Leslee nodded, then touched her left ear. “Jack, thank you. Hold on a minute. My producer is telling me something.” The blond, who wore a green and blue outfit suitable for early fall in New York City, looked up at the studio camera. “More data. A source close to the mayor’s office says the bearded terrorist has threatened to kill one of the women by sunrise tomorrow if all jihadists held in federal jails are not released and put on a plane to Pakistan. Jack, break in if anything new develops at your end. We’re now bringing in senior international reporter Arwa Gillespie who has spent months in the Middle East, talking to both jihadist guerrillas in Syria and to families trapped in the fighting between jihadists and the Syrian government. Arwa, welcome. What do you make of this situation?”
“Damn,” said Billy, lowering the TV sound as the talking head reporter began opining about the situation. He looked my way. “Jeff, your parents worked at Los Alamos, at the lab, right? You got any idea what will happen here?”
I licked my lips, giving silent thanks that our shift supervisor Bridget Hampstead had not made an appearance. She would have ordered us both back to work. This terror scene at a building I’d once visited hit me hard. One of the women resembled my Mom. All three looked badly frightened in the copter close-up.
“Well, when I visited this Top Deck floor, the only way up was by a single elevator,” I said, keeping my eyes on the copter image. “It was an old-style Otis elevator that was manually operated. Which is why it takes an operator to make it work.”
“No automatic elevators?” Billy said, looking puzzled.
“Uh, I think the elevators that service the lower floors, up to the 86th floor, are now automated. But back in 1931, when the Empire State Building was completed, all the elevators had operators,” I said, lifting my pop and taking a sip. “There are no stairs up to the Top Deck floor, nor is there an outside balcony. It’s at the top of the round spire that rises from the building’s 86th floor. The room is fully enclosed. All the windows are sealed. So if this terror guy has forced open the elevator doors and locked it on the 102nd floor, there’s no way to get up there. Until he unfreezes the elevator controls.”
Billy, an Anglo who had grown up in nearby Taos, looked surprised. “You sure know a lot about that place with the hostages. Me, I just thought the only place people could see the city was from that open balcony area with high fences above the stone railing. I’ve seen pictures of that in a movie.”
I nodded, not looking away from the copter image. “That’s the Observation Deck on the 86th floor. It’s got neat Art Deco wall art and a big outside balcony that can hold maybe two hundred people. The Top Deck on the 102nd floor is much smaller. Maybe twenty or thirty people could fit into that room. Which is round since the spire is round. You gotta pay more money for a VIP pass to Top Deck. It’s the topmost level that is open to the public.”
Billy opened his lunch pail and pulled out a meatball sub. He began munching on it, watching the TV and half-listening to the low voices of the two women. “So it’ll be hard for the cops or SWAT people to reach this guy?”
“Very hard,” I said, not mentioning to him the fact there was another floor above Top Deck. It was the 103rd floor and was smaller. Its ceiling was filled with copper tubes holding wiring for the radio and TV transmitters up top. That room was different than Top Deck. Its windows could be opened from the inside, and a glass fronted door gave access to an outside balcony that ran around the entire topmost floor. The balcony’s concrete railing was just waist high and lacked the high metal fencing that protected people on the 86th. Only VIPs and Hollywood celebrities got to visit the 103rd floor, and only in the company of the observatory’s director. The 103rd floor was reached by a stairwell lying behind a door that was close to the elevator. Did the terrorist know about it? Maybe not. And it was clear from how he was pushing the women up against the double-paned windows of the 102nd floor that he wanted them to be seen and the imagery to be broadcast worldwide. “Maybe the cops could climb up the inside of the elevator shaft, starting at the 86th floor. Don’t know. Never asked anyone about that while my parents and I were touring the Empire State Building.”
Billy swallowed a bite of his meatball sub. “Well, you got me beat there. Closest I’ve been to New York is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.” He looked over to me. “And you sure know a lot about that building. More than I heard in that movie I watched. How come?”
I shrugged, then picked up my ham and cheese sandwich. “Got a good memory. Hard for me to forget things. Helped me in school, you know.”
Billy smiled and looked back to the TV. “Yeah, well, sure wish I could remember ancient stuff like what you’ve been saying. Me, I gotta use a calendar app to be sure I don’t set up dates with two different gals on the same night!”
I chuckled. Billy was a decent guy even if rather shallow in his interests. “Well, I’m not talented at nature photography like you are. We all have something we’re good at.”
“You got that right,” he muttered, putting down his sub and taking a drink from a chocolate milk carton. “Well, let’s hope the cops can find a way to rescue those women before sunrise. Sure wouldn’t want to explain to their families why they all died.”
Memories from my overseas trips with my parents filled my mind. As did my memory of visiting the Gateway Arch in St. Louis with my parents, years ago. “I hope so too. But there is no way this guy will get his jihadist buddies released from jail. The American government never gives in to terrorist demands. Not publicly.”
“So they say,” Billy said, giving a shrug. “Who knows what they do in the dark of night?”
Who indeed?
