The Event

by McBride, Michael

  “I’m on it.”

  He cursed as he typed on the keyboard. The gloves of his isolation suit made it challenging to hit the right keys. Fortunately, he wore his Bluetooth earpiece under his helmet so he could at least stay in contact with his team, manning their stations back on the 23rd floor at Federal Plaza.

  Lawton tried to think about this logically. This location had been chosen for one specific reason without any consideration for price. To the east were the tunnels and the ferries to Brooklyn and beyond. To the west, the NYSE, where the refrigerated trucks were beginning their mass migration toward the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner near the NYU School of Medicine, where it would take positively months to decontaminate, autopsy, and embalm so many casualties. There would be families who might not be able to bury fathers and husbands and mothers and wives until the ground was frozen and covered in snow, a thought that was almost surreal beneath the blazing sun and inside of the sweltering isolation suit. She was beginning to think she might actually have a chance to drown in her own sweat.

  That left the north and the south as her primary focuses, but surely not directly in either direction. Their guy would need to turn down another block so as to prevent someone from seeing him walk straight into this apartment from any of the office windows, which further narrowed her search to the northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest.

  There had to be something she was missing. She could feel it. But what could it possibly be?

  All of these kids…they’d been manipulated and used as weapons to create times of panic and indecision on the stock market so that someone could make an inordinate amount of money. So where was that money? The individual investors were myriad and too many to consider actual suspects, and their financial returns, while significant, were outside of their direct, or even their indirect, control. They’d merely invested in the ideas of a brokerage that had bought seemingly worthless stocks that had exploded in value over the course of years. They were low-risk investments with high predictive value. Those investors would have made significant returns regardless of the overnight sale and buyback in the wake of the following morning’s tragedy. Or if the stocks had tanked, their initial investments were so relatively small they would have served as nice tax write-offs to mitigate the capital gains on the returns from other high-yield stocks with more consistent returns. The key was who made the lion’s share of the money from that one single event? If she was forced to admit that it wasn’t Lloyd, then that left the brokers themselves, and Hargrove’s meltdown, if nothing else, had revealed that his actions were being controlled by someone else: This wasn’t supposed to happen. They promised. They fucking promised me!

  And even Hargrove’s personal accounts hadn’t shown an absurd amount of money being funneled into them. The only entity that had demonstrated huge returns was the corporate entity of first Webster & Lloyd and then Global Capital Management. And that was because their commission came right off the top. To keep sudden and enormous profits from being realized, all whoever was responsible would have needed to do was leave the money in the market, translate it into a low volume of high-cost, steady-return funds or money market accounts, or even shuffle the money into other international markets, and then wait to pull it all out in one gigantic chunk when no one was looking because they were too distracted by—

  “The mass casualty event at the stock exchange itself,” she finished out loud.

  The buildings started to spin around her as the brilliance of the scheme fell together.

  Every broker who physically worked within shouting distance of the NYSE was now dead, either felled on the market floor, outside of the building, or in the surrounding offices. So many had died that it would take days to identify all of them and separate them from the tourists and the workers who staffed their offices and the businesses that serviced them: the restaurants and security firms and newsstands and shops of all kind. Meanwhile, someone whose remains should have been counted among the dead wouldn’t be, and it would take them days to figure out who should have been at the NYSE that morning, but wasn’t. And that person would use those days to cash out the enormous fortune he’d been juggling from account to account and from domestic to foreign markets while every law enforcement agency chased its tails around the metaphorical rubble of the largest free trade market in the world, a market that when all of the dust settled and all of the books were balanced would show exactly who was responsible. Unlike the previous tragedies, the opening of the market wasn’t delayed by a few measly hours, it was delayed indefinitely to postpone that revelation. And unlike before, the money wouldn’t be there when it opened again because there would be no buyback of the sold shares. All of the money would have been invested into one of the other international markets that were hours ahead, and then cashed out sometime before the close of the business day.

  She looked up at the hands of the giant clock on the building cattycorner across the street.

  Noon.

  One hundred and eighty minutes post-event.

  London was the closest market, geographically, and it had already been closed for half an hour.

  The money was long gone.

  “Lawton!” Badgett called. He appeared almost frantic when he waved her over.

  She ran to the passenger door, leaned through the open window, and looked at his computer screen.

  “We have forty-three former employees of the various incarnations of Webster & Lloyd and GCM working within that radius. They’re all plotted on this map.”

  “Narrow it from a three-block radius to two.”

  He typed some keys and the map of the Financial District shrunk to a grid of roughly sixteen square blocks.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Eliminate all businesses and properties with line-of-sight approach to this building.”

  “Down to twelve.”

  “Eliminate the outermost four corners.”

  “Eight.”

  “Give me the list.”

  His phone chirped.

  “Hang on a sec.”

  He answered it, grunted a response, thanked the caller, and hung up.

