddenly remembered her conversation with Suarez by Finney’s burning car. “Chief? Finney’s a painting contractor. My guys think he delivered the fuel for his other firebombs inside five-gallon plastic spackling buckets. Can you ask the men to see if they can locate any?”
“Affirmative,” said Greco. Behind him, at the bronze vestibule doors, two firefighters lifted a woman in a wheelchair down the front steps. A crowd surged behind them, some with disheveled hair, some screaming in panic and trying to shove their way past the bottleneck.
Georgia turned to Greco now. “My son and mother were in there, too. Is there some way to confirm if they’ve made it out?”
The chief started. He hadn’t realized this was personal. His handlebar mustache twitched, and his normally bewildered expression dissolved into a kind of awkward embarrassment. He suddenly lost the nerve to look her in the eye.
“We’ve initiated a CRC,” he said, then caught her blank look and checked himself. “A civilian rendezvous checkpoint. But a lot of people have simply gone home.”
“Can you radio over there?” Georgia prodded. “See if my mother and son are there?”
Chief Greco nodded to his aide, who tried to make radio contact. As Georgia stood waiting, she spotted a little girl in a white bonnet standing to one side of the church steps, enduring the crush of adults, crying for her mother in a sea of legs. Georgia leaped over the barricade and picked up the crying child.
“It’s all right. We’ll find your mom,” she cooed, then motioned for Greco’s aide to radio the child’s description to the post as well.
The aide frowned. Georgia thought it was because he resented taking “orders” from a rookie marshal. But his eyes looked more frightened than annoyed. “You, ah…better get over to the CRC yourself,” the aide stammered. “The captain there has a firefighter’s widow with the same last name who can’t find her grandson.”
Georgia dashed out of the command post and pushed through the crowds until she found her mother behind a cordon of firefighters, looking pale and disoriented.
“I had his hand…I had it,” Margaret sobbed. “People kept running and pushing and I couldn’t hold on…”
“Richie’s still in there?” Georgia staggered back against the barricade. Her head buzzed. Her insides felt as cold and hard as marble.
“I’m not sure,” said Margaret, wiping her tears. “He’s not with the paramedics. Jimmy insisted on going back inside.”
“Jimmy’s looking for him?”
“Of course,” her mother said, a puzzled look on her face. “If anyone can help—”
“Don’t talk to me about help!” Georgia screamed. “I’m going in.”
“You can’t. They won’t let you—”
“I’m not asking.” She ducked under a barricade and walked past a line of fire trucks. In the back of one, some overheated firefighter had carelessly tossed his turnout coat, along with his handie-talkie. Georgia grabbed the coat and slipped it on, shoving the handie-talkie in a pocket. Voices crackled across the rig’s radio in the cab compartment up front.
“Field communications to Manhattan, Chief Greco requests mixer off.”
There was only one message that would cause the chief to request the mixer off in such a tense situation.
Someone had found the device.
Georgia crawled under a second set of barricades near the north-side doors of the cathedral and pushed against the crowds tumbling onto the sidewalk. The press of bodies was frightening. Firefighters had been asked to stay inside until everyone else was evacuated, and for the most part, they had. But in their zeal to get their families out, people had formed a bottleneck at the doors, trampling one another under a sea of legs.
Inside, sunlight turned shadowy and otherworldly. Panicked voices echoed off the marble arches like the tortured laments of the damned. Blank-eyed saints stood sentry, their hands raised as if passing final judgment, their silhouettes ghoulishly outlined in the ever-shifting flicker of votive candles.
Hymn books, coats, and prayer cards were strewn across the aisles. Lumpy bagpipes lay in heaps on the ground, like roadkill. Georgia could almost hear their plaintive wail.
She searched behind statues, in confessionals, and under pews for Richie. Every cry, every terrified face made her heart burst with expectation. But she couldn’t find him. She was not a praying woman, but she prayed now—prayed that Finney had gotten it wrong, prayed that her son had gotten out, prayed that Con Ed could work some kind of miracle by shutting off the power.
