Alert

by James Patterson

  “What is this?”

  “The mayor just came out of another meeting with the scientists. She’s doing it. She’s pulling the trigger.”

  I listened to the beep repeat.

  “This is not a test,” said the voice. “I repeat, this is not a test of the Emergency Alert System.”

  “Pulling what trigger?” said Lopez. “You mean she’s going to give them the money?”

  “No. She’s going to evacuate, right?” I said as I stared at the STAND BY on the screen.

  Fabretti nodded.

  “That’s right. God help us all,” said Fabretti. “The mayor is going to call for the complete evacuation of New York City.”

  Chapter 79

  Chief Fabretti received a text from the deputy mayor, and we followed him up the four flights of too-warm stairs and then through a corridor crowded with cops and suits into the main war room again.

  In a fishbowl office in the corner, beyond a row of printers, stood the mayor, along with the glaring lights of the small camera crew that was filming her live for the emergency broadcast.

  I watched as the blue screen on the wall was replaced by an image of the mayor.

  “Fellow New Yorkers, hello. I am sorry to tell you this, but we have received word that an undersea earthquake in the Atlantic may be imminent within the next six to eight hours. It is believed by experts that this quake may cause an Atlantic Ocean tsunami large enough to be a serious threat to people throughout the city. We are not one hundred percent sure that this is the case, but for the sake of caution and the preservation of life, I have signed an order to evacuate the entire city.”

  “Why is she lying and talking about an earthquake?” said Arturo. “Like people have been sleeping through the bombings and assassination?”

  “Who knows?” Doyle said. “Maybe she—”

  “Shut the fuck up, both of you!” said Fabretti, standing behind them.

  “This evacuation is a legal order not a recommendation. All the people of the city—in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island and the Bronx—must leave their homes as soon as possible and head inland. If you have a car parked in Manhattan, we are asking you to leave it where it is, as roads will soon become impassable with traffic. Please use public transport.

  “The MTA and Port Authority have already been ordered to mobilize the mass transit system. All buses, trains, subways, and ferries will be open to the public at no charge in order to move people inland. Shelters in New Jersey and northern Westchester have already been set up, and we are working on opening more shelters farther north and inland as the number of people increases.

  “We urge any and all of you to stay with family, but remember to stay away from all coastal areas within thirty miles of the shore. Please do not panic. We need to have as orderly an evacuation as possible. You have time to pack, and everyone will be given transportation and shelter. Stay tuned to local media. If you have not done so already, prepare a go bag.”

  The mayor was saying that the fire department had been mobilized to help the hospitals when I stepped over into a corner and called Martin.

  “Mike, how goes it?”

  “I guess you’re not watching TV.”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Listen to me carefully, Martin. This isn’t a joke. They think an Atlantic Ocean tsunami is coming, so they’re evacuating the city. Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Not a New York one,” he said. “I can drive, though.”

  You had to hand it to the kid. I thought he sounded alert yet calm. I just told him the world was ending, and he was immediately ready to deal.

  “Good,” I said. “In the front hall closet is our seventy-two-hour kit—a big knapsack containing food and water, first aid, maps, flashlights, glow sticks, a crank radio, and five hundred bucks in cash. There’s also an extra set of van keys in it. The van’s in the lot at Ninety-Eighth, just off West End. I want you to go get it and pick up the kids and Seamus at Holy Name.

  “When you get everybody, don’t get on the highway. Go north up Broadway and over the Broadway Bridge into the Bronx. Keep going north until Broadway becomes Route 9A up in Westchester. Just keep going then, okay? Call me when you have the kids.”

  “How far do you want me to go?” said Martin.

  I thought about what the geophysical experts had said about the 170-story wave.

  “I have a cousin in the Catskills. You should head there.”

  “The Catskills! That’s, like, a hundred miles. What the hell is coming? A meteor? Is Ireland going to be hit, too?”

  “Don’t panic, Martin. It may be nothing, honestly, but better safe than sorry. Now hop to it. Grab the kids and call me back.”

  Chapter 80

  Half an hour later, I sat at a desk in the OEM war room quietly watching the big screen. It was divided up into a grid of nine screens, just like it was at the beginning of The Brady Bunch, but instead of seeing Carol and Mike and the gang smiling, various parts of the city were visible. The center was losing hold, and things were falling apart.

  What looked like war footage was being beamed in from the traffic-light cameras. In SoHo, Times Square, Central Park, Harlem, and everywhere else, the streets were packed with cars and the sidewalks were filled with people carrying things. Knapsacks, rolling suitcases, paintings, dogs. On the screen that showed Broadway and 72nd Street, I watched as a short black guy in a gray business suit pushed a shopping cart up the middle of Broadway with an old black woman, probably his mother, lying in it.

  I’d never seen so many people in Grand Central Terminal. They were packed in like sardines, a lot of them pushing and shoving. As I watched, a tall, curly-haired old lady by the information booth went to the floor as her cane was kicked out from under her by a group of stupid kids pushing past her. She was trampled by three or four other thoughtless jerks before some nice Asian teen boy stepped in. I was almost heartened as he dragged her back to her feet, but then as I watched, blood began gushing from her nose.