  “We have the video surveillance from across the street.”

  He tapped the keys again and the map was replaced by a video screen, in the center of which was a recording thirty-two seconds in length. He pressed the play button and she saw the view from the window, only reversed. The hot tub and table were the main focus of the recording. Behind them, the shrubs framed the building across the street. Dozens of distant windows, none of them particularly clear, all of them reflecting the façade of the building from which the footage was gleaned. She picked out the window through which she’d been looking minutes prior and watched it for the sign of movement she knew had to be there. She was rewarded with a shifting of the shadows behind it, and then the recording ended.

  “Useless,” she said.

  “Have a little faith, will you?”

  He isolated the frame where she had seen movement and began the process of digitally manipulating it. Zoom. Highlight. Tweak the focus. Sharpen the contrast and lighting. Refocus. De-pixelate. When he was done, he gestured to the screen with a flourish.

  “Voila.”

  Lawton gasped and recoiled as if she’d been struck.

  “Well, what do you—?”

  “The list! Bring up the goddamn list!”

  “Easy, okay? Just let me save this first.”

  More typing and the image Lawton recognized all too well was replaced by a list of eight names, addresses, and their current employers.

  She saw exactly what she expected to see.

  She sprinted around the hood. Climbed in. Slammed the door.

  One hundred and eighty-four minutes post-event.

  “Buckle up.”

  Lawton cranked the ignition, pinned the gas, and with the squeal of tires, launched the Crown Vic northward on Pearl Street.

  Twelve

  Staten Island Ferry

  Wh
itehall Terminal

  New York, New York

  September 30th

  One Year Ago

  Chaos.

  Lawton fought through the throngs with her badge at arm’s length in front of her like a battering ram. There were people everywhere. Crying. Screaming. Consoling each other. Jostling and fighting to get a better view of Upper New York Bay. Some held each other, while others held up cell phones to try to take videos of the disaster over the heads of the crowds swarming the overwhelmed police barricades. The great glass Whitehall Terminal teemed with people, but Lawton managed to squirm through sideways and battled her way against the flow of panicked men and women—soaked to the bone and black with soot and ash—flooding up the stairs. By the time she reached the ferry slip where the Coast Guard boat was moored, the last of the survivors had already been shuttled into the terminal.

  News choppers thupped overhead, buffeted by the omnipresent winds that assailed the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island, where the Hudson and East Rivers bled into the bay. A mist of flume whipped first one way, then the other, sapping her bangs to her forehead and cheeks. She raised her badge up above her head and shouted her name and agency affiliation until she worked her way through the staff of seamen, firemen, and various recruits whose ranks she identified by the bars on the collars of their navy blue fatigues. She caught sight of the horizontal blue and silver bars of a chief warrant officer and grabbed him by the arm.

  He whirled to face her with wide eyes that stood out like enormous white beacons from his soot-covered face. She could feel him shivering from his wet uniform and the abandonment of the flood of adrenaline that had fueled him. She had to shout into his face to be heard over the riot of helicopters circling the ferry slip and the distant smear of smoke that churned in their rotor wash.

  “Lawton! FBI! Who’s in charge?”

  “Captain Brighton at Operations Command.”

  “On site.”

  “Lieutenant Cogsdale. That’s him over there.”

  He nodded in the direction of a man barking commands from the slip beside a forty-seven foot silver motor life boat with the flag on its tower snapping in the wind. He wore an orange and black helmet that was scuffed and scored to such a degree that it almost looked like he’d used his head to punch through the hull of the sinking vessel. Like all of the others, his face was black with soot, save for a smear of pink, abraded skin on his right temple and cheek. His features were indefinable.

  “Lieutenant!” she shouted.

  He held up a finger to indicate he’d be right with her.

  She stared across the choppy black water toward where the bright orange bow of the ferry still broke the surface about two miles offshore to the southeast, churning black smoke into the gray sky as fire barges doused it with water and the Coast Guard life boats circled the wreckage, drifting in and out of the smoke as they searched for survivors. And bodies. She couldn’t even see Governor’s Island through the haze.

  It had taken her maybe ten minutes to sprint through the crowds gathered on the streets and the stalled traffic clogging Broad and South Streets to get to the terminal from Lloyd’s office. Maybe another five to fight her way through the congested terminal itself. In all, it had been maybe fifteen minutes and already the massive vessel was nearly a memory. The ambulances and fire trucks hadn’t even arrived yet.

  “Lieutenant!”

  He disengaged from his subordinates and she shoved her badge into his face. He acknowledged it with a nod. If there was one thing they had all learned from the past horrors, it was that there were no jurisdictional lines when it came to tragedy.

  “Lawton. FBI. What happened here?”

  He wiped the sweat from his brow and smeared a bare streak across his left eye in the process.

