by Paul Batista
“I’m more interested in telling the public what is going on, what the facts are, what needs to be done. All of that is not necessarily reassuring.”
The president was impatient, too, not pleased with the brusque local Italian girl.
“Do your best.”
The man is a candy-ass, Gina thought. “Sure thing,” she said.
And she hit the “end” button on the cell phone before he did on his.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’M NOT STAYING,” Roland Fortune said. “Let’s get that IV out right now.”
The excruciating pain in his shoulder and back had lessened since the moment he walked through the emergency room door at Mount Sinai, the hospital nearest the museum. He was surrounded by policemen, some of whom had guns drawn. He was the first wounded person to arrive at the hospital, at exactly 1:45 p.m. Covered in blood and grass stains and dirt from the ground where he had fallen at the rear of the museum, he had regained consciousness in the ambulance that raced through Central Park. As he lay on the stretcher in the rocking vehicle, he’d felt the initial surge of relief from pain when one of the medics injected him with morphine.
“Mr. Mayor, you’ve lost significant quantities of blood,” Dr. David Edelstein, a sober man with the weight and presence of a rabbi, told Roland. “Your hemoglobin is low, you’re so impaired by painkillers that you’ll have trouble walking on your own, and you aren’t likely to be able to hold any press conferences or to act in a coherent, focused way. There’s a significant risk of infection. You need to be treated.”
“Listen: I was hit by a stone, not shrapnel. I was cut, not shot. You run a hospital. I run a city. I can’t lie down in a hospital because my shoulder hurts when there is complete chaos out there. There are thousands of people who think I’m dead. Unless they can see me and see that I’m alive and functioning, there will still be this alarming distraction that the leader of the City of New York is dead.”
Edelstein’s expression didn’t change. “I can’t worry about that. You and you alone are my patient right now, not the population of the City of New York.” He paused. “If you leave, you’ll be doing that against medical advice and you will have to sign a form that says precisely that, just like anybody else who walks out of here without the approval of a doctor.”
“I genuinely appreciate the concern, but I feel strong and alert enough to step up to do the things I’m supposed to do. I can’t live with myself secluded in a hospital bed while there are fires still burning ten blocks downtown from here and the dead are still being counted.”
At a signal from Edelstein, two male nurses expertly disassembled the tubes of the IVs to which Roland Fortune was attached. They then placed his damaged shoulder and arm in a sling, fastening it to the fresh clothes that had been brought to him from Gracie Mansion, the spacious Georgian mansion overlooking the East River in which New York City mayors lived during their terms. As they worked on him, he felt a resurgence of the pain and asked for another Vicodin. One of the male nurses placed the pill in his mouth, like a priest giving communion, and he swallowed it without water. Just the act of taking the pill brought him increasing levels of relief from the pain. Like a drug addict worried about not having enough, he put a handful of Vicodin in his pocket.
He watched the television set affixed to the wall just below the ceiling as Gina Carbone began to speak to the world. She stood in bright sunlight on the sidewalk in front of PS 6. “We now know that six hundred thirty-six people are dead,” she announced. “There are at least ninety-five men, women, and children in hospitals throughout the city who are wounded in varying degrees, most with burns, many in life-threatening condition.”
Gina Carbone had a commanding presence. She was calm and measured. She was an attractive woman. Her raven hair was pulled back from her forehead and tied at the back of her neck. Her well-balanced features and the graceful muscularity of her body gave her the look of an athlete. Roland was grateful for the firmness she conveyed, and he found her Staten Island-tinged accent reassuring, a home-bred New Yorker obviously in command.
She said, “At this point, we’re not certain what the final number of dead and wounded will be. We are still involved in search and rescue operations inside the museum. So far we have located at least fifteen wounded inside the building, which, as many of you know, has dozens of separate galleries. We consider it still a place of high security concerns and danger. Too many evil, cowardly, and dangerous men have too many places to hide and opportunities to carry out more evil.”
