Dead Simple

by Jon Land

  “Excuse me,” interrupted City Engineer Muldoon, the only man who hadn’t spoken yet, in a soft voice.

  Chief Logan continued speaking, not seeming to notice that Muldoon was trying to get the floor. “But it’s going to take more men than I’ve got to do that and keep order in the city, and believe me, order in the city is going to break down pretty quick if this nut keeps broadcasting his plans over the radio.”

  “Excuse me,” Muldoon repeated, a bit more loudly.

  “You’ve got a full regiment on its way from Fort Dix,” announced the governor through the speakerphone, “including a detachment of military police and a brigade from the Army Corps of Engineers. Get them a route into the city from New Jersey, and they can be on-site within four hours.”

  “Excuse me!”

  All eyes in the room at last turned toward Warren Muldoon. A bookish, balding, round-faced man wearing glasses, he ruffled through a nest of papers, manuals, and binders stacked before him.

  “If we can get one of the decks of the George Washington Bridge cleared, then I can have it open by three o’clock.”

  “Open for traffic in four hours?” posed a disbelieving Takamura.

  “No way we can get an AVLB folding bridge here by then,“added Kirkland.

  Muldoon was unfazed. “I’ve got another idea of how to create one lane easily large enough to accommodate the trucks the army will be using, if the specifications in this manual here are right.”

  “That’s assuming the city can hold out until three, of course,” Chief Logan noted grimly, clearly not sure it could.

  “As soon as this meeting breaks,” started the mayor, “I’m going on the air. Do my best to reassure the people.”

  Logan looked down, hiding his skepticism.

  “You worried I’m not up to the task, Chief?”

  “Madam Mayor, I don’t think anyone’s up to that task.”

  The door to the conference room burst open and one of the mayor’s chief aides rushed in.

  “New York Harbor!” he uttered breathlessly. “Channel Five—quickly!”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Liz Halprin rode her horse straight into the emergency room lobby of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. She let Sal Belamo climb off first, and then together they eased the wounded boy down to the floor.

  “This boy needs help!” she shouted through the frantic activity whirling around her. “Stat!”

  A nurse rushed over, inspected the wound, and then instantly summoned a doctor who was halfway out the door, on his way to join one of the mobile triage units being dispersed throughout the city. Liz answered what questions she could, then drifted off to join Sal Belamo, who stood in front of a wall-mounted television, a gauze packet pressed against his head wound in place of the scarf he had appropriated on the George Washington Bridge.

  “Hey,” he said, “check this out.”

  Jack Tyrell had been watching Channel 5 for several minutes now. Since the East and Hudson Rivers provided the only viable routes off the island of Manhattan after his explosions, the frantic level of activity in New York Harbor was hardly surprising. The piers were crammed with people seeking passage on any boat that would have them. Luxury liners that happened to be in port were besieged with desperate individuals offering to pay anything to be ferried out. Enterprising small-boat owners had already lined up clients and joined a massive flotilla of sailboats, speedboats, yachts, and cabin cruisers moving both north and south along the Hudson.

  The result was a form of gridlock never before seen on the waters surrounding the city, as boats vied with one another to flee, the smaller craft maneuvering desperately to stay clear of the paths of the larger ones. A number of boats had already collided and were dead in the water or listing badly. The sleeker speedboat types, meanwhile, weaved through the channel, even the best pilots challenged by the obstacle course in their path.

  “I think it’s time we grounded the fleet,” Tyrell said decisively, turning to Marbles. “Activate the mines.”

  “Get them out of there!” McCracken said, gesturing toward the screen.

  The rest of those in the room looked at each other, unsure what he was getting at.

  “Jesus Christ! This is Jackie Terror we’re dealing with here. Do you think he would have left anyone a way out?”

  Mayor Corrente had just snapped a telephone to her ear when, on Channel 5, explosions erupted in the harbor. Flaming chunks and refuse were hurled through the air, smashing into boats that had been fortunate enough to steer free of the mines. And in some cases, boats trying desperately to flee rammed each other, resulting in the same explosive effect.

  A pair of coast guard helicopters tempted fate by dropping toward the surface, the search for survivors already beginning while another series of flaming rumbles coughed debris and black smoke into the air. Virtually no craft was spared, the harbor turned into a watery graveyard of floating oil, blood, and marine debris.

  Blaine felt the rage building in him as he watched Jack Tyrell’s work unfold. The drifting life jackets were the worst; McCracken knew there were bodies, or what was left of them, attached to the orange spots dotting the water. The underwater explosions seemed to stretch on forever, continuing until the hovering coast guard choppers were silhouetted by a ghostly curtain of smoke blown about by the wind.

  “I say we give this bastard shit,” Chief Logan muttered just loud enough for everyone to hear. “I say we call his bluff.”

  “Really think he’s bluffing, Chief?” Blaine asked him.

  “We pay him, he blows the city anyway. You said that.”

