by Paul Batista
But both of them tacitly knew Davidson would opt for Plan C, the “Charlie plan.” And that when the Charlie plan ended Davidson and his corps of ten men whom he had recruited over the last two years and the only men, all with fake names, who knew the essence of Code Apache’s details, would themselves just disappear to different places around the planet.
***
Plan C began as soon as Gabriel Hauser became a black, utterly misshapen skeleton at the bottom of the cage in glimmering light over the Hudson River. Davidson addressed the members of his team who had been with him on the roof of the blockhouse, the men who had filmed Mohammad speaking and then Gabriel Houser in flames. “Throw the equipment into the river and let’s get downstairs fast. Keep the masks on.” More gently he told Mohammad, “Good work. Come down with us.”
They raced down the iron stairwell, ripping off their black masks now that they were out of the sight of the outside world. On the factory-like floor of the blockhouse the prisoners were still in clusters of five or six, each cluster guarded by other members of Davidson’s crew armed with M-16s and various German-manufactured pistols. “Let’s get them all back in the tunnel,” Davidson ordered. The sullen men moved, some of them reluctantly, responding to the commands of the three men in his group who spoke Arabic.
Once inside the tunnel the prisoners were again separated into small groups spaced about thirty feet from one another. “This,” Davidson said, “is Plan C. Let’s get it on.”
At those words from Davidson, volleys of rifle and pistol shots resonated through the inside of the tunnel. Davidson, too, was shooting. He and all of his team wore bulletproof vests and lay prone on the tunnel’s floor to minimize the risks of ricocheting bullets. Within thirty seconds all eighteen men who had been on the hit list were riddled with bullet holes. All were dead. Mohammed, too, was dead.
Davidson’s men then took out of the sealed vans the hidden supplies of ISIS-style weapons, primarily AK-47 rifles and Ruger pistols. They placed those weapons and spent bullet casings from them in the inert hands and near the bodies of the dead. As his people worked methodically through the well-rehearsed ruse of Plan C, Davidson ran down the corridor through which he had, less than forty-five minutes earlier, calmly walked with Gabriel Hauser. At that time Davidson had known exactly what would happen to Hauser.
Davidson walked deliberately to Silas Nasar’s body. He shot Nasar seven times. Wearing plastic gloves, Davidson put the Russian-made AK-47 in Nasar’s right hand.
All that remained of Plan C was for the man known as Roger Davidson to disappear, to slip into anonymity. He was in the back of one of the windowless vans when it emerged from the Holland Tunnel. He was in plainclothes. All of his other special team members were in the uniform and helmets of the NYPD Counterterrorism Unit.
No one on Canal Street, that southern border of Chinatown now teeming with oblivious Chinese immigrants, noticed Roger Davidson as he stepped quickly from the rear door of the van.
***
Andrew Carter stood in his exquisitely tailored suit in the middle of the stage in the small press room in Gracie Mansion. The stage was covered in black carpet, and behind him was a big, vivid American flag. He had rejected the idea of standing behind a podium with the presidential seal or a desk with the seal. He was now perfectly composed, convinced that the simple act of standing would convey better to the world that he was well and unhurt by the horrific explosion on First Avenue. And he had no notes and no prompters. A tiny microphone was attached to his lapel. Reporters were excluded from the room, just as they had been excluded from the mansion itself.
The president began, “As you can see, I am alive and well. I came here to see for myself the condition of this largest and most important urban center in the United States.
“Obviously the route of my travel was discovered by the ever-contracting remnants of the people who have been attempting to carry out a reign of terror here. Because of my presence, the brave men and women who traveled with me were the targets of yet another cowardly attack. But it was a desperate one, a man and a woman strapped with explosives. One was killed by a highly skilled sharpshooter. That was the woman. The man, too, was shot at the same time by another sharpshooter, but unfortunately the massive amount of explosives strapped to his body detonated. The cowardliness of this attack is demonstrated by the fact that he had placed himself next to a playground.
“My heart goes out to the brave men and women on motorcycles who accompanied me on this trip. Five of them are dead. The sixth is in a nearby hospital, where her condition is critical, but she is expected to survive her wounds. I know well all of these brave people. They protected me and the office I hold for years. More important, they were my friends.
“At the same time, my deepest sympathies are with the children and their parents, all of them totally innocent, who were trying to bring this city to its vital normalcy. We will soon release the count of the dead and wounded in the playground.”
Andrew Carter as he spoke moved slightly with the grace he had learned as a college and professional basketball player. They were slight movements, but fluid, natural. It was a Steve Jobs performance, unadorned, confident, and direct. He intended the movements to reveal that nothing had harmed him, that he was healthy and intact. “There is positive news. Thanks to the efforts of United States Homeland Security agents, thousands of brave United States soldiers, and the heroic counterterrorism tactics of the New York City Police Department, the tide has immensely and successfully turned against these terrorists. They have been weakened immeasurably, and, as to the few who are left, we know where they are and are hunting them down. They will soon pose no threat.
