Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  The cop’s name was Ballestros, brightly engraved on his plastic name tag. “I don’t think they need you. Everything that was going to happen here happened.”

  It was not a rude or dismissive statement. The man had the relaxed attitude of a cop assigned to a street fair and accumulating overtime.

  “Thanks, Officer,” Gabriel said. “How many people were hurt?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Suddenly a convoy of vehicles emerged from inside the cordoned area. They were mainly black SUVs with heavily tinted windows. The wailing of their sirens displaced all other sound.

  “Important people?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the convoy.

  “They think so.”

  ***

  Gina Carbone was in the back seat of the third vehicle. She gripped the handle embedded in front of her as the SUV made a sweeping turn onto 125th Street. Almost instinctively, her long-ago training as a patrol cop still caused her to look at faces in a crowd. As clearly and distinctly as if she were staring at a photograph rather than scanning a chaotic crowd, she saw and recognized the Angel of Life, Gabriel Hauser.

  “Can you believe it?” she said to Rocco Barbiglia.

  Rocco—as good-looking as a young Robert DeNiro—glanced in the direction toward which Gina pointed. “What’s up, Chief ?”

  “Over there, look. The doctor who treated the guy with the big birthmark at the museum.”

  “Right, I see him, Chief. The guy gets around.”

  Gina said, “He’s Zelig, the man who shows up everywhere. He’s been talking to the cop next to him. Rocco, find out who the cop is and have him tell us what the Angel of Life had to say.”

  Gina knew the ambulance that carried a person she described as “Gift No. 1” would not arrive at Pier 37 for another hour. She had given instructions for the ambulance to drive slowly through the West Village and the West Side Highway below 14th Street as though on an ordinary cruise. That was a tactic, she knew, that would allow the ambulance to elude reporters or anyone else who might have seen it leave the George Washington Carver projects.

  The ambulance was not going to any hospital. Silas Nasar was strapped and handcuffed to a gurney. Rifles were pointed at him.

  Since she had some time before she, too, would arrive at Pier 37, she told her driver to stop at the service entrance to the Regency Hotel on 61st Street. Accompanied by two guards dressed as hotel porters, she took the huge service elevator to the sixth floor. The elevator had the faint but distinct scent of the garbage which had been accumulating in the hotel’s basement during the long quarantine of Manhattan.

  When she entered the room, Tony Garafalo was reading a book. One of the things that attracted her to him was that he was a complex, unpredictable man, so much more interesting than the conventional people who surrounded her in her daily life. During his years in the legendary Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, the most secure of all the prisons in the federal system, the place where the Unabomber, Arab terrorists, John Gotti, and Mexican drug lords were imprisoned, he had developed a passion for reading the classic books: Thackeray, Tolstoy, Conrad, even Jane Austen. As she approached him, he put down the Modern Library edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

  “Hey, big guy,” she said, “pretty soon you can start teaching a course on the Great Fucking Books at Harvard.”

  “Hey, doll. There’s only one course about fucking I want to teach.”

  “I’m all ears, teacher.”

  Tony led her to the elegant bathroom, all marble and glowing brass. Naked, she stood under the shower, her hair soon streaming black and straight, and Tony, muscular and powerful, stood behind her. She pressed her glorious ass into his groin. He kissed her hair and shoulders and the length of her spine. When he reached the firm cleavage of her ass, he gently turned her. He was on his knees. Her vagina was in front of his face. He pressed his tongue into her, the water flowing over his mouth. As his tongue caressed her clitoris from every angle, she moaned, “Tony, Tony.” Finally she said, “Fuck me.”

  He stood. They were face to face, chest to chest under the clean flowing water. He entered her. She placed her hands on his shoulders. She was ecstatic. So was he.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “DO YOU HAVE any idea, Gina, how unacceptable that is?” Roland Fortune asked. “How bad, bad?”

  “It’s what it is,” she said.

  “It’s a disaster.”