Georgia heard a soft sobbing behind one of the statues and looked down with a brief stab of anticipation. But it wasn’t Richie. Instead, a young Latino mother was cradling an infant, mumbling prayers through her tears. Georgia squatted before her.
“You’re not going to die,” she said, lifting the baby from her arms. Then she yelled across to a firefighter helping civilians out one of the doors.
“Start a chain!”
The firefighter was young, freckle-faced, and wide-eyed with fear. Probably not unlike Sean Duffy the night of the Howard Beach fire, Georgia surmised. He was a few feet from the exit. It would’ve been so easy for him to bolt. But he stood firm, his lips pressed together—steeling himself for the worst—and reached out his arms to retrieve the infant over the heads of the crowd.
“We’ll get the baby,” he promised.
The infant was screaming now as Georgia passed it through a sea of hands until at last it was in the firefighter’s arms.
“My baby! My baby!” the woman cried.
“You’re next,” said Georgia. “Help me lift you onto my shoulders.”
“Bless you! Bless you!” she said as she climbed on top of Georgia’s turnout coat and scrambled over people’s heads to the exit, where she was safely reunited with her baby.
I can’t save them all. I can’t even save my own son, thought Georgia now as she looked up to the choir loft forty feet above the front entrance of the church. Three middle-aged men in dress uniforms were peering intently at something near the main organ. Georgia made out the rosacea-scarred face of the man in the center. Chief Brennan. She recognized the other two—a bald man and another with a shock of white hair—as high-ranking staff chiefs from headquarters. They’ve found the device.
She raced to a stone spiral staircase in the north vestibule, then stopped short at the top. A cold, bare bulb from a construction lamp shone brightly from its wire-mesh cage, backlighting the three men, raking their monstrous shadows across the wall. The real monster at their feet looked timid by comparison: six five-gallon buckets once filled, according to their labels, with spackling compound. All white plastic. All labeled with a logo that read ACE HARDWARE. They were lined up inconspicuously on the wood plank floor near an arc welder’s grip and face mask. Only the thick, sinewy strands of copper wire protruding from the buckets and snaking along the door frame gave any hint of the danger lurking within.
The gleaming copper wire, braided like rope, was stripped of all insulation and tacked along the door frame, then poked through a hole in the wall, presumably attached to a power source—traceable, if you had an hour. But not traceable in nine minutes. It was now ten-fifty-one. Georgia could already see the events as they were about to unfold.
Somewhere inside these buckets, there had to be a timer. At eleven A.M., the timer would complete its circuit. Electricity already humming through the copper wires would spark fuses in the buckets.
But that jolt of power, however intense, couldn’t burn a solid metal fuel like HTA, she reasoned. It was the same principle that explained why a match touched to a log wouldn’t incinerate the log. Georgia guessed that Finney had poured a layer of diesel fuel or kerosene over the granular mixture. Once sparked, the fuel vapors inside the buckets would burn rapidly, and the heat would ignite the HTA.
She studied the six buckets now. Each could carry five gallons—about fifty pounds—of what was essentially solid rocket fuel. Three hundred pounds in all. The combination of chemicals and sealed containers made the device not only extremely flammable, but highly explosive as well. It could take under a minute for such a mixture to topple the cathedral’s three-hundred-and-thirty-foot twin spires across Fifth Avenue—and little more than that to send flames skyrocketing forty feet in the air. Not a lot of difference between this and the fertilizer bomb at Oklahoma City, except that this would burn as well as explode.
The three high-ranking chiefs before her recognized the danger, too. Beads of sweat glistened across their brows. The chief with the shock of white hair hoisted a fire extinguisher and attempted to spray the uninsulated copper wire with water. Georgia knew what he was trying to do—submerse the wire in enough water to short it out. But the spray merely sizzled as it dripped down the vertical strands and pooled on the plank floor. Everyone stepped back. Touching the bare wires, especially in water, would be suicide. Even if the wires could be ripped from the buckets, anyone who even attempted would be fatally electrocuted before he could succeed.