“Along with Mayor Roland Fortune, we will soon announce that this essential, and successful, lockdown of Manhattan is coming to an end. The mayor, although severely injured during the first explosions, has led this city through this crisis with his characteristic charisma and care.”
Andrew Carter paused. “Thousands of brave men and women have met and thwarted these attacks. Much of the credit for that goes to Gina Carbone, the commissioner of the police department of this great city.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
THE METROPOLITAN DETENTION Center was a surprisingly small building with a brown brick exterior. The MDC was built in the 1970s and it was anonymous, with no signs announcing its name or purpose. Only its narrow and widely spaced windows with wire meshing suggested from the outside that it might be a prison.
Internally it was an extraordinary building. Its official purpose as a prison was to act as a short-term and secure facility for three hundred men and as many as fifty women who were federal prisoners and who, because a judge had determined that they posed a risk of danger or a threat of flight, were denied bail. Anyone who was in MDC was not guilty; men and women were held there, often for months, because they had been indicted on serious federal crimes and not released on any form of bail while waiting for their trials.
MDC was attached by an intricate series of tunnels, suspended walkways and other outwardly invisible avenues to the three closely adjacent federal courthouses and to the adjoining building, the office of the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, so that the prisoners could easily and secretly be moved to the courthouses for appearances before judges or trials. As soon as a person was convicted, he or she was bundled out of the MDC and sent to one of the more than seventy regular prisons around the country that kept the thousands of people convicted of federal felonies.
There were traditional conference rooms in the MDC where lawyers could meet with their inmate clients. They were not comfortable rooms but they were well-known to the lawyers who used them. But there were a few other, entirely unknown rooms, even more medieval than the rest of the prison. They were known as the “rubber hose rooms” and only a few of the federal marshals who ruled MDC knew where they were. They were only the size of large closets.
And they were nothing like the more conventional conference
rooms in the adjoining, far more comfortable U.S. Attorney’s office where Tony Garafalo had one day earlier met with the two government lawyers and the six or seven bemused federal agents. Instead, in this secret room, Tony Garafalo stood against one of the walls, his hands and feet shackled to the wall.
He waited in the almost total darkness for two minutes. Nothing like this, not even several weeks in solitary confinement at the Supermax prison in Colorado, had ever happened to him. And, in these two minutes, probably for the first time in his life, he felt fear.
Tony heard the three iron locks to the door slide in quick intervals from left to right. Gina Carbone entered the cell. He knew that only because for the briefest moment her tall shape formed a black silhouette against the empty dim hallway. She slid the iron door closed.
Gina turned on the small halogen flashlight she carried. She trained the beam, which was as bright as the sun, into his eyes.
Tony said, “Hey, babe, didn’t know you were into S and M.”
“Once a wiseass always a wiseass.”
“You talk too much.”
“Think so? I never said a word to you about my company business,” she answered. “Somehow you got into my cell phone and computer. Where did they teach you to get to be a computer genius? Not at Supermax, right?”
“You gonna unlock me from this shit? It is unconstitutional. Right there in the Eighth Amendment. No cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Now you’re Alan Dershowitz?”
“At least stop shining that friggin’ light in my face.”
“Don’t worry. You’re still as good looking as ever.”
She kept the intense, single focus beam on his face. “You didn’t get away with it, you know?”
“I did, and you know it, babe, and you know why.”
“I have great forensics people. You’re too stupid to know that. They’re issuing a report to the world that the tape the little Indian put out was a forgery. He spliced it all together. It was phony—like you. You know those Indians? And those Indians, unlike a cheap bum like you, are geniuses when it comes to tech stuff.”
“You’re dreaming this all up, babe.”
“And the Indian reporter never laid eyes on Gabriel Hauser in his life. The guy on the bench was one of my people, a great actor and look-alike of a guy, the Angel of Life, Mr. Gandhi had only seen on TV.”
Garafalo laughed.
Gina Carbone laughed, too, the sardonic laugh, the mocking chuckle she had learned from her Gambino family uncle. It was, Tony realized, the chuckle he’d learned when an order was given from a family consigliere to do bad things to someone. This was the first time in his life he felt, and knew he felt, real fear.
“Babe,” he said, “we’ve fucked in a lot of different places. How about here? Nobody’s looking.”
“And those agents you talked to yesterday. Never happened. You know the drill. You never left your cell. Not yesterday, not today.”
“You know, Gina, you were always a crazy broad. I’m going to keep on talking. Maybe I’ll write a book. Make a million bucks.”
“With your heart condition? I don’t think so.”
Tony closed his eyes. But the membranes that were his eyelids could not stop the glare. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me all those good doctors at Supermax didn’t have all those long talks with you about how your heart valves were shot to hell? How they told you they would have you flown to that prison hospital in Texas for surgery to replace the valves? I just had all their reports e-mailed to me. I felt real bad for you. I never knew anything was wrong.”
“Gina, you’re full of shit. That fucking Usain Bolt guy wishes he had my heart.”
“That’s what you kept on telling the doctors. You said, and it’s in their notes, that you had the heart of Usain Bolt.”