The scene on CNN shifted to the museum’s steps. The front of the museum was profoundly scarred. The windows were blown away. The massive stone façade, that heavy nineteenth-century fortress-style front, had huge gouges. For more than a century two immense blocks of stone had rested above the entrance. There had once been plans to sculpt them into neoclassical figures or lions’ heads but that had never happened. Now they were toppled.
Incredibly, there was still bright midafternoon sunshine, as on any limpid day in June. And the long oval fountains still gushed water into the sunlight even though flames rose from the water.
The camera shifted back to Gina Carbone. “While no single life is more important than any other, I can now reliably tell you that Mayor Roland Fortune is alive. There have been rumors all afternoon that the leader of the city, who was attending an event at the museum when these despicable bombings happened, was among the casualties. He did sustain what are described as serious but not life-threatening wounds, and he will certainly recover.”
Roland’s attention was suddenly and fully arrested by the question he heard from one of the reporters. “Do you know anything about the condition of the mayor’s partner, Sarah Gordan?”
Roland had repeatedly asked Irv Rothstein, who had arrived at the hospital from his apartment on the West Side an hour after Roland was admitted, where Sarah Hewitt-Gordan was. Rothstein repeatedly had said, “We don’t know.”
“The confirmed names of the dead are being posted right now on the city’s website. Ms. Hewitt-Gordan was with the mayor at the museum event. Unfortunately, her name is on the list of the dead.”
Roland Fortune felt his bones turn instantly to water. He couldn’t stand. He sat down on the bed and leaned forward, his hands covering his face. Except for the voice of Gina Carbone still speaking steadily, matter-of-factly, there wasn’t a sound in the room. When Roland took his hands from his face, he looked at Irv Rothstein.
“Did you know about this?”
“We weren’t certain.”
“Is Gina certain?”
“She should have told us, Roland, before she went public with it.”
There was a sixty-second pause. Irv had from time to time counseled Roland to express more emotion when he was on television or speaking to large groups of people. Irv felt that Roland projected class and intelligence and control under pressure, but not enough rachmonis, the Yiddish word for passion from the gut.
Suddenly Roland, lithe and tall, stood up. There were tears on his face. He wiped them away. In a clear voice, he said, “Let’s get moving.”
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WERE ALREADY thirty patients in the emergency room at Mount Sinai when Gabriel Hauser arrived. Men, women, and children lay on stretchers or on blankets on the floors in the hallways. With shades drawn, the emergency room’s cubicles were filled to capacity with the most seriously wounded. He rushed through the ER toward the locker room where doctors changed from civilian clothes to white or blue scrubs, the baggy uniforms of their trade. He saw five of the dead lined on the floor against a wall. Three of them were uncovered. Except for the fact that they were in the torn remnants of the casual clothes of Sunday tourists—the thick-soled walking shoes favored by Europeans, Abercrombie & Fitch safari pants and t-shirts with names and slogans stenciled on them—the bodies were identical to the torn bodies of the dead soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan: ripped faces, torsos with livid holes, legs cut to the exposed bones.
In the locker room, Gabriel swiftly shed the clothes he’d put on four hours earlier for his Sunday walk with Oliver. He had managed to call Cameron Kennedy Dewar, his partner, to ask him to retrieve Oliver and take him home. He told Cam to stay away from the area around the museum where rumors still swept that more explosives were planted somewhere in the vicinity.
The clothes he had worn were as bloody as the clothes of the wounded he had treated on the horrific steps. He dropped them to the floor in front of his locker as he put on the immaculate scrubs. His pants were unusually heavy: the thick bracelet he’d removed from his first, badly injured patient was still in his left pocket. Gabriel remembered that the wounded man hadn’t carried a wallet. He put his own wallet, a comb, the keys to the apartment, and the bracelet he’d removed from the first wounded person he treated into the roomy pockets of his scrubs. And then he trotted back to the nearby emergency room.