  “The Global Maritime Distress Safety System was activated at 8:43 and we were on the horn with the captain via digital selective calling on the ship-to-ship VHF in a matter of seconds.” He spoke very formally, as though giving report to a commanding officer. “He identified the vessel as MV Brian Leetch, a Molinari class ship from the Staten Island Ferry Fleet. He reported what sounded like an explosion belowdecks and a loss of primary engine power. She started taking on water in a big hurry after that. We weren’t more than two minutes away and by the time we got there, we could hardly see a thing through the smoke. Just her bow standing from the water and people hurling themselves from her decks left and right. We started hauling them out of the water as fast as we could before the ship could suck them down with it.”

  “How many people were on board?”

  “St. George Terminal shows just over twenty-three hundred. And fifteen vehicles. Barely over half-capacity. If this had happened an hour and a half ago…”

  “How many casualties?”

  “Too soon to tell. We had private and merchant vessels coming in from everywhere to help. We’ve got boats dropping off survivors at every open dock from here to Sandy Hook and a full cutter yet to unload. According to the people I’ve talked to, the explosion came from somewhere near the stern, presumably from one of the cars in parking.”

  “They have video security down there?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “I need to see it.”

  “You’ll have to go through the DOT. And good luck getting through to them.”

  “They’re wired into the same global distress system, right?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t have an emergency response arm.”

  “But they own the ferries.”

  “Worth a try.”

  He led her up onto his boat and into the cabin. The radio spat a riot of voices resounding with tension bordering on panic and those of the rescue coordination center, which tried to reign them all in. Cogsdale ran through a half-dozen codes and identification signs before he finally got through to someone at the Department of Transportation while she watched the fire barges quench the flames still burning on the skein of spilled fuel through the front window.

  “I’ve got someone from maritime safety and security on the line. Thinks he can get you what you need.”

  “Thank you, lieutenant,” she said, and took the com.

  Their conversation was brief and far less confrontational than it could have been. The DOT obviously needed someone to take the blame to avoid the onslaught of lawsuits to come, and cooperation was the first step toward that end. It didn’t hurt that their director of maritime security took the attack on the MV Brian Leetch personally and wanted vengeance on the responsible party, albeit posthumously, as he’d seen the security recording from the car hold and said, “Whatever judgment this piece of shit faces will be before a court far higher than ours. Or in this kid’s case, far lower. May he burn in hell.”

  The words “this kid” resonated in her skull as she waited for him to transmit the digital recording to her cell phone and watched the last hint of the Leetch’s orange bow sink beneath the waves. In all, it had taken thirty-three minutes for her to sink, more than long enough for the survivors of the initial blast to man the lifeboats or grab life vests and leap into the frigid bay. More than long enough for the Coast Guard to circle the sinking wreckage and pluck them, shivering, from the foul water. More than long enough to cause the greatest spectacle possible. To allow the news choppers to fill the skies and transmit the requisite images that would overtake the airwaves for the foreseeable future. More than long enough to take them right up to the market’s opening bell, which today would not sound.

  At least not for a while.

  Even from the wheelhouse of the life boat she could see the crowds in front of the station peppered with onlookers in suits trying to get a peek at the fate that could have been theirs had the bomb been detonated on one of the packed ferries mere hours ago. She could only wonder at how many people had chosen to sit at benches or stand near windows within the blast radius. How many mothers and fathers wouldn’t be coming home tonight because one sick individual had decided that they would go up in fla
mes with him today while his collaborator sat in his office with his sallow skin and his black heart and plotted how to make the most money from the ending of their lives and the pain their families were about to endure.

  Lawton felt like she was going to throw up and had to get off the infernal rocking boat before she did just that.

  Her phone chimed to announce the arrival of the video file as she hopped down to the slip. She walked away from everyone else and opened the file. By the time it was done downloading and started to play, she was already formulating a plan for what she was going to do to Lloyd. There were no longer any consequences great enough to deter her from doing what needed to be done. This monster might have been dying a slow death, but to let him linger on this earth for even a single day longer was a crime in itself, and one for which she would not be held accountable.

  She sat on the edge of the slip and let her legs dangle over the waves, which thumped against the tires affixed to it in time with the throbbing in her head. Shielded the screen from the glare and any prying eyes. Played the video. It was black and white and recorded from a camera mounted to the ceiling and facing the open rear of the vessel, where the cars had driven from the dock at St. George on Staten Island right out onto the ship. The image itself reminded her of cars stalled in a long tunnel. They were parked nose-to-bumper in the middle two lanes, although with a lot more room between them than she was accustomed to seeing. The sun cast long stripes of light and shadow through the windows on the left. Flumes of water burbled and sprayed in the ship’s wake. The cars themselves were little more than silhouettes with reflections on their windshields. If there was anyone inside any of them, she couldn’t tell. At least not until the driver’s side door of what looked like a minivan opened.

  The driver climbed out and closed the door behind him. Stood silhouetted against the white-capped bay.