The three women’s lives were at severe risk. One of them would die in less than fifteen hours, when the sun rose at 6 a.m. in New York. And the place they were being held was a place I had visited. I’d also visited the 103rd floor above Top Deck when my parents got the director to take us all up there. My Dad had mentioned his work at Los Alamos. Turned out the director’s father was a WWII Army grunt who’d been slated to take part in the invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945. Instead, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from dying or being wounded in a seaborne invasion. The director said he was thankful his father had lived to marry and have kids like him and his sister. So he'd taken us on the VIP tour of the 103rd floor. At the time, I’d heard the chatter and not given it a thought. The history of World War II was something I’d memorized in third grade, before going on to study Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.
Anyway, I knew I could teleport to the 103rd floor and then go down the stairs and access the Top Deck floor. Maybe the guy would be dozing off. But the way he had his shotgun roped to one woman’s neck, with the other two women neck-roped to her, was a sign that any escape effort by any woman would wake him and cause him to pull the trigger of the shotgun. Was that the reason no police sharpshooter had tried a head shot on the man? I knew that a Barret .50 caliber rifle could put a slug long as my hand through the double-paned window and through the bearded guy’s brains. The Barrett’s range was a good mile, so a sniper could take him out, assuming he was in a quiet copter hovering at the same level as the Top Deck floor. Or so I’d learned while hunting with my Dad in the Santa Fe National Forest, near the East Fork of the Jemez River. We’d also camped nearby at the Jemez Falls Campground and taken the forest road south to the picnic area. From there we’d hiked down to the falls. Now, all I had left of him were memories, his .308 hunting rifle and the 1911AI Federal Ordnance semi-automatic pistol he’d taught me to shoot.
The middle-aged woman captive resembled my Mom. Memories of her filled my mind. When Mom learned about my abilities when I was five, she’d told me not to let other people see what I could do. Like teleporting across the playground. She had warned me there was a chance other people might grab me, take me some place and study me like a rat. But later, as I got older, she’d talked about my mind powers and said
she hoped I could use them “to do good, to help people in need.” And now, here was a chance to do what my Mom had urged me to do.
Possibilities filled my mind. The Denver REI store, which I’d visited on a training trip, held some stuff I would need after teleporting to New York. And I would have to wait for nightfall so my sudden appearance in the floor above Top Deck wouldn’t be visible to people watching from the news copter or from FBI spotter stations. I’d read a bit about FBI tactics. I was sure there were FBI agents inside the building now. I doubted they would do anything until nightfall. Maybe, just maybe, my superpower abilities could save some lives. I knew that once a police assault on the jihadist guy began, the lives of the three women were at risk. While the FBI was great at rescuing hostages, there were often casualties among bystanders or among the hostages. I stood up.
“Well, I’m heading back to work. Got to put out some new bedrolls.”
Billy grinned. “Worker bee you are! Me, I got ten more minutes to my lunch break. See you soon.”
“See ya,” I said, tossing my lunch trash into the trash can. I put my lunch bag back into my locker, then I headed for the door that gave access to the public area of the store. It was Saturday and I would have to work until my shift ended at six.
With my mind filled with memories of the Empire State Building, its layout and the stuff I had in my apartment that might help me mount a rescue attempt, I did my best to put on a nice customer-friendly smile.
♦ ♦ ♦
Janet stood at the outer edge of the giant room that held the Strategic Information and Operations Center, on the fifth floor of her building. It was the one part of the FBI that operated 24/7 and which was focused on hostage rescue and crisis management. The center belonged to the agency’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. Its field action part was the Critical Incident Response Group, which shared the fourth floor with her branch. Standing beside her was Beverly, who’d pulled her into the room to see the agency’s response to the Empire State Building hostage taking. They watched the rows of desks filled with flatscreens where agents sat, talked over neck phones, reviewed live imagery from the 102nd floor’s security cameras and acted tense. It was 8:45 p.m., hours after the original incident began, and she ignored the rumbling of her stomach that demanded food.
“Have they dispatched the SWAT team out of Quantico yet?” she asked softly.
“Yes. Along with a full HRT unit,” Beverly said, looking aside and up to Janet. Her friend was a few inches shorter than her own five feet eleven inches. Her black face was intense. “Their copter is on the roof of the MetLife building right now.”
Janet frowned. “Thought all Manhattan helipad landings on building roofs were shut down after 9/11.”
“They were,” Beverly said softly. “Special override of city rules. The HRT folks are coordinating with the New York City field office people. They have the most up to date building interior maps and data on the ESB. Their office has a live feed to those desks over there,” she said, pointing to the far side of the room.
This was a big part of why she had joined the bureau just after finishing college at George Washington. Rescuing hostages, saving lives and protecting the nation’s military and industrial secrets was something she’d long admired about the FBI. While she would have loved to be on the HRT copter, she didn’t have the military small unit training for it, nor was she sure she could have been satisfied being part of the Hostage Rescue Team on the copter. While she’d been decent in track and field in high school, and had played soccer at GWU, it was not in her nature to grab and hold suspects or hostages. She was more the analytical type, the kind of person who enjoyed the chess game of finding patterns in supposedly innocent behavior by citizens and foreign visitors. That was why she was in Counterintelligence, rather than in Beverly’s Terrorism Screening Center or the CIRG. But now, watching the live imagery of the bearded man who still stood next to the western windows side of Top Deck, his shotgun roped to the neck of one of the three women, she found herself wishing she could be one of the people who would rescue three badly frightened women.