Brennan noticed Georgia now. His blotchy, pitted face was grave and stony. “What are you, Skeehan? My purgatory? I’ve not only got to die, I’ve got to suffer you before I go?” He turned his back to her and spoke into his handie-talkie.
“Brennan to Greco: Is Con Ed here yet? K.” From the looks of it, Finney’s device appeared to run solely on electrical power—probably because Finney wanted a big jolt to maximize the bomb’s speed and efficiency.
“Con Ed has rendezvoused,” Greco radioed back. Brennan made a face. He was no fan of Greco-speak, either, it seemed. “They’re terminating power at street level forthwith. Stand by. K.”
The bodies of the chiefs slumped with visible relief. If Con Ed could shut the juice to the building, there’d be no spark to start a flame. Plus, the stripped copper wiring—the device’s ignition-delivery system—could be handled and removed. And not a moment too soon. It was now ten-fifty-four. They had six minutes.
54
The two staff chiefs began to radio fire officers in the nave. News spread across the crowd. People crossed themselves and prayed as the air system shut down and the amber chandeliers winked out. Quiet cries of relief reverberated through the cathedral, now lit only by filtered light through stained glass windows and votive candles at the altars.
Georgia scanned the nervous faces below her, hoping to see Richie’s. But he wasn’t there. He must have gotten out, she told herself. He must have.
Suddenly, Brennan let out a string of expletives. She turned, noticing for the first time that the light in the choir loft was too bright to be pouring in from the twenty-six-foot stained-glass rose window behind her. And then she saw it—the bulb in the construction lamp dangling from a rafter above the men. It was still burning.
“What the—?” the bald staff chief exclaimed. He grabbed the thick black insulated electrical cord running from the base of the bulb and began snaking it through the loft. But it, too, disappeared into a space in the wall. Firefighters and civilians in the nave saw the bulb now. A murmur of panic rose through the crowd. The light attracted attention outside as well. Greco came back on the radio.
“Greco to Brennan: Where’s that light coming from? K.”
Georgia’s eyes scanned Finney’s uninsulated copper wiring and the arc wel
ding equipment near it. Her dad once borrowed some arc welding equipment to fix the wrought-iron railing along their front stoop. A friend in his firehouse loaned him a portable generator to supply the 250 amps needed to melt the iron. In arc welding, standard current is never enough.
“Chief?” Georgia ventured. “Finney may have hooked up his device to a backup generator the welders were using. It’s probably in the basement somewhere, running off a diesel engine.”
Brennan nodded at the logic. He got on the radio and immediately dispatched two fire companies to the basement of the cathedral to find the generator and shut it off. Then Brennan and the staff chiefs hustled down the stairs to supervise.
Georgia went to follow, but her attention was diverted by the sound of shattering glass. A group of panicked parishioners, sensing the bad news, had snagged a maintenance ladder and broken one of the stained-glass panels. A new surge of people raced toward it, clinging to the ladder and throwing themselves through the sharp glass, slicing up their arms and legs. Georgia scanned the mob of people with hungry eyes. Still no sign of her little boy.
Brennan’s voice crackled over the department radio. He was speaking to Chief Greco. A midtown ladder company had found the backup generator, but it was locked against theft in a tamperproof steel cage. Like an airline pilot, Brennan spoke in a tone that betrayed none of the panic he had to be feeling. Firefighters were trying to break the lock, Brennan reported to the chief. Georgia shook her head at the irony. The contractor was probably on the street somewhere with the key. But even if he explained who he was, the young, overzealous cops on duty already had strict orders not to let anybody inside. It would take too long to get clearance.
It was now ten-fifty-six, and many firefighters—memorial service attendees and guys on duty—were still inside, knowing full well what price they might pay for staying to help the hundreds of civilians remaining.
And how will we die? Georgia wondered as she stared up at the muted prisms of blue light filtering through the stained-glass windows of the clerestory. Will there be a burst of white-hot flame and an end of consciousness? Will the fire rise up slowly, choking off our air as we struggle over one another for the door? She hadn’t been in a church since she was a kid. And now she was going to die in one.
The Fourth Angel Page 30