  Then there was the eighteen-wheeler on fire in the middle of the Verrazano Bridge. The whole thing—the cab and the trailer—just blazing along. It would continue to do so, I knew, until it burned out, because a fire truck had as much chance of getting through the stalled traffic as I had of becoming the starting power forward for the Knicks this season.

  No one was listening about not panicking, and who could blame them? It was every man for himself now, as hard as that was to believe.

  From time to time, I looked away from the sickening screens to just stare at the items on the desk I was sitting at. I blinked at a bottle of hand sanitizer, a LEGO Movie mouse pad, a tube of ChapStick. All of it was going to be underwater in a few hours?

  Beside the computer was a framed picture I couldn’t stop staring at. Two coltish girls and a tall blond mom smiling as they waded among the rocks of a river.

  It looked like it was taken in New England somewhere, with autumn-yellow leaves on the trees. The girls were adorable, with braces, and the smile on the mom’s face was room-brightening. It looked like an old Coca-Cola ad or something. Americans being happy. It was time to say sayonara to that now?

  Squinting angrily at the photo, I suddenly didn’t want to just catch the sons of bitches responsible anymore. I wanted to hunt them down and kill them with my bare hands.

  When I called Martin for the twentieth time in the last twenty minutes, it kicked into voice mail. Martin was on the road now. Everyone was with him except Brian. They were in northern Manhattan, trying to get across the Harlem River to meet up with Brian at Fordham Prep. The problem was that Brian wasn’t picking up his phone, which meant he had forgotten to charge it. But Martin had called the school and left word to have Brian stay there for pickup, so maybe all was still good.

  I balled my hands into fists as they started to shake.

  Who was I kidding? I felt completely helpless.

  I looked up as Emily came in.

  “Did you g
et your kids out?” she said.

  “Almost. How about you? Are you near the coast in Virginia?”

  “No, thank God. My brother got Olivia out of school, and they’re at Costco stocking up,” she said glumly.

  Emily’s face lit up suddenly as she got a text.

  “Mike, get up! C’mon!” she said, grabbing my hand.

  “What?”

  “Arturo and Doyle are at the scientist meeting on six. They say they might have something.”

  Chapter 81

  “They know where the bombs are!” said a wide-eyed Arturo, grabbing my shoulders as I stepped into the doorway of the sixth-floor conference room.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Árvore Preta,” said Doyle, looking every bit as pumped as Arturo. “It’s Portuguese for ‘black tree.’ It’s a volcanic island just south of the Cape Verde archipelican.”

  “Archipelago, you mean, moron,” said Arturo.

  We all backed out into the hallway.

  “Slow down, fellas,” said Emily. “Where is this island?”

  “The Cape Verde island chain is off the coast of Africa,” said Doyle. “They said it’s roughly three hundred and fifty miles to the west.”

  “Why do they think this particular island is where the bombs are?” I said. “Didn’t they say there’s a bunch of different island chains in the area?”

  “Well, these two rock scientists were in there arguing endlessly,” said Arturo. “They kept looking at the video, and this guy from UC Berkeley—”

  “Cut to the chase, Arturo,” I said, trying to be patient.

  “All of a sudden, this little guy, a Brit, in the corner of the room stands up and points at the screen and says, ‘Excuse me, but are those petrels?’”

  “Petrels?” I said.

  “They’re freaking birds!” said Doyle. “Those little birds you see in the video when the guy pans the camera down the cliff. They’re an endangered seabird that nests on this Cape Verde island, Árvore Preta.”

  “That’s when Larry Duke and Dr. Bower went bonkers,” said Arturo. “Árvore Preta has an active volcano that last erupted in 1963. They actually knew all about it. They’d listed Árvore Preta in a paper they did in the late eighties about potentially unstable volcanoes.”

  “Bottom line is they think this is it, Mike,” said Doyle. “We know where the bombs are.”

  Chapter 82

  Four hours later, at a little after 11:00 p.m., Emily and I came out the OEM building’s side entrance alongside the dark Hudson River with Larry Duke and Dr. Bower. A moment later, a loud roaring sound drew our eyes upward, and we watched as a huge helicopter appeared over the lip of the building.

  “Oh, my! It’s like from that movie. What’s it called? Black Hawk Down?” said Dr. Bower as we ducked back from the whining turbo-rotor wash.

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope this one stays up,” I said as it touched down on the concrete pad twenty feet in front of us.

  The imposing military chopper, bearing an emblem of a rearing winged white centaur, was from the army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. The 160th worked hand in glove with the Navy SEALs and had actually been on the mission that had killed Osama bin Laden.

  All stops were now officially pulled out. After a tense closed-door teleconference with the US president himself, the mayor had pulled the trigger. We had only one option left on the table, and the mayor was taking it.

  The Night Stalkers were here to give us a ride to the airport. We were heading to Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, with the military to find the explosives.

  Though it was probably a buzzer-beating long shot that we would find them before the terrorists’ deadline, it was definitely the right move, I felt.

  Because what if the three billion dollars were paid? What was to stop them from blowing up the cliff anyway? Or charging another three billion next week?