“Any ID on the guy?” she asked.
Beverly nodded slowly. “He calls himself Omar Muhammad. Which we think is an alias. There were no fingerprints from his entry points into the building. And he’s wearing surgical gloves.” She pointed at one desktop screen that had an enhanced image of the man. “Nor does his face show up in any of my center’s facial recognition databases. But he’s been talking to our field office people over his smartphone. Maybe we’ll get a voice print match to someone in the metadata files of the NSA.”
“Would be nice to know who he is, for real. Maybe the Crisis Negotiation Unit people could find a parent to talk him down,” Janet said, keeping her voice low. She looked over at the video wall screens that filled the far side of the room. “Has he agreed to anything?”
“Nope. The CNU negotiator on the phone offered to send up trays of food and water for the women. He refused to unlock the elevator to go down for the trays. Which ruled out sending agents up on top of the elevator.” Beverly sighed. “The folks in here are doing what they can. Besides the live CCTV feeds from several parts of Top Deck, they have activated the smartphones in the handbags of the three women. That lets us hear what is happening whenever he shuts off his phone.”
“Can’t we remote activate his phone’s camera and speaker?”
“We can, and likely are doing that,” Beverly said. “Still, our CNU people are doing their best to friendly chat with him over his smartphone. Keep the tension low, don’t excite him with unexpected sounds, you know.”
“I do know,” Janet said, recalling her classes at Quantico in basic hostage negotiation. That training had been focused on bank holdups where the suspect is surrounded by local law. Negotiating with an armed man holding three women hostages was several steps above her training. “So what are our rescue options?”
Beverly shrugged. “The obvious ones are to fly the HRT tactical team up to the spire and let them rope down. Or have some HRT agents climb up the outside of the spire from the 86th Main Deck balcony.”
Janet nodded. “Poor options in daylight. The news copter will show either team’s approach. Is the SIOC going to force the news people to land? So we can watch our teams deploy in the infrared screen?”
“Don’t know,” Beverly said. “Seems likely the news copter will still shine a spotlight on the floor when the room’s lights go dark at 2 a.m. Plus there are the outside spire lights that go on during Christmas and special occasions. Guess the field office people can cut power to all the lights above the 86th floor. Unless someone wants this illuminated feed to continue.” She pointed at a dark screen on another wall of the room. “The FLIR feed will go up over there, if things go dark.”
“What’s the real HRT game plan?” Janet prodded.
Beverly looked around, perhaps checking for a team leader or supervisor. She leaned closer. “There’s another floor above Top Deck. It’s the 103rd. Pretty small but it has an outside balcony and a door leading inside. Plan is for the HRT chopper to haul four agents upwind of the spire later tonight, then each will jump out and deploy their own paraglider chute. No engines on them. They’ll be quiet as the wind.” She paused, biting her lip. “They’ll land on the 103rd floor balcony, go inside, go down its enclosed stairwell, open a locked door near the elevator and try to shoot Omar before he has a chance to blow off someone’s head.”
She thought that option had a better chance than doing something loud like a copter approach. “When will it happen?”
“Just after 2 a.m.” Beverly whispered. “This Omar surely saw the signs at ground level and on 86th floor when he changed elevators. They clearly say both observation decks close at 2 a.m. Our CNU person will likely remind him that the lights going off is normal and automatic. Whether Omar takes a nap or not, we’ll know what he does by way of the activated smartphones. And our infrared scope at MetLife that’s aimed at the windows of
Top Deck will show us whether the four of them stay near the outside viewing windows, or head down the inside stairs to the arrival well that is outside the elevator door.”
The live CCTV images that showed on five wallscreens displayed Omar, the women, the elevated walkway that circled the Top Deck room, and much more. Janet could see both the central pillar that housed the elevator shaft and the railed walkway that gave tourists a clear view of Manhattan’s many skyscrapers, along with the Hudson, the East River and the view toward the Statue of Liberty. She wondered why this Omar had not tried to knock out the black domes of the CCTV cameras, maybe using a paintball gun. But if he was like the jihadist wannabees she’d studied at Quantico, he wanted to be seen. He wanted his strike against the infidels to be broadcast worldwide. Which CNN, Fox, MSNBC and local New York stations were doing and had been doing continuously. While the stations did not have access to the CCTV images she now watched, they did have a live feed from the news helicopter. It was hovering to the west of the spire windows, a telescopic lens on the craft’s camera providing a real-time feed that appeared on another screen in one corner of the spacious room. But that view was growing darker. It was fall and the daylight hours were shorter. By 9 p.m. the top of the Empire State Building would be dark, except for the red, white and blue outside lights that ran up the side of the spire from the roof of the 86th floor. Her stomach rumbled again. She told it to shut up. Being with Beverly was both a privilege and an opportunity.
Superpowers 1: Superguy Page 3