  “But he could be wrong,” Kirkland said, aiming his words at the mayor, “in which case we use the ransom to catch him. Bills can be marked electronically now. We can disguise directional beacons as money wrappers. We can trace bearer bonds twenty seconds after they’re presented for liquidation. We’ve got fake gold even Fort Knox couldn’t tell from the real thing.”

  “Then I wonder what it is he’s going to ask for,” Blaine posed flatly.

  The black phone rang again. The mayor pounded the speaker button without checking to see if the FBI technicians were ready.

  “Hey, we didn’t have this many channels in the sixties,” Jack Tyrell greeted. “You see that boat go up on nine? Man oh man, how about that crash on five? …”

  “We were bargaining in good faith. Why’d you do it?” Corrente demanded.

  “What do you think this is, Lucy, a negotiation? I own your city. It’s mine to do with as I choose, and what I chose was not to let anyone leave it. Didn’t think that would be fair to everyone else.”

  “I overestimated you, Tyrell,” McCracken broke in.

  “Then I guess I better watch my nuts, eh, McCracken? Been reading about you. You really shoot the balls off Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square?”

  “You want to stand on a pedestal, see if my aim’s still good?”

  “McCrackenballs … Name’s got a nice ring to it. What happened made you do that?”

  “Somebody pissed me off.”

  “Bad as me?”

  “I’ve been telling these people you’re a pro, Jackie. Now I’m going to have to take it all back.”

  “You’re hurting me. You really are.”

  “Women and children make easy targets, don’t they? Especially from a distance.”

  “You looking at the harbor now, Mr. Balls? Their blood’s as red as everybody else’s.”

  “That what I’m gonna find inside when I cut you open, Jackie?”

  “Really think you’re up to that, Mr. Balls? Word is you haven’t been yourself since you and I had our first run-in.”

  “As you saw yesterday, I’ve made a miraculous recovery.”

  “That so? Then what’s it gonna be—you gonna advise the mayor to pay up so she can keep her city?”

  “We don’t want anyone else hurt today—no more mayhem,” interrupted the mayor.

  “Come on, Lucy, just imagine yourself presiding over th
e rebuilding of New York. No place to go but up.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Might be preferable, though.”

  Corrente fixed her gaze on Sam Kirkland, who nodded. “Just tell us how you want the fifteen billion.”

  “In gem-quality diamonds.”

  The mayor felt her stomach sink toward her feet. Kirkland’s mouth dropped. McCracken’s face alone remained impassive.

  “That’s fifteen billion dollars wholesale,” Tyrell added gloatingly.

  “Where and when?” Corrente managed.

  “Let’s start with who: my friend Mr. Balls. Two o’clock.”

  “Where?” McCracken asked before the mayor could speak, a scowl darkening his face and the scar through his left eyebrow turning a savage red.

  “You still got your television on?”

  Blaine glanced at an overview of the coast guard lifting survivors out of the Hudson at New York Harbor. “Yes.”

  “See you right there at two, Mr. Balls.”

  “I got Kirkland on the phone for maybe five seconds,” Sal Belamo reported to Johnny and Liz outside the hospital. “Apparently the boss made it safe and sound to City Hall.”

  Relieved, Liz climbed back on her horse. She extended a hand to Belamo. “We’ve got some ground to cover.”

  Mayor Lucille Corrente strode to the podium at the front of the City Hall pressroom without being announced. She knew it would have made a better show to have her various department heads behind her to demonstrate solidarity, but their services were urgently required elsewhere.

  She ignored the onslaught of questions thrust at her and the hands flapping to grab her attention from the jam-packed room. Dozens of cameras followed her every move, the feed being carried live by all three major networks and CNN across the entire world.

  She waved the reporters off again and waited for them to go quiet before beginning. “I think what I have to say will answer all of your questions as well as the city’s.”

  Her words echoed through Times Square, where throngs viewed her on the giant Sony screen. Others watched at home, in bars, and even through the windows of the city’s countless electronics stores. The few not near a television tuned their Walkmans louder or increased the radio volume in their cars, where thousands remained prisoners.

  Lucille Corrente spoke without benefit of notes, leaning slightly forward over the podium.

  “People of New York City …”

  A dozen choppers painted in military green cut across the sky from the northwest. The noise as they dipped low toward the landing zone on the Great Lawn in Central Park was deafening, drowning out the mayor’s words to any trying to listen nearby.

  A regiment of national guardsmen was already waiting in the park, to lend whatever logistical support was required and escort the specialists from Fort Dix to the pool of waiting vehicles. A trio of guard airmen took on the task of directing the choppers in for landings in three separate zones, designated by both white spray paint and a spread of orange cones that kept getting thrown across the grass by the rotor wash.

  Upon touchdown, the arriving troops flooded out, dragging their weapons and equipment. They took seats in the vehicles appropriated for them and sped away, or in some cases formed up as marching brigades and set off for their designated destinations closer by. The process went so smoothly that it looked rehearsed, when nothing could have been farther from the truth.