  Though it wasn’t announced, the mayor had also decided that, deadline or no deadline, she wasn’t going to give them a single penny of her or the city’s money. Which, again, was exactly right, in my humble opinion. Terrorists needed to be dealt with head-on. Whoever was doing this to us needed to be found and stopped, not negotiated with.

  After a quick strap-in by the Black Hawk’s crew chief, the chopper took off and stayed low as we headed north up the Hudson. Through cold air blasting in my face from a half-open window, I stared out at the glittering strings of Manhattan’s lights on my right.

  The glittering, unmoving strings of Manhattan’s lights.

  Despite the mayor’s directive not to drive, it was obvious that the streets were completely impassable because of traffic.

  Staring at the sea of dead-stopped cars, I thought about Martin and the kids. The last message I had received from them, about an hour and a half ago, was that they were all together and crossing into Westchester.

  Were they far enough away? I wondered, looking north up the lightless river. They had to be, right? Or at least they would be far enough away by the deadline tomorrow.

  At least that’s what I was going to keep telling myself, I decided, as I took out my phone again.

  “Mike? Hello? Are you there?” said Seamus as my call, surprisingly, went through.

  “Yes, Seamus. It’s me,” I said straining to hear over the engine whine. “Where are you? Did you get out? Where are you?”

  “We’re—”

  Then the signal went screwy.

  I ripped the phone off my ear and stared at the screen. It was still connected.

  “Seamus?” I said. “Seamus?”

  Then I looked at the screen again and cursed.

  The line was dead.

  Chapter 83

  “Mike? Are you there, Mike?” said Seamus as he lifted the phone off his ear and stared at its screen.

  “It cut off,” he said.

  “Ah, the cell sites are just melting, Father. Must be millions trying to get through now,” Martin said as he let out an extra-large breath.

  Martin’s glance went from the standstill traffic to the needle of the gas gauge, which was at the halfway point now, then back to the traffic again. He wiped his sweating forehead. He’d give it another minute, then turn off the engine to conserve gas, he decided.

  They were on Broadway in Yonkers. It was a sketchy part of town—run-down houses and buildings and stores. They’d been stopped for almost five minutes, which meant God only knows what was happening up ahead. In the last hour, they had probably traveled less than a mile.

  As Martin watched, two stocky young Hispanic kids zoomed past on a Kawasaki dirt bike. The one on the back was seated backwards, and he gave Martin and the good Father the finger as his buddy threaded between the cars.

  “Did ya see that, Father?” Martin said. “That wasn’t very neighborly, now, was it?”

  “We’re not on the old sod anymore, Martin,” Seamus said, shaking his head. “It’s probably best to pretend you’re blind.”

  Martin turned to his left and looked beyond an empty parking lot as the Metro-North Hudson Line train went slowly by. It was incredibly packed with people in and even standing between the cars. On the last car, there were several people sitting on the roof!

  It was like something out of news footage from the Great Depression or a science fiction film, Martin thought. This crazy country. He’d just wanted to make a little pocket money with the nanny job, and now look where he was. Wandering the set of The War of the Worlds 2.

  When the train finally passed, he could see the Hudson River. Great, he thought, drumming his fingers on the wheel. They were right next to water, the one place Mike had specifically told them not to be.

  Should they leave the van and try to get on a train? Martin thought, staring at the gas gauge again. He let out another long breath as he bit at his lower lip. It was impossible to know what to do.

  “Martin?” Jane called from the back, distress in her voice.

  “Wh
at is it?” Martin said, trying to keep his tone light for the children.

  “Bad news, Martin,” she said.

  “How is that even possible?” Martin said under his breath.

  “It’s Jasper. I think…well, I think he has to tinkle.”

  “You want to walk the dog out there in the ’hood?” Seamus said, turning around in the passenger seat with a flabbergasted look.

  “It’s either out there, Gramps,” said Jane, shrugging, “or right here in the van.”

  “Okay, okay. Brian and Eddie and Ricky and—what the heck—you, too, Trent. Look lively and get the leash. I have an important mission for you boys. You’re all on Jasper tinkle patrol,” Seamus said.

  “Yes!” said Brian, putting the now-moaning Jasper on the leash. “Finally something to do!”

  “Buddy system, okay, boys?” Martin said. “Leave no man behind.”

  “Or dog!” said Chrissy frantically. “Or dog!”

  “Exactly. No man or dog, okay? Now hit it!”

  They burst out of the van and ran with Jasper through the traffic to a concrete wall beside a run-down tenement.

  “I see them,” said Bridget, cupping her hands over her eyes and looking out the window. “He’s tinkling! Jasper is tinkling!”

  “Yay!” said Fiona.

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day, isn’t it, Father?” said Martin.

  Seamus rolled his eyes.

  The van burst into applause as the boys arrived back, breathless, with the pup. The happy, excited dog started barking like mad as Chrissy grabbed him to her chest in a bear hug while Socky, the cat, remained aloof, snuggled in one of Shawna’s sweatshirts on the floor of the van.

  “We’re clear,” said Brian, slamming the door. “Quick! Martin! Hit the gas!”

  If only, Martin thought as he stared out at the sea of brake lights.