Alert

by James Patterson

  “These buildings are tremendous,” Emily said as we walked with our necks craned and eyes up, like Iowa tourists fresh off the farm. “They almost look like a cross between art deco skyscrapers and factories.”

  “That’s exactly what they used to be,” I said. “All these buildings are mostly offices now, but back in the old days, they were vertical clothing factories. The art deco–like setbacks were required so workers on the upper stories would have light and air.

  “It’s hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women’s clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York’s fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion.”

  “But if these were just factories, why so elaborate? Why all the architectural stuff, especially on the upper floors? You can’t even really see it from down here,” Emily said.

  “The people who built them were poor Lower East Side Jews who came up out of the sweatshops and made good,” I said, remembering something I’d read. “They wanted to make their mark by building factories that had over-the-top class. Also, they had a heart and wanted the mostly female workers stuck in the buildings all day to have something pretty to look at out the window, hence the stringcourses and volutes and egg-and-dart molding on the upper floors.”

  “How do you know so much about all this?” Emily said, giving me a baffled look.

  “I’m not all brawn. I actually have a library card,” I said with a shrug. “I also used to walk an evening beat here when I was fresh out of the academy, and I used to wonder about the buildings, so I did some homework. You quickly run out of things to look at after all the pretty secretaries go home.”

  We were at 36th Street, staring up at the setbacks of an old telephone-company building, when Chuck Jordan called.

  “Mike, we’ve been monitoring the room, and it sounds like the person snoring just woke up and left.”

  “Is the laptop still there?”

  “Yes,” Chuck said. “No change with that. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just went out to get something to eat.”

  I’d just hung up with Chuck when one of the uniforms hailed me on the radio.

  “Hey, Detective. This is Sergeant Rowe,” he said. “I think you should head over here to Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth. I’m not positive, but I think I found that doodad you’re looking for on a building about a quarter of the way toward Seventh.”

  “Good job, Rowe,” I said as I grabbed Emily’s arm and immediately started hustling her west toward Eighth Avenue. “We’re about a block away. Don’t leave yet, and try to stay out of sight. Keep your eyes peeled for Yevdokimov coming out of the building across the street. It looks like he’s on the move.”

  We heard the yelling right as we made it to the corner of Eighth.

  A block to the north, at the intersection of 37th, there was some kind of commotion in the street between a guy in a car and some guys on a motorcycle.

  The car was a silver Mercedes double-parked beside a sidewalk construction shed, its bald driver half out of its window as he yelled. The two guys on the motorcycle beside him were dressed in black and wearing black full-face helmets. The big glossy orange Japanese motorcycle they sat on was so close to the Benz it seemed to be leaning on its left rear quarter panel.

  Had the bike tapped the Benz? I thought, staring, as I started crossing 36th. A fender bender?

  As I reached the other corner of 36th, the motorcycle’s engine suddenly screamed as it roared away from the Benz like a rocket east up 37th.

  East up westbound 37th! I thought as the driver threw open his door.

  “Down!” I yelled as I dove to the ground.

  I was just able to pull Emily down on top of me on the sidewalk when the Mercedes exploded with a blast of light and a deafening boom.

  Chapter 97

  I got up off my knees a disoriented moment later. I stood there with my hands over my ears, waiting for them to stop ringing, before I realized the ringing was the piercing blare of a stuck car horn.

  I looked north and saw that the sound was coming from the half-blown-apart Mercedes. Through what looked like billowing white smoke, I could see the car up on the sidewalk, its front end wedged under the wreckage of the now-collapsed sidewalk shed.

  I called in the description of the motorcycle over the radio as I ran toward the wreckage, pushing through an already clustering crowd on the sidewalk and street. I squinted against the nasty tang of burned metal as I began pulling away the aluminum poles and wooden sheets of the destroyed construction shed, trying to get access to the car.

  As I peeled away the last couple of splintered plywood sheets, I saw that some type of tarp from the shed had fallen perfectly over the side of the car, like a showroom cover. Then I pulled the cover away, and I got my first good look at the damage.

  The car’s hood was folded in, and its front and rear windshields were completely shattered. All the interior air bags had gone off, and all the tires were blown flat.

  I had to move one last sheet of wood to get a look at the driver. He gasped as he sat in the driver’s seat of the ruined car, clutching the wheel with his right hand. The driver’s door was missing. So was the driver’s left arm below the elbow. His striped polo shirt was scorched and sliced to tatters from bomb shrapnel, and when he turned, I could see a still-smoking piece of metal the size and shape of a Dorito embedded in his right cheekbone.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I lied to him. “Just sit tight. What happened? Did you see who did it?”

  He didn’t say anything. I watched his jaw suddenly clench and his lips begin to tremble. His whole face started shivering, like he was suddenly freezing. I was looking into his blue eyes when they glazed over and he stopped moving. I stepped back in startled horror, looking away. I knew I’d just watched him die.

  I recognized his face when I peered back at him a split second later. It was Anatoly Gavrilov, the other Russian we’d brought in during the Bronx arrest of Yevdokimov.