  “We knew there were risks.”

  “Seven of our twelve people? Risks? Seven of our people dead? Every fucking guy in the apartment? That gives a whole new meaning to risks. It’s more like a suicide video game.”

  Roland raised the right hand he had held like a visor over his eyes. Outside, the leafy trees in City Hall Park were suffused with the green, comforting glow of afternoon sunlight.

  “When you act, there are consequences.”

  Roland resisted the impulse to say Tell me something else I don’t know. Instead he said, “Have the families been told yet?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Has Lazarus been told?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “So who knows, right at this moment, in real time?”

  “You. Two or three of my top people.”

  “What did you find in the apartment? Beyond dead bodies, I mean.”

  “Weapons, ammunition.”

  “What about bombs?”

  “None.”

  “Bomb-making materials?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Computers?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Three-year-olds have computers.”

  “We’re still searching.”

  “Still? How big is the place?”

  “One bedroom.”

  “It’s not the Vatican. Do you really expect to find something?”

  “I don’t expect anything, Mr. Mayor.” That abrasive bluntness of Gina which Roland had admired for so long emerged at the edge of her tone. “Whatever is there is there. Whatever isn’t there isn’t there.”

  “Gina, we had a Defense Secretary once who spoke in enigmas. Remember? Rumsfeld? All that amusing crap about known unknowns. Known knowns.”

  It was the Gina Carbone who never tried to be charming who spoke. “I don’t expect to find anything buried in the walls. What we have now, and what we know now, is likely to be all there is. Let me say it again: seven of our people dead, all nine of the Arabs dead. Ten assault rifles. Six pistols. Enough ammunition for those weapons, nothing like an arsenal. No grenades, no homemade bombs, no pressure cookers, no books, no computers.”

  “How about cell phones?”

  “Three cell phones. Those are in the hands of our technical people. Here is a known unknown: I don’t know what is in them.”

  How many hours ago, Roland thought, did he wake in a sundrenched room in Gracie Mansion beside the still-sleeping, sweet-breathing, vibrantly alive Sarah Hewitt-Gordan? Sounding subdued, he said, “All right, Gina, keep me posted. Call at least every ten minutes, more if necessary.”

  Gina said nothing about Silas Nasar, Gift No. 1, who, unhurt, even in the cauldron of gunfire and explosions in the apartment at the Carver Towers, was still being driven around the city in a quiet ambulance before he would be delivered to Pier 37.

  ***

  The images on the immense high-definition television screen were somehow familiar, like images from Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Aleppo, anyplace where chaos was unfolding. Armored vehicles all over the streets, men and women in uniforms, the blackened side of a heavily damaged building, thousands of spinning emergency lights, ambulances. Roland said to the men, Irv Rothstein and Hans Richter, who were with him in his office, “Enough, turn it off, this isn’t telling me anything that hundreds of millions of people watching CNN and Fox don’t already know. This makes the Paris assaults look like a holiday.”

  Seated in a wooden chair in front of Roland Fortune’s desk, Hans Richter removed the white earbud f
rom his left ear just as the scene on the television screen dissolved into a pinpoint of evanescent light. He said, “The president is on the line now.”

  Roland nodded, held up a silencing hand and instantly the room resonated with an electronic hum. There was no video this time, at Roland’s direction. The eerie electronic resonance lasted for at least ten seconds. It ended when Andrew Carter said, “Let’s have a head count. Mr. Mayor, who is with you?”

  There were no gracious preliminaries this time, no greetings.

  Roland was no more interested in introductory pleasantries than Andrew Carter was. “Two deputy mayors, Rothstein and Richter.”

  “And what about the police commissioner? Capone?” Carter asked.

  “Carbone,” Roland said. “She’s in the field.”

  “Don’t you think it’s important to have her in on this?”

  “No.”

  “I would have wanted her here. Can we get her?”

  “No.”

  “Would she be available if I need her?”