  “Go! … Go! … Go! …”

  That command, shouted loudly to carry over the rotor wash, was the only word to be heard.

  “ … You all know that our city has come under attack from the most vile of criminals, one for whom innocent lives are no more than bargaining chips. He has convinced us of his capacity and capability to kill. He has demonstrated a callous disregard for everything we hold dear and demanded we pay him to preserve our homes and our lives … .”

  The convoy of army trucks en route north from Fort Dix stretched as far as the eye could see up Route 295, heading toward New York City. The highway had been all but shut down to accommodate it. Even so, the huge amount of heavy construction equipment and ordnance the convoy carried kept it moving at a snail’s pace. The best it could manage, even with a state police escort clearing the way, was forty miles per hour, a considerable handicap given the sign that none of the convoy’s members could miss: NEW YORK CITY 75 MILES.

  “ … It has long been the policy of this city never to negotiate with criminals. However, today we must weigh that policy against the very real threat of additional casualties … .”

  The first reports Chief Logan received upon returning to the streets were not encouraging. Looting had broken out in certain areas of the city and was spreading. So much of his manpower had to be used to quell these disturbances before they turned into outright riots that he had little to spare toward the more pressing task of getting the streets as clear as possible.

  Early into his drive-through of the city, his car was pelted with soda cans and various debris on three occasions. Both the back window and the windshield were shattered, two of the side windows as well, by mobs that were more terrified than angry. Searching to find a way out of the city when none existed.

  “ … Therefore I am announcing to the people of the city of New York our intention to comply with the terms of this criminal’s demands. The money, while a significant sum, pales by comparison with the preservation of even one human life. That is the difference between him and us. That is where the strength that will see us through this crisis lies.”

  Explosives specialists drawn from the FBI, arriving combat engineers from Fort Dix, and members of the NYPD’s bomb squad were being assembled by Sam Kirkland even as Department of Transportation Director Les Carney hurried to identify the circles dotting the charred map of Manhattan that Blaine McCracken had left with him. To further expedite the process, he had made copies of the map and assigned one or two circles each to four longtime workers in the Hall of Records, specialists in either zoning or deeds who knew the city’s landscape intimately.

  “The best we’re going to be able to do in many cases is narrow things down to a city block or so,” Carney explained to McCracken, looking up from his slide rule, maps, and charts. “The scale’s too small to get any more specific than that.”

  “It’ll have to do.”

  Carney gazed up at the clock just as it ticked to 11:45. “You have any idea how long it takes to search a building, never mind a block? And we haven’t even got enough teams to handle two apiece.” He paused. “That’s why I put my name in with Kirkland.”

  “You?”

  “I did a tour as a minesweeper during the Gulf War. I know the basics.”

  Blaine looked at his missing arm. “That how you … ?”

  “This? No, it was long gone before Saddam even crossed the border. Bone cancer.”

  “It’s still a different game.”

  “But this is my ballpark. I figure that counts for something.” Carney raised his eyebrows. “You mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You want to play delivery boy, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you want to put all your minesweeping experience to good use?”

  “Because it’s my job.”

  Blaine’s point had been made. He pointed at the map. “Do me a favor and pick two of those for us.”

  “Don’t you have to be somewhere else?”

  “Not until two o’clock I don’t.”

  The mayor’s senior staff were waiting outside when a convoy of four police cars with sirens screaming led a pair of ordinary sedans off Chambers Street toward a side entrance of City Hall. Four men dressed in dark suits and sporting the trademark side curls and beards of Hasidic Jews climbed out as soon as the sedans came to a halt.

  “The mayor’s waiting upstairs,” Lucille Corrente’s chief aide said, leading the members of the Diamond Merchants Association’s executive
board up the steps.

  The mayor hung up her phone and turned to Bob Corrothers. “They’re here, Bob. Let’s wrap this up.”

  “Just another minute.”

  Corrothers continued viewing the twenty-seven-inch television playing a tape his people had put together over the course of the last hour. “As you can see, we’ve managed to clear two lanes of traffic on all major streets running north and south,” he said, as the camera panned the civilian vehicles that had been swept aside into the other two lanes.

  The picture changed perfectly on cue to the West Side Highway. “On the main access arteries leading in and out of the city, like the West Side Highway here, at least two and in some cases all three lanes are being cleared.” He waited for the picture to change again. “Running east and west, we’re concentrating on clearing two major streets in the north, two in midtown.”

  Corrothers switched subjects fast when the picture changed yet again. “This is the latest footage to come in.”

  He didn’t need to explain the massive snowplows, riding three abreast and slightly offset, clearing wrecked cars from their path to widen the channel on the George Washington Bridge.

  “Muldoon still claims he can have the bridge open again by three o’clock,” said Corrothers. “He just needed a little help.”

  On the upper span of the George Washington Bridge, City Engineer Warren Muldoon stood near the edge of the jagged chasm, setting up a tripod atop which rested a laser transit. Muldoon shifted the tripod even closer to the edge and took the readings again.