  Yevdokimov! I thought as I quickly looked past Gavrilov’s body to the passenger door on the other side of the car. Shit! It was open, and there was blood on the passenger seat and in the footwell.

  “Yevdokimov!” I yelled to Emily as I scrambled out of the wreckage and headed into the street around the destroyed vehicle’s trunk. “He was in the car. He’s hurt and on foot. The real bombers must have tried to hit him. C’mon, he can’t have gotten far.”

  Around the other side of the car, there was an actual blood trail on the sidewalk. A lot of blood. Yevdokimov was obviously hurt very badly. It was like we were tracking a gut-shot deer up Eighth Avenue.

  “Back out of the damn way!” I said to all the looky-loos, trying to preserve the crime scene.

  We turned the corner, and the trail ran smack-dab into a tall West African street vendor who was crouched down, picking up iPhone covers out of the gutter.

  “Hey! Anyone come past here bleeding?” I said.

  “Yes! A white man. A crazy white man,” said the vendor in a musical voice. “He had blood on his arm and pouring off his chin. I tried to get him to sit, but he pushed past me and knocked over all my stuff. He got into a taxi not a minute ago.”

  I couldn’t see any taxi on 37th when I stepped into the street, so I radioed it in.

  Officer Rowe and his buddies had arrived and were surrounding the scene when we went back around the corner to the wreckage. There had to be about a thousand people standing around now. Cars stopped in the street. Everybody had their phones out, immortalizing our bombing scene for the folks at YouTube to instantly globally disseminate.

  “Fuck the police!” so
meone in the crowd threw out over the still-wailing horn to get a laugh. He got several, unfortunately.

  “Isn’t this great? We’re going viral,” Emily said as we stood there gaping at the still-steaming, torn-apart car.

  “Of course we are,” I said. “Who wants to watch Times Square Elmo beat the crap out of Times Square Spidey when you got a real live blown-up guy in a car?”

  “So I’m going to take a wild guess and say we’re not the only ones looking for Yevdokimov,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Guess not,” I said as I moved back through the crowd into the street. I walked around Rowe and crawled back toward the front of the car and reached in over the dead Russian and found the keys still in the ignition.

  People in the crowd actually booed as I finally cut the car’s engine and the horn.

  “That’s all, folks,” I said.

  Chapter 98

  “So…anything yet?” I said for the twentieth time over Chuck Jordan’s shoulder as he sat at the desk, tapping at Yevdokimov’s laptop.

  “Oh, plenty, Mike, but I’m keeping it to myself,” the young agent said, rolling his eyes.

  “Why don’t we give Chuck a little space to work, Mike?” Emily said, yanking me out into the hallway.

  We were in Yevdokimov’s flop now. We’d found it soon after the bombing. Sergeant Rowe had been spot-on. The building was just where he said it was, down the block from the bombing off Eighth Avenue on the north side of 37th. Yevdokimov’s crash pad was on the tenth floor, and it was filled with me and Emily and about twenty FBI agents who were scouring every nook and cranny for some sign of who the real bombers could be.

  We still were unsure of Yevdokimov’s whereabouts. We’d told all the hospitals to be on the lookout for him, but so far, nothing was shaking. The good news was that we’d actually found three computers, which Chuck Jordan and his guys were now poking through.

  “This isn’t exactly what people have in mind when they think ‘New York loft,’ is it?” Emily said, looking at the moldering plaster and probably asbestos-covered overhead pipes. “What did the building manager say? This used to be a sewing machine factory? Wasn’t there a famous fire in a sewing machine factory in New York in the eighteen hundreds or something? Because this place definitely looks haunted.”

  “You’re thinking of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” I said. “That was down in the Village. After the fire started, more than a hundred garment workers died. People were jumping out windows. Because the kindly owners had gated and locked the exit stairwells to keep the workers on task.

  “Some good actually came out of it, though, because the public went nuts, and it led to fire safety laws and sprinkler systems and fire escapes and the forty-hour workweek.”

  “You’re just a walking Ken Burns documentary, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yes, and my fee for this extended walking tour is the capture of a Russian homicidal bomber in handcuffs with a big shiny bow on his head.”

  “Get in here! I think I found something,” Chuck Jordan bellowed.

  We went back in. On the screen was a picture of three fat kids in an aboveground pool. It took me a couple of seconds to see Papa Yevdokimov sitting behind them on the pool ladder holding a Super Soaker water gun.

  “These are Yevdokimov’s personal photographs. There are about a hundred that show him at the same seaside cottage,” Chuck said.

  “It’s his dacha,” Emily said.

  “His what?”

  “I worked a Russian organized crime case a couple of years ago. Dachas are Russian vacation houses. All the mobsters have them back in the old country,” she said.

  “So are we going to try to peg the location from the background again?” I said.

  “No. These shots are JPEGs with Exif file formats, which means that they were taken with a smartphone. Smartphone cameras record GPS locations of where each picture is taken in a process known as geotagging. Give me a second,” Chuck said, clicking open some new screens.

  “Here it is. The latitude and longitude,” he said a second later. “It’s Eleven Roseleah Drive, Mystic, Connecticut.”