“You should know that. I could pump you for two hours easy without breaking a sweat.”
“I got the notes, Tony. They’re the only notes, all copies are deleted.” She paused and turned off the intense flashlight. “You won’t be the first fifty-four-year-old inmate to die in the federal prison system of a heart attack. You were always a stubborn Wop who thought he knew everything.”
***
Two hours later, in the solitary confinement cell where John Gotti and other celebrity prisoners were held while awaiting trial, Tony Garafalo was dead of a heart attack. There was nothing the two new prison doctors could do to save him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“I HAVE AN important announcement,” Gina Carbone, dressed in her customary black pants and shirt on which the traditional patch of the New York City Police Department was sewn with only the word commissioner on it to differentiate her from the 40,000 other cops who wore the patch, stood at the simple wooden podium in the small press room at One Police Plaza.
“We believe that we have eliminated, either through capture or deaths in firefights, all the significant terrorists who through the last several days created as much chaos and death as they could.
“Within the last half hour elite and courageous members of the NYPD have killed as many as eighteen of the fanatical jihadists who somehow gained access to the Holland Tunnel. These were the people who, in a despicable display of cowardice, burned to death Dr. Gabriel Hauser in a cage on top of the building that for years has served as the most visible part of the ventilation and emergency escape route of the tunnel.
“To anticipate a question one of you is likely to ask, and I will take some questions, we do not at this moment know when and how these eighteen members of what we believe to be ISIS gained access to the tunnel’s interior system. There is some evidence that they were members of a sleeper cell that in the three days before the attacks began had steadily gained access to the intricate and very large and almost never used or patrolled ventilation and escape system.”
Deftly, Gina adjusted the slender and flexible microphone. “We do not yet know why ISIS selected Dr. Hauser for this horrible display. In fact, to be completely direct, we are investigating how Dr. Hauser came to be in the tunnel in the first place. His presence may have been voluntary. It may have been involuntary. Let me say this as well. Although the doctor was originally praised for his courage, we have, as you know, developed and are investigating his possible involvement in the planning or prearrangement of the attacks. And his familiarity with some of the people who participated. All of this, of course, is not meant to detract from the horror of his murder.”
She stared into the camera’s glowing orange eye. “More important than anything else I’ve said is this: the president and the mayor will soon lead a march over one of the city’s bridges. Traffic will begin to flow into and out of Manhattan, all in an orderly way. No one will be hurt, no one injured. The lockdown which has inconvenienced so many of you has been a success. As difficult as it has been, the people of this city have sustained this hardship and it has allowed us to hunt down, isolate, and incapacitate murderers. Within hours the streets in all parts of the city will be clean, traffic will flow, bars and restaurants will be open, as will schools, hospitals, all those things that have made this city the vital center of the world.
“But for a time, and it will be a time that the president and the mayor will decide with me and my people’s assistance, there will be soldiers and armed NYPD officers on the streets and in the subways and in almost every public space. If a person means no harm, there will be no harm to you or to him or her. We are not vigilantes, we are not racists, we do not profile people because of their ethnic or religious status. We are law enforcement officers. But if you do mean harm, you will be stopped by any means necessary.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
IN ALL HIS forty-seven years of living in the Bronx and Manhattan, Roland Fortune had never walked on the Triboro Bridge. In the past, as he drove either on his own or, more recently, surrounded by black SUV police vehicles for his protection, he had always gazed out the window at the immense view of th
e island of Manhattan, that Emerald City, and its extraordinary skyline, as extraordinary in daylight or at night, in rain, fog, snow, or clear sunshine.
And in the three years he had lived in Gracie Mansion, with its unobstructed view of the bridge’s almost two mile long expanse, it had taken on an almost totemic significance for him, from the sunrises that seemed to originate from and through and under the bridge’s structure as he sat quietly for a few minutes on the flagstone outdoor patio to the nighttime views when thousands of lights etched the bridge’s fantastical curved outline.
Today, toward the center of the bridge with only the president of the United States, the day at noon was awash with full sunshine, as it had been since Sunday. Both Andrew Carter and Roland Fortune were in business suits. Carter wore a colorful tie. Roland’s white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.
Behind them, at a distance of thirty feet, were the symbols and objects of America’s awesome military power, tanks, armored personnel carriers, unsmiling Marines in full battle gear. On the long, bridge-spanning walkways that Roland had never seen anyone use, rows of New York City police officers, also completely armed, stood like the Praetorian Guard. Helicopters were suspended in midair over, above, below and at the sides of the bridge. The East River waters were dazzling.
Fifteen feet ahead of the handsome WASP president and the equally handsome Hispanic mayor as they waved, smiled, and nodded were the five television vehicles with cameras broadcasting to billions of people this scene of two jubilant and confident men walking across the major bridge that linked Manhattan to Queens and to the rest of the world. Behind the television vans and their cameras was another dense phalanx of armor and soldiers. The surface of the bridge quaked slightly beneath the feet of the two smiling men as they waved at the cameras.