  “Not now.” Roland’s voice was strong. All his instincts told him that this sudden conference was designed by Andrew Carter and Harlan Lazarus as a score-settling, blame-allocating exercise. From the time when he was twelve and a potent street fighter, Roland had learned that anyone who confronts you has to be kept off-balance. “And who’s with you?”

  “Judge Lazarus. General Jones. Ms. Bates. Director de Carlo.”

  Roland sensed that Andrew Carter didn’t want to give a complete roster. “And who else, Mr. President?”

  “My Chief Counsel, Loretta Andreano. Loretta, say hello to the mayor.”

  Loretta’s seductive voice rang out. “Roland, I’m so sorry about your loss.” Clearly she meant Sarah Hewitt-Gordan.

  Roland and Loretta Andreano seven years earlier, when he was starting his first term in Congress and she was newly minted as the chief lawyer for the New York Governor, had a happy three-week affair. It ended when Page Six, the gossip page of the New York Post, carried a twenty-word entry that Roland Fortune had been sighted holding hands with Madonna at two in the morning at Tartine on West 11th Street. A cool and graceful woman, Loretta had simply said at the time, “Lucky you, enjoy yourself. And go fuck off.” Roland wondered briefly how many people involved now in this call knew that there had once been an intimate connection between him and the chief counsel to the president. He said, “There have been many losses to many people in the last day, Loretta. I hope your family has been safe.”

  Andrew Carter said, “And I also have Beau Broadbent here.”

  Roland saw Irv Rothstein roll his eyes upward. Beau Broadbent, who was the president’s press secretary, had worked for two years as a national reporter for the Times when Irv was there. “The glibbest Southern boy Robert E. Lee ever fathered,” Irv once told Roland about Edward Beauregard Broadbent. “Always be careful with him,” Irv had said. “They invented buses so that Beau Broadbent could throw people under them.”

  “Is that it?” Roland asked.

  “On our end? Yes, sure.”

  “And are you recording this?”

  “Of course. Are you?”

  “No, of course not.” It was a lie.

  Roland decided to wait. There was a faint electronic hum in the silence. Andrew Carter spoke. “What happened?”

  “Seven of our people are dead. There are ten or so dead suspects in the apartment.”

  “Any prisoners?”

  “No.”

  “It would have been nice to have a survivor, don’t you think? Like that Tsarnaev brother from the Boston Marathon bombing.”

  “These people weren’t interested in survival.”

  Harlan Lazarus spoke, “Who were they?”

  “Is that Mr. Lazarus?” Roland asked.

  The president said, “Yes, that’s Judge Lazarus.”

  “We don’t know yet who they were.” And then he added, “It’s always good to know, Mr. Lazarus, that you’re in the middle of everything when we need you.”

  “Who did you think they were when you decided to mount this attack?” the president asked.

  “You know the answer to that. We had information, obviously accurate, that there were as many as ten men with heavy weaponry in an apartment in a public housing complex.”

  “Judge Lazarus tells me you decided to handle this as a local police issue.”

  “Andrew, no one ever said that to Mr. Lazarus. The commissioner explained to Mr. Lazarus’ assistants, since she wasn’t able to reach Mr. Lazarus himself, that we had highly reliable informants’ tips and surveillance that there was a concentration of unknown force in a public housing project.”

  “The judge tells me he offered further intelligence assistance before any steps were taken,” Andrew Carter said. “Isn’t that right, Judge?”

  “That’s correct,” Harlan Lazarus said. It was a piping, shrill voice.