  “That’s where he’s headed—has to be,” said Emily.

  “What are we waiting for, then? Let’s roll,” I said.

  Chapter 99

  We were back in the dingy building’s hallway, getting a move on so we could head up to Connecticut, when the elevator opened and Chief Fabretti appeared.

  “There you are, Bennett. I’ve been trying to call you,” he said with an agitated look on his face.

  “Sorry, Chief,” I said, fishing my phone out of my pocket. “Oh, here’s the problem. Left it on airplane mode.”

  “Stop screwing with me, Bennett,” Fabretti said, pulling me over to a corner. “I’ve been getting calls from my bosses. Their counterparts over at the Bureau saw you traipsing around their new digs this morning. They said thanks but no thanks for your help. There’s no more task force. The feds are taking over the investigation from here.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, agitated myself now. “We’re right in the middle of this. We’re about to grab the only guy who knows who the real bombers are.”

  “No, Bennett. They’re about to grab him. Not you. The feds want to nail the bastards who blew up their building all by themselves.”

  “What about the college kids who died on the train and the mayor and the people who died in the EMP attack? They were New Yorkers, right? The people we’re supposed to protect.”

  “It’s already been settled. The FBI is going to get the credit for this.”

  “They can have the damn credit, and if there’s any left over, you can have it. I’ll leave before the reporters show, I swear. C’mon, Chief. We’ve got a beeline on this guy. We just need to find this bastard now before the real bombers take him out.”

  “It’s over, Bennett. So stop arguing,” Fabretti said, glaring coldly at me. “You’re off the case, and that’s an order. There were about a hundred robberies during the evacuation. We have plenty of work for you to do. Now drive me back to One Police Plaza.”

  “Mike?” called Emily from down the hall, where all the FBI agents were packed into the elevator.

  “Go,” I said. “Get this guy. It’s up to you now. Don’t lose him!”

  “That’s the spirit, Bennett,” said Fabretti as the elevator door rumbled closed.

  Chapter 100

  Fabretti insisted on buying me a coffee at a Times Square Starbucks before we headed way back downtown to One Police Plaza.

  “See, Mike? I’m not such a bad guy,” he said, tipping his nonfat latte at me as I chauffeured him down Broadway. “Listen, I know you’ve been neck-deep in this from the beginning, but this is coming from up high. The mayor—hell, the senior senator—is involved. We’re just small potatoes.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “Exactly. I’m doing you a favor. I heard the mayor sent her plane for you. That had to be sweet. A real ride on the gravy train. Or should I say ‘the gravy plane’? Honestly, you play your cards right, Mike, you keep playing ball, retirement is going to be smooth sailing for you.”

  “Sure, definitely,” I said, checking my phone to see if there was anything from Emily.

  After another excruciating twenty minutes of Fabretti’s pep talk, I dropped him off at the door of One Police Plaza. I told him I was going to park and meet him up at his office, but instead I actually squealed out of the lot and got immediately on the northbound FDR Drive.

  I called Emily as I punched it.

  “Where are you?” I yelled.

  “We just crossed the Connecticut border, but we’re still about two hours away. Mystic is practically in Rhode Island. We have a team of agents out of New Haven almost at the house. What’s your status?”

  “I’m on the highway about half an hour behind you.”

  “What about Fabretti?” Emily said. “Aren’t you off the case?”

  “I never heard him say that
,” I said. “My ears are still ringing from that car bomb.”

  “Mine, too, Mike,” Emily said with a laugh. “See you there.”

  I hung up and asked Siri for directions and proceeded to put the pedal to the metal. I took the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge into the Bronx, then took the Bruckner to I-95.

  It was coming on rush hour when I crossed into Connecticut and hit traffic. It was stop-and-go past Stamford when I saw the Chevy’s tank was almost empty, so I got off at the next exit and pulled into a BP gas station and filled up.

  As I stood squeezing the nozzle, I looked at my phone and laughed when I saw that Fabretti had left twenty angry texts. Where the f are you? came his latest.

  Taking a ride on the gravy plane, I texted back.

  My phone rang a moment later.

  “Hey, Robertson,” I said.

  “Mike, big news!” he yelled. “We just got a bead on two Russians that might be our guys. Brooklyn and I have been going bonkers with these flight manifests, but we have two Russian immigrants who have been back and forth to Cape Verde from the States six times over the last year.

  “Their names are Vladislav and Oleg Filipov. They’re father and son. Turns out they flew to Cape Verde out of Miami, not New York.”

  “Miami?”

  “Yes. The father, Vladislav, ran a brutal Russian prostitution and drug-dealing crew there for most of the eighties and nineties—allegedly, at least, since he never got caught for a damn thing. No fixed address.”

  “What about the son?”

  “We don’t have anything on him in terms of a record. He had a house in Queens up until six months ago, but since then, nothing. No address. No job. No visible means of support. I’m e-mailing you their photographs from their driver’s licenses as we speak. They could definitely be the guys on the video. One older, one younger. They’re looking good on this!”