More wounded had arrived in the ER in the five minutes Gabriel needed to change and wash his hands and face. The level and intensity of noise had escalated with the new arrivals. Doctors and nurses were shouting in the din of the cries and moans of the injured. He grabbed the arm of a male nurse who leaned against the nurse’s station as if catching his breath, and tugged him toward an injured woman who was in the stretcher closest to him. The ER was now so completely overwhelmed that it was no longer possible to give priority to the more severely injured. It was a random choice. Everyone looked grievously wounded.
In three hours he treated at least thirty people. This was an endurance contest, his body fed on adrenaline, his mind tempered by experience and good judgment. He had spent hundreds of hours in war treating the injured, but there had been only one three-hour period when he was confronted with as many injured as this.
Just as he was finally preparing to take a break outside in the crisp afternoon air of Central Park across Fifth Avenue from the hospital, he turned to one more patient. It was the man he’d first treated on the museum’s steps. The birthmark that spanned the area below his left eye to the edge of his beard made him instantly recognizable. There was, too, something else about the face. Fleetingly, Gabriel thought the face had the vaguely familiar features of a man he had seen in the grainy cell phone picture he had intended to use to meet a man he believed was named Silas Nasar, an Afghan. Gabriel had been so engrossed by other injured people that he hadn’t once thought about this man. Now it was as though he had come across a person from his long-ago past. And Gabriel was relieved: if the man was still held in the emergency room and had not yet been taken to an operating room or a better-equipped unit elsewhere in the hospital then his injuries were less serious than they had seemed when Gabriel cared for him on the museum steps.
“How do you feel?” Gabriel touched the hand into which the IV needle had been inserted.
The man’s lips were still parched. His black eyes were focused on Gabriel. He whispered in clear English, “Pain, the pain is awful.”
“We’ll give you more painkillers.”
“And water, please.”
Gabriel remembered that he’d placed water from a random plastic bottle to this man’s lips hours earlier. He took a cup of water with a straw from a nearby tray and placed the straw between the man’s lips. He sucked greedily.
Finally Gabriel asked, “Do you remember me?”
The intense eyes kept their focus on Gabriel. Although the man didn’t speak, Gabriel had a sense that somewhere in that pool of pain there was recognition. Gabriel gripped the man’s right hand, trying to give reassurance, comfort. He took the heavy bracelet out of his pocket and gently fastened it to the man’s right wrist. He had never imagined that he would be able to return it.
The patients who had arrived with no names, no wallets, no handbags, no knapsacks, and no passports were identified by numbers and letters written in magic markers on their foreheads. Someone had handwritten Patient X52 on the dark man’s forehead.
“You’ll be all right,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”
Patient X52 squeezed Gabriel’s hand powerfully. Gabriel, who was not certain he knew Patient X52’s name, didn’t erase the magic marker lettering and replace it with the words Silas Nasar.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GINA CARBONE GAVE the order for the eighteen arrests. Most of the men were in Queens. Four were in Washington Heights in Manhattan. They were selected from the secret Hit List that the police department had covertly maintained during the three years she had served as commissioner. No one outside the department knew that there was a Hit List, and only ten other officers in the department knew about it. Gina hadn’t asked for any legal opinion from the staff lawyers assigned to the department for one simple reason: she was certain that any legal opinion would conclude that the creation and maintenance of the list was illegal, that it involved racial profiling, and that it entailed violations of Fourth Amendment rights since the homes and apartments of these men had been secretly examined without search warrants and sophisticated surveillance devices installed in them without any judge’s authorization. Roland Fortune knew nothing about it. She had created the Hit List so that she could act quickly if something catastrophic happened in the city she loved, the only city she really knew. She had an innate distrust of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Defense Department, and the CIA. Even of Roland Fortune when it came to this kind of issue. He was in no way a warrior.
The men who were arrested were not brought to Central Booking in Manhattan or the police precincts or Rikers Island for processing and arraignment, the standard routine after any arrest. There was no plan to bring them before judges or assigned lawyers or told what charges they faced. They were all taken in unmarked police vehicles to a detention center embedded in one of the vast, abandoned piers that extended into the East River. The cops who made the arrests had been trained for swift seizure of the men on the list, which was constantly revised as new information developed, and her special secret unit consistently monitored the men on the list to be certain where they were in the event they had to be taken down.
“Any of them cooperating?” Gina asked Roger Davidson.
She and Davidson were in the small girls’ locker room in PS 6. The entrance to the room, which smelled of disinfectant, was closed and two sergeants stood outside. There was no way anyone could hear the conversation between Davidson and her. Davidson was a retired CIA agent who was nominally the head of the NYPD’s Operation Outreach, the benign name Gina created for the Hit List unit. Like every other member of the unit, Davidson posed as a civilian employee of the department. He was designated as a community liaison officer, an absurd title for a man who in his long career had killed fifty-five people.
“Not yet. But one of them seems to be having second thoughts.”
“Which one?”
“The guy who owns the food wagons.”
Gina already knew that it was not suicide bombers in civilian clothes who detonated the explosions. The sources of the explosions were three food wagons in front of the museum. One of the department’s forensics investigators had reported to her that the wagons were crammed with explosives; even the metal poles that supported the festival-like umbrellas were stuffed with explosives. Someone using a remote device had triggered them—one, two, three. Mohammed Butt owned a business in Queens that provided hundreds of food wagons to street vendors. He had become rich.
“What is he saying?”
“He must be a make-believe lawyer. So far he’s saying he wants to get a lawyer, make a plea deal and get immunity.”
Gina rolled her eyes. “What a fucking world we live in. A plea deal? Immunity? The fucker must spend his time watching lawyer television shows when he isn’t planning jihad and making millions off of no-bid city contracts.”
Although Davidson had spent many hours in windowless conference rooms with Gina Carbone, he had never once heard her swear. It added a new and welcome dimension to her.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
�
��Pull his balls off and make him eat them unless he talks. At least pull his balls off.”
Davidson returned her taut smile. Imitating a line Richard Nixon once spoke, he said, “That would be wrong.” Like Nixon, he didn’t mean it.
Gina laughed, her first laugh since the sunny hours on the patio on Staten Island with her family so many hours ago.
“Promise him anything and everything,” she said. “Write it down for him so that he thinks he has a contract. See whether that works.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Be creative.”
Davidson gave her a knowing look. He had a license from her to use the skills he had developed during his years in the CIA interrogating Arab men in secret dark prisons around the world. He said, “Creativity is the lifeblood of this business.”
“Did you pick up everybody on the Hit List?”
“Except one.”
“Who?”
“Silas Nasar. He’s a U.S. citizen. In fact, he was born in Bayonne. Only native-born on the list.”
“Why is he on the list?”
“I told you a month ago. Don’t you remember? He’s traveled to Pakistan six times, five times after 9/11, once before. He claimed to have long-lost family members there.”
“Remind me. We had to have some other reason to put him on the list. Takes a lot to qualify.”
“He owns a big electronics store in Queens. He has a fixation on communication equipment. Not just cell phones and pagers, but GPS systems and tracking devices. He loves innovative stuff, like tracking devices in candy bars. Things that send and get messages and let people know where you are. Jewelry, watches with tiny communicating devices. Even bracelets; my ex-wife would love to be a customer.”
“Which one is he?” she asked.
Davidson took out his iPad and delicately touched the illuminated screen. For a large man who had killed people with his own hands, he had unusually long fingers as graceful as a pianist’s. His fingers floated over the bright graphics. A picture as vivid as life appeared. It was Silas Nasar. It was a far clearer, better-defined picture than the one on Gabriel Hauser’s cell phone.