  “You know what?” Roland asked. “I don’t care. And Harlan Lazarus doesn’t care, either. I’m just a simple country mayor, but for years very odd people from Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the Girl Scouts of America, and the Stepford Wives have been telling me how seamlessly coordinated all these anti-terror agencies are. Out of many, one. E pluribus unum. All that pablum. And what do I see when the rubber meets the road, the shit hits the fan? The echo chamber. The faint, distracting, eerie moan of a thousand people looking at each other and murmuring, What the fuck do we do now? The only voices that speak to me are my own people saying they know there are bad guys with assault weapons suddenly appearing in a public housing project. What better place to be in Manhattan if you have guns and a lust to maim and kill than a housing project in Manhattan? They are not places where people who see something really want to say something. The George Zimmerman types, the neighborhood watch dogs, in other words, the people who live in those projects get fed to the dogs in places like the George Washington Carver Houses . . .”

  “Mr. Mayor,” Andrew Carter said. “Roland?”

  “Let me finish. So when I have Gina Carbone, a woman I trust, a person I can see, touch, and smell, tell me there are as many as ten guys with powerful weapons who will likely soon disperse and do some dirty work, do I wait to get more guidance from Harlan Lazarus? Maybe there are better people in the world than I am, but the only thing I know to do is say yes to the people I trust.”

  “I’m not following that, Mr. Mayor,” Lazarus said. “We have multiple resources there.”

  “Really? So seamless as to be invisible? So transparent because it has no substance?”

  Neither Carter nor Lazarus responded immediately. In the faintly resonating interlude of silence, Roland envisioned the president glancing around the Oval Office in which he sat, an expression of bewilderment or scorn on his face. Then Carter said, “Cooperation is a two-way street, Mr. Mayor. We weren’t given an opportunity over the last two hours to give intelligence and tactical support.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “The judge and his people told me so.”

  “Is that so? We better check the timeline. At one today, the commissioner learns there are several men with heavy weapons in an apartment in a public housing project. Arabs. Arabs don’t live in public housing projects. Ten minutes later she reports that information to me. I ask her what the source of that information is. An informant, she says, corroborated by eye and ear confirmation from a small team of her anti-terrorist unit. I ask if the Feds are involved. She answers they aren’t. I instruct her to contact Harlan Lazarus. When I speak with her fifteen minutes later, I approve the cordoning off of the complex. In that conversation, I ask about her conversation with Harlan Lazarus. No response from him. He hadn’t called her back.”

  Andrew Carter said, “I’m looking at him right now.” There was a murmur of voices, of people speaking almost inaudibly. “There is no record of that on our end.”

  “There is no record of it, Mr. President? Or it didn’t happen? Those are two different concepts.
No record of an event isn’t the equivalent of no event.”

  Another pause. Andrew Carter said, “It did not happen. Your commissioner didn’t call the judge. She’s lying.”

  “I’m not going to have a debate, Andrew. At three p.m., the commissioner let me know that the men in the building may have hostages. I gave her permission to use her judgment in terms of bringing the situation to an end.”

  “Why do you think they were terrorists? How were they connected to the other attacks?”

  “I never said that, Mr. President. Our information is that there were as many as ten men in an apartment or cluster of apartments on a floor in a project. No one in the project had seen them before, according to the reports we had. It is also a project that has been relatively peaceful for the last three years, as far as we know, free of gangs because of Gina Carbone.” Roland stopped for a moment. “It could not have been a complete coincidence that these men surfaced just as these attacks are taking place.”

  “Coincidence? We could have helped you sort that out if we’d been consulted.”

  “I’m not buying into that version of the story, Andrew. We acted because these men, whoever they were and wherever they came from, were an unacceptable danger. And a danger in my city, not yours.”

  There was a twenty-second suspension of the conference. Roland was determined not to speak the next words. Andrew Carter did. “You don’t have a rosy outcome here.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. President, I’m responsible for the outcome, not you, and certainly not Mr. Lazarus. What was it that JFK said? Victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

  “What is it that you plan to do?”

  “In forty-five minutes I’m holding a press conference to tell the world what we know.”

  “Don’t you think you have to be careful?”

  “Is there anything I’ve done that has not been careful, Andrew?”

  Lazarus’ voice rose up. “Isn’t that what we’ve been discussing here. The absence of carefulness.